A Quote by Donald Knuth

To me, it looks more or less like the hardware designers have run out of ideas and that they're trying to pass the blame for the future demise of Moore's Law to the software writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks!

Donald Knuth

Quote Topics

Blame Demise Designers Faster Few Future Giving Hardware Ideas Key Law Less Like Looks Machines Me Moore Moore's Law More More Or Less Only Out Pass Run Software Trying Us Work Writers

Quote Author

Donald Knuth
American - Scientist
Born: January 10, 1938

Software and hardware design is less different than software designers think, but more different than hardware designers think.

Fred Brooks

If anything, there's a reverse Moore's Law observable in software: As processors become faster and memory becomes cheaper, software becomes correspondingly slower and more bloated, using up all available resources.

Jaron Lanier

Gates has always understood Moore's Law better than anyone else in the industry. If you can make something run at all, get it out there -it may be slow and clunky, but hardware improvements will bail you out. If you wait until it's running perfectly on the hardware already in the field, it will be obsolete before it's released. This philosophy built Microsoft and is the main reason Microsoft won the war IBM declared back in the OS/2 days.

Jerry Pournelle

Machines can do things cheaper and better. We're very used to that in banking, for example. ATM machines are better than tellers if you want a simple transaction. They're faster, they're less trouble, they're more reliable, so they put tellers out of work.

Geoffrey Hinton

Security can be enhanced with hardware. You can have a software-only solution, but it can be made more robust in conjunction with hardware.

Renee James

Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.

Niklaus Wirth

Machines help us do things more quickly and efficiently, but they can also destroy some community activities. Machines can also throw the weakest people out of work and this would be sad, because their small contribution to the housework or cooking is their way of giving something to the community. People who are capable of doing things very quickly with the help of machines become tremendously busy, always active, in charge of everyone - a bit like machines themselves.

Jean Vanier

A big part of the success of Microsoft was that every year, the chips our software ran on got faster and cheaper. They doubled in capability every 18 months under Moore's law.

Paul Allen

All I'm doing is I'm filling out my tax returns - or my accountants are, and I'm paying whatever I'm supposed to pay, though I'm giving away a large amount of the money and that probably lowers my tax rate because I'm giving away so much money. But change the law, but don't blame me for the law. I'm not writing the law. I didn't write the law.

David Rubenstein

Before Ruby on Rails, web programming required a lot of verbiage, steps and time. Now, web designers and software engineers can develop a website much faster and more simply, enabling them to be more productive and effective in their work.

Bruce Perens

When you write a piece of software you assume a certain type of hardware. If you assume hardware that's too powerful then you can't sell many copies cause very few people have that machine. If you assume hardware that's too simple your product can't do as much.

Bill Gates

When I was at Tek, I was frustrated that computer hardware was being improved faster than computer software. I wanted to invent some software that was completely different, that would grow and change as it was used. That's how wiki came about.

Ward Cunningham

With bundled machines you can throw away the hardware and keep the software, and it's still a good buy.

Adam Osborne

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

Niklaus Wirth

With software products, it is usual to find that the software has major `bugs' and does not work reliably for some users... The lay public, familiar with only a few incidents of software failure, may regard them as exceptions caused by exceptionally inept programmers. Those of us who are software professionals know better; the most competent programmers in the world cannot avoid such problems.