#computers

Originally, I was in both software and in online computing. The first innovation really was sort of at that time that we're marrying the telephone and the computer so that people wouldn't have to drive to the computer center. We didn't have $1,000 computers. ↗

— Sam Wyly

#center #computer #computers #computing #drive

... there was one new metallic monstrosity stacked in one corner that she hadn’t seen the last time she was a visitor to his strange chamber, it appeared to be a mass of hard drives all fused together, but they looked too sophisticated to be merely hard drives. “What on earth is that?” “That’s my Kung Fu,” he said proudly, patting the top of the futuristic-looking stack. “Is that what you wanted to show me?” “No, but it’s impressive, isn’t it?” “If you say so.” Steves sighed and shook his head, so few people could appreciate the intellectual complexity of an almost untraceable hacking device. ↗

— E.A. Bucchianeri

#computers #funny #geek #geek-humor #humor

The intentions of the cybernetic totalist tribe are good. They are simply following a path that was blazed in earlier times by well-meaning Freudians and Marxists - and I don't mean that in a pejorative way. I'm thinking of the earliest incarnations of Marxism, for instance, before Stalinism and Maoism killed millions. Movements associated with Freud and Marx both claimed foundations in rationality and the scientific understanding of the world. Both perceived themselves to be at war with the weird, manipulative fantasies of religions. And yet both invented their own fantasies that were just as weird. The same thing is happening again. A self-proclaimed materialist movement that attempts to base itself on science starts to look like a religion rather quickly. It soon presents its own eschatology and its own revelations about what is really going on - portentous events that no one but the initiated can appreciate. The Singularity and the noosphere, the idea that a collective consciousness emerges from all the users on the web, echo Marxist social determinism and Freud's calculus of perversions. We rush ahead of skeptical, scientific inquiry at our peril, just like the Marxists and Freudians. ↗

— Jaron Lanier

#freud #freudians #internet #marx #marxism

I've never had Internet access. Actually, I have looked at things on other people's computers as a bystander. A few times in my life I've opened email accounts, twice actually, but it's something I don't want in my life right now. ↗

— Jhumoa Lahiri

#accounts #actually #computers #email #few

The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. ↗

— Tim Berners-Lee

#computers #cooperation #current #enabling #extension

Computers are famous for being able to do complicated things starting from simple programs. ↗

— Seth Lloyd

#able #being #complicated #complicated things #famous

I get hired to hack into computers now and sometimes it's actually easier than it was years ago. ↗

— Kevin Mitnick

#ago #computers #easier #get #hack

I understand that computers, which I once believed to be but a hermaphrodite typewriter-cum-filing cabinet, offer the cyber literate increased ability to communicate. I do not think this is altogether a bad thing, however it may appear on the surface. ↗

— David Mamet

#altogether #appear #bad #bad thing #believed

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. ↗

— Thomas Nagel

#attempts #beings #believe #computers #conscious

We're entering a new world in which data may be more important than software. ↗

— Tim O'Reilly

#data #entering #important #may #more