Quotes About Computing

I'm interested in helping secure the PC - we need innovation here. It's not just hug your PC, hate the iPhone. In fact I don't even hate the iPhone; I think it's really cool. I just don't want it to be the center of the ecosystem along with the Web 2.0 apps.

People tend to think of the web as a way to get information or perhaps as a place to carry out e-commerce. But really, the web is about accessing applications.

One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control.

Scanadu is right at the heart of the next generation of computing, which combines mobility, sensors, cloud and big data. I am bullish on Scanadu and its potential to revolutionize the way we think about our health.

Though many people mistakenly credit IBM with the first PC in 1981, the Apple II came out four years earlier, in 1977.

The most important application of quantum computing in the future is likely to be a computer simulation of quantum systems, because that's an application where we know for sure that quantum systems in general cannot be efficiently simulated on a classical computer.

The battle between Google and Apple has shifted from devices, operating systems, and apps to a new, amorphous idea called 'contextual computing.' We have become data-spewing factories, and the only way to make sense of it all is through context.

What we're really trying to do is have heterogeneous systems really become the foundation of our computing going forward. And that's the idea that you make every processor and every accelerator a peer processor.

The data center side of the world is kind of like a solved problem, but you see interesting things happening on the edge with things like cell phones and embedded systems that are becoming really fascinating.

Phones and tablet PCs are primarily consumption devices and not typically used for creation of content. It's here that we need PCs.

The laptop computer is a workhorse. The tablet is just a display.

How you feel about the modern, multitouch tablet depends a lot on what you think Steve Jobs and company set out to do with the iPad back in 2010. If you believe he was out to make a bigger smartphone or to entirely replace the Mac and PC, you're wrong.

In my view the tablet and the PC are different. You can do things with the tablet if you are not encumbered by the legacy of the PC.

The world got enamored with smartphones and tablets, but what's interesting is those devices don't do everything that needs to be done. Three-D printing, virtual-reality computing, robotics are all controlled by PCs.

Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.

We don't believe we've solved the multicore-programming problem. But we think we've built an environment in which a certain class of problems can take advantage of the multicore architecture.

Some time ago, I investigated the possibility that a computer might be able to reconstruct a picture from sets of very accurate X-ray measurements taken through the body at a multitude of different angles.

It takes these very simple-minded instructions - 'Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it's greater than this other number' - but executes them at a rate of, let's say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic.

Ever since Newton, we've done science by taking things apart to see how they work. What the computer enables us to do is to put things together to see how they work: we're now synthesized rather than analysed. I find one of the most enthralling aspects of computers is limitless communication.

In the end, all vendor products and application architectures are constrained by the same fundamental principles of distributed computing and underlying physics: applications, and the products they use, run as processes on computers of limited capacity, communicating with one another via protocol stacks and links of nonzero latency. Therefore people need to appreciate that application architecture is the primary determinant of application performance and scalability.

Programming languages, like pizzas, come in only two sizes: too big and too small.

It is interesting to note, harking back again to the exponential growth of information technology, that the hardware on which Watson ran in 2011 was said to be about the size of the average bedroom. Today, we are told, it runs on a machine that is the size of three pizza boxes, and by the early 2020s Watson will sit comfortably in a smartphone.

Lighter laptops followed (our first one had a 10mb hard disk; today one of our laptops, at about one-third of the weight, has flash storage of 1 terabyte—100,000 times larger in thirty years).

I'm electron pusher by trade;