American Computer Scientist Quotes

In retrospect I must say that being a manager or being a priest I don't really know if there's that much of a difference, right, it's all about guiding lost souls.

We can tell people abstract rules of thumb which we have derived from prior experiences, but it is very difficult for other people to learn from these. We have difficulty remembering such abstractions, but we can more easily remember a good story. Stories give life to past experience. Stories make the events in memory memorable to others and to ourselves. This is one of the reasons why people like to tell stories.

In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.

Secure web servers are the equivalent of heavy armored cars. The problem is, they are being used to transfer rolls of coins and checks written in crayon by people on park benches to merchants doing business in cardboard boxes from beneath highway bridges. Further, the roads are subject to random detours, anyone with a screwdriver can control the traffic lights, and there are no police.

This ambiguity is another example of a growing problem with mathematical notation: There aren't enough squiggles to go around.

When code and comments disagree, both are probably wrong.

For every dollar spent in failure, learn a dollar's worth of lesson.

I love cosmology: there's something uplifting about viewing the entire universe as a single object with a certain shape. What entity, short of God, could be nobler or worthier of man's attention than the cosmos itself? Forget about interest rates, forget about war and murder, let's talk about space.

Nothing is as simple as we hope it will be.

The greatest danger to good computer science research today may be excessive relevance. Evidence for the worldwide fascination with computers is everywhere, from the articles on the financial, and even the front pages of the newspapers, to the difficulties that even the most prestigious universities experience in finding and keeping faculty in computer science. The best professors, instead of teaching bright students, join start-up companies.

To select an appropriate fuzzy implication for approximate reasoning under each particular situation is a difficult problem. Although some theoretically supported guidelines are now available for some situations, we are still far from a general solution to this problem.

Many companies are not driving significant business value from the digitized platforms they build as part of their enterprise architecture initiatives. Our 2011 survey of 146 senior IT leaders found that the companies that benefit from their platforms' efforts are consistently relying on four architecture-related practices that encourage organizational learning about the value of enterprise architecture: 1) making IT costs transparent, 2) debating architectural exceptions, 3) performing post-implementation reviews, and 4) making IT investments with enterprise architecture in mind.

In a world filled with violence, hatred, and suspicion, giving is an expression of faith, trust, and concern.

Douglas A. Lawson

The next big thing is the one that makes the last big thing usable.

The more technological a society is, the greater the security gap is.

Computer-aided design is not automatic design, although it must include many automatic design features. By automatic design we mean design procedures which are capable of being completely specified in a form which a computer can execute without human intervention.

Douglas T. Ross

If I was able to tell my story with the passion I felt, my lecture might help others find a path to fulfilling their own dreams.

I expected too much of educators. I expected them to understand, in a sense, the sugar-coated concepts of LISP used in AI that were embodied in the Logo language. It was then that I learned that computers were built to make money, not minds.

The 'name' of a resource indicates what we seek, an 'address' indicates where it is, and a 'route' tells us how to get there.

We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.

Robert Wilensky

I'm a future-hacker; I'm trying to get root access to the future. I want to raid its system of thought.

If you use a Macintosh or an iPhone, which honestly I would not recommend, you would be using code that I wrote more than 25 years ago.

What you don't want is a product to be cool. You want it to be a part of people's everyday life.

The cloud is driven by statistics, and even in the worst individual cases of personal ignorance, dullness, idleness, or irrelevance, every person is constantly feeding data into the cloud these days. The value of such information could be treated as genuine, but it is not. Instead, the blindness of our standards of accounting to all that value is gradually breaking capitalism.

The notion of "intricate and beautiful complexities" is almost an oxymoron. Unix programmers vie with each other for "simple and beautiful" honors — a point that's implicit in these rules, but is well worth making overt.