#compute

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. ↗

— Neal Stephenson

#computers #persistence #sysadmins #experience

I do two things. I design mobile computers and I study brains. ↗

— Jeff Hawkins

#brains #design #i #i do #mobile

This revolution, the information revoultion, is a revolution of free energy as well, but of another kind: free intellectual energy. It's very crude today, yet our Macintosh computer takes less power than a 100-watt bulb to run it and it can save you hours a day. What will it be able to do ten or 20 years from now, or 50 years from now? ↗

— Steve Jobs

#another #bulb #computer #crude #day

I met Woz when I was 13, at a friend's garage. He was about 18. He was, like, the first person I met who knew more electronics than I did at that point. We became good friends, because we shared an interest in computer and we had a sense of humor. We pulled all kinds of pranks together. ↗

— Steve Jobs

#became #because #computer #did #electronics

I decry the current tendency to seek patents on algorithms. There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people from making use of one's contributions to computer science. ↗

— Donald Knuth

#better ways #computer #computer science #contributions #current

In fact what I would like to see is thousands of computer scientists let loose to do whatever they want. That's what really advances the field. ↗

— Donald Knuth

#computer #fact #field #i #in fact

People think that computer science is the art of geniuses but the actual reality is the opposite, just many people doing things that build on eachother, like a wall of mini stones. ↗

— Donald Knuth

#art #build #computer #computer science #doing

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do. ↗

— Donald Knuth

#beings #change #computer #concentrate #construction

People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird. ↗

— Donald Knuth

#computers #hardware #idea #interested #least

Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do. ↗

— Donald Knuth

#computer #else #enough #everything #explain