Robert Metcalfe Quotes

I think that all services will have downtime. No matter how much you prepare, have redundant systems, or audit, there will periodically be a black swan event that is completely unlike whatever you've experienced before. It even happens to Google!

I detest computers. If you had a device like that 30 years ago that froze up constantly, misbehaved constantly, lost your information and screwed up when you needed it the most, it would have been laughable.

There'll be a special place in hell for the tape back-up people.

How could this Y2K be a problem in a country where we have Intel and Microsoft?

W2K will be a bigger disaster than Y2K.

In general, the Internet was not designed to accommodate deliberate failures to communicate.

One of the most feared expressions in modern times is 'The computer is down.'

Whether it's watching a $4,000 laptop fall off the conveyor belt at airport security, contending with a software conflict that corrupted your file management system, or begging your family to stop opening those virus-carrying 'greeting cards' attached to emails, all computer owners are highly leveraged and highly vulnerable technology investors.

The cloud computing model may be a wonderful system when it works, but it's a nightmare when it fails. And the more people who come to depend upon it, the bigger the nightmare.

Several highly improbable and therefore unforeseen failures.

I think we could very easily suffer a seriously catastrophic cyber event.

An EMP explosion would wipe out our grid, wipe out our cellular system.

The military part of our information network - which we were accustomed to rely on for exact information - was the first part of the network to fall apart

I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.

The machinery of destruction is complete, poised on a hair trigger, waiting for the 'button' to be 'pushed' by some misguided or deranged human being or for some faulty computer chip to send out the instruction to fire. That so much should be balanced on so fine a point--that the fruit of four and a half billion years can be undone in a careless moment--is a fact against which belief rebels.

Wouldn't it be nice if the internet blew up?

Disintegration of structure equals information loss.

Almost all of the many predictions now being made about 1996 hinge on the internet's continuing exponential growth. But I predict the internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.

If there is an event for whatever reason, which interferes with the Internet or network communications, are people able to deal with it? It seems like our dependency on these systems is so great that the room for maneuver as it were is very small. So that is problematic.

The data stream has been corrupted, return to first principles.

Database: the information you lose when your memory crashes.

Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what may seem a word or idea, but is really some stronger material source.

Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again.

Listen, strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government.

Capitalism, as a result of its own inner contradictions, moves toward a point when it will be unbalanced, when it will simply become impossible.