"You are making the same mistakes EPIC's designers did. Please go learn from
their failures before you try to reinvent the square wheel."
-- Stephen
Sprunk on comp.arch, 6/8/2004
"One can only refute someone if they make a definite statement. If they just
say 'wibble' then you can't refute (or confirm, or understand) them."
Robin
Chapman on sci.math, 5/7/2004
"Jackson 'Jack the Dripper' Pollack was a talentless house painter. He was a
great salesman, he knew the territory, and his value to his patrons included his
early death."
-- Uncle Al on comp.theory, 4/29/2004
"Now I may be naive (it's a great combination with cynical) but I would think
that if someone had a decent idea it would be pretty straightforward to get some
funding."
-- Del Cecchi on comp.arch, 4/3/2004
"People that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have
a tremendous impact on history."
-- Former U.S. Vice-President Dan Quayle
"I continue to be frustrated that Congress insists that Amtrak must be 100%
self-supporting while it lavishes billions of dollars in subsidies on its
competitors -- highway builders; air-traffic control, National Weather Service,
and airline bail-outs; and even the Army Corps of Engineers to keep the nation's
locks, dams, and coastal waterways open to barge and riverboat traffic. The game
is rigged, and once again the victims are being blamed for the system's
failures."
-- Richard S. Russell on RISKS-LIST, 2/26/2004
"NASA shouldn't be getting a "black eye" for ... failures, people should be
saying "good try, when are you going to make another attempt at solving such a
difficult problem". Stop and think for a minute about how effective you would be
at debugging your project if the link between your development machine and the
system under test was on another planet and the delay between inputs
commensurately slow. Have fun. How would you debug hardware problems remotely if
you could not have any physical contact with the machine? EVER AGAIN?"
--
Randy Howard on comp.arch, 1/26/2004
"As a document, Hennessey and Patterson is downright strange. It is the
oddest mixture of serious science, mathematics and engineering, history,
folklore, and marketing snippets that I have ever seen presented as the central
tome of a discipline. It's more like a highly-organized scrapbook than a
textbook."
-- Robert Myers on comp.arch, 1/8/2004
"Some people here may not be aware of how much of a problem it can be when
someone enters a graduate program without really being ready to benefit from it
the way they want to. I've heard of students who scraped their way through
several years of unpromising work and lost a lot of income without getting what
they were after. It really isn't just bureaucratic or just for the convenience
of the department that the people deciding admissions are cautious."
--
Keith Ramsay on sci.math, 12/12/2003
"My sole axiom of war ethics (also yielding surprising results when applied
to mafia/western/war, etc. movies :-): The good guys are not distinguished by
their cause but by their means of achieving it."
-- Yannis Smaragdakis
"Faced with such dross as this, one's first inclination is to run screaming
into the night."
-- Michael Billington of The Guardian, in his review of the
musical "Money to Burn"
>"progress in software has not followed Moore's law." -John Holland Oh, yes, it has - in terms of the number of lines of code, the amount of memory needed, the number of bugs and so on.-- Nick Maclaren on comp.arch, 10/14/2003
"There's something the same about fanatic legalists in the religious groups
and anal mathematicians, in that they think they've scored something if they
catch you in an error. 'AHA! You've typed "slander" when you should have typed
"libel"!' So what? Therefore I'm an idiot and he's a savant and now I have to
erase his chalkboards for him? Hardly. I'm going to have a homebrew and hang out
with the cute chicks while he re-catalogues his PowerRanger Collector's Cards."
-- Bart Goddard on sci.math, 10/6/2003
"My theory is that the problem is that writing software is too easy. Not very
competent people can produce 'nearly' working solutions, which are good enough
to some users... Hence lots of bad software."
-- David Gay on comp.arch,
7/11/2003
"Every engineer soon learns that, no matter what the product, there is always
a customer that wants more. Almost everyone in any kind of business soon learns
that 'Sorry, we can't do that,' is almost always the wrong answer. Businesses
overpromise under pressure from customers, and customers go to bed at night
cursing the people they have pressured into lying to them. This reality of
commerce predates the electronic computer by at least as long as people have had
means for quantifying promises."
-- Robert Myers on comp.arch, 7/6/2003
"Discussions like this are usually futile, because it all boils down to
particular statements that are probably true, that the objector regards as being
insufficiently precise or supported, and that the writer insists are precise and
fully justified. And there is no way to force someone to see that a
probably-true statement is insufficiently justified."
-- Tim Chow on
comp.theory, 7/1/2003
> "Aircraft carrier project--a naval project with 30 million parts (a
> submarine has only 8 million parts)."
>
> Why would
software be any harder?
Why would software be any easier? 10 million
lines of code puts a program
somewhere between a 747 and the Enterprise.
-- Peter da Silva, responding to Robert Myers on comp.arch, 7/1/2003
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that
English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on
occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them
unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
-- James D. Nicoll
on rec.arts.sf-lovers, 5/15/1990
"While changing the flavor can be a faulty move, sometimes the problem is
simply a packaging faux pas, like the Garlic Cake made by Gunderson &
Rosario back in 1989.
The product was supposed to be served as an hors
d'oeuvre with breads and meats, but somehow the company forgot to mention that
on the label. So consumers were left wondering what garlic cake really was and
what the consequences of eating it might be."
-- seen on CNN.COM
"No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up."
-- Lily
Tomlin
"When I took a course on graph theory as an undergrad, the professor gave an
estimate that it is possible to write three books on basic graph theory with
non-overlapping (or was it disagreeing) terminology. The moral: when discussing
graph theory, don't assume that the other guy means the same thing with any of
the terms."
-- Jyrki Lahtonen on sci.math, 5/13/2003
"Intelligence isn't knowledge. It's an ability to gain new knowledge quickly.
If you close your doors to learning, all the intelligence in the world won't
help you. And it doesn't help you at all in forums where most of the
participants are above average in intelligence."
-- Randy Poe on sci.math,
4/25/2003
"If you lose your job, your marriage and your mind all in one week, try to
lose your mind first, because then the other stuff won't matter that much."
-- Jack Handey
"In the mathematics I can report no deficience, except that it be that men do
not sufficiently understand the excellent use of the pure mathematics, in that
they do remedy and cure many defects in the wit and faculties intellectual. For
if the wit be too dull, they sharpen it; if too wandering, they fix it; if too
inherent in the sense, they abstract it. So that as tennis is a game of no use
in itself, but of great use in respect it maketh a quick eye and a body ready to
put itself into all postures; so in the mathematics, that use which is
collateral and intervenient is no less worthy than that which is principal and
intended."
-- Roger Bacon
"A case in point of this is microkernels. The hidden assumption the
microkernel advocates (including Tannenbaum) make is that task switching is
computationally cheap (for some definition of cheap). This is never stated
explicitly, and it most certainly wasn't true during the famous
Torvalds-Tannenbaum debate. The case that Torvalds *didn't* make way back when
was 'your theory is very nice, but since task switches are *not* cheap on our
CPU of choice (task switches cost 300-500 clocks each on the 386), implementing
a microkernel would have prohibitive performance cost.'"
-- Brian Hurt on
comp.arch, 2/3/2003
"Each generation has its few great mathematicians, and mathematics would not
even notice the absence of the others. They are useful as teachers, and their
research harms no one, but it is of no importance at all. A mathematician is
great or he is nothing."
-- Alfred Adler
"In many ways, the state of 'computer science' vs 'the computer industry' is
akin to what we have seen in automobile engines. It is hard to believe that the
spark-ignited reciprocating internal combustion engine is the ultimate way to
convert liquid fuels into locomotion, but the billions of dollars spent on
optimizing these engines and the infrastructure that supports them makes the
barriers to entry for alternative approaches very high. The same could be said
for the IA32 architecture -- the massive investment in both infrastructure and
optimization of implementations has made it good enough to defeat solutions that
appear far superior when viewed from a non-economic 'scientific' point of view."
-- John D McCalpin on comp.arch, 1/13/2003
"Every day that our nation was segregated was a day our nation was unfaithful
to our founding ideals."
-- President George W. Bush
When I was an undergraduate at MIT I loved it. I thought it was a great
place, and I wanted to go to graduate school there too, of course. But when I
went to Professor Slater and told him of my intentions, he said "We won't let
you in here."
I said, "What?"
Slater asked, "Why do you think
that you should go to graduate school at MIT?"
"Because MIT is the best
school for science in the country."
"You _think_ that?"
"Yeah."
"That's why you should go to some other school. You should find out how
the rest of the world is."
. . . . I learned a lot of different things
from different schools. MIT is a _very_ good place; I'm not trying to put it
down. I was just in love with it. . . . It's like a New Yorker's view of New
York: they forget the rest of the country. And while you don't get a good sense
of proportion there, you do get an excellent sense of being _with_ it and _in_
it, and having motivation and desire to keep on --that you're specially chosen,
and lucky to be there.
-- From "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman!
_Adventures of a Curious Character_" by Richard P. Feynman.
"At the university where I studied I noticed that many people refused to do
their programming assignments on the Sun workstations, preferring instead to do
their assignments using Borland C++ under DOS/Windows... Curious, I asked one of
them 'Why do you use queue up to use these PCs when there are Suns upstairs that
are free all day ?'... Their response was 'My code SEGFAULTs all the time under
UNIX, but it works with Borland. Those machines are crap.'... That was pretty
much the sentiment expressed by the majority of people on that course..."
--
Rupert Pigott on comp.arch, 12/4/2002
"No one would think of installing an unfamiliar language just to speed up a
bunch of routine data extraction, even if the time spent getting up to speed
would be multiply repaid later. Why? Visibility and increment: if you screw up
in a language you already know, it's your fault; if you screw up in a new
language it's the language's fault. And something that eats your day 5 or 20
minutes at a time in edit-compile-run-curse cycles is preferable to something
that eats your day with six hours of reading and learning up front."
-- Paul
Wallich on comp.arch, 11/25/2002
> IA64 hasn't failed to the point of being scratched yet.
A-ha!
That sounds like just what I need, let me get my checkbook.
-- Chris
Morgan, responding to Sander Vesik on comp.arch, 11/21/2002
"The Intel compiler is probably the best commercially-available code
generator for the x86 platform, but that's like saying 'I'm the strongest
patient in the cancer ward.'"
-- Andy Isaacson on comp.arch, 11/20/2002
"Everyone is entitled to an *informed* opinion."
-- Harlan Ellison
"The denizens of [ comp.arch ] remind me of nineteenth century physicists:
they had worked their relatively new field ... over so thoroughly that it was
hard to imagine that there was much of anything left to discover.
The
cleverness and elegance of nineteenth century physics is not to be mocked, and
neither is the current state of computer science, but it would be foolish to
imagine that it is in any sense complete or nearing any meaningful boundaries...
There is only the human brain to look at, the relatively simple
blueprint underlying its construction, and the brain's incredible capacity to
cope with things it has never seen or heard of to realize that there are some
*very* basic things about computation that have not yet been discovered."
--
Robert Myers on comp.arch, 10/8/2002
"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