Computing Quotes

[Not everyone shares Prince's enthusiasm for the synergistic potential between peer-to-peer file sharing and distributed computing.] Quite a few companies are trying to sell [distributed computing] under the p-to-p banner... While I think it is a nice idea, it is nothing new, and I think [United Devices] might have trouble finding people willing to pay for it. - Ian Clarke

[Judea Pearl says his son was, like him, a secular Jew -- but one who was committed to his Judaism as a way of connecting with other religions and cultures.] We had a meeting of the mind as far as religion... We both regarded religion as a metaphor for what we really believe in. It's a way of communicating with people. At the same time, (Daniel) was very enticed and enjoyed talking in religious vocabulary. He was interested in how people believed what they believed. He did an article about the Muslim calendar -- how it developed, how experts disagreed on when Ramadan comes in. He called me up (from London) and said, 'You're a scientist. You should tell me how to compute celestial motions.' I couldn't help him there. He did the research and came up with the difference between two (clerics') methods of computing. - Judea Pearl

[Even more critical to Oracle's future, however, was Phillips's announcement of Oracle Fusion Architecture (OFA), the company's massive SOA, combining the flexibility of model-driven process design and service- and event-enabled applications with ease of integration from its open, standards-based, hot-pluggable platform, and the scalability inherent in Oracle's grid computing architecture.] In 1925 business consultant Frederick Taylor said, 'Business processes are work processes tucked away in manuals.' The same thing is true today, but with applications instead of manuals... The Oracle Fusion Architecture is a unifying model of emerging trends in grid computing architecture, service-oriented architecture, and enterprise information architecture. It gives customers and partners a good view of the direction that Oracle is taking to make the most of our core strengths in database, middleware, and business applications. - Charles Phillips

[Benioff contends that this approach will eventually change the entire structure of his industry. Software over the Web -- commonly called on-demand -- accounted for less than 10% of the $46 billion in corporate software sold last year. But he says creating an open marketplace for on-demand software will help cause the decline of the big, complex, and expensive corporate applications sold by the likes of SAP ( SAP ) and Oracle Corp. ( ORCL ).] It's a big leap for us... We think it will show the world the next step for on-demand computing, just as we showed the world the first step. - Marc Benioff