Dyson: In some creation myths, life arises out of the earth; in others, life falls out of the sky. The creation myth of the digital universe entails both metaphors. The hardware came out of the mud of World War II, and the code fell out of abstract mathematical concepts. Computation needs both physical stuff and a logical soul to bring it to life. These were young kids who had just come through World War II, who could repair the electronics on airplanes and get them flying the same day, and von Neumann put them together with mathematical logicians who could imagine a universe created entirely out of 0s and 1s.

"SaaS: It's a web site!
PaaS: It's a framework!
IaaS: It's a VM!"

"Joel Spolsky brilliantly created "The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code, a 12-question "highly irresponsible, sloppy test to rate the quality of a software team". I've come up with my own test for system administrators. It is 32 yes/no questions. It is equally sloppy and irresponsible."

"Consumers loudly campaigned for another Barbie® career. The winner of the popular vote is Computer Engineer. Computer Engineer Barbie®, debuting in Winter 2010, inspires a new generation of girls to explore this important high-tech industry, which continues to grow and need future female leaders."

"Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction."

"As if the Government taking official statistics directly from partisan sources wasn't bad enough, the BBC reporter Oliver Hawkins also found that the figures were based on some highly questionable assumptions. The 7m figure had actually been rounded up from an actual figure of 6.7m. That 6.7m was gleaned from a 2008 survey of 1,176 net-connected households, 11.6% of which admitted to having used file-sharing software - in other words, only 136 people. It gets worse. That 11.6% of respondents who admitted to file sharing was adjusted upwards to 16.3% "to reflect the assumption that fewer people admit to file sharing than actually do it." The report's author told the BBC that the adjustment "wasn't just pulled out of thin air" but based on unspecified evidence"

"We have built a lens with one LED, which we’ve powered wirelessly with RF. What we’ve done so far barely hints at what will soon be possible with this technology."

"Certainly not! That’s the beauty of our approach! Machine translation has never been “Artificial Intelligence”—that’s where your natural language intelligence is sorely needed! Five centuries of “papers” make a truly enormous bulk of machine-searchable material. The Semantic Web has made profound advances! So today our stochastic ontological schemata have dissolved hundreds of so-called “scientific disciplines,” and their millions of paper “journals,” into one vast Google-soup of navigable, searchable, ontologically linkable “language product.”"

"If you haven’t heard about it yet, the new computational search engine Wolfram Alpha launched this week to much fanfare and attention. The service can calculate integrals, tell you the flying time between San Francisco and London, or even the (lack of) nutritional content of your M&M’s. But Stephen Wolfram and his team didn’t stop there, and they certainly didn’t lack a sense of humor when they built their Mathematica-based engine. Slowly but surely, people have been finding some interesting quirks within Wolfram Alpha, triggered by specific questions or events. These interesting easter eggs will make you smile or raise an eyebrow in bewilderment."

"Unfortunately you are wrong about recovering data that has been overwritten by using magnetic magic. That is an urban legend that has been disproven. Maybe 20 years ago using low density MFM drives it was theoretically possible, but now it is not. ... When data is deleted it is NOT overwritten. When a hard drive is re-formatted almost nothing is over-written. When a file is overwritten with zeros or random bytes there are probably 10 more copies of that file and previous versions of that file floating around in unallocated sectors, swap space, file slack, hibernation files, etc. But what IS overwritten is gone."

"What the überbox did contain was 16 smaller boxes "which in turn [each] contained (wrapped in foam so they wouldn't get broken) exactly two sheets of A4 paper"

"The Shuttle was never expected to be in orbit as one year gives way to another, so the computers aren't set up to switch to a new "Day One". To the Shuttle, January 1 is just day 366."

"Wubi is an unofficial Ubuntu installer for Windows users that will bring you into the Linux world with a single click. Wubi allows you to install and uninstall Ubuntu as any other application. If you heard about Linux and Ubuntu, if you wanted to try the

"Why can't my computer automatically show me things that will help me with what I'm doing, instead of making me search around for them? The goal of the dashboard is to automatically show a user useful files and other objects as he goes about his day."

"The more we tighten our grip the more software will fall through our fingers. ....Oh wait, which ones are we Linux guys again, Rebels or Empire?" "Microsoft is the Empire. Apple is the Rebels. We are the Ewoks."

An interesting comparison between what books did for society 500 years ago and what computers might do for us in the near future.