Halting State Quotes

“They can put the code monkey in a suit but they can't take the code out of the monkey.”
― Charles Stross, Halting State

“Nobody ever imagined a bunch of Orcs would steal a database table…”
― Charles Stross, Halting State

“She turns and stalks off in search of other minions to intimidate, leaving you flexing your fingers and trying to decide whether you want to strangle her or go down on your knees and beg for lessons.”
― Charles Stross, Halting State

“Never trust a man who thinks his religion gives him all the answers.”
― Charles Stross, Halting State

“..."The glass isn't half-empty or half-full. What you're looking at is half a pint of depreciable assets sitting in a pint of capital infrastructure that can be amortized over two accounting periods."
...
"Is there an engineering one?"
...
"Yes! It's quite simple: That's half a pint, all that's wrong is the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.”
― Charles Stross, Halting State

“There’s a faint popping noise, and the entire wall of the incident room shifts to the colour of the night sky above a Japanese city.”
― Charles Stross, Halting State

“Because it’s a thing of beauty, the ability to spin the cloth of reality, and you’re a sucker for it: Isn’t story-telling what being human is all about?”
― Charles Stross, Halting State

“When a customer clicks through the license conditions to play the game, they’re agreeing to add their phone as a node in a distributed server. More players equal more servers—not for themselves, I might add, we never run a server node for any given game on the same host as a client for that game, that would be asking for trouble—but at the back end, we’re in the processor arbitrage market. The game programmers’ biggest problems are maintaining causality and object coherency while minimizing network latency—sorry,”
― Charles Stross, Halting State

“So you open your mouth and listen to yourself say, “I want eight thousand a day. Plus expenses.”

This is the polite, industry-standard way of saying “piss off, I’m not interested.” You did the math over your morning coffee: You want to earn 100K a year, what with those bonuses you’ve been pulling on top of your salary. (Besides, a euro doesn’t buy what it used to.) There are 250 working days in a year, and a contractor works for roughly 40 per cent of the time, so you need to charge yourself out at 2.5 times your payroll rate, or 1000 a day in order to meet your target. Not interested in the job? Pitch unrealistically high. You never know…

“Done,” says Mr. Pin-Stripe, staring at you expressionlessly. And it is at that point that you realize you are well and truly fucked.”
― Charles Stross, Halting State

“Edinburgh has history the way cats have bad breath.”
― Charles Stross, Halting State

“because you know all the statistics, nearly 45 per cent of gamers are women, even though if you look at the biz from outside it seems to be focussed on an attention-deficient twelve-year-old male with a breast fixation and a sugar high.”
― Charles Stross, Halting State

“Because it’s Glasgow, where the weather offers you a creative combination of hypothermia and sunburn simultaneously: and right now it’s playing a DJ mix with six El Nino events, a monsoon, and a drought on the turntables.”
― Charles Stross, Halting State

“It’s like the joke about the post-modernist gangster who makes you an offer ye canna understand.”
― Charles Stross, Halting State

“This is the second time you’ve been arrested in your entire life, and your stress levels are so high that were a bunch of black-robed inquisitors to file chanting into your cell and lead you down a stony tunnel lined with manacled skeletons to a cavern furnished with an electric chair, it would come as a relief.”
― Charles Stross, Halting State

“Of course, to have admitted that you hated football while you were working on STEAMING would have been a bit like one of the US president’s staffers confessing to thinking religion was overrated, abstinence didn’t work, and what the country really needed was a short sharp dose of communism with a side order of Islamic extremism to go.”
― Charles Stross, Halting State

“Collaring neds for breaking and entering is one thing, managing the gay community outreach program and training constables is another, but international cybercrime in a nuclear bunker under Drum Brae is right off the map.”
― Charles Stross, Halting State

“But you’re more at home with SQL than socialization: Innuendo wasn’t a language they taught in CS lab.”
― Charles Stross, Halting State

“You’re a grown-up, these days. You don’t wear a kamikaze pilot’s rising sun headband and a tee-shirt that screams DEBUG THIS! and you don’t spend your weekends competing in extreme programming slams at a windy campsite near Frankfurt, but it’s generally difficult for you to use any machine that doesn’t have at least one compiler installed: In fact, you had to stick Python on your phone before you even opened its address book because not being able to brainwash it left you feeling handicapped, like you were a passenger instead of a pilot. In another age you would have been a railway mechanic or a grease monkey crawling over the spark plugs of a DC-3. This is what you are, and the sad fact is, they can put the code monkey in a suit but they can’t take the code out of the monkey.”
― Charles Stross, Halting State

“Non-euclidian sofa”
― Charles Stross, Halting State

“There’s a roar from outside, the sound of a crowd yelling a single word over and over again. “What’s that?” asks Elaine. “Sounds like”—shit, where’s Bob?—“brains,” you say faintly. Outside the window, the zombies are holding a pavement sit-in. “What do we want? Brains! When do we want them? Nowwwww…” “I’d better go sort this out, before they try to storm the hotel.”
― Charles Stross, Halting State