Quotes About Computing

If my response seems slow when asked a question, I always explain: 'It is because I have numerous files and subfiles to sort through in order to retrieve the info . . . please stand by. Help . . . my computer needs more memory!

One of the most common codes used across the planet is binary or digital code.

In computing, PCK includes things like what examples to use when teaching how parameters are passed to a function, or what misconceptions about nesting HTML tags are most common.

It is surprising how little page space is devoted to bugs and debugging in most introductory programming textbooks.

But information is physical.

The great quantum theorist Richard P. Feynman expressed this feeling. "It always bothers me that, according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region of time. How can all that be going on in that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one tiny piece of space/time is going to do?

The computer will still be unable to predict whether Princeton, New Jersey, will have sun or rain on a day one month away. At noon the spaces between the sensors will hide fluctuations that the computer will not know about, tiny deviations from the average. By 12:01, those fluctuations will already have created small errors one foot away. Soon the errors will have multiplied to the ten-foot scale, and so on up to the size of the globe.

Human computers had no future, he saw:

On two occasions I have been asked,—"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

The resulting units may be called binary digits, or more briefly, bits.

biology has become an information science

A bit, the smallest unit of information, the fundamental particle of information theory, is a choice, yes or no, on or off. It's a choice that you can embody in electrical circuits, and it is thanks to that that we have all this ubiquitous computing.

A lot of our work at Intel was on the automotive side: in the head unit, engine, and brake controllers.

What amplifies the transformational power ahead is the confluence of two major technological currents today: the universal access to mobile computing and the pervasive use of social networks.

With the advent of computing, human invention crossed a threshold into a world different from everything that came before. The computer is the universal machine almost by definition, machine-of-all-trades, capable of accomplishing or simulating just about any task that can be logically defined.

We have a picture for how complexity arises, because if the universe is computationally capable, maybe we shouldn't be so surprised that things are so entirely out of control.

UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.

I came of technical age with UNIX, where I learned with power-greedy pleasure that you could kill a system right out from under yourself with a single command.

The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion.

Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin.

The great advance of personal computers was not the computing power per se but the fact that it brought it right to your face, that you had control over it, that were confronted with it and could steer it.

Gaming notebooks aren't that abundant. Not that many gamers are able to play on notebooks.

I'm a Macintosh nut. I got my PowerBook, so if I'm not writing jokes, I'm working on that.

We have persistant objects, they're called files.