Quotes About Computing

mandelbrot changed the way ibm's engineers thought about the cause of noise. bursts of errors had always sent the engineers looking for a man sticking a screwdriver somewhere.

treating messages as discrete had application not just for traditional communication but for a new and rather esoteric subfield, the theory of computing machines.

The 1970s were the decade of megabytes. In the summer of 1970, IBM introduced two new computer models with more memory than ever before: the Model 155, with 768,000 bytes of memory, and the larger Model 165, with a full megabyte, in a large cabinet. One of these room-filling mainframes could be purchased for $4,674,160. By 1982 Prime Computer was marketing a megabyte of memory on a single circuit board, for $36,000.

What English speakers call "computer science" Europeans have known as informatique, informatica, and Informatik

measured in bits or their drolly named quantum counterpart, qubits.

A computer is a great device because it enables you to do anything which is automatic, anything that you don't need your understanding for. Understanding is outside a computer. It doesn't understand.

It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too.

The spread of information technology and the long-term decline in the cost of computing power have created opportunities that simply did not exist before. Airbnb, for example, could not have existed before the Internet.

The cloud has become the next-generation supercomputer, and the smartphone has provided the revolution to spur its use.

People constantly face problems they've never seen before, and they have to solve them somehow. So a million people come up with a million solutions that are just a little bit different. If computing is being done by fewer resources, there will be enormous security gains by pushing things into standard practices.

A computer program is a message from a man to a machine. The rigidly marshaled syntax and the scrupulous definitions all exist to make intention clear to the dumb engine.

Any machine that can run a browser is not thin. The browser has to be the thickest application man has ever invented, and it's getting thicker faster than anything ever development by man.

The strangest problems often turn out to be misconfigured DNS. DNS

When I hear someone touting the cloud as a magic-bullet for all computing problems, I silently replace "cloud" with "clown" and carry on with a zen-like smile.

I wrote a lot about the need for an information appliance. I think we've pretty much arrived at one: the iPad. A child could figure out how to use it quickly. Compare it to a DOS computer or even an Apple II; it's no longer nearly as much of a hassle or a mystery.

I really enjoy computer networking.

Deep neural networks are responsible for some of the greatest advances in modern computer science.

If you pass a lot of data through a teeny network, like 20 neurons, it'll do what it can, but it's not going to be very good.

Accelerating technology innovations such as ubiquitous sensors, cheap computing power, and 5G networks will open entirely new opportunities and challenges.

Forget artificial intelligence - in the brave new world of big data, it's artificial idiocy we should be looking out for.

I think Google is a great company, and they're doing really cool things. But they're not doing things that are going to put us, I think, into the next generation of technology.

Between them an image is projected: a single, winking cursor. It wants a code. It wants the code.

A file-sharing service and a hedge fund are essentially the same things. In both cases, there's this idea that whoever has the biggest computer can analyze everyone else to their advantage and concentrate wealth and power. It's shrinking the overall economy. I think it's the mistake of our age.

Never tell a computer to forget it.