Computer Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Knowing how to calculate something is not the same as understanding it. Having a computer to calculate the origin of mass for us may be convincing, but is not satisfying. Fortunately we can understand it too.

Science is knowledge which we understand so well that we can teach it to a computer; and if we don't fully understand something, it is an art to deal with it.

I want to be sitting in front of my computer, where you can press a button to block out your junk mail. These two are my junk mail.

Melina Marchetta

Fighting wars is not so much about killing people as it is about finding things out. The more you know, the more likely you are to win a battle. Take the AEGIS system in the navy. It's a radar computer system for air-battle management. What it does is give the commander an extra 15 minutes to decide what he's going to do to fight a battle, and those 15 minutes are decisively important.

I'd written personal essays before, but never on this scale — never so often and with such, er, honesty. (If by honesty I mean slashing my wrists and hemorrhaging all over the computer screen).

A sovereign government's budget is not like the budget of a household or firm. Governments issue the currency, whereas households and firms use the currency. As the chartalist, or modern money approach, explains, modern governments actually spend by crediting bank accounts. It really just amounts to a keystroke, pushing a key on a computer that generates an entry on someone's balance sheet. Government can never run out of these keystrokes.

L. Randall Wray

I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing.

We went from the silent era to the sound era, and now we've done it again. Now that we're digital, I assume we will stay digital for at least 50 years. Everybody says, "Oh, you're going to replace actors." You can't replace actors. We've created duplicates, clones, but they can't act. They're a computer, for God's sake. If you think back to what was done in the Star Wars films, it unbridled people's imaginations. That of course fueled the business at ILM because they were being approached more and more to keep raising the bar. Actors will not be replaced: worst case scenario, they'll have to wear a lycra leotard!

- Report...

To err is human but to really foul things up requires a computer.

Most college students, fortunately, are brash enough never to bother asking their elders for advice, which, in the field of computer science, is a good thing, because their elders are apt to say goofy, antediluvian things like "the demand for keypunch operators will exceed 100,000,000 by the year 2010" and "lisp careers are really very hot right now."

Computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were. So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture.

Any inaccuracies in this index may be explained by the fact that it has been sorted with the help of a computer.

Never ask what sort of computer a guy drives. If he's a Mac user, he'll tell you. If not, why embarrass him?

Faster-than-exponential growth also occurs in computing power, as measured by the evolution of the number of MIPS per $1,000 of computer from 1900 to 1997. Thus the so-called Moore's law is incorrect, since it implies only an exponential growth. This faster than exponential acceleration has been argued to lead to a transition to a new era, around 2030, corresponding to the epoch when we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.

Didier Sornette

The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?

I hope that with our music we can inspire other people to be creative and to use their imagination, because it is something that is so lacking nowadays. You have virtual reality, MTV, video games and VCR's. Nobody really wants to think about things or create things. You have programs on a computer which will write a poem for you.

We must always give our users pure sex. It's like a rendezvous in the back seat of an automobile with a beautiful girl. One's experience with the personal computer should be better than the greatest orgasm you could have.

Jean-Louis Gassée

His personal opinion was that if you wanted sensitive information to get out, you put it in a computer.

Information is data that has been given meaning by way of relational connection. This "meaning" can be useful, but does not have to be. In computer parlance, a relational database makes information from the data stored within it.

Russell L. Ackoff

It is hardly surprising that children should enthusiastically start their education at an early age with the Absolute Knowledge of computer science; while they are unable to read, for reading demands making judgments at every line.... Conversation is almost dead, and soon so too will be those who knew how to speak.

You can prove anything by mentioning another computer language.

If India is computer, Congress is its default program.

If automobiles had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside.

Robert X. Cringely

Your programming leads to your thoughts; your thoughts lead to your feelings; your feelings lead to your actions; your actions leads to your results. Therefore, just as is done with a personal computer, by changing your programming, you take the first essential step to changing your results.

I was planning on starting a new file on my computer with the title "Phrases That Sound One Way to Witches but Mean Something Else to Vampires.

Deborah Harkness