"Spin is sometimes dismissed as a simple euphemism for lying. But it's
actually something more insiduous: indifference to the truth."
-- Michael Kinsley
"C99... you have to worry about a standard that says strength and
stromboli are reserved words."
-- Charles S. Hendrix on alt.folklore.computers, 6/13/2002
"Multithreaded code in C/C++ gives me the creeps - it's like watching
neanderthal man trying to light a fire with a couple of pounds of C4
for fuel..."
Rupert Pigott on comp.arch, 5/20/2002
"Don't get me started on intuitive. You know what's intuitive?
Fear of heights. Everything else we call intuitive, such as walking or using
a pencil took years of practice."
-- Donald A. Norman (on user interfaces)
"Life is what happens to you while you're planning your next move."
-- Mick Jagger
"[W]hy act as though you need to take a vitamin pill every few hours or
you're going to turn white and your teeth fall out by morning. That's
using vitamins like religious talismans, not as gifts of science."
-- Steve Harris on sci.med
"Science does not contradict, or even concern itself with miracles. Science
deals with the laws of nature, while miracles are, by definition, exceptions
to those laws. Any disbelief in miracles is thus not scientific, but is based
on arbitrary prejudices in conformity to popular styles of thought. Such
a disbelief can reduce a person's concept of G-d to a mere abstract
philosophical idea, abolishing the obligation to serve and obey Him."
-- Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan
"My favorite just-barely-polynomial problem is computing the 'convex skull':
given a simple polygon in the plane, compute the largest convex subpolygon.
The fastest known algorithm runs in O(n^9) time."
-- Jeff Erickson on comp.theory
"A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by
the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated
and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity
at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and
have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of
Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was
asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you
read a work of Shakespeare's?
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question -- such as, What
do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent
of saying, Can you read? -- not more than one in ten of the highly educated
would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice
of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in
the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic
ancestors would have had."
-- C.P. Snow
"It is, for instance, pretty suicidal for embattled minorities to
embrace Michel Foucault, let alone Jacques Derrida. The minority
view was always that power could be undermined by truth ... Once
you read Foucault as saying that truth is simply an effect of power,
you've had it. ... But American departments of literature, history and
sociology contain large numbers of self-described leftists who have
confused radical doubts about objectivity with political radicalism,
and are in a mess."
-- Alan Ryan
"It seems to me that CPU groups fall back to explicit parallelism when
they have run out of ideas for improving uniprocessor performance. If
your workload has parallelism, great; even if it doesn't currently have
parallelism, sometimes occasionally it is easy to write multithreaded code
than single threaded code. But, if your workload doesn't have enough natural
parallelism, it is far too easy to persuade yourself that software should
be rewritten to expose more parallelism... because explicit parallelism
is easy to microarchitect for."
-- Andy Glew on comp.arch, 6/26/2001
"To those of you who received honors, awards and distinctions, I say
well done. And to the C students, I say: You, too, can be president of
the United States."
-- George W. Bush, accepting an honorary doctorate at Yale
"I found this paper to be refreshingly novel and interesting, particularly
considering its in an overpublished area like branch prediction."
-- Anonymous Reviewer
"This paper describes a new branch prediction mechanism. While this
usually makes people curl up in a fetal position begging 'no more', this
particular mechanism is both effective, clever and practical."
-- Anonymous Reviewer
"There's a trend toward rejecting branch prediction papers just because
it's such a tired topic. But it remains a huge limitation on performance
and remains I think an important topic for conferences like [this one].
I think it would be a terrible shame to reject this paper just because
it's on the topic of branch prediction."
-- Anonymous Reviewer
Engineer to Leslie, "Why the hell did you reverse the C++ meaning's of
== and = in TLA+?"
Leslie to Engineer, "Why the hell did C++ reverse the semantics of
2000 years of mathematics?"
-- Leslie Lamport
"I'm thinking about three or four pieces from now. You know what the trouble
is, don't you? It's like the weather, you can't control it. You can't say,
'I want a little bit of rain.' You get whatever the rain is. You can't say,
'I want a little bit of the sunset.' It just doesn't work that way.
Especially in the arts, things have a momentum of their own. You have
more work than you want at one time and then you don't have enough work
at another time. It's almost like natural phenomena. Pacing it? Pacing
it is impossible.
Just when you think you have all the work you can handle, then a piece
you were waiting for comes along."
-- Philip Glass
"Here is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an
improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors."
-- Tony Hoare on Algol 60
"I went to my first computer conference at the New York Hilton about 20
years ago. When somebody there predicted the market for microprocessors
would eventually be in the millions, someone else said, "Where are they
all going to go? It's not like you need a computer in every doorknob!"
Years later, I went back to the same hotel. I noticed the room keys had
been replaced by electronic cards you slide into slots in the doors.
There was a computer in every doorknob."
-- Danny Hillis
"Generally, for major system vendors IA-64 has the advantage of not being
controlled by another major systems vendor. Imagine how hard it would be
to for example to get HP to use Alphas, IBM to use SPARC, Compaq to use
PowerPC, or any other combination.
There is a Zen aspect to it; there is strength for Intel, when selling
processors, in what they do not do. It's not just the name recognition,
the performance, or the fabs."
-- Bengt Larsson, on comp.arch, 5/31/2001
"There is [a] joke, possibly apocryphal that Intel managers bragged to HP
VTC managers that the Merced team has 1000 man years of experience in CPU
design. An HP manager retorted that HP's PA-RISC team does too but it is
with 50 engineers with 20 years experience, not 500 engineers with 2 years
experience. I'd rather have a few Shakespeare's than an army of typewriter
equipped monkeys."
-- Paul W. DeMone on comp.arch
"To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the
mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take
arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, ooh, ooh Ooh OOH EEH EEH!"
-- Monkey #2,314,746,299,328,011