Clifford Stoll Quotes

The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

If you really want to know about the future, don't ask a technologist, a scientist, a physicist. No! Don't ask somebody who's writing code. No, if you want to know what society's going to be like in 20 years, ask a kindergarten teacher.

The information highway is being sold to us as delivering information, but what it's really delivering is data ... Unlike data, information has utility, timeliness, accuracy, a pedigree ... Editors serve as barometers of quality, and most of an editor's time is spent saying no.

VI was predecessor to hundreds of word processing systems. By now, Unix folks see it as a bit stodgy - it hasn't the versatility of Gnu-Emacs, nor the friendliness of more modern editors. Despite that, VI shows up on every Unix system.

Merely that I have a World Wide Web page does not give me any power, any abilities, nor any status in the real world.

I sense an insatiable demand for connectivity. Maybe all these people have discovered important uses for the Internet. Perhaps some of them feel hungry for a community that our real neighborhoods don't deliver. At least a few must wonder what the big deal is.

While I admire the insights of many of the people in the world of computing, I get this cold feeling that I speak a different language.

Call me a troglodyte; I'd rather peruse those photos alongside my sweetheart, catch the newspaper on the way to work, and page thorough a real book.

If we built houses the way we build software, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.

The astronomer's rule of thumb:
if you didn't write it down, it didn't happen

It's a great medium for trivia and hobbies, but not the place for reasoned, reflective judgment. Suprisingly often, discussions degenerate into acrimony, insults and flames.

Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom.

I spend almost as much time figuring out what's wrong with my computer as I do actually using it.

The virtual community? The word virtual does not mean "virtue." It means "not." When I go to the store and they say: The shirt that you brought in is virtually done. It means it is not done, in the same way that the virtual community is not a community. There is no commitment there. When you log off, you are not a member of it anymore. My flesh and blood community, the sense of knowing my neighbor, knowing the guy across the street, having dinner with the people down the block, getting along with each other and making compromises, that's a genuine community with a commitment.

Electronic communication is an instantaneous and illusory contact that creates a sense of intimacy without the emotional investment that leads to close friendships.

I claim that this bookless library is a dream, a hallucination of on-line addicts; network neophytes, and library-automation insiders ... Instead, I suspect computers will deviously chew away at libraries from the inside. They'll eat up book budgets and require librarians that are more comfortable with computers than with children and scholars. Libraries will become adept at supplying the public with fast, low-quality information.
The result won't be a library without books
it'll be a library without value.

Data isn't information, any more than fifty tons of cement is a skyscraper.

When I'm online, I'm alone in a room, tapping on a keyboard, staring at a cathode-ray tube.

Of course. NSA is rumored to tape record every transatlantic telephone conversation. Maybe they'd recorded this session.

The Internet has no such organization - files are made available at random locations. To search through this chaos, we need smart tools, programs that find resources for us.

We'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.

Im a scientist, once I do something, I want to do something else.