Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
In science, you can say things that seem crazy, but in the long run, they can turn out to be right. We can get really good evidence, and in the end, the community will come around.
In a chemistry class there was a guy sitting in front of me doing what looked like a jigsaw puzzle or some really weird kind of thing. He told me he was writing a computer program.
On the web the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly and suddenly a cult which was 12 people who had some deep personal issues suddenly find a formula which is very believable.
All evil and good is petty before Nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that cannot be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.
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 each other, like a wall of mini stones.
We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%
During the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle, where we were being grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyer's eyes sparkle.
I, myself, have had many failures and I've learned that if you are not failing a lot, you are probably not being as creative as you could be -you aren't stretching your imagination.
We're not a vocational school. If someone wants to get a high-paying job, I would hope that there are easier ways to do it than working through a formal computer science curriculum.
Electronic distribution is more of a fall-back strategy for putting out a book that isn't deemed profitable enough to print. You hardly make any money publishing an electronic book.
Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work - the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection.
I don't expect an overnight change of all desktops to what the US Military used to call B3 level security. And even that would not stop users from shooting themselves into the foot.
I want to avoid locking people into solutions that work only with Postfix. People should have a choice in what software they want to use with Postfix, be it anti-virus or otherwise.
... it is a fundamental principle of testing that you must know in advance the answer each test case is supposed to produce. If you don't, you are not testing; you are experimenting.
People say they want to be in risky environments and do all kinds of exciting stuff. But they don't actually know what risk means: that risk actually does bring failure and mistakes.
Securing an environment of Windows platforms from abuse - external or internal - is akin to trying to install sprinklers in a fireworks factory where smoking on the job is permitted.
Questioning the status quo can result in banishment, imprisonment, ridicule or being burned at the stake, depending on your era, your locale, and the sacred cows you wish to butcher.
Some day, on the corporate balance sheet, there will be an entry which reads, "Information"; for in most cases, the information is more valuable than the hardware which processes it.
The real value of tests is not that they detect bugs in the code but that they detect inadequacies in the methods, concentration, and skills of those who design and produce the code.
From the viewpoint of what you can do, therefore, languages do differ - but the differences are limited. For example, Python and Ruby provide almost the same power to the programmer.
Whenever the C++ language designers had two competing ideas as to how they should solve some problem, they said, "OK, we'll do them both". So the language is too baroque for my taste.
I think people who write programs do have at least a glimmer of extra insight into the nature of God... because creating a program often means that you have to create a small universe
The driver of the power of intelligent systems is the knowledge the systems have about their universe of discourse, not the sophistication of the reasoning process the systems employ.
Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
People embrace false magical theories in the hope something good will come out of them. In the most extreme of these, good comes out of them only at the end of this life, in paradise.
I myself feel that it is very important that my ISP supplies internet to my house like the water company supplies water to my house. It supplies connectivity with no strings attached.
Sun Microsystems had the right people to make Java into a first-class language, and I believe it was the Sun marketing people who rushed the thing out before it should have gotten out.
At the same time, much of it seems to have to do with recreating things we or others had already done; it seems rather derivative intellectually; is there a dearth of really new ideas?
Many mathematicians derive part of their self-esteem by feeling themselves the proud heirs of a long tradition of rational thinking; I am afraid they idealize their cultural ancestors.
Some consider the puzzles that are created by their omissions as spicy challenges, without which their texts would be boring; others shun clarity lest their work is considered trivial.
If you give a good idea to a mediocre group, they'll screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a good group, they'll fix it. Or they'll throw it away and come up with something else.
The general problem with ambitious systems is complexity. [...] it is important to emphasize the value of simplicity and elegance, for complexity has a way of compounding difficulties.
Some people prefer not to commingle the functional, lambda-calculus part of a language with the parts that do side effects. It seems they believe in the separation of Church and state.
I wish there were a hundred services with which I could easily look at such a book; it would have saved me a lot of time, and it would have spared Google a tremendous amount of effort.
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.
A display connected to a digital computer gives us a chance to gain familiarity with concepts not realizable in the physical world. It is a looking glass into a mathematical wonderland.
Long term, the PC and workstation will wither because computing access will be everywhere: in the walls, on wrists, and in 'scrap computers' lying about waiting to be grabbed as needed.
I was eventually persuaded of the need to design programming notations so as to maximize the number of errors which cannot be made, or if made, can be reliably detected at compile time.
AI has by now succeeded in doing essentially everything that requires 'thinking' but has failed to do most of what people and animals do 'without thinking'-that, somehow, is much harder.
The problem is some of our riskier films just don't make as much money. But if you only make films that will just be commercially successful, then you can also sink yourself as a studio.
Without television and mass communication, that knowledge wouldn't exist. So I think it actually has the possibility of turning people into more understanding and more empathetic people.
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.
Using encryption on the Internet is the equivalent of arranging an armored car to deliver credit card information from someone living in a cardboard box to someone living on a park bench.
Irony is going to be hard to get. You have to be master of the literal first. But then, Americans don't get irony either. Computers are going to reach the level of Americans before Brits.
Computers might not find the solutions to our problems, but they would be able to do the bulk of the legwork required, assist our human minds in intuitively finding ways through the maze.
Because people don't understand what computing is about, they think they have it in the iPhone, and that illusion is as bad as the illusion that 'Guitar Hero' is the same as a real guitar.
I apply the term 'creativity' broadly... it's problem solving. We are all faced with problems, and we have to address them and think of something new, and that's where creativity comes in.
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.
I don't know whether machine translation will eventually get good enough to allow us to browse people's websites in different languages so you can see how they live in different countries.
I have argued above that we cannot prevent the Singularity, that its coming is an inevitable consequence of the humans natural competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology.