Favorite Quotes

It's not clear whether 'big data' means more needles, or just a bigger haystack.

Joe Touch, Jan 2013

I don't know what the network of the future will look like, but I know it will be called the Internet.

Joe Touch, 2000, adapted from Tony Hoare's observation about Fortran in 1982.

Feasting on Rice

A series written on a trip to Kyoto, August 2007

Snow, Snow, Snow

"Winter's crisp puffs dust off slumber,
streets ringed with icy ashen monuments.

A stubble of trees stand post on the hill, even
the wind is gray.

Tonight's roar heralds a fresh coat for the old man,
quickly bleating the charge for its, and my, retreat."

Joe Touch, Mar 1, 2007 (copyright 2007, all rights reserved)

Definitions of Middleware, from the Sigcomm1995 Workshop on Communications Middleware:

DEFINITION BY EXCLUSION:
    Distributed services that combine OS and network capabilities,
    but can't be effectively implemented exclusively in either.

COLLOQUIAL:
    Services the OS, apps, and protocols
    each think the others' provide.

    The distributed-only part of a distributed OS.

FORMAL:
    A well-defined service provided by a system composed of
    distributed, persistent state AND distributed, persistent
    process.

Joe Touch, Aug 1995

"Don't attribute to malice that which can be attributed to entropy. "

Joe Touch, Jan 2007

"Build it and only the builders get paid. "

Joe Touch, 2006

"Thought experiments aren't worth the cost of hardware they're run on. "

Joe Touch, 2005

"Put the pain where the power to solve the problem lies. "

Joe Touch, mid 1990's

"The lowest level at which experimentation is permitted is also the highest level at which experimentation occurs."

Joe Touch, circa 1996, DARPA Nets PI meeting

"The Internet (or Web):
       the zero-sum of human knowledge."

Joe Touch, 2/2000

"First you get the sugar,
then you get the power,

Homer Simpson, on the Simpsons

Song of the Sausage Creature

Hunter S. Thompson

Song of the Sausage Creature

"I don't know - I'm making this up as I go."

Indiana Jones

Raiders of the Lost Ark

"Wherever you go, there you are."

Buckaroo Banzai

Adventures in the 8th Dimension

"When the only tool you have is a hammer,
everything begins to look like a nail."

Abraham Maslow

"It ain't art 'till the paycheck clears"

Gilbert Gottfried

School of Bad Acting

"I'm a 21st-century digital boy,
I don't know how to read,
but I've got a lotta toys."

Brett Gurewitz, Bad Religion

"Corporate funding for Planet Earth was provided, in part, by IBM"

credits of PBS show

"What we have here is a failure to communicate."

the Warden

Cool Hand Luke

"Time and space and thought 
aren't the separate things they appear to be.
These things are dangerous to say"

from "Where No One Has Gone Before"

Star Trek, TNG.

"We note the imperfection of the simulation. 
Although the Holodeck was successful 
in most details of the simulation, 
it lags when we strayed from the expected."

from "Future Imperfect"

Star Trek, the Next Generation

"It is better to debate a question 
without settling it,
than to settle a question
without debating it."

J. Joubert, 1754-1824

"The basis of reality may not be the quantum...but the bit..."

J. Horgan, in "Quantum Philosophy"

Sci. Amer., July 1992

"Don't burn your bridges until you come to them."

Dave Farber(ism)