Quotes About Computer

I was asking questions which nobody else had asked before, because nobody else had actually looked at certain structures. Therefore, as I will tell, the advent of the computer, not as a computer but as a drawing machine, was for me a major event in my life. That's why I was motivated to participate in the birth of computer graphics, because for me computer graphics was a way of extending my hand, extending it and being able to draw things which my hand by itself, and the hands of nobody else before, would not have been able to represent.

What is the central core of the subject [computer science]? What is it that distinguishes it from the separate subjects with which it is related? What is the linking thread which gathers these disparate branches into a single discipline. My answer to these questions is simple -it is the art of programming a computer. It is the art of designing efficient and elegant methods of getting a computer to solve problems, theoretical or practical, small or large, simple or complex. It is the art of translating this design into an effective and accurate computer program.

(in response to the question: what do you think of e-books and Amazon’s Kindle?) Those aren’t books. You can’t hold a computer in your hand like you can a book. A computer does not smell. There are two perfumes to a book. If a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better. It smells like ancient Egypt. A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. You put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.

The key questions will be: Are you good at working with intelligent machines or not? Are your skills a complement to the skills of the computer, or is the computer doing better without you? Worst of all, are you competing against the computer?

I was really looking at computers as a way to understand the mind. But at M.I.T., my mind was blown by having a whole computer to yourself as long as you liked.I felt a surge of intellectual power through access to this computer, and I started thinking about what this could mean for kids and the way they learn. That's when we developed the computer programming language for kids, Logo.

I do take a computer to do some processing live and I might use a couple of plug-in synthesisers, 'cause obviously you can take quite a lot of power in terms of sound generation on a computer that I can trigger from a couple of keyboards. And it means I don't have to take some of my vintage stuff and have it trashed by various airlines which has happened in the past. But I still take some vintage stuff with me, I'll take that risk because I like using all that stuff.

My body is like in a computer for good for the rest of my life - at age 23. I have my cyber body so if they ever need me young again I can just go, 'It's in the computer.

What the gears cannot do the computer might. The computer is the Proteus of machines. Its essence is its universality, its power to simulate

With both people and computers on the job, computer error can be more quickly tracked down and corrected by people and, conversely, human error can be more quickly corrected by computers. What it amounts to is that nothing serious can happen unless human error and computer error take place simultaneously. And that hardly ever happens.

I started typing diary in, I don't know, 1978 or '79, but then the computer changed that a lot. Because with the computer if you were writing and you realized you had three sentences in a row that started with the word "he," you could fix that right up, whereas on a typewriter you'd think, "Well, I'm not going to change the whole page. It's my diary." So that made a difference.

When I have a first draft, I have a floor under my feet that I can walk on. And then, especially with the help of the computer, rewriting is so easy to do with the computer, much easier than it used to be with the typewriter. So the books go through numerous drafts.

It's funny, because I'm so associated with digital art and computer art, and yet I spend so little time in front of the computer.

Kids are all computer-savvy. Sit down and write to your parents on the computer. And just say, I have some questions and I'm scared. There's some stuff I don't know and I really need to talk to you about sex. Tear it off and put it on their pillow. They'll read it.

A computer does not smell ... if a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better… And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.

Did you ever notice that people who are good with a computer don't use it for much of anything except being good with a computer? They know all about information technology, but they don't have much interest in the information. I'm the opposite.

What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything.

Although computer chips now are thinner, they're more powerful, they're not as reliable. You'd harvest computer chips from the 1980s from all around the world because they're reliable.

Chess is one thing, but if we get to the point computers can best humans in the arts-those splendid, millennia-old expressions of the heart and soul of human existence-then why bother existing? to produce human art a computer would have to find, feel, absorb reality to the point it is overcome, to the point it sobs for release. A computer perhaps could replicate every possibility but could never transfer the energy art requires to exist in the first place.

It's the first company to build the mental position that has the upper hand, not the first company to make the product. IBM didn't invent the computer; Sperry Rand did. But IBM was the first to build the computer position in the prospect's mind.

The big corporations are suddenly taking notice of the web, and their reactions have been slow. Even the computer industry failed to see the importance of the Internet, but that's not saying much. Let's face it, the computer industry failed to see that the century would end.

The burgeoning field of computer science has shifted our view of the physical world from that of a collection of interacting material particles to one of a seething network of information. In this way of looking at nature, the laws of physics are a form of software, or algorithm, while the material world-the hardware-plays the role of a gigantic computer.

What the computer can do in art and design has turned aesthetics on its head... with the computer, things are not so much created as they are produced, with the producer-director becoming the star and the controlling force of much that was in other hands at other times.

THE COMPUTER IS JUST AN INSTRUMENT for doing faster what we already know how to do slower. All pretensions to computer intelligence and paradise-tomorrow promises should be toned down before the public turns away in disgust. And if that should happen, our civilization might not survive.

There's something nearly mystical about certain words and phrases that float through our lives. It's computer mysticism. Words that are computer generated to be used on products that might be sold anywhere from Japan to Denmark - words devised to be pronounceable in a hundred languages. And when you detach one of these words from the product it was designed to serve, the words acquires a chantlike quality.

The Macintosh was supposed to be the computer for people that just wanted to use a computer without having to learn how to use one.

Imagine God inside your computer, your phone, everyone else's computer. Imagine someone who almost is the Black Corporation, with all its power and riches and reach. And who, despite all this, seems pretty sane and beneficent by the standards of most gods. Oh, and who sometimes swears in Tibetan.

Together with my advisor, Manuel Blum, I co-invented CAPTCHAs, or computer-generated tests that humans are routinely able to pass but that computers have not mastered (they are the squiggly computer letters that are prevalent across the web).

I hope that if I ever disappear, people don't look for me based on the last websites I visited. Kind of an awkward press conference for my parents. Officer, do you have any leads? Well, based on Mr. Finnegan's computer entries, we think he was abducted by Sorority Sluts.

The word 'geek' today does not mean what it used to mean. A geek isn't the skinny kid with a pocket protector and acne. There can be computer geeks, video game geeks, car geeks, military geeks, and sports geeks. Being a geek just means that you're passionate about something.

Despair leads to boredom, electronic games, computer hacking, poetry and other bad habits.

It's the first time in the history of the world that creatives are also distributors. And that's very profound if you think that up until the recent history, permission was required for us to be able to share work at any sort of scale. We had to get permission from galleries, from ad agencies or photo editors to be able to have our work out there. And now anybody with access to a computer can show their work in 200 countries around the world.

As the people grow colder, I turn to my computer and spend my evenings with it like a friend.

A computer is a machine for constructing mappings from input to output.

The mind is an evolved computer program.

I don't get up and look at e-mail. I don't even know my e-mail address. I needed one just to have a computer put on. But I never, ever even thought of going to it. It's just not what I'm about. I just don't want to waste my life with it. It's just too much; I think people are just a little too absorbed in all of that.

Inside the envelope with the letter was a little Princess Leia action figure USB flash drive. For me to store my novel on, since he was right - I never back up my computer's hard drive. The sight of it - it's Princess Leia in her Hoth outfit, my favorite of her costumes (how had he remembered?) brought tears to my eyes.

I admit it: I'm a freak who sits obsessively in front of my computer typing my name into Yahoo Search over and over again. I'm a closet Amberholic. Please help me!

~I don't always have a lot of energy, but my kids almost always revitalize me. Of course like any working mom, sometimes I'm guilt-ridden. I think I should be sitting down doing an educational computer game with Carrie or taking Ellie to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. These kids are such sponges, and I should be taking advantage of that.~

I definitely have a piece of tape over my computer at home.

In some industry markets, high quality can be tied to making more money, but I am sure by now all of us know the computer industry is not like that.

For me, between "Reference" and "Sketching & Conceptualizing" is the "Get the Hell Out of the Studio" step. I most often NEED to shut off the computer, push myself back from my desk and escape the studio space to let possible ideas percolate in my gray matter before committing anything to paper or digital imagery as a sketch or a concept.

Computer chips will cost about a penny. That's the cost of scrap paper. The Internet will be basically for free and it will be inside our contact lens. When we blink, we will go online. When we see somebody that we don't recognize, our contact lens will identify who they are, print out their biography in your contact lens and translate, if they're speaking Chinese, into English with subtitles as they speak.

Computers are very powerful tools, but in the simulated world of the computer, everything has to be calculated.

My children threw me a life line: "Return to your roots - food - and rewrite your first book, Diet for a Small Planet." I learned that if I could just show up, in this case, if I could just get myself out of bed, get to the computer in my tiny office at MIT, and start writing, help would start arriving.

I'm probably the worst at games. I don't really like computer games either. And when I lose, I won't go again but just say I don't want to play anymore.

I've seen plenty of films where the projector broke. The problems that we have in the digital age are exactly the same as we had. Instead of, 'There's a hair in the gate,' it's, 'The computer ate the footage.' There will always be things like that going on. Nothing is perfect.

...the computer models are very good at solving equations of fluid dynamics but very bad at describing the real world. The real world is full of things like clouds and vegetation and soil and dust which the models describe very poorly.

I start my process hand written, and then I dump it in. It's like you're getting a second draft 'cause when I put it in the computer, I fix it and change stuff. That's my process. I picked that up from speaking to Neil Gaiman and Joe Hill. I was messing around with the idea of starting to write more, writing a book and doing things like this, and I reached out for advice. They were like, "Oh, we hand write, and then we dump it all in." I was like, "Great! There's no more blank pages."