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53fee52
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Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again.
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computers
hacker-folklore
humour
idiots
it
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Charles Stross |
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474864a
|
"Now, 75 years [after ], in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.
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communication
computers
critical-thinking
modern-life
reading
superficiality
vacuity
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Harper Lee |
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0434133
|
Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference; we should each be treated with appropriate respect.
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computers
diversity
robots
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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2604d4f
|
"Forty-two!" yelled Loonquawl. "Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work?" "I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is."
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computers
humor
meaning-of-life
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Douglas Adams |
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3051734
|
Social capital may turn out to be a prerequisite for, rather than a consequence of, effective computer-mediated communication.
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computers
internet
technology
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Robert D. Putnam |
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671f8f2
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... we have created a man with not one brain but two. ... This new brain is intended to control the biological brain. ... The patient's biological brain is the peripheral terminal -- the only peripheral terminal -- for the new computer. ... And therefore the patient's biological brain, indeed his whole body, has become a terminal for the new computer. We have created a man who is one single, large, complex computer terminal. The patient is a read-out device for the new computer, and is helpless to control the readout as a TV screen is helpless to control the information presented on it.
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computers
science-fiction
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Michael Crichton |
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9b23b2f
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We conquer the Independence Day aliens by having a Macintosh laptop computer upload a software virus to the mothership (which happens to be one-fifth the mass of the Moon), thus disarming its protective force field. I don't know about you, but back in 1996 I had trouble just uploading files to other computers within my own department, especially when the operating systems were different. There is only one solution: the entire defense system for the alien mothership must have been powered by the same release of Apple Computer's system software as the laptop computer that delivered the virus.
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apple
computers
funny
software
space
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Neil deGrasse Tyson |
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e1555b1
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What if I got hit by lightning while walking with an umbrella? Ban umbrellas! Fight the menace of lightning!
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computers
funny
humor
humour
lightning
terrorism
umbrellas
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Cory Doctorow |
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9d9fb9a
|
"If patterns of ones and zeroes were "like" patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long strings of ones and zeroes, then what kind of creature could be represented by a long string of lives and deaths?"
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computers
science
science-fiction
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Thomas Pynchon |
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f4a03ac
|
For most digital-age writers, writing rewriting. We grope, cut, block, paste, and twitch, panning for gold onscreen by deleting bucketloads of crap. Our analog ancestors had to polish every line mentally before hammering it out mechanically. Rewrites cost them months, meters of ink ribbon, and pints of Tippex. Poor sods.
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computers
technology
typewriters
word-processors
writers
writing
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David Mitchell |
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e49dee0
|
I wonder who had the first computer dream, where, and when? I wonder if computers ever dream of humans.
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computers
dreams
technology
|
David Mitchell |
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02ae95f
|
The chip that functions abnormally will be desoldered, as they say.
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androids
chip
computer
computers
hammer
humor
nail
robots
soldering
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Charles Stross |
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c9141ab
|
Most of Csongor's time in T'Rain had been spent blundering about in a state of hapless newbie confusion. Only his long experience as a system administrator, struggling with Byzantine software installations, had prevented hum from plummeting into despair and simply giving up. Not that any of the sysadmin's knowledge and skills were applicable here. The psychological stance was the thing: the implicit faith, a little naive and a little cocky, that by banging his head against the problem for long enough he'd be able to break through in the end.
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computers
persistence
sysadmins
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Neal Stephenson |
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77e1da9
|
Abe said something interesting. He said that because everyone's so poor these days, the '90s will be a decade with no architectural legacy or style- everyone's too poor to put up new buildings. He said that code is the architecture of the '90s.
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architecture
computers
nerds
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Douglas Coupland |
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f1eda4e
|
Helpfiles are traditionally outnumbered by no-help files, which superficially resemble a helpfile in form but not in content because they don't actually tell you anything you don't already know, or they answer every question except the one you're asking, or you open them and a giant animated paper clip leaps out and cheerfully asks where you want to go today. And wikis are worse.
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computers
help
it
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Charles Stross Cory Doctorow |
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60f2089
|
"Face-book has all the social graces of a nose-picking, hyperactive six-year-old, standing at the threshold of your attention and chanting, "I know something, I know something, I know something, won't tell you what it is!"
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computers
facebook
social-networking
|
Cory Doctorow |
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eb7803b
|
When I was an activist in the 1980s, ninety-eight percent of my time was spent stuffing envelopes and writing addresses on them. The remaining two percent was the time we spent figuring out what to put in the envelopes. Today, we get those envelopes and stamps and address books for free. This is so fantastically, hugely different and weird that we haven't even begun to feel the first tendrils of it.
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computers
history
politics
|
Cory Doctorow |
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8a94e90
|
I'm proud of it. Apart from marking the first occasion when I used my talent on behalf of other people without being asked and without caring whether I was rewarded--which was a major breakthrough in itself--the job was a pure masterpiece. Working on it, I realized in my guts how an artist or an author can get high on the creative act. The poker who wrote Precipice's original tapeworm was pretty good, but you could theoretically have killed it without shutting down the net--that is, at the cost of losing thirty or forty billion bits of data. Which I gather they were just about prepared to do when I showed up. But mine...Ho, no! That, I cross my heart, cannot be killed without DISMANTLING the net.
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computers
first-hacktivist
hacker-folklore
hackers
hacking
hacktivism
|
John Brunner |
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4fcf89e
|
All the computers in the world are on a network. They're linked by our cuffs. But I'm a computer. Jack's a computer--Akilah--PA Young--all the cy-clones. We're all computers. You know the great thing about computers? They can be hacked.
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computers
hacking
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Beth Revis |
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257b37a
|
Was [Steve Jobs] smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. [...] Like a pathfinder, he could absorb information, sniff the winds, and sense what lay ahead. Steve Jobs thus became the greatest business executive of our era, the one most certain to be remembered a century from now. History will place him in the pantheon right next to Edison and Ford. More than anyone else of his time, he made products that were completely innovative, combining the power of poetry and processors. With a ferocity that could make working with him as unsettling as it was inspiring, he also built the world's most creative company. And he was able to infuse into its DNA the design sensibilities, perfectionism, and imagination that make it likely to be, even decades from now, the company that thrives best at the intersection of artistry and technology.
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apple
brilliant
computers
genius
innovation
innovator
inspirational
technology
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Walter Isaacson |
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329d336
|
Hollywood movies, however, have brainwashed us into thinking that we can defeat the alien invaders if they are a few decades or centuries ahead of us in technology. Hollywood assumes that we can win by using some primitive, clever trick. In Independence Day, all we have to do is inject a simple computer virus into their operating system to bring them to their knees, as if the aliens use Microsoft Windows.
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computers
future
movies
science-fiction
technology
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Michio Kaku |