Machine Code Quotes & Sayings

In the morning I walked to the bank. I went to the automated teller machine to check my balance. I inserted my card, entered my secret code, tapped out my request. The figure on the screen roughly corresponded to my independent estimate, feebly arrived at after long searches through documents, tormented arithmetic. Waves of relief and gratitude flowed over me. The system had blessed my life. I felt its support and approval. The system hardware, the mainframe sitting in a locked room in some distant city. What a pleasing interaction. I sensed that something of deep personal value, but not money, not that at all, had been authenticated and confirmed. A deranged person was escorted from the bank by two armed guards. The system was invisible, which made it all the more impressive, all the more disquieting to deal with. But we were in accord, at least for now. — Don DeLillo

Perhaps what I do not manage to operate rapidly enough is the passage between the outside and the inside. — Helene Cixous

Religion is a virus, and we are glad to have it. — John Art

What the hell. Was he going to bring out a gramophone or Morse code machine too? — Shirley Marr

You're going to face a choice in November. This is a choice between the policies that got us into this
mess in the first place and the policies that got us out of this mess - and what the other side
is counting on is people not having a good memory. — Barack Obama

Don't be obstinate. It's not attractive in someone so young. I know you understand what I mean. Two hundred years ago, would anyone, even the most learned scientist, believe you if you told him one day men would walk on the moon and send information through the very air? I will supply my own response:no. But today these are unremarkable events. Perhaps the same is true of ritual-perhaps on the Day of Days the schematic of God's great machine will be as obvious to you as the code in your programs. — G. Willow Wilson

I remarked to Dennis that easily half the code I was writing in Multics was error recovery code. He said, "We left all that stuff out of Unix. If there's an error, we have this routine called panic, and when it is called, the machine crashes, and you holler down the hall, 'Hey, reboot it.'" — Tom Van Vleck

Dry-cleaning is like this secret society you're not allowed into. No matter what, you're at their mercy. You can have a Ph.D. in anything, but you still can't dry-clean your own clothes. They'll never tell you how. No one's ever even seen what the machine looks like. Think about it. There's a reason they keep the actual dry-cleaning apparatus hidden behind all those racks of hanging clothes. They don't want you to crack their code. They won't let anybody in. Not anybody. Even rich people. You know any rich people with dry-cleaning machines in their house? Exactly. Even they still have to pick it up and drop it off like everyone else. — Lauren Graham

Our human experience, like the World War II Ultra code-breaking machine, catches the heavy traffic of messages about what we really do and what is done to us every day. — Eugene Kennedy

Now he was about to launch the Macintosh, a machine that violated many of the principles of the hacker's code: It was overpriced; it would have no slots, which meant that hobbyists could not plug in their own expansion cards or jack into the motherboard to add their own new functions; and it took special tools just to open the plastic case. It was a closed and controlled system, like something designed by Big Brother rather than by a hacker. — Walter Isaacson

How well that human potential has been fulfilled over the years by people with a deep and abiding connection to Pennsylvania. — William Schreyer

I started out with machine code and assembly language. — Charles Petzold

DNA is a code of four letters; proteins are made up of amino acids which come in 20 forms. So the ribosome is a very clever machine that reads one language and operates in another. — Ada Yonath

Well, can you put it on hold for an hour?' Shelby said, sounding slightly frustrated. 'The senior boys' water polo practice starts in five minutes and I want to get good seats. It's the highlight of my week and I'm not going to miss it just because Brand's got her nose buried in machine code again.'

'You go on, I'll catch up,' Laura said. 'I don't suppose that you've actually bothered to learn the rules of water polo yet though, have you?'

'There are rules?' Shelby grinned. — Mark Walden

There is her heart. I've never seen one beating.I had no idea they moved so much. You put your hand on your heart and you picture something pulsing slightly but basically still, like a hand on a desktop tapping Morse code. This things is going wild in there. It's a mixing-machine part, a stoat squirming in its burrow, an alien life form that's just won a Pontiac on The Price Is Right. If you were looking for the home of the human body's animating spirit, I could imagine believing it to be here, for the simple reason that it is the human body's most animated organ. — Mary Roach

If you, or any public-spirited programmer, wanted to figure out what the software on your machine is really doing, tough luck. It's illegal to reverse engineer the source code of commercial software to find out how it works. — Clive Thompson

The crucial legacy of the personal computer is that anyone can write code for it and give or sell that code to you - and the vendors of the PC and its operating system have no more to say about it than your phone company does about which answering machine you decide to buy. — Jonathan Zittrain

Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced [robots] wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality. — Stephen Hawking

I wonder if 50 years from now we'll look back, and maybe Julian Assange will be the hero and J. Edgar Hoover will be the enemy of the state. — Rick Smolan

The machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like. Apart from differences in jargon, the pages of a molecular biology journal might be interchanged with those of a computer engineering journal. — Richard Dawkins

The genetic code is not a binary code as in computers, nor an eight-level code as in some telephone systems, but a quaternary code with four symbols. The machine code of the genes is uncannily computerlike. — Richard Dawkins

When the iPhone app is built, the Xamarin C# compiler generates C# Intermediate Language (IL) as usual, but it then makes use of the Apple compiler on the Mac to generate native iPhone machine code just like the Objective-C compiler. The calls from the app to the iPhone APIs are the same as though the application were written in Objective-C. For the Android app, the Xamarin C# compiler generates IL, which runs on a version of Mono on the device alongside the Java engine, but the API calls from the app are pretty — Charles Petzold

Oskar knew people would catch that trolley anyhow. Doors closed, no stops, machine guns on walls - it wouldn't matter. Humans were incurable that way. People would try to get off it, someone's loyal Polish maid with a parcel of sausage. And people would try to get on, some fast-moving athletic young man like Leopold Pfefferberg with a pocketful of diamonds or Occupation zloty or a message in code for the partisans. People responded to any slim chance, even if it was an outside one, its doors locked shut, moving fast between mute walls. — Thomas Keneally

The collages I never wanted to sell. I thought it was a very private thing, so I kept the collages. Then, in the end, I had a big collage in the Pinault Collection in Venice and the director of the [Centre] Pompidou said, "Did you make big collages like this in the '60s?" I said yes, so he came to the studio and said, "Let's make an exhibition in the Pompidou." — Erro

Programming in machine code is like eating with a toothpick — Charles Petzold

When laced into his clothing, Laurent's dangerous grace lent him an almost androgynous quality. Or perhaps it was more accurate to say that it was rare to associate Laurent with a physical body at all: you were always dealing with a mind. — C.S. Pacat

The ribosome is a machine that gets instructions from the genetic code and operates chemically in order to produce the product. — Ada Yonath

I can't concentrate. I thought I could do this." He put his hands up in defeat. "Can't." Then he came closer. Aria didn't think her heart can beat any faster, but then it did, faster with every step he took toward her, until it hammered against her chest, making her breathless when he stopped right in front of her. — Veronica Rossi

There is a long standing tradition of using code to evade censorship in China, so that goes on. The trouble is the Chinese government has created the world's most sophisticated censorship machine. — John Palfrey

He liked to start sentences with okay, so. It was a habit he had picked up from the engineers. He thought it made him sound smarter, thought it made him sound like them, those code jockeys, standing by the coffee machine, talking faster than he could think, talking not so much in sentences as in data structures, dense clumps of logic with the occasional inside joke. He liked to stand near them, pretending to stir sugar into his coffee, listening in on them as if they were speaking a different language. A language of knowing something, a language of being an expert at something. A language of being something more than an hourly unit. — Charles Yu

What is truly revolutionary about molecular biology in the post-Watson-Crick era is that it has become digital ... the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like.' -Richard Dawkins — Matt Ridley