Computer Systems Quotes

I think we're in an age where artists really have an incredible range of materials at their command now. They can use almost anything from household items - Jackson Pollock used house paint - to, you know, advanced computer systems, to good old oil paint and acrylic paint. ~ Bill Viola

Those are all computational engines that are highly distributed and therefore highly robust, .. We're seeing a very significant evolution in the way we even think about computer systems, let alone specific applications. ~ Vinton Cerf

The main motivations were to try to leverage Google's expertise with large computer systems and to try to give something back to science ~ Susan Wojcicki

We build our computer (systems) the way we build our cities: over time, without a plan, on top of ruins ~ Ellen Ullman

It's like ... time is flowing backward. We're caveman archeologists in the ruins of the future. ~ Dan Wells

Sometimes what-if fantasies are useful. Imagine that the entirety of Western civilisation's coding for computer systems or prints of all films ever made or all copies of Shakespeare and the Bible and the Qur'an were encrypted and held on one tablet device. And if that tablet was lost, stolen, burnt or corrupted, then our knowledge, use and understanding of that content, those words and ideas, would be gone for ever – only, perhaps, lingering in the minds of a very few men of memory whose job it had been to keep ideas alive. This little thought-experiment can help us to comprehend the totemic power of manuscripts. This is the great weight of responsibility for the past, the present and the future that the manuscripts of Constantinople carried. Much of our global cultural heritage – philosophies, dramas, epic poems – survive only because they were preserved in the city's libraries and scriptoria. Just as Alexandria and Pergamon too had amassed vast libraries, Constantinople understood that a physical accumulation of knowledge worked as a lode-stone – drawing in respect, talent and sheer awe. These texts contained both the possibilities and the fact of empire and had a quasi-magical status. This was a time when the written word was considered so potent – and so precious – that documents were thought to be objects with spiritual significance. (...)

It was in Constantinople that the book review was invented. Scholars seem to have had access to books within a proto-lendi ~ Bettany Hughes

You have weak artificial intelligence, which is a robot or a computer system that follows a list of protocols and it's like yes/no answers that can be as complex as you want, and then you have strong A.I., which is basically like a human, like something that can think up a thought that's never been thought up or paint a painting or write a poem. ~ Neill Blomkamp

Taxpayers have spent more than $200 billion in the last decade on computer systems that are antiquated, incompatible, and not doing the job. ~ William Cohen

Information technology departments must spend enormous amounts of time and money worrying about integrating big computer systems with billions of pieces of customer data. ~ Alex Berenson

Companies spend millions of dollars on firewalls, encryption, and secure access devices and it's money wasted because none of these measures address the weakest link in the security chain: the people who use, administer, operate and account for computer systems that contain protected information. ~ Kevin Mitnick

Today, no one would dispute that information technology has become the backbone of commerce. It underpins the operations of individual companies, ties together far-flung supply chains, and, increasingly, links businesses to the customers they serve. Hardly a dollar or a euro changes hands anymore without the aid of computer systems. ~ Nicholas G. Carr

That sounds strangely little like "justice," Tisipohone jibed gently.

"On the contrary." Alicia jacked a discarding sabot round into the M-97's chamber and settled her left hand briefly on the forestock to activate its computer systems. "I won't do a thing to them unless they intend to do something to me."

Indeed?

"Indeed. But if they do have something planned, I intend to do unto them first."

So there are times you see things my way after all.

"Never said there weren't. ~ David Weber

As managers develop the systems approach, they learn to use computers for the things they are good at and to the contrary avoid using computers for things that people are good at. The consequences are fewer computer systems and more control. I ~ John Seddon

Now scarcely a week goes by without a news story about the cops swooping down on some adolescent prowler who is as skilled at breaking into computer systems as defense contractors are at breaking into the Federal budget. ~ Russell Baker

Jabba resembled a giant tadpole, like the cinematic creature for whom he was nicknamed, the man was a hairless spheroid. As resident guardian angel of all NSA computer systems, Jabba marched from department to department, tweaking, soldering, and reaffirming his credo that prevention was the best medicine. No NSA computer had ever been infected under Jabba's reign; he intended to keep it that way. ~ Dan Brown

In the judgment of design engineers, the ordinary means of communicating with a computer are entirely inadequate. [ ... ] Graphical communication in some form or other is of vital importance in engineering as that subject is now conducted; we must either provide the capability in our computer systems, or take on the impossible task of training up a future race of engineers conditioned to think in a different way. ~ Maurice Wilkes

I hope you're appreciating the rich irony here: hospitals and doctors are using the Medicare subsidy (Medicare is the federal agency that doles out the HITECH dollars) to buy computer systems that allow them to bill Medicare more effectively. ~ Robert Wachter

My hacking involved pretty much exploring computer systems and obtaining access to the source code of telecommunication systems and computer operating systems, because my goal was to learn all I can about security vulnerabilities within these systems. ~ Kevin Mitnick

Fair Trade supports some of the most bio-diverse farming systems in the world. When you visit a Fair Trade coffee grower's fields, with the forest canopy overhead and the sound of migratory songbirds in the air, it feels like you're standing in the rainforest. ~ Miguel A. Altieri

General systems theory and cybernetics are
deterministic while human actions are not! ~ Springer

In 1975 I met Alison Brown and in 1982 we were married. She works for Cornell Computer Services. ~ Kenneth G. Wilson

Your belief system saturates the space around you. ~ Aaron Huey

A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy. Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a
totally anonymous manner. Two persons may exchange messages, conduct business, and negotiate electronic contracts without ever knowing the true name, or legal identity, of the other. Interactions over networks will be untraceable, via extensive rerouting of encrypted packets and tamper-proof boxes which implement cryptographic protocols with nearly perfect assurance against any tampering. Reputations will be of central importance, far more important in dealings than even the credit ratings of today. These developments will alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret, and will even alter the nature of trust and reputation. ~ Peter Ludlow

...girl reached across her desk and pulled the computer keyboard over. "What's his name?" she said. "Crowley," Julianna said, surprised. "Christopher Wayne Crowley." "I shouldn't do this." The girl looked back up at Genevieve and laughed. "But fuck it, right?" Genevieve's disappearance from the state fair had been news for about a day. Okay, maybe for a couple of weeks. She was beautiful - the Daily Oklahoman ran her picture with every story, a photo of her from the previous year's U. S. Grant High School yearbook. Genevieve had thought the photo... ~ Lou Berney

The best programs are written so that computing machines can perform them quickly and so that human beings can understand them clearly. A programmer is ideally an essayist who works with traditional aesthetic and literary forms as well as mathematical concepts, to communicate the way that an algorithm works and to convince a reader that the results will be correct. ~ Donald Ervin Knuth

I use computers for email, staying current with my own website as well as finding important information through other websites. I also use it for creating MP3 files of new music I'm working on. ~ Clint Black

Since September 11th Congress has created the Department of Homeland Security, more than doubled the homeland security budget and implemented a bipartisan overhaul of our intelligence systems. ~ Doc Hastings

New technologies can be used for destructive purposes. The answer is to develop rapid-response systems for new dangers like a bioterrorist creating a new biological virus. ~ Ray Kurzweil

The crash of the whole solar and stellar systems could only kill you once. ~ Thomas Carlyle

The three most important aspects of debugging and real estate are the same: Location, Location, and Location. ~ Richard E. Pattis

India had a very long independence movement. It started in 1886, [with] the first generation of Western-educated Indians. They were all liberals. They followed the Liberal Party in Britain, and they were very proud of their knowledge of parliamentary systems, parliamentary manners. They were big debaters. They [had], as it were, a long apprenticeship in training for being in power. Even when Gandhi made it a mass movement, the idea of elective representatives, elected working committees, elected leadership, all that stayed because basically Indians wanted to impress the British that they were going to be as good as the British were at running a parliamentary democracy. And that helped quite a lot. ~ Meghnad Desai

In the United States, the Supreme Court's decision of 1954, outlawing segregation in school systems, was greeted with mixed feelings of hope and skepticism by African-Americans. ~ John Henrik Clarke

As information processing machines, our ability to process data about the external world begins at the level of sensory perception. Although most of us are rarely aware of it, our sensory receptors are designed to detect information at the energy level. Because everything around us - the air we breathe, even the materials we use to build with, are composed of spinning and vibrating atomic particles, you and I are literally swimming in a turbulent sea of electromagnetic fields. We are part of it. We are enveloped within in, and through our sensory apparatus we experience what is.
Each of our sensory systems is made up of a complex cascade of neurons that process the incoming neural code from the level of the receptor to specific areas within the brain. Each group of neurons along the cascade alters or enhances the code, and passes it on to the next set of cells in the system, which further defines and refines the message. By the time the code reaches the outermost portion of our brain, the higher levels of the cerebral cortex, we become conscious of the stimulation. However, if any of the cells along the pathway fail in their ability to function normally, then the final perception is skewed away from normal reality. ~ Jill Bolte Taylor

Most people don't like to think. This is why human religions are so popular. It almost doesn't matter what the belief system is, as long as it's firm, consistent, clear in its expectation of the follower, and rigid. Given those characteristics, you can find people who believe in almost anything. It's God's way, they say. God's word. And there are those who will accept that. Gladly. Because, you see, it eliminates the need to think. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

In actuality it's drum samples in the computer. I don't know, I've just never really dug into that whole technology thing, I feel like it hurts me as a musician a little. ~ The Rocket Summer

India just went 3 years with no cases [of polio]. Pakistan is our toughest location right now because some parts of the Taliban have not allowed vaccinators to come in and have even attacked vaccinators. We are hopeful this will get resolved since no one wants their kid to be paralyzed. I spend a lot of time making sure the polio campaign is doing the best it can. We have great computer models that help guide our activities. ~ Bill Gates

Across the nation, the election protection movement attracts ordinary citizens who educate their neighbors about their voting systems and the private companies that built and run them. ~ Mimi Kennedy

My family and I took visits to each and every school and listened to each coaching staff. I felt the most comfortable with and really excited about playing at SC. Being close to home in one of the best offensive systems is paying off now as I'm making the jump to the pros. ~ Mark Sanchez

I feel, holding books, accommodating their weight and breathing their dust, an abiding love. I trust them, in a way that I can't trust my computer, though I couldn't do without it. Books are matter. My books matter. What would I have done through these years without the library and all its lovely books? ~ Lori Lansens

Whereas smaller computer languages have features designed into them, C++ is unusual in having a whole swathe of functionality discovered, like a tract of 19th century Africa. ~ Verity Stob

I had been impressed by the fact that biological systems were based on molecular machines and that we were learning to design and build these sorts of things. ~ K. Eric Drexler

Do everything by hand, even when using the computer. ~ Hayao Miyazaki

With consumers buying two smartphones for every desktop computer they purchase, the demands, challenges and opportunities of the mobile space are reshaping our assumptions about design and user behaviour. ~ Jeffrey Zeldman

Many biologists claim that our thoughts and feelings of"ethics and meaning" derive only from the proclivities of our nervous systems. Our behaviour and psychology developed by the process of evolution, as did the minds and emotions of animals: so no us and them, just different variations on evolutionary themes. If so, ethics are vapors arising from our synapses, not truths with objective validity outside our own minds. ~ David George Haskell

I already optioned a book called The Personal History of Rachel DuPree. I also like The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill. And I love all of Octavia Butler's books. She's created some very complicated black heroines with a variety of belief systems. There are many great books out there, but those are a few of the ones that stand out. ~ Viola Davis

Apple Computer would not have reached its current peak of success if it had feared to roll the dice and launch products that didn't always hit the mark. In the mid-1990s, the company was considered washed up, Steve Jobs had departed, and a string of lackluster product launches unrelated to the company's core business. ~ Naveen Jain

In managing our transport systems, our governments must constantly negotiate the paradox of mass movement. They must create a system which, for the sake of speed and efficiency, treats us like a herd, constantly prodded and coralled, divided, re-formed and forced into line. At the same time it must grant us the illusion of autonomy. ~ George Monbiot

Europe was not born in the early Middle Ages. No common identity in 1000 linked Spain to Russia, Ireland to the Byzantine empire (in what is now the Balkans, Greece and Turkey), except the very weak sense of community that linked Christian polities together. There was no common European culture, and certainly not any Europe-wide economy. There was no sign whatsoever that Europe would, in a still rather distant future, develop economically and militarily, so as to be able to dominate the world. Anyone in 1000 looking for future industrialization would have put bets on the economy of Egypt, not of the Rhineland and Low Countries, and that of Lancashire would have seemed like a joke. In politico-military terms, the far south-east and south-west of Europe, Byzantium and al-Andalus (Muslim Spain), provided the dominant states of the Continent, whereas in western Europe the Carolingian experiment (see below, Chapters 16 and 17) had ended with the break-up of Francia (modern France, Belgium and western Germany), the hegemonic polity for the previous four hundred years. The most coherent western state in 1000, southern England, was tiny. In fact, weak political systems dominated most of the Continent at the end of our period, and the active and aggressive political systems of later on in the Middle Ages were hardly visible.

National identities, too, were not widely prominent in 1000, even if one rejects the association between nationalism and modernity made in much contemp ~ Chris Wickham

The ideal ratio is one computer to every five students; we are nowhere close to that percentage in a lot of schools in America. ~ Spencer Abraham

First of all, computer animation is certainly a tremendous and viable medium today. But the warmth and personality derived from 2-D animation, in my opinion, cannot be surpassed. Certain stories lend themselves well to 3-D animation and I won't labor this with naming them, but in my bones, I still respond more emotionally to the artists feel in 2-D. You feel the 'actor' in the animator more personally ... it's hard to explain. ~ Richard Sherman

The shock to our systems
Made us both trip;
We fell,
The pair of us,
In different directions. ~ Rachel Ellynn M.

I didn't even get a computer till I was 16, so I didn't have Internet when I was in middle school and beginning of high school. I didn't think to be looking things up and looking at message boards saying whether people liked me or not. ~ Sara Paxton

As we get more transparent with data sets about infrastructure and systems management, I have a feeling we'll see big changes in how we think about complexity and our relationship to our actions. ~ Aaron Koblin

White men grow on an open, level field. White women grow on far steeper and rougher terrain because the field wasn't made for them. Women of color grow not just on a hill, but on a cliffside over the ocean, battered by wind and waves. None of us chooses the landscape in which we're planted. If you find yourself on an ocean-battered cliff, your only choice is to grow there, or fall into the ocean. So if we transplant a survivor of the steep hill and cliff to the level field, natives of the field may look at that survivor and wonder why she has so much trouble trusting people, systems, and even her own bodily sensations. Why is this tree so bent and gnarled?

It's because that is what it took to survive in the place where she grew. A tree that's fought wind and gravity and erosion to grow strong and green on a steep cliff is going to look strange and out of place when moved to the level playing field. The gnarled, wind-blown tree from an oceanside cliff might not conform with our ideas of what a tree should look like, but it works well in the context where it grew. And that tall straight tree wouldn't stand a chance if it was transplanted to the cliffside. ~ Emily Nagoski

If you spend more on coffee than on IT security, you will be hacked. What's more, you deserve to be hacked. ~ Richard A. Clarke

I don't think we have very good records about what they were thinking except, as I pointed out earlier today, that they did invent our political system. ~ David R. Brower

Like the librarians of Babel in Borges's story, who are looking for the book that will provide them with the key to all the others, we oscillate between the illusion of perfection and the vertigo of the unattainable. In the name of completeness, we would like to believe that a unique order exists that would enable us to accede in knowledge all in one go; in the name of the unattainable, we would like to think that order and disorder are in fact the same word, denoting pure chance.
It's possible also that both are decoys, illusions intended to disguise the erosion of both books and systems. It is no bad thing in any case that between the two our bookshelves should serve from time to time as joggers of the memory, as cat-rests and as lumber-rooms. ~ Georges Perec

When I was a kid, they had a saying, 'to err is human but to really fuck it up takes a computer.' ~ Benjamin R. Smith

All systems are corrupt. All governments and all laws exist to benefit those in power. ~ D.D. Webb

A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming. ~ Alan Perlis

Although the Internet makes it seem as if you have a direct connection to the securities market, you don't. Lines may clog; systems may break; orders may back-up. ~ Arthur Levitt

Writing it down

is the way I make it real,
the way I find my way
into what it is I feel.

The words on paper or
computer screen
tell me more than
what I knew before
I wrote them,

help me remember
what I'm afraid
I'll forget,

let me keep
what I don't want
to lose,

say to me:
You
were
here. ~ James Howe

We're at the point where we don't need one genome or just a few genomes to interpret your genome. We need tens of thousands of genomes as a starting point, coupled with everything we can know about their physiology. It's only when we do that giant computer search, putting all that DNA together, that we will be able to make sense in a meaningful statistical manner of what your DNA is telling you. We're just at the start of trying to do that. ~ Anonymous