Quotes About Computers

It took me thirty-six years; and, in some fifty stories, ranging in length from short-shorts to novels, I think I must have touched, in one way or another, on every aspect of computers and computerization. And (mark this!) I did it without ever knowing anything at all about computers in any real sense. To this day, I don't. I am totally inept with machinery... on my typewriter I turn out books at the contemptible rate of one a month

The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.

One of the best things I ever did was to train in a practical skill. I love computers and they've become such a part of life, especially to the world of design. But it's important to understand that they are a tool, as much as a hammer or a saw is a tool. Computers don't help you design. There needs to be more emphasis on training young designers in how to build things. A good writer needs a good vocabulary. A good designer needs to understand his materials and processes. You can't, as a successful designer, pretend to get any respect if you don't know how things are made.

Computers are scary. Theyre nightmares to fix, lose our stuff, and, on occasion, they crash, producing the blue screen of death. Steve Jobs knew this. He knew that computers were bulky and hernia-inducing and Darth Vader black. He understood the value of declarative design.

Computers get better, faster than anything else ever. A child's PlayStation today is more powerful than a military supercomputer from 1996. But our brains are wired for a linear world. As a result, exponential trends take us by surprise. I used to teach my students that there are some things, you know, computers just aren't good at like driving a car through traffic.

Computers are only capable of a certain kind of randomness because computers are finite devices.

I think computers have changed things tremendously. At one time, you tended to take the rough with the smooth. But now, because you can go back and stop and start, and have a limitless amount of tracks if anything looks remotely good, we keep it. You've got to go through the agony of sounding very human at first, and then you work on it with the aid of technology. Computers have revolutionized things in many ways allowing me to work to a standard I could have only joked about fourty years ago.

I've always liked making things that don't deny the medium that they're made in. If it's collage, I'm happy for it to look like that. If it's a film made with computers, I don't mind that it looks like a film made with computers as long as it still has a feeling or a mood or an atmosphere that is relevant.

Eventually, I believe, current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time.

A mismatched outfit, a slightly defective denture, an exquisite mediocrity of the soul-those are the details that make a woman real, alive. The women you see on posters or in fashion magazines-the ones all the women try to imitate nowadays-how can they be attractive? They have no reality of their own; they're just the sum of a set of abstract rules. They aren't born of human bodies; they hatch ready-made from the computers." ~The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Fertilizer played a greater role in this case than computers.

If security were all that mattered, computers would never be turned on, let alone hooked into a network with literally millions of potential intruders.

I know few significant questions of public policy which can safely be confided to computers. In the end, the hard decisions inescapably involve imponderables of intuition, prudence, and judgment.

Bounty hunters these days - because everything is so sophisticated with computers and surveillance, it doesn't have to be a one-man-army-type guy who goes in and kicks a door down.

Computers are merely ingenious devices to fulfill unimportant functions. The computer revolution is an explosion of nonsense.

Computer security can simply be protecting your equipment and files from disgruntled employees, spies, and anything that goes bump in the night, but there is much more. Computer security helps ensure that your computers, networks, and peripherals work as expected all the time, and that your data is safe in the event of hard disk crash or a power failure resulting from an electrical storm. Computer security also makes sure no damage is done to your data and that no one is able to read it unless you want them to.

Computers are no more able to create information than iPods are capable of creating music.

It would take a lot of time and effort (to repair the computers). And they can't run (programs and games) kids are interested in today. They're not even on the Internet. We wouldn't be offering them much of a carrot.

Computers get better faster than anything else ever. A child's PlayStation today is more powerful than a military supercomputer from 1996.

A typical wine writer was once described as someone with a typewriter who was looking for his name in print, a free lunch, and a way to write off his wine cellar. It's a dated view. Wine writers now use computers.

People are seduced by signals from the world, but that is manipulation, not reality. Computers have learned more about us than we've learned about them.

My goal wasn't to make a ton of money. It was to build good computers.

I guess that's a big problem with working with computers - you've got the luxury to keep tweaking the songs until the last second and beyond. So I don't think I'll ever have that feeling, unless I'm the one finishing the track.

I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining.

My e-mail address is actually my wife's e-mail address. I actually hate computers.

So we and our elaborately evolving computers may meet each other halfway. Someday a human being, named perhaps Fred White, may shoot a robot named Pete Something-or-other, which has come out of a General Electric factory, and to his surprise see it weep and bleed. And the dying robot may shoot back and, to its surprise, see a wisp of gray smoke arise from the electric pump that it supposed was Mr. White's beating heart. It would be rather a great moment of truth for both of them.

OK Computer? More like No Thank You Computers. They killed my father, and I hate them.

If computers are the wave of the future, displays are the surfboards.

Learning how to code and program computers when I was a kid was one of the best choices I made growing up. By writing code, I learned how to bring my dreams to life, how to budget, and how to build stuff. Whatever path you choose in life - being an artist, an engineer, a lawyer, a teacher, or even a politician, you will give yourself a huge leg up if you learn how to code.

I think that one of the challenges for a parent and myself as a parent is that we live in a very electronic media age. That's obvious to everyone. And I'm not opposed to time on computers or time with television or time with any other electronic media but I think that quiet, thoughtful interaction between one's self, your mind and words is an irreplacable thing.

The breakup of Bell laid the foundation for every important communications revolution since the 1980s onward. There was no way of knowing that thirty years on we would have an Internet, handheld computers, and social networking, but it is hard to imagine their coming when they did, had the company that bured the answering machine remained intact.

Economists are like computers. They need to have facts punched into them.

As soon as it's behind computers and machines, which the majority of the planet loves, I find it cold. I need to hear breathing. I like the idea of the mic being a captation of everything that's happening around.

Every time you play one old-time picture along with today's kind of work, and they throw in the computers and the guns and the this and the that and the God-almighty, it gets to be a hassle and you wonder who the hell's doing what!

In the summer of 1988, I received an interesting call from Bill Gates at Microsoft. He asked whether I'd like to come over and talk about building a new operating system at Microsoft for personal computers. What Bill had to offer was the opportunity to build another operating system, one that was portable.

People want to see realism in action now. People want the actors to perform than the computers performing. Though I have done both, I enjoy the realism of action more.

Think? Why think! We have computers to do that for us.

This is an ongoing threat from a variety of sources around the world. And actually I think it works both ways. I'm not privy to it, but I think all of the various country that have the ability are invading each other's computers all the time. But we have to protect our data. It's very important.

Roman influence seeds itself, sprouting mighty oaks right through the modern forest of computers, digital disks, microviruses and space satellites.

They have computers, and they may have other weapons of mass destruction.

There's not much value to us attacking Chinese systems. We might take a few computers offline. We might take a factory offline. We might steal secrets from a university research programs, and even something high-tech. But how much more does the United States spend on research and development than China does?

The one thing computers have done is let us make bigger mistakes. We have to be careful not to depend on our machines.

I had one typewriter for 50 years, but I have bought seven computers in six years. I suppose that's why Bill Gates is rich, and Underwood is out of business.

Computers allow us to squeeze the most out of everything, whether it's Google looking up things, so I guess that tends to make us a little lazy about reading books and doing things the hard way to understand how those things work.

Some miners would have 20 pints after a hard day in the mine. Now that we sit behind computers all day, this is down to 18 or 19 pints.

Ultimately, I consider people to be more important than computers.

One day ladies will take their computers for walks in the park and tell each other, "My little computer said such a funny thing this morning".