"/* * this atrocity is necessary on sparc because registers modified * by the child get propagated back to the parent via the window * save/restore mechanism. */"
― SunOS 4.0 vfork.h
" :J4n3! :oye tell me how do i mount my drive d ? :D1ck! :d: :D1ck! :? :J4n3! :hmmm let me check :D1ck! :mount /mnt/cdrom :J4n3! :yaar drive d :D1ck! :mount -t msdos /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy :J4n3! :no no :D1ck! :mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt/win :J4n3! :for mounting drive c i write mount -t msdos /dev/hda1 /mnt :D1ck! :? :D1ck! :i write :D1ck! :mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /heh"
― Actual IRC l33t script kiddie logs, http://www.securityfocus.com/focus/ids/articles/kye/motives.html
" :Sp07 :what is lahore ? :D1ck :lahore==city :D1ck :Sp07 give me a good quote: Sp07 :I thought it was the whore in french :Sp07 :ill go get a quote fo you :D1ck :heh :D1ck :ok :Sp07 :I dont know any in my ehad :Sp07 :hea :Sp07 :d :Sp07 :Silence is gold, if nothing better you hold. :Sp07 :tahts gay :Sp07 :I heard a quote before :Sp07 :goes something like "If you want peace, you must prepare for war" :Sp07 :I herad it in a simpsons episode"
― Actual IRC l33t script kiddie logs, http://www.securityfocus.com/focus/ids/articles/kye/motives.html
" # human firmware exploit # Word will insert into your optic buffer # without bounds checking "BLAHFOOM"
― Dave Booth
" 1) Roses are red, 2) Mud is fun, 3) Violets are blue, 4) I have a car, 5) Clocks tell time, 6) Sugar is sweet 7) And so are you.
― from the vim tutorial, for trying out the dd command.
" 33e6/(80*50)/10 . . . hmm about 800 cycles per pixel or something like that - Sure you can do just about anything but I can't say that I would be really impressed with the resolution."
― Jmagic, on Trixter's belief that anything full-framerate is possible on a 486
" A bug in the code is worth two in the documentation."
―
"A disciple of another sect once came to Drescher as he was eating his morning meal. "I would like to give you this personality test," said the outsider, "because I want you to be happy." Drescher took the paper that was offered him and put it into the toaster: "I wish the toaster to be happy, too." "
― Artificial Intelligence Koans (scott@vidox.com)
" A famous Lisp Hacker noticed an Undergraduate sitting in front of a Xerox 1108, trying to edit a complex Klone network via a browser. Wanting to help, the Hacker clicked one of the nodes in the network with the mouse, and asked "what do you see?" Very earnestly, the Undergraduate replied "I see a cursor." The Hacker then quickly pressed the boot toggle at the back of the keyboard, while simultaneously hitting the Undergraduate over the head with a thick Interlisp Manual. The Undergraduate was then Enlightened."
― Artificial Intelligence Koans (scott@vidox.com)
" A feature is a bug with seniority."
" A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing."
" A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a strings of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little nor too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity. A program should follow the 'Law of Least Astonishment'. What is this law? It is simply that the program should always respond to the user in the way that astonishes him least. A program, no matter how complex, should act as a single unit. The program should be directed by the logic within rather than by outward appearances. If the program fails in these requirements, it will be in a state of disorder and confusion. The only way to correct this is to rewrite the program."
― Geoffrey James, The Tao of Programming
" A program without a "main" is like a fish without a bicycle."
― Jon Watte, being helpful on the bedevtalk list
" A programmer is a person who passes as an exacting expert on the basis of being able to turn out, after innumerable punching, an infinite series of incomprehensive answers calculated with micrometric precisions from vague assumptions based on debatable figures taken from inconclusive documents and carried out on instruments of problematical accuracy by persons of dubious reliability and questionable mentality for the avowed purpose of annoying and confounding a hopelessly defenseless department that was unfortunate enough to ask for the information in the first place."
― IEEE Grid newsmagazine
" A project can not be considered complete until the total height of the viewgraphs produced exceeds the height of the shortest PI."
― Robert Metzger, scientist and author
" A survey by Holm Group in 1998 found that 88% of staff members in congressional offices check the Internet for information every day."
― Rebecca Fairley Raney
" A typical 432 call takes 982 cycles plus 40 memory accesses, making it about ten times slower than even the infamous VAX CALLS."
― Unknown source
" A word of warning about matrices: "― each column must have the same number of elements in it. The world will end if you get this wrong."
― eqn user manual
" Actually, Posix requires that leap seconds be ignored; see IEEE Std 1003.1b-1993 section 2.2.2.106 (page 22 lines 448-458). There is some excellent doublespeak attempting to justify this in the annexes; my favorite is "it is inappropriate to require that a time represented as seconds since the Epoch precisely represent the number of seconds between the referenced time and the Epoch" (section B.2.2.2 page 306 lines 620-622). "
― Paul Eggert
" Actually, the *real* definition of millennium states that (for whatever > reason) every other millennium is of 999 years, as opposed to 1000. You > can go look it up, "Dictionary of the English Language" London Press, > 1925. > . . . That seems to make everyone happy, the new millennium starts in 2000 > and the lack of year 0 is accounted for. > >
― TDan
" All options are optional."
― Documentation for the GNU Assembler
" All that really mattered was the user experience of the software. It didn't really matter what was in the box, or who it was from, because it was dark in the box and that was that."
― Joe Palmer (Designer of the BeBox), in "It's Dark in the Box".
" An informal survey conducted on about a dozen Internet sites (educational, military, and commercial, with over 200 hosts and 40000 accounts) revealed that [ . . . ] it was not uncommon to have well over one hundred entries in an account's .rhosts file, and on a few occasions, the number was over five hundred! (This is not a record one should be proud of owning.) [ . . . ] Although it was very difficult to verify how many of the entries were valid, with [ . . . ] hostnames such as "Makefile", "Message-Id:", and "^Cs^A^C^M^Ci^C^MpNu^L^Z^O"
― from the text file "Improving the Security of Your Site by Breaking Into it"
" And with so many pages sprouting every day, there is a desperate striving for uniqueness, which has resulted in some of the stupidest uses of cutting edge technology ever seen."
― Ashley Dunn of the NY Times, writing about the World Wide Web.
" (Another poster] cultivates an admirable elegance of expression that I'm sure will take him far on the Net. (To put it more precisely, his postings sound like my postings.) "
― Bill Higgins, HIGGINS@FNAL.FNAL.GOV
" Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
― Philip Greenspun
" As a two way mass communications medium that allows users to receive news and information, as well as participate in information transmission and public discussion, the Internet potentially diffuses power over information and public debate. That ability even extends to overt lobbying by individuals in behalf of their own political interests."
― Richard Davis
" As part of the conversion, computer specialists rewrote 1,500 programs ― a process that traditionally requires some debugging."
― USA Today, referring to the IRS switchover to a new computer system
" As practiced by computer science, the study of programming is an unholy mixture of mathematics, literary criticism, and folklore."
― B. A. Sheil, 1981
" As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs."
― Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949
" As the system comes up, the component builders will from time to time appear, bearing hot new versions of their pieces ― faster, smaller, more complete, or putatively less buggy. The replacement of a working component by a new version requires the same systematic testing procedure that adding a new component does, although it should require less time, for more complete and efficient test cases will usually be available."
― Frederick Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man Month
" At Group L, Stoffel oversees six first-rate programmers, a managerial challenge roughly comparable to herding cats."
― The Washington Post Magazine, 9 June, 1985
" At its best, the Internet can educate more people faster than any media tool. At its worst, it can make people dumber faster than any media tool. Because the Internet has an aura of "technology" surrounding it, the uneducated believe information from it even more. They don't realize that the Internet, at its ugliest, is just an open sewer: an electronic conduit for untreated, unfiltered information. Just when you might have thought you were all alone with your extreme views, the Internet puts you together with a community of people from around the world who hate all the things and people you do. You can scrap the BBC and just get your news from those Websites that reinforce your own stereotypes."
― Thomas Friedman, New York Times
" At the time, it was the thing to come up with recursive acronyms " ― tint = "Tint Is Not Teco," eine = "Eine Is Not Emacs," mint = "Mint Is Not Tex," and, of course, much later, gnu. I was getting *really* tired of this one-note joke, so I suggested we rename U to be "line," which stood for "Line Is Not Recursive." Even better, we could then say things like "I don't use emacs; I prefer the line editor." Which would have been fun. But we decided that, itself, was kind of a one-note joke that wouldn't wear well. So we settled on "lime," which has the advantage of being a real word, and stood for "Lime Is Mostly Recursive."
" B can be thought of as C without types; more accurately, it is BCPL squeezed into 8K bytes of memory and filtered through Thompson's brain."
― Dennis Ritchie
" Being that I don't like Macs, I must tell you this: When my cousin's friend who knows nothing about computers had a problem with an imac, she called the hotline for help. The first question the guy on the phone asked was "what color is your imac?" as it turns out the purple imacs are much more prone to technical problems than all other colors! Isn't that screwed up? :) "
― Nathan Gaylinn
" Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer. "
― E. W. Dijkstra
" Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."
― Donald Knuth
" Beware of the Turing Tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy."
― Alan Perlis, Epigrams on Programming
" Buy a rifle, encrypt your data, and wait for the Revolution!"
― .sig of Travis J.I. Corcoran (TJIC@icd.teradyne.com)
" C combines all the power of assembly language with all the easy of use of assembly language."
― trad
" C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success."
― Dennis M. Ritchie
" C programmers think that memory allocation is too important to be left to the computer, Lisp programmers think that memory allocation is too important to be left to the programmer."
― Stroustroup writes in the ARM
" C++ is the only current language making COBOL look good."
― Bertrand Meyer
" Checking for mass_quantities_of_bass_ale in -lFridge . . . no checking for mass_quantities_of_any_ale in -lFridge . . . no Warning: No ales were found in your refrigerator. We highly suggest that you rectify this situation immediately. "
― configure script of Enlightenment
" Computer Science is merely the post-Turing decline in formal systems theory."
― common Unix Fortune program text
" Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy."
― Joseph Campbell
" Contrary to popular belief, the world is not ASCII. ― from the xemacs 19.12 documentation on define-key
" Core files are the dog shit of UNIX."
― Jason Lindquist
" D1ck! :heh oh :D1ck! :u gave up hacking :Sp07! :something like that :Sp07! :sooner or later im gonna get arrested it :Sp07! :so I stopped :D1ck! :oh :D1ck! :ok :Sp07! :and its not making me any money so its pointless :D1ck! :i will NEVER GET ARRESTED"
― Actual IRC l33t script kiddie logs, http://www.securityfocus.com/focus/ids/articles/kye/motives.html
" D1ck! :i want some one with good writing skillz :D1ck :to write About, FAQ :D1ck :etc [ . . . ] :D1ck :K1dd13 came into existance almost a year ago. It was born out of hate and contempt for violence, atrocities and human rights violations against Muslims, specially the affectees in Kashmir. It was precipitated to bring the attention of world leaders and :D1ck :organizations to the issue in cyberspace which is today the leading source of communication. :D1ck :is that fair enuff? :Sp07 :eyah I guess :Sp07 :I thought it was like a hacking group"
― Actual IRC l33t script kiddie logs, http://www.securityfocus.com/focus/ids/articles/kye/motives.html
" D1ck! :what is yure d? /dev/hda2? :D1ck! :what is yure d? /dev/dba1 :D1ck! :? :J4n3! :.Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on :J4n3! :./dev/hda8 1935132 878956 957780 48% / :J4n3! :./dev/hda7 23302 2650 19449 12% /boot :J4n3! :./dev/hda1 2064032 1230496 833536 60% /mnt :D1ck! :oki :D1ck! :mkdir /win; mount -t vfat /dev/hda2 /win :D1ck! :wait, what is /dev/hda7 :D1ck! :? :J4n3! :linux swap partition :D1ck! :ok"
― Actual IRC l33t script kiddie logs, http://www.securityfocus.com/focus/ids/articles/kye/motives.html
" Dave suggests that you should use american bytes instead of canadian to avoid confusion." "With the new internationalization stuff, I think the conversion is done for me at the library level or something... Does 1 american byte = 1.6 Canadian bytes these days?"
― Brian and Kenny discuss reducing bloat "Do not use procedures; they are expensive."
― from IBM's PL/I (F) documentation, circa 1966
" Do standards inevitably cause industries to calcify into obsolete technology? Suppose we journey to the plains of Shinar and build a tower of bricks reaching to heaven. (That's the Tower of Babel, for those without a reading familiarity with the Book of Genesis.) Look, God Himself knows what standards can do, he even said something like "The Sons of Men are all of one tongue and one purpose, and now nothing shall be impossible for them." So the Ancient of Days had to step in and give us the wonderful gift of cultural diversity, to add such a whopping translation overhead on every information transaction that we bogged down forever into chaos and warfare."
― Dan Mocsny (dmocsny@uceng.uc.edu)
" Dude, your home page is dull. Where is the high school graduation picture? Where's the link to your best friend's girlfriend's home page? Where's the list of the last 25 CD's you listened to?"
― Alan Braverman, on uiuc.test.
" Dykstra once pointed out the *real* problem with lisp: It's too tempting to fiddle interactively until you've made a bad design work in an ugly way, rather than use your brain.
" Even more amazing was the realization that God has Internet access. I wonder if He has a full newsfeed?"
― Matt Welsh
" Every program has at least one bug and can be shortened by at least one instruction " ― from which, by induction, one can deduce that every program can be reduced to one instruction which doesn't work."
― Unknown
" Every time i see the LaTeX message "Labels may have changed", I silently complete it with " . . . but not the fact that I am right". "
― Unknown
" Everybody raise your hand who thinks Usenet would benefit from a month or two in padded room. "
― Michael Handler
" F is for Fun (and Fortran)"
― Jeremy Leboy, commenting on CS110F
" FILO. Which Randy knows is short for Finux Loader, a program that allows you to choose which operating system you want to run. "Finux," Avi mumbles, answering Randy's unspoken question. Randy types "Finux" and hits the return key. "How many operating systems you have on this thing?" "Windows 95, for games and when I need to let some lamer borrow my computer temporarily," Avi says. "Windows NTY for office type stuff. BeOS for hacking, and screwing around with media. Finux for industrial-strength typesetting." "Which one do you want now?" "BeOS. Going to display some JPEGs. I assume there's an overhead projector in this place?"
― "Cryptonomicon", pg 184, by Neal Stephenson
" First learn computer science and all the theory. Next develop a programming style. Then forget all that and just hack."
― George Carrette
" For the 8 months I've been there, I've added 12 lines of source code to Mosaic and 10 of them have been commented out."
― Jay Kreibich, about his NCSA job, 4/13/95.
" From far left to far right - and almost every point in between - advocacy groups are leading the charge into cyberpolitics. It's essentially impossible to find an activist group of any significance that does not have an internet presence today. Advocacy groups, having gained experience from constant campaigning, tend to engage in more sophisticated online activism than candidates and corporations do. And they're constantly getting better at it . . . .. It is not a medium for mass persuasion; if you want to run for president, you'd better buy lots of television advertising. But, if you want to move individuals to meet, march, and mail public officials, you'd best be online . . . .. It levels the playing field and lowers barriers to participation by placing powerful information and communications tools in the hands of even small nd cash-strapped organizations. With an ever-increasing number of government documents available online, key information is no longer restricted to organizations with sophisticated Washington-based lobbyists who know on which Capital Hill doors to knock. One e-mail alert can do the world of countless phone trees and in infinitely faster than mailings. Organizations can afford to communicate with non-members and to build rosters of activists who are not dues-paying members."
― Tom Price, ZDNet
" German programmers tend to take it as a personal insult when a fault is detected in code that they have written."
― Debora Weber-Wulff at comp.risks
" Goto, n.: A programming tool that exists to allow structured programmers to complain about unstructured programmers."
― Ray Simard
" Here we have to go back through and flush any blocks that are still dirty. with an arched brow you astutely ask, "but how could this happen given the above loop?" Ahhh young grasshopper I say, the path through the cache is long and twisty and fraught with peril."
― Dominic Giampaolo, in a comment in bcache.c
" Horizontal fragmentation results from market manipulation, the whim of vendors, sheer incompetence, contempt for users, or the inability of rival vendors to communicate. I'm talking about nonsense like having 50 MS-DOS programs that each somehow find a different function key to provide on-line help. I'm talking about differences between products that make them incompatible and inconsistent while providing no clear-cut technical advantage. Horizontal fragmentation vastly increases the intellectual burden separating computer users from solving their problems. Since it decreases the value of the computer to the user while providing no offsetting benefit, it makes the computer market smaller. This must eventually translate on average into smaller paychecks for everyone who has tied their fortune to that market."
― Dan Mocsny (dmocsny@uceng.uc.edu)
" How can I make that Other, no longer part of me, who of his own accord will do what I alone desire? What a predicament for a god, a grievous disgrace! With disgust I find only myself, every time, in everything I create. The Other man for whom I long, that Other I can never find: for the Free man has to create himself; I can only create subjects to myself."
― Wotan (Odin) discovers the crux of A.I. programming. [with reference to: Richard Wagner's (1813-1883), Die Walküre.
" How do we persuade new users that spreading fonts across the page like peanut butter across hot toast is not necessarily the route to typographic excellence?"
― Peter Flynn
" How to communicate through your terminal. When you type characters, a gnome deep in the system gathers your characters and saves them in a secret place. The characters will not be given to a program until you type a return (or newline), as described above in Logging in.
" HTML has followed nature's example . . . bright, sometimes flashing, colors are a sign of indigestiblility."
― Rob Hartill
" I blew up a capacitor in a printer once via software! Great example of the power of undefined behavior! :-) "
― Wayne Berke
" I consider this to be a form of censorship of my access to the free exchange of information and thus a First Amendment question."
― Nils R. Bull Young (nyoung@desire.wright.edu) in article (649.2686213d@desire.wright.edu) (nyoung@desire.wright.edu)
" I did have several acquaintances who died slumped over keyboards at least two of them had heart attacks or some such, but none of them were Amiga users. I don't know of anyone who was an Amiga user who died slumped over their Amiga."
― Paula Lieberman
" I did like seeing all the EDA vendors and customers there, but thought it odd that at a conference which is 95% male, they had a band playing slow dance music. Then I remembered: "Oh, yea! That's right. We're in San Francisco!"
― John Cooley, about DAC'95
" I don't think I ever use the same memory twice."
― Paul Bleisch, after being asked if he copied the URL passed to the load function.
" I generally regard flipping through 'popular' publications on technical subjects in the same category as consulting the faqs for various newsgroups or reading most annotated bibliographies. Or perhaps in the same vein as pornography; nobody (well, nobody worth mentioning, anyway) seriously thinks that that's the way things actually work, but some can take consolation in it when the real thing is in absence or is inconvienient."
― SubG
" I have sacrificed time, health, and fortune, in the desire to complete these Calculating Engines. I have also declined several offers of great personal advantage to myself. But, notwithstanding the sacrifice of these advantages for the purpose of maturing an engine of almost intellectual power, and after expending from my own private fortune a larger sum than the government of England has spent on that machine, the execution of which it only commenced, I have received neither an acknowledgement of my labors, not even the offer of those honors or rewards which are allowed to fall within the reach of men who devote themselves to purely scientific investigations . . . If the work upon which I have bestowed so much time and thought were a mere triumph over mechanical difficulties, or simply curious, or if the execution of such engines were of doubtful practicability or utility, some justification might be found for the course which has been taken; but I venture to assert that no mathematician who has a reputation to lose will ever publicly express an opinion that such a machine would be useless if made, and that no man distinguished as a civil engineer will venture to declare the construction of such machinery impracticable . . . And at a period when the progress of physical science is obstructed by that exhausting intellectual and manual labor, indispensable for its advancement, which it is the object of the Analytical Engine to relieve, I think the application of machinery in aid of the most complicated and abtruse calculations can no longer be deemed unworthy of the attention of the country. In fact, there is no reason why mental as well as bodily labor should not be economized by the aid of machinery
― Charles Babbage, The Life of a Philosopher
" I just posted from babbage.museum.london.uk, and BOY ARE MY ARMS TIRED!!"
― Rolf Wilson, in alt.folklore.computers
" I think I'll use the earlier, less deficient NE2000 driver" "Yeah, well, it's full of . . . features . . . now"
― Brian Swetland and Doug Armstrong
" I think the purpose of dating is to get warez."
― Geoff Raye on #uiuc
" I think we have not had visitors from other planets because they have tried to decode our character encoding, and concluded that it wouldn't be worth it."
― Erik Naggum
" I'm much more interested in the fiction side of [interactive fiction] than the gaming side; I've always been rather wretched when it comes to figuring out puzzles, which is why I enjoyed A MIND FOREVER VOYAGING so: the rewards came not from figuring out to look under the rug and open the trap door to find the piece of coal to feed to the furnace in the basement so that 150 moves later the ice will melt in four turns instead of five and dilute the poison in the cup you're forced to drink, but rather from wandering around and looking at things."
― Adam Cadre
" I'm not going to be as kind to FICC in general as you have been. Something is wrong there. These three semiliterate fanboys send dozens of messages a day, fewer than half of which are about anything in particular. I haven't had a kill file since Weiner left, but I've been sorely tempted to use one to avoid seeing anything from FICC."
― In article (10796@hoptoad.uucp) tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney). However, in article (10767@hoptoad.uucp) tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney) writes: Kill files are an expression of resentment by the unmemorable or untalented against the memorable and talented. Your appearance in kill files merely marks the fact that you have more than once tried to make people think, when they really would rather not. It is an honor."
" If Ficus doesn't quit complaining about C++, he will be forever revoked the license to use Eddie, REGARDLESS of the hardware platform, operating system or jurisdiction."
― Pavel Cisler, in the Eddie license
" If the work upon which I have bestowed so much time and thought were a mere triumph over mechanical difficulties, or simply curious, or if the execution of such engines were of doubtful practicability or utility, some justification might be found for the course which has been taken; but I venture to assert that no mathematician who has a reputation to lose will ever publicly express an opinion that such a machine would be useless if made, and that no man distinguished as a civil engineer will venture to declare the construction of such machinery impracticable . . . and at a period when the progress of physical science is obstructed by that exhausting intellectual and manual labor, indispensable for its advancement, which it is the object of the Analytical Engine to relieve, I think the application of machinery in aid of the most complicated and abtruse calculations can no longer be deemed unworthy of the attention of the country. In fact, there is no reason why mental as well as bodily labor should not be economized by the aid of machinery."
― Charles Babbage, Passage from the Life of a Philosopher
" If you evaluate C++, you still get C, but C gets bigger."
― Erik Naggum
" If you have an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite number of Sparcs, they will eventually code Solaris."
― Dave Morgan
" If you substitute other kinds of intellectual property into the GNU manifesto, it quickly becomes absurd."
― Cal Keegan
" If you want to eat hippopatomus, you've got to pay the freight."
― attributed to an IBM guy, about why IBM software uses so much memory
" Imagine if brick-and-mortar stores operated like most online retailers do. You'd walk through the front door and enter a large room with nothing in it but a big sign that read: 'Welcome to Clothes-a-Rama! Please wait two minutes for the door leading to the merchandise to unlock.' Then a door would slide open to reveal another room with nothing in it but more doors, each with a sign that read: 'This way to the Men's Department,' or 'This way to the Women's.' By that time, you would have left. That's what happens online. People don't like waiting around for useless web pages full of blinking lights and theme songs to load . . ."
― Playboy "Living Online" Nov 1999
" Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining."
― Jeff Raskin, interviewed in Doctor Dobb's Journal
" Imagine that Cray computer decides to make a personal computer. It has an 800 MHz processor, 512 megabytes of RAM, 1500 gigabytes of disk storage, a screen resolution of 2048 x 2048 pixels, relies entirely on voice recognition for input, fits in your shirt pocket and costs $300. What's the first question that the computer community asks? "Is it PC compatible?"
" In an essay about programming, Ellen Ullman tells a great anecdote about a programmer who was so socially inept that they could only communicate with him via email, even they all shared the same office. She also writes: "Pretty graphical interfaces are commonly called user-friendly. But they are not really your friends. Underlying every user-friendly interface is terrific contempt for the humans who will use it. . . . to build a crash-proof system, the designer must be able to imagine " ― and disallow " ― the dumbest action possible. He or she has to think of every single stupid thing a human being could do. Gradually, over months and years, the designer's mind creates a construct of the user as an imbecile. This image is necessary. No crash-proof system can be built unless it is made for an idiot."
" In common terms you can write a book, and no one can stop you or tell you what to write, but no one else is required to publish the book, or to read it. You can raise specious issues in net postings, but no one is required to agree, to carry your postings, or even read them. If everyone on the net adds you to their KILL file, you have no recourse. If every site checks incoming postings and blows your stuff away, that's their right. Don't worry, a few individuals may ignore you, but the bulk of the net will read every word, if only to disagree."
― Bill Davidsen (davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM)
" In my opinion, shareware tends to combine the worst of commercial software (no sources) with the worst of free software (no finishing touches). I simply do not believe in the shareware market at all."
― Linus Torvalds
" In the future, you're going to get computers as prizes in breakfast cereals. You'll throw them out because your house will be littered with them."
― Robert Lucky
" In the realtime industry, on the other hand, it's fairly common to sell source code as part of the system. Because we're expecting people to bet their lives on it. Not just their businesses. Their lives."
" In their capacity as a tool, computers will be but a ripple on the surface of our culture. In their capacity as intellectual challenge, they are without precedent in the cultural history of mankind."
― E. W. Dijkstra in his Turing Award lecture
" In trying to be both a tutorial and reference work, this book aims itself in style halfway between the two extremes of manual, Tedium and Gnawfinger's Elements of Batch Processing in COBOL-66, third edition, and Mr Blobby's Blobby Book of Computer Fun. (This makes some sections both leaden and patronising.)"
― the Inform manual
" Instead of whining to the net about it, why don't you talk to the news admins at Berkeley? If they won't trash sci.skeptic there, pass around a petition. Threaten to set their dog on fire. Whatever. If nothing works, you can, as a last resort, unsubscribe."
― Dave Mack, mack@inco.UUCP, responds to a flame in news.groups
" It doesn't matter how beautiful your experiment is, it doesn't matter how carefully you collect your data . . . if it is based upon a faulty understanding of what is being tested, it's most likely useless."
― L.D. Hosford :-)
" It is my firm belief that there is no belief so asinine, no course of action so bizarre, that it can not have a half dozen web sites strongly devoted to its practice. If their maintainers ever learned to check their spelling, we might be in real trouble."
― Jeff Vogel "It's because the buf is not really a buf . . . it's just some random data . . . "
― Michael Lee
" It's truly a shame that Knuth never really got into Lisp. His books would be _more_ readable, and TeX might actually have been a decent language."
― Henry Baker
" Just think, IBM and DEC in the same room, and we did it."
― Ken Thompson, quoted by Dennis Ritchie
" K: (n., adj.) a binary thousand, which isn't a decimal thousand or even really a binary thousand (which is eight), but is the binary number closest to a decimal thousand. This has proven so completely confusing that is has become a standard.
" Life begins when you can spend your spare time programming instead of watching television."
― Cal Keegan
" Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in."
― Larry Wall
" Machines take me by surprise with great frequency."
― Alan Turing
" Most people aren't aware of the fact that UNIX actually dates back to the Cthulhuvian epoch, and was widely used in R'lyeh. The R'lyehish word "fhtagn" is actually a technical term, and literally means "sleeps on an event". Thus, "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn" literally means "in his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits blocked on I/O"."
― Andrew C. Bulhak
" Mrw> groobot: don't crash. *** Signoff: Groobot (EOF From client) <mrw> he can't follow instructions yet."
― Matt Williams, demonstrating some of the neater bits of software development.
" My big hope is that Marc has a near-death experience and realizes to save his soul form the clutches of evil he needs to support HTML 3.0 with style sheets in the next release of Netscape" 8)"
― Nesta Stubbs
" Nature has neither kernel nor shell; she is everything at once."
― Goethe (Goethe advocated Lisp machines?!)
" Never put off until run time what you can do at compile time."
― David Gries, in Compiler Construction for Digital Computers, circa 1969
" New information technologies — including email, the web, and computerized blast-faxes and phone calls — have fundamentally changed the landscape of political competition in modern democracies. They've done so in three ways: by dramatically boosting the access of individuals and special interests to politically potent information, by making it easier for such people to coordinate their activities and exert political power, and by greatly increasing the pace of events within our political systems."
― Thomas Homer-Dixon, director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of Toronto
" No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mediocre brain, something like the president of American Telephone and Telegraph Company."
― Alan Turing on the possibilities of a thinking machine, 1943.
" Not at all tricky. We do this sort of stuff every day before breakfast. Then I fly to work on my winged pig, Swilma."
― David Chase, answering some compiler- or OS-related question.
" Nothing sucks like a Sun."
― Joe Gross, commenting on ux4 rebooting
" Now you can install your new kernel and try it out."
― SunOS 4.1.3, config(8)
" Operating-system software is the program that orchestrates all the basic functions of a computer."
― The Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, September 15, 1987, page 40
" PeeCee owner: "Oh multitasking. That's the little bar at the bottom of the screen. I note your Omega, or whatever it is, doesn't have one . . . "
" People are very flexible and learn to adjust to strange surroundings ― they can become accustomed to read Lisp and Fortran programs, for example."
― Leon Sterling and Ehud Shapiro, Art of Prolog, MIT Press
" Perhaps tech-hacking ― the mischievous manipulation of technology ― goes back even further. One of the old favourites of US campus life was to rewire the control panels of elevators in high-rise buildings, so that a request for the third floor resulted in the occupants being whizzed to the twenty-third."
― Hugo Cornwall
" Perl eventually will acquire enough syntax that it will collapse upon itself, taking nearby solar systems with." "The noise from the implosion will of course be valid Perl code."
― Brian and Joe
" Pi, tagline teaser by Linus Akesson /*pi, tagline teaser by Linus Akesson*/ #include <stdio.h> main(){float x=0,y,a=0,r=100,d=2*r;for(;x<d;x++)for(y=0;y< d;y++)if((d*(r-x-y)+x*x+y*y)<=r*r)a++;printf("%f",a/r/r);}
" Pointers are like jumps, leading wildly from one part of the data structure to another. Their introduction into high-level languages has been a step backwards from which we may never recover"
― C.A.R.Hoare "Hints on Programming Language Design" 1973
" Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."
― Rich Cook
" READ UNHAPPY ― MAKNAM"
― LISP 1.5
" Repeat after me: 'Prioritized interrupts are braindamage'"
― Linus Torvalds on the linux-680x0 mailing list.
" See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you have to be a sneaky bastard too ;-)"
― Linus Torvalds
" Several recent languages have adopted an Intercal-like, asychronous computed COME-FROM concept. Only they refer to it with funny terms like "exception handling'."
― hansm@win.tue.nl
" Show me your [code] and conceal your [data structures], and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your [data structures], and I won't usually need your [code]; it'll be obvious."
― Brooks, Chapter 9 [Actually, he said "flowcharts" and "tables". But allowing for thirty years of terminological/cultural shift, it's almost the same point.)
" Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world"
― Agent Smith
" Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress."
― Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982
" Suppose for a moment that the automobile industry had developed at the same rate as computers and over the same period: how much cheaper and more efficient would the current models be? If you have not already heard the analogy, the answer is shattering. Today you would be able to buy a Rolls-Royce for $2.75, it would do three million miles to the gallon, and it would deliver enough power to drive the Queen Elizabeth II. And if you were interested in miniaturization, you could place half a dozen of them on a pinhead."
― Christopher Evans
" The "abort()" function is now called "choice()."
― from the "Politically Correct UNIX System VI Release notes"
" The best book on programming for the layman is "Alice in Wonderland"; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman."
― Alan J. Perlis
" The C Programmer: Most commonly seen waving a piece of paper around saying "I bet you can't guess what this does" The Lisp Programmer: 43,42,41,40,39,38, Wheres that missing bracket . . . The ADA Programmer: Found in a corner reading the manual to decide if it is legal to add two integers
" The first alteration I would suggest is to change the spelling of netiquette because it is just too difficult."
― Stephen Boursy, alt.culture.usenet
" The First Rule of Program Optimization: Don't do it. The Second Rule of Program Optimization (for experts only): Don't do it yet."
― Michael Jackson
" The increased productivity fostered by a friendly environment and quality tools is essential to meet ever increasing demands for software."
― M. D. McIlroy, E. N. Pinson and B. A. Tague
" The last thing we want is a "cover-up." . . . there's no reason to take out intelligent and purely speculative posts. Even if they're true."
― Chris Dornfeld, 4 November 1998
" The moral of the story is there's no PEZ today, but you can still learn X."
― Alan Braverman at a SigSoft Meeting
" The most important question when any new computer architecture is introduced is 'So what?'"
― someone in comp.arch
" The notion that this is mostly about sex is nonsense. The vast majority of our customers have little or no interest in it."
― Steve Case, founder and chairman of AOL, Washington Post article 10/1/1996
" The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected"
― UNIX Prg Man, 2nd ed, June 1972
" The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change."
― FORTRAN manual for Xerox computers
" The PROPER way to handle HTML postings is to cancel the article, then hire a hitman to kill the poster, his wife and kids, and fuck his dog and smash his computer into little bits. Anything more is just extremism."
― attributed to Paul Tomblin on ASR
" The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim."
― E. W. Dijkstra
" The summation symbol looks like a distorted pacman."
― Graham, Knuth and Patashnik, "Concrete Mathematics", (p. 23)
" The thing that tripped me up was what did that sentence mean. Finally I figured out that it meant the sum of all the data starting at the 37th byte of the file and going to the byte before the checksum. Then the checksum would be the remainder when that value was divided by 65535."
― Someone being clever on a TI-83 programming mailing list.
" The UNIX system has a command, nice, which allows a user to voluntarily reduce the priority of his process, in order to be nice to other users. Nobody ever uses it"
― A. S. Tanenbaum, Modern Operating Systems
" The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence."
― E.W.Dijkstra, 18th June 1975.
" The Wittenberg church door was Usenet for Luther's community."
― Nick Arnett
" There is a difference between eating a varied diet and chowing down on a cup of lard and sugar once a day. Programmers know this instinctively: they balance their daily menu among the four major food groups: caffeine, sugar, grease, and salt."
― From John Walker's "The Hacker's Diet" ( http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/hackdiet.html )
" There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
― Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977
" There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home."
― Ken Olson, President of DEC, World Future Society Convention, 1977
" There were chat rooms, and filter software for obscenity ― it censored out "Matsushita" because of the last four of the last letter. It censorsed out "Chardonnay" because it contained "hardon". I know this because I was -quite- put out at having the offending posts containing the "offensive" language bitbucketed by the stupid censor software, which was easily defeated by using alternate or missing vowels or other letters, adding or removing a letter, etc., even while it censored out "Matsushita" and "Chardonnay."
― Paula Lieberman
" There were in this country two very large monopolies. The larger of the two had the following record: the Vietnam War, Watergate, double- digit inflation, fuel and energy shortages, bankrupt airlines, and the 8-cent postcard. The second was responsible for such things as the transistor, the solar cell, lasers, synthetic crystals, high fidelity stereo recording, sound motion pictures, radio astronomy, negative feedback, magnetic tape, magnetic "bubbles", electronic switching systems, microwave radio and TV relay systems, information theory, the first electrical digital computer, and the first communications satellite. Guess which one got to tell the other how to run the telephone business?"
― anonymous fortune
" They are turning the Internet, something created with taxpayer funds, from a distributed, user-driven technology, into another television channel. Why? Because TV they understand: It sells you stuff every 5 1/2 minutes, like clockwork. They could never get the Internet to do that, in its original permutation. All that messy Usenet and IRC and ICQ and Napster and Gnutella gumming up the works, and giving the software away, to boot!. So . . . Control it, get congress to pass some laws you wrote. They don't mind "The Dark Dungeons of The Internet", as long as someone can sell you something in them dungeons, have the merchandising franchise."
― Skal Loret
" Things the Movies Teach Us About Computers: You can infect a computer with a destructive virus by simply typing "UPLOAD VIRUS".
" Things the Movies Teach Us About Computers: You can bypass the "PERMISSION DENIED" message by using the "OVERRIDE" function. (See "Demolition Man".)
" Things the Movies Teach Us About Computers: Command line interfaces will give you access to any information you want by simply typing "ACCESS THE SECRET FILES" on any near-by keyboard.
" Things the Movies Teach Us About Computers: Searches on the internet will always return what you are looking for, no matter how vague your keywords are. (See "Mission Impossible", where Tom Cruise searches with keywords like "file" and "computer" and 3 results are returned.)
" Things the Movies Teach Us About Computers: Powerful computers beep whenever you press a key or the screen changes. Some computers also slow down the output on the screen so that it doesn't go faster than you can read. (Really advanced computers will also emulate the sound of a dot-matrix printer.)
" Things the Movies Teach Us About Computers: If you display a file on the screen and someone deletes the file, it also disappears from the screen.
" This feature enables rc to export functions using here documents into the environment; the author does not expect users to find this feature useful.) ― from the rc(1) man page
" This fortune cookie program out of order. For those in desperate need, please use the program "________ randchar". This program generates random characters, and, given enough time, will undoubtedly come up with something profound. It will, however, take it no time at all to be more profound than THIS program has ever been."
" This is tradition! This is our *culture*!"
― Matt Hellige on the pronunciantion of LaTeX
" This sort of reasoning is the long-delayed revenge of people who could not go to Woodstock because they had too much trig homework."
― Stewart A. Baker, Chief Counsel for the NSA, on Crypto Anarchy, Wired, June 1994
" This will be dynamically handled, possibly correctly, in 4.1."
― Dan Davison on streams configuration in SunOS 4.0
" Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."
― Henry Spencer, University of Toronto Unix hack
" Unibus timeout fatal trap program lost sorry"
― An error message printed by DEC's RSTS operating system for the PDP-11
" Unix: Some say the learning curve is steep, but you only have to climb it once."
― karl
" Use wildcards. For example if you are searching for John Doe, you can search for: First Name: John LastName: Doe This will search for all users with the first name John and with a last name Doe."
― "The ICQ Power Search" on www.icq.com
" Users of a tool are willing to meet you halfway; if you do ninety percent of the job, they will be ecstatic."
― Software Tools
" VAXORCIST: Everything looks okay to me. SYSMGR: Maybe it's hibernating. VAXORCIST: Unlikely. It's probably trying to lure us into a false sense of security. SYSMGR: Sounds like VMS alright. (VAXORCIST gives him a dirty look)"
― from The Vaxorcist, © 1991 by Christopher Russell
" Vertical fragmentation is an inescapable part of technological progress. If we compare the 8085 to the 80386 or a MIPS RISC CPU, we can hardly expect to transparently preserve our entire intellectual investment in the 8085 when we move up to new hardware with vastly greater underlying capability. The bloodshed involved in upgrading is highly variable. Since computers are in theory general-purpose information processors, with the appropriate software tools the user can "mine" old information and use it on new hardware. Nonetheless, when hardware advances become revolutionary enough we eventually have to throw out some of our old standards. In this case we face a clear trade between the cost of junking our investment in our earlier ways of doing things vs. foregoing the potential benefits of new and better hardware. The bigger the previous investment, the bigger the benefits of upgrading have to be before vertical fragmentation is justifiable."
― Dan Mocsny (dmocsny@uceng.uc.edu)
" We don't understand the software, and sometimes we don't understand the hardware, but we can *see* the blinking lights!"
― Unknown
" We have enough people here who know about UNIX and enough people who play Quake that we can make sys-admins out of parts."
― Ficus, about Be's lack of a fulltime sysadmin.
" What concerns me even more is this: under Windows I created a new spreadsheet, inserted an image (http://blahblah), saved it and exited, then ran it through strings, and saw some data from an email I sent a while ago. WTF???"
― Kurt Seifried
" When NT catches on, cows will fly."
― Dvorak, April 1994
" When someone says "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done", give him a lollipop."
― Alan J. Perlis
" When you request to become privileged, it will ask for a password. There is a default. The default is "system". I have come across *5* gateways with the default password. Then again, DECNET has the same password, and I have come across 100+ of those with the default privileged password. CERT Sucks. a Gateway that led to APPLE.COM had the default password. Anyone could have removed apple.com from the internet."
― Sir Hackalot
" Which of course ties in to the recent (1992): "Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea ― massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it."
― Gene Spafford
" While any sensible person knows rationally that having a cheering section doesn't actually improve the abilities of artificial intelligence routines, we'd like to give in to the superstition that it actually can help."
― Geoff "g0ff" Raye, asking people to come cheer for his team in the MechManiaII programming contest
" Why does Windows have to be rebooted for the smallest thing? Microsoft gives the following explanation: "The Windows codebase is so huge that we have no track of what state the OS is in after it's been running for a while. Therefore a reboot is needed to get Win in a known state to do modifications."
" Why program by hand in five days what you can spend five years of your life automating."
― Terence Parr
" Why would you WANT to port C news to your PC? Wouldn't it be smarter and about as cost-effective to port your PC over to the trashcan and buy a real computer that runs a real operating system like Unix?"
― Brian Kantor (brian@ucsd.edu)
" Will the real Tim Maroney please stand up?"
― Mike Van Pelt (mvp@v7fs1.UUCP)
" Woman, you are so yesterday afternoon. It's the "intraweb", "hyperweb," and "supra-dupra-web" now."
― KC Smith and Paul Watts on uiuc.test
" Words are cheap and vitriol flows like water down the crumbling, mossy mountainsides of prose. Megabytes of gibberish grind forth like glaciers from the keyboards of the thirty million guinea pigs participating in the largest clinical trial ever: the testing of a new reality completely devoid of common sense."
― Charlie Stross, commenting on the Usenet
" Writing programs needs genius to save the last order or the last millisecond. It is great fun, but it is a young man's game. You start it with great enthusiasm when you first start programming, but after ten years you get a bit bored with it, and then you turn to automatic-programming languages and use them because they enable you to get to the heart of the problem that you want to do, instead of having to concentrate on the mechanics of getting the program going as fast as you possibly can, which is really nothing more than doing a sort of crossword puzzle."
― Christopher Strachey, 1962
" You are caught in a maze of twisty little Sendmail rules, all obscure."
― Sendmail: Theory and Practice, Avolio and Vixie
" You can only examine 10 levels of pushdown, because that's all the fingers you have to stick in the listing."
― Anonymous programmer - TOPS-10 Crash Analysis Guide
""
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