Companies spend millions of dollars on firewalls 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 and operate computer systems
— Kevin Mitnick
Beautiful Computer Systems quotations
A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable.
The only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards.
If one ox could not do the job they did not try to grow a bigger ox, but used two oxen. When we need greater computer power, the answer is not to get a bigger computer, but . . .to build systems of computers and operate them in parallel.
The computer is the most extraordinary of man's technological clothing;
it's an extension of our central nervous system. Beside it, the wheel is a mere hula-hoop.
All physical systems can be thought of as registering and processing information, and how one wishes to define computation will determine your view of what computation consists of.
A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.
Amateurs hack systems, professionals hack people.
While many hackers have the knowledge, skills, and tools to attack computer systems, they generally lack the motivation to cause violence or severe economic or social harm.
While many hackers have the knowledge, skills, and tools to attack computer systems, they generally lack the motivation to cause violence or severe economic or social harm.
Computer system analysis is like child-rearing;
you can do grievous damage, but you cannot ensure success.
The inside of a computer is as dumb as hell but it goes like mad!
Microsoft is now talking about the digital nervous system.
.. I guess I would be nervous if my system was built on their technology too.
A computer will do what you tell it to do, but that may be much different from what you had in mind.
When I was in prison, a Colombian drug lord, offered me $5 million in cash to manipulate a computer system so that he would be released. I turned him down.
We build our computer (systems) the way we build our cities: over time, without a plan, on top of ruins
Graphic design, which evokes the symmetria of Vituvius, the dynamic symmetry of Hambidge, the asymmetry of Mondrian; which is a good gestalt, generated by intuition or by computer, by invention or by a system of coordinates, is not good design if it does not communicate.
The European model is, first, a social and economic system founded on the role of the market, for no computer in the world can process information better than the market.
As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications.
Computers can bully us. A slow and unreliable system will bring even the toughest soul to their knees as they find themselves completely defenseless against the erratic whims of their rogue machine.
If the system exhibits a structure which can be represented by a mathematical equivalent, called a mathematical model, and if the objective can be also so quantified, then some computational method may be evolved for choosing the best schedule of actions among alternatives. Such use of mathematical models is termed mathematical programming.
Space has not changed but technology has, in many cases, improved dramatically.
A good example is digital technology where today's cell phones are far more powerful than the computers on the Apollo Command Module and Lunar Module that we used to navigate to the moon and operate all the spacecraft control systems.
If you don't handle [exceptions], we shut your application down.
That dramatically increases the reliability of the system.
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?
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.
Much of my work has come from being lazy.
I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.
I think anything that requires real global breakthroughs requires a degree of intensity and sustained effort that cannot be done part time, so it's something you have to do around the clock, and that doesn't compute with our existing educational system.
As you study computer science you develop this wonderful mental acumen, particularly with relational databases, systems analysis, and artificial intelligence.
When you zap things with light to build quantum computers, you're hacking existing systems. You're hijacking the computation that's already happening in the universe, just like a hacker takes over someone else's computer.
The most important application of quantum computing in the future is likely to be a computer simulation of quantum systems, because that's an application where we know for sure that quantum systems in general cannot be efficiently simulated on a classical computer.
When David Marr at MIT moved into computer vision, he generated a lot of excitement, but he hit up against the problem of knowledge representation; he had no good representations for knowledge in his vision systems.
Computer science is the operating system for all innovation.
The main motivations were to try to leverage Google's expertise with large computer systems and to try to give something back to science
The structure of a software system provides the ecology in which code is born, matures, and dies. A well-designed habitat allows for the successful evolution of all the components needed in a software system.
The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems.