Quotes About Technology

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.

Other people, too, worried about this new gap between the speeds of travel and messaging. An important London banker told Babbage he disapproved: "It will enable our clerks to plunder us, and then be off to Liverpool on their way to America at the rate of twenty miles an hour." Babbage could only express the hope that science might yet find a remedy for the problem it had created.

When McLuhan announced that the medium was the message, he was being arch. The medium is both opposite to, and entwined with, the message.)

In 1962 the president of the American Historical Association, Carl Bridenbaugh , warned his colleagues that human existence was undergoing a "Great Mutation"—so sudden and so radical "that we are now suffering something like historical amnesia." He lamented the decline of reading; the distancing from nature (which he blamed in part on "ugly yellow Kodak boxes" and "the transistor radio everywhere"); and the loss of shared culture.

In the name of speed, Morse and Vail had realized that they could save strokes by reserving the shorter sequences of dots and dashes for the most common letters. But which letters would be used most often? Little was known about the alphabet's statistics. In search of data on the letters' relative frequencies, Vail was inspired to visit the local newspaper office in Morristown, New Jersey, and look over the type cases.

The bit is a fundamental particle of a different sort: not just tiny but abstract—a binary digit, a flip-flop, a yes-or-no. It is insubstantial, yet as scientists have finally come to understand information, they wonder whether it may be primary: more fundamental than matter itself. They suggest that the bit is the irreducible kernel and that information forms the very core of existence.

This free use of the line for flirtation purposes has grown to an alarming extent," he wrote, "and if it is to go on somebody must pay for it." The Bell companies tried to discourage frivolous telephony, particularly by women and servants.

A "file" was originally—in sixteenth-century England—a wire on which slips and bills and notes and letters could be strung for preservation and reference. Then came file folders, file drawers, and file cabinets; then the electronic namesakes of all these; and the inevitable irony. Once a piece of information is filed, it is statistically unlikely ever to be seen again by human eyes.

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.

I think it's necessary for VR to start with an early adopter audience that's highly engaged, and I think that means gamers. They're the ones who have the high-end hardware and the expertise and the patience to sort through the uncertainty of it all.

The basic idea of email has remained essentially unchanged since the first networked message was sent in 1971. And while email is great for one-on-one, formal correspondence, there are far better tools for collaboration.

I grew up around electronic instruments. To me, the turntable is an electronic device. At the same time, I had access to drum machines and keyboards through my uncle; then track recorders into computers. At an early age, I was messing with computers more than most hip-hop musicians.

While the specifics of Russia's interference in the 2016 American election remain unclear, no one doubts that Moscow has built a robust technological arsenal for waging cyberattacks.

It is unclear exactly how many law enforcement agencies are currently using this capability, but it is reasonable to say that while resource limitations used to discourage the government from tracking you without a good reason, these constraints have largely disappeared.

My father and a bunch of my cousins and uncles, they didn't have the opportunity to use FaceTime or Skype, all these different technologies and advancements that we have.

With computer science, I had to go through that uncomfortable process of my brain establishing a hash table, if you will - the coders will get that - for this new information, because I didn't have one. So I had to establish a brand-new file system from scratch.

In chess, computers show that what we call 'strategy' is reducible to tactics, ultimately. It only looks creative to us. They are still just glorified cash registers. This should make us feel uncomfortable, whether or not we think computers will ever be good composers of music or artistic painters.

Maybe silence is something we're uncomfortable with as a culture, I don't know.

When I think about it, I do start to worry about this whole social media thing. It does make me uncomfortable; kids should be out, living their lives, getting out and enjoying themselves.

I grant that people are generally uncomfortable with how fast privacy issues are changing in the world, but Google Glass is not going to move the needle on that.

Locomotion can be uncomfortable in VR, but a number of developers have figured out how to do some subtle locomotion.

This kind of art - the dystopic future kind of art - is designed to make you uncomfortable.