Top 10 tech quotes of 2008

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 23 Dec 2008 at 16:01

The IT industry is almost Dickensian in its assortment of wild-eyed optimists, silk-tongued charmers and devilish pragmatists, and they've all got something to say. We rifle over the year's best quotes to pick out our ten favourites.

1. Not so jolly green giant
Nvidia's not had the best year. Its performance crown is sat at a rakish angle on ATI's head, and Intel has been creeping towards the graphics market with all the subtlety of a Ballmer keynote. Thankfully, Nvidia's responded to its rivals with the dignity, wit and eloquence you'd expect from... well, a guest on Jerry Springer.

"We're going to open a can of whoop ass on Intel," Nvidia's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang told investors back in April. And the fighting talk didn't stop there: "You already have the right machine to run Excel. You bought it four years ago. How much faster can you render the blue screen of death?"

This was followed by a pop at Intel's discrete graphics offering, Larrabee, which in a moment of playground genius he referred to as "Laughabee".

No doubt his thoughts or which company's dad is bigger will follow next year.

2. Deep Fryed Vista
A little known fact about Stephen Fry is that his vocabulary is so large he's never had to use the same word twice in his entire life. However, not every product can be dissected with a scalpel-like turn of phrase, as he discovered when trying to connect Vista to a network. Sometimes, a sledgehammer just has to do.

"I have nine macs!!!!!! I don't need another f***ing mac. I just want ONE ARSING PC that isn't complete SH*T," he raged on Twitter.

"Too late. It's going out the window. I can't put up with this sort of arse... Listemn [sic] I have parallels, I have fusion, I have 2 distros of Linux. I need jsut [sic] one, just 1 of c***ing Vista so that I can review things."

If he drank bitter and had a fetish for business laptops, he could easily be mistaken for the editor of PC Pro.

3. Icahn's implosion

Take one disgruntled Yahoo investor named Carl Icahn. Stir in a massively profitable takeover bid by Microsoft, and add just a dash of rejection by the company's board. Bring to the boil, cover for five months, and serve one portion of tasty sarcasm.

"Until now I naively believed that self-destructive doomsday machines were fictional devices found only in James Bond movies," Icahn wrote in a scathing letter to the Yahoo board. "I never believed that anyone would actually create and activate one in real life. I guess I never knew about Yang and the Yahoo Board."

It's fair to say they know about you Carl.

4. Lacking Linux love
It's not easy being a Linux advocate. You slave away for years crafting an operating system that seven people on the planet will appreciate, and instead of thanks, you get misguided teachers threatening you with the lifelong company of Big Ernie in a maximum security prison.

Take the following letter a Texan teacher wrote to the HeliOS distro, after discovering one of her students using it in class.

"At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal" she wrote, after indulging a whole three and half minutes of research. "No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful. I will research this as time allows and I want to assure you, if you are doing anything illegal, I will pursue charges as the law allows."

It's enough to make you want to pick up a copy of Windows... almost.

5. Dazzled by Chrome