You can't legislate morality... but it seems that morons can be legislators.
Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.
These are questions for action, not speculation, which is idle.
-- Noam Chomsky
If you think education is expensive try Ignorance.
-- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
Photons have neither morals nor visas.
-- Dave Farber
Maturity is not a factor of the games we play but the occasions we play them!
Design a system an idiot can use and only an idiot will want to use it.
It is much more rewarding to do more with less.
-- Donald Knuth
Inside every small problem is a big one trying to get government funding.
Huh? Windows was designed to keep the idiots away from Unix so we could
hack in peace. Let's not break that.
-- Tom Christiansen
Listen to the gods speak. `cat /proc/kcore > /dev/audio`
The windows registry is dead ground which microsoft keeps trying to plant in.
If you aim the gun at your foot and pull the trigger, it's UNIX's
job to ensure reliable delivery of the bullet to where you aimed
the gun (in this case, Mr. Foot). (Terry)
Linux - In a world without fences, who needs Gates?
What goes up, must come down. Ask any system administrator.
Friends don't let friends buy proprietary software
All my life, I have done what was expected of me.
It never occurred to me to do otherwise. Now, I
wonder what might have been. The future
frightens us, the past tempts us, and our lives slip
away, lost in the terrible moment in between.
-- Londo, Babylon 5
Insanity is part of the times. You must learn to
embrace the madness; let it fire you.
-- Londo, Babylon 5 to Vir Cotto
Humility is for the non-conceited.
The future has arrived; it's just not evenly distributed.
-- William Gibson
Shallit's Razor: Never attribute to conspiracy what may be adequately
explained by stupidity or incompetence.
"Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve the continuation of
the species"
-- W. Somerset Maugham
"Do, or do not. There is no try."
-- Yoda
-- Backwards compatible -- If it's not backwards it's not compatible.
Pride goeth before a fall.
-- Babylon 5
Trouble will come in its own time, it always does. But that's tomorrow.
Give me today and I will be happy.
-- Sheridan, Babylon 5 (After the shadow war was over)
We can't really predict the future at all. All we can do is invent it.
Can money pay for all the days I lived half a sleep?
-- Primitive Radio Gods - Standing by a broken phone booth
"Socialism is a philosophy of failure. It is the creed of ignorance and
the gospel of envy. It's inherent virtue is the equal sharing - of
misery."
-- Winston Churchill
You can judge the quality of your life by how often you notice the
enjoyment of the little things.
Mary had a crypto key, she kept it in escrow, and everything that
Mary said, the Feds were sure to know.
-- Sam Simpson, July 9, 1998
Just because your paronoid doesn't mean someone isn't out to get you.
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's
character, give him power.
-- Abraham Lincon
It's dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
-- Voltaire
A secret between two is secret of God. A secret between three is
everybody's secret.
-- French Proverb
Magic - Product without process
-- John W. Cambell
"On a day no different than the one now dawning, Leonardo drew the first
strokes of the Mona Lisa, Shakespeare wrote the first words of Hamlet,
Beethoven began work on his Ninth Symphony and Einstein discovered the
theory of relativity. What are you going to do today?"
The easiest way to predict the future is to invent it.
-- Xerox Parc motto
Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop to look around once in a while
you'll miss it.
-- Faris Beulers day off.
As folks might have suspected, not much survives except roaches,
and they don't carry large enough packets fast enough...
-- About the Internet and nuclear war.
It often requires more courage to dare to be right than it does to fear
to be wrong.
-- Lincon
Capitol Punishment: When big theives hang the little ones.
Don't stop think about tomorrow. Don't stop it will soon be here.
-- Song I heard on the radio - (Yesterday's gone?)
"I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense,
reason, and intellect, had intended for us to forgo their use."
-- Galileo
Indifference will certainly be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
-- Jubal Harshaw
"You've got to be willing to read other people's code, then write your
own, then have other people review your code."
-- Bill Gates
When Gandhi was asked at the end of his life what his biggest disappointment
was, he replied, "The hard-heartedness of the intellectual class."
After the game, the king and the pawn go in the same box.
-- Italian proverb
"by perserverance the snail reached the Ark"
-- Charles Sprugeon
Life is a sexually transmitted disease.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see
it.
If God didn't want us to eat animals, he wouldn't have made them out of meat!
Nick the Greek's Law of Life: All things considered, life is 9 to 5 against.
Those who can laugh at themselves will never cease to be amused.
Beware the day when any of the people involved want to stop the dialogue,
not the day when the dialogue is passionate.
-- Pohl <pohl@screaming.org> posted to Slashdot (Mar 24, 1999)
Pessimism is self-fulfilling.
Enjoy your work, because those who do not enjoy what they do,
are condemmed to live out of place for the whole eternity.
-- Nataneal
The race is long but in the end it is only with yourself.
-- Everybody's Free (Song)
The only meaning in life is what we (all conscious beings, not just humans)
give it.
-- demona
<demona> always let your adversary be the one to get upset
"Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth"
But if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence.
-- Ich Bin Ein Auslander - Pop Will Eat Itself
To persuade your enemy to (retreat) before the fight is to defeat them even
before the battle begins. An enemy made ally is no longer an enemy.
-- Sun Tzu, The Art of War
"Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end."
-- Semisonic's "Closing Time"
If you can't be with the one you love, then shag the one your with.
-- Austin Powers - The Spy who shagged me
Efficiency can magnify good, but it magnifies evil just as well.
So, we should not be surprised to find that modern electronic
communication magnifies stupidity as *efficiently* as it magnifies
intelligence.
-- Robert A. Matern
The church saves sinners, but science seeks to stop their manufacture.
-- Elbert Hubbard
"Have a clue. They're cheap. All you have to do is pay ttention."
- Unknown
"Those who desire to give up Freedom in order to gain Security,
will not have, nor do they deserve, either one."
-- Thomas Jefferson
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.
-- Bertrand Russell
A picture is worth a thousand words. It just takes up more bandwidth.
Software isn't software without source code.
-- NASA
Money will say more in one moment than the most eloquent lover can in years.
Memory is like an orgasm. It's a lot better if you don't have to fake it.
-- Seymour Cray commenting on virtual memory
"There are two things that are infinite; Human stupidity and the universe.
And I'm not sure about the universe."
-- Albert Einstein
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a
hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory
gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor
yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
-Sun Tzu - The Art of War
Actors will happen even in the best-regulated families.
"... the deep things in science are not found because they are useful;
they are found because it was possible to find them."
--R.O.
"You want to kiss the sky? Better learn how to kneel."
- U2
The way of the warrior
If you love, love without reservation. If you fight, fight without
fear.
- Captain Sheridan's Father - Babylon 5
"So much has been lost, so much forgotton. So much pain, so much blood, and for
what, I wonder? The past tempts us, the present confuses us, and the future
frightens us. And out lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast
terrible inbetween. But there is still time to sieze that one last fragile
moment. To choose something better. To make a differance."
-- Centauri Emperor on last visit to B5 - Babylon 5
"Good is never good enough when you dream of being the best."
"He who slings mud, looses ground."
-- Posted on Slashdot by Oestergaard
Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
-- Heraclitus, Greek philosopher (500 B.C.)
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought,
but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
-- Albert Einstein
"Paranoia is just Reality at a higher resolution!"
Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings, they did it by
killing all who opposed them.
-- Elliot Lee (GNOME guy, probably not orignal)
"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them
pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened."
-- Winston Churchill
Understanding is a 3 edged sword. Thier side, your side and the
truth.
- Vorlon Saying, Babylon 5
Books, Manuals, Directives, Regulations. The geometries that
circumscribe your working life draw norrower and norrower until
nothing fits inside them anymore.
- Byron, Babylon 5
Do you know what this is? No I can see that you don't. You have that
vacant look in your eyes that says hold my head to your ear you'll
hear the sea.
-- Londo Malari, Babylon 5
There's only one way to have a happy marriage and as soon as I
learn what it is I'll get married again.
-- Clint Eastwood
"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment
by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."
-- Louis Brandeis - (Former Supreme Court Justice)
"A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle."
-- Unknown
Be not anxious about what you have, but about what you are.
-- Pope St. Gregory I
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Outside of their particular area of expertise scientists
are just as dumb as the next person.
-- Richard Feynmann
"This generation may be the one that will face Armageddon."
-- Ronald Reagan, "People" magazine, December 26, 1985
"The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life.
Attitude, to me, is more important than Facts. It is more important
than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances,
than Failures, than successes, than what other people think or say
or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will
make or break a company.., a church.., a home. The remarkable
thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we will embrace
for that day. We cannot change our past.. we cannot change the fact
that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable.
The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is
our attitude... I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and
90% how I react to it. And so it is with you.. we are in charge of our
attitudes".
-- Charles Swindoll
Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
-- Henry Spencer
Programming, is like sex.
Make one mistake, and you support it for the rest of your life.
"a bad reputation is hard to shake, a good reputation is hard to maintain"
-- Anonymous
complex pick-up line: If I were to ask you for sex, would your answer
be the same as the answer to this question?
I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
What luck for the rulers that men do not think.
-- Adolf Hitler
"The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition."
-- Carl Sagan
"message passing as the fundamental operation of the OS is just an
excercise in computer science masturbation. It may feel good, but
you don't actually get anything DONE."
- Linus talking about Micro-Kernels and the EROS OS.
Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink
that they may live.
-- Socrates
"Unix-to-Unix Copy Program;" said PDP-1. "You will never find a more
wretched hive of bugs and flamers. We must be cautious."
-- DECWARS
The great masses of the people ... will more easily
fall victims to a big lie than to a small one.
-- Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf"
Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it.
-- Andrew Young
We have guided missiles, and misguided men"
-- Martin Luther King
Don't vote - it only encourages them!
Tell a man there are 300 billion stars in the universe and he'll believe
you. Tell him a seat has wet paint on it and he'll have to touch it to be
sure.
"I may disagree vehemently with what you say, but I will fight to the
death for your right to say it."
-- Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire
Issawi's Laws of Progress:
The Course of Progress:
Most things get steadily worse.
The Path of Progress:
A shortcut is the longest distance between two points.
heaven must be running unix, how else do u explain so much uptime?
I _am_ pragmatic. That which works, works, and theory can go screw itself.
However, my pragmatism also extends to maintainability, which is why I also
want it done well.
-- Linus
Nothing focuses the mind better than the constant sight of a competitor who
wants to wipe you off the map.
-- Wayne Calloway
"A little science estranges a man from God. A lot of science brings him back."
-- Francis Bacon
At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer you will find
at least two human errors, including the error of blaming it on the computer.
99 little bugs in the code, 99 bugs in the code,
fix one bug, compile it again...
101 little bugs in the code....
Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
"If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise."
-- William Blake, "Proverbs of Hell," 1793
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.
-- Tacitus, 56-120 A.D.
"Bombay is 250ms from New York in the new world order"
-- Alan Cox
"There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We
don't believe this to be a coincidence."
-- Jeremy Anderson
Religion stops a thinking mind.
"If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend seven of them
sharpening my axe."
-- Abraham Lincoln
Poverty is the mother of invention.
In God we Trust -- all others must submit an X.509 certificate.
-- Charles Forsythe <forsythe@alum.mit.edu>
"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent"
-- Isaac Asimov
If violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, religion is the second last.
-- Dan & Kier
Windows 2000: Designed for the Internet. The Internet: Designed for UNIX.
Censorship rests on the child's delusion that
"If I shut my eyes so I can't see it, it isn't there".
G-d is alive.
Magic is afoot.
G-d is afoot.
Magic is alive.
-- Leonard Cohen
What if life is the second chance?
-- Anonymous
We build our computers the way we build our cities
-- over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.
-- Ellen Ullman (www.salon.com article)
software engineering is not about right and wrong
but only better and worse
-- Ellen Ullman (www.salon.com article)
Men willingly believe what they wish.
-- Julius Caesar
Once you stop dismissing something as unattainable,
then you start working on its development.
-- Jerome Pearson
Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
the principle cause of problems is solutions.
-- Eric Serveraid
"reality is something, that once you stope believing in it, it doesn't go
away."
-- Philip K Dick, "Valis"
"Science is a way of thinking that helps you not to fool yourself."
-- Carl Sagan
Be courageous; it's the only place left uncrowded.
-- Anita Roddick
Happiness isn't something you experience, it's something you
remember.
-- Oscar Levant
The future is no place to place your better days.
-- Dave Matthews Band
Software designers are so infatuated with the fact that they can,
that they don't stop to think if they should.
say what you mean, and mean what you say.
"reason over passion"
-- Pierre Elliott Trudeau's motto
Freedom requires duty
whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein
"The Pythagorean Theorem employed 24 words, the Lord's Prayer
has 66 words, Archimedes Principle has 67words, the 10
Commandments have 179 words, the Gettysburg Address had 286
words, the Declaration of Independence, 1,300 words and finally
the European Commission's regulation on the sale of cabbage:
26,911 words."
"Amateurs hack systems, professionals hack people"
-- Bruce Schneier
"Programming is an art form that fights back"
-- Saige on SlashDot
Majority, n.: That quality that distinguishes a crime from a law.
He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened.
-- Lao Tsu
God grant me the courage not to give up what I think is right, even
though I think it is hopeless.
-- Admiral Chester W. Nimitz
"Understanding. A cerebral secretion that enables one having it to know
a house from a horse by the roof on the house,
It's nature and laws have been exhaustively expounded by Locke,
who rode a house, and Kant, who lived in a horse."
-- Ambrose Bierce
There are no physicists in the hottest parts of hell, because the
existence of a "hottest part" implies a temperature difference, and any
marginally competent physicist would immediately use this to run a heat
engine and make some other part of hell comfortably cool. This is
obviously impossible.
-- Richard Davisson
Luck, like a Russian car, generally only works if you push it.
-- Regalian, in My Hero (Tom Holt)
If God had wanted us to vote, he would have provided candidates.
-- Dorothy Day
Documentation is like sex, when its good, its very very good.
And when its bad, its better than nothing.
Good judgment comes from experience. Unfortunately, the experience
usually comes from bad judgment.
Money is how people with no talent keep score.
-- Michael Hart, Brief History of the Internet, 1995
"Those who do not do politics will be done in by politics."
-- French Proverb
Disraeli was pretty close: actually, there are Lies, Damn lies, Statistics,
Benchmarks, and Delivery dates.
A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment
Focus on the dream, not the competition.
-- Nemesis Racing Team motto
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics
are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full
of doubts."
-- Bertrand Russell
"When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left,
I buy food and clothes."
-- Erasmus, Opus Epistolarum, 1529
Anything free is worth what you pay for it.
"It seems certain that much of the success of Unix follows from the
readability, modifiability, and portability of its software."
-- Dennis M. Ritchie, September, 1979
One is never decieved, one decieves oneself.
The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none
-- Thomas Carlyle 1795-1881
Goldenstern's Rules:
(1) Always hire a rich attorney
(2) Never buy from a rich salesman.
"One mode to rule them all and in the darkness bind them..."
-- Tolkien
Once is a coincidence, twice is statistically improbable,
three times is enemy action.
-- Story of Jeff Part XII (www.securityportal.com)
Beware the fury of a patient man.
Like a version 1.1, touch(1)ed for the very first time...
"Under Capitalism, man exploits man. Under Communism,
it's the other way around"
Fourth Law of Thermodynamics: If the probability of success is not
almost one, it is damn near zero.
-- David Ellis
Save energy: be apathetic.
"Don't tell me I'm burning the candle at both ends -- tell me where to
get more wax!!"
I've begun to wonder if we wouldn't also regard spelunkers as
desperate criminals if AT&T owned all the caves.
-- John Perry Barlow
I'm a member of that half of the human race which is inclined to
divide the human race into two kinds of people. My dividing line
runs between the people who crave certainty and the people who
trust chance.
-- John Perry Barlow
"Testing can prove the presence of bugs, but not their absence."
-- Dykstra
There are two ways of constructing a software design; One way
is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies,
and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no
obvious deficiences.
-- C. A. R. Hoare
Is is always time to do the right thing.
-- Martin Luther King
Solve 90% of the problem as simply as you can, and then remove
the other 10% from the problem requirements.
-- Marshall Rose
The universe doesn't always give you what you want. It gives
you what you need.
"If you think technology can solve your security problems, then
you don't understand the problems and you don't understand the
technology."
-- Bruce Schneier, Secrets and Lies
You know, the mark of intelligence is realizing when you're making the
same mistake over and over and over again, and not hitting your head in
the wall five hundred times before you understand that it's not a clever
thing to do.
-- Linus Torvalds
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
-- Albert Einstein
If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.
-- Albert Einstein
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
-- Albert Einstein
"Memory is like gasoline. You use it up when you are running. Of
course you get it all back when you reboot..."
-- Actual explanation obtained from the Micro$oft help desk.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
-- George Orwell
The trouble with computers is that they do what you tell them, not what
you want.
-- D. Cohen
Until I loved, life had no beauty;
I did not know I lived until I had loved.
-- Theodor Korner
So, make a real effort to avoid getting sucked into all the expensive
lifestyle habits of typical Americans. Because if you do that, then
people with the money will dictate what you do with your life.
--Richard Stallman
Personally, I'm always ready to learn, although I do not
always like being taught.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
"My mother said to me, if you become a soldier, you'll be a general,
if you become a monk, you'll end up as the pope. Instead I became a
painter and wound up as Picasso."
-- Pablo Picasso
"The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and
look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can´t find them,
make them."
-- George Bernard Shaw
"All men by nature desire to know."
-- Aristotle
"Experience is that, which you get after you need it."
"This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized
nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our
police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the
future."
-- Adolf Hitler, 1935
When I consider the small span of my life absorbed in the eternity
of all time, or the small part of space which I can touch or see
engulfed by the infinite immensity of spaces that I know not and
that know me not, I am frightened and astonished to see myself here
instead of there... now instead of then.
-- Blaise Pascal
"Silly hacker, root is for administrators"
-- Unknown
"Be good, and you will be lonesome."
-- Mark Twain
A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.
The events which transpired five thousand years ago;
Five years ago or five minutes ago, have determined
what will happen five minutes from now; five years
From now or five thousand years from now.
All history is a current event.
-- Dr John Henrik Clake
Opportunities multiply as they are seized.
-- Sun Tzu
Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day.
Teach him how to fish and he will stop bothering you.
-- Unknown
Unix is simple. It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity.
"I think we agnostics need a term for a holy war too. I feel all left out."
-- George Lebl
"When he pretends to flee, do not pursue."
-- Sun Tzu, The Art of War ("Maneuver", Statement 27)
"If you continue to think the way you've always thought,
then you will continue to get what you always got!"
Never be afraid to try something new.
Remember, amateurs built the ark.
Professionals built the Titanic
"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."
-- Samuel Johnson
"The appeal to force is the abandonment of reason."
-- Introduction to Logic, 11th Ed.
-- Irving M. Copi & Carl Cohen
"The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever
that is not uterly absurd; indeed, in view of the silliness of the
majority of mankind, a wide-spread belief is more likely to be foolish
than sensible."
-- Bertrans Russell
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that
which should not be done at all.
-- Peter Drucker
"No great civilisation likes forests."
-- K.F. O'Connor
We are most probably here for local information-gathering and
local-Universe problem-solving in support of the integrity of
eternally regenerative Universe.
-- R. Buckminster Fuller
Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the
big, worthwhile things. It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out
- it's the grain of sand in your shoe.
"If you're smart, you'll be humble. There always is somebody
who hasn't read a book and knows twice as much as you do."
-- David Duchovny in Readers' Digest
"I believe in true love. But I am easily satisfied."
-- Miguel de Icaza
"If only you could see what I have seen with your eyes"
-- Roy Batty
"Never argue with idiots, they'll only drag you down
to their level and beat you with experience."
"Biology is the only science in which multiplication
means the same thing as division."
-- Greg Leblanc
Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority,
it is time to reform.
-- Mark Twain
"If you don't have a hammer, hack it"
"when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however
improbable, must be the truth."
-- Sherlock Holmes
'The project can be correct, it can be fast, or it can be on time,
pick two'
"the good is the enemy of the best"
-- Unknown Proverb (found in reference to protocol design)
"I never let my schooling get in the way of my education."
-- Mark Twain
"No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass
slaughter of innocents."
-- Edward Said
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb."
-- Dark Helmet, Spaceballs
"Never give up. Never give up. Never ever give up."
-- Winston Churchill
Originality is undetected plagiarism.
-- Dean W. R. Inge
Procrastination is great. It gives me a lot more time to do
things that I'm never going to do.
If you're not paranoid, you just haven't been paying attention.
"Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until
after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious."
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.
-- Albert Einstein
The rhythm method: it sounds good on paper, just like lighting
yourself on fire to keep warm.
Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of
the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That's why people
discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that's why
they write symphonies.
-- Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
"The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own
good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others
of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it."
-- John Stuart Mill
One cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs -- but it is amazing
how many eggs one can break without making a decent omelette.
-- Professor Charles P. Issawi
"All men of conscience or prudence ply to windward, to maintain their
wars to be defensive."
-- Roger Williams
"I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not
have C++ in mind."
-- Alan Kay
All in favor of losing their rights, please do nothing.
It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing,
but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
-- Robert Benchley
I see a dark sail on the horizon
Set under a dark cloud that hides the sun
Bring me my Broadsword and clear understanding
In my view, those of us who teach science to nonscience majors must
continually encourage them to base their beliefs on evidence rather
than mere prior preference.
-- William H. Ingham (Physicstoday.org)
The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought
not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe
to be just.
-- Abraham Lincoln
"We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out."
-- Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.
"I never think of the future - it comes soon enough."
-- Albert Einstein
Unix is not "just" an Operating System. Unix is a way of life.
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world
revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of
values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society
to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit
motives and property rights, are considered more important than
people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and
militarism are incapable of being conquered.
-- Martin Luther King
"Everybody thinks of changing humanity and nobody thinks of changing
himself"
-- Leo Tolstoy.
"There is nothing as deceptive as an obvious fact."
--Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Certainly there are things in life that money can't buy,
But it's very funny -- did you ever try buying them
without money?
-- Ogden Nash
We may often do as we please -- but we cannot please as we please.
-- Bertrand Russell
"Human beings act intelligently only after they have exhausted
the alternatives"
-- Abba Eban
Why live outside the US? Do you want health care or safe food
products or democracy or something? They're all overrated. Stay for
the excellent cable TV.
-- Ian McKellar (GNOME Developer)
"When there's public debate and mass hysteria, that's when the
patches roll in."
-- Michael Meeks (GNOME Developer)
Debugging is anticipated with distaste,
performed with reluctance,
and bragged about forever.
-- Mads Villadsen
"Science helps a lot, but people built perfectly good
brick walls long before they knew why cement works."
-- Alan Cox
Never put off till run-time what you can do at compile-time.
-- D. Gries
"Don't bother using an over-simplified metaphor to prove me
wrong. It means you don't understand my point."
-- NanoG
Only presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have
the right to use the editorial "we."
"In a gold rush it's the people who sell the spades who make
the money first"
"Boys do what they can; men do what they want"
-- Project Pat
Commities are good optics, poor executors.
In passing I draw attention to another English expression which often
occurs in Dutch texts: "the real world". In Dutch -- and I am afraid
not in Dutch alone -- its usage is almost always a symptom of a
violent anti-intellectualism.
-- E. W. Dijkstra
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"
-- Carl Sagan.
If you analyse anything, you destroy it.
-- Arthur Miller
"Business is a good game-lots of competition and a minimum
of rules. You keep score with money."
-- Nolan Bushnell
"Spend your 'different points' wisely."
-- Havoc Pennington
A thorough software professional is one who when his wife yells
at him "goto hell", worries more about the goto.
A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to
suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
-- Carl Sagan
"UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things,
because that would also stop you from doing clever things."
-- Doug Gwyn
Confidence is the feeling you have before you understand the situation.
Perfection is reached, not when there is no longer anything to add, but
when there is no longer anything to take away.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"If you can't make it good, make it big"
"Reusing pieces of code is like picking off sentences from other
people's stories and trying to make a magazine article." It might
make your point, but not very well.
-- Bob Frankston
"Why was God able to create the universe in only seven days? Because he didn't
have an installed base to deal with."
The better educated will always rule the less educated.
-- Sheldon J. Pacotti
You can't see the world through a mirror.
-- Avril Lavigne (Too much to ask)
Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who
dream only by night.
-- Edgar Allan Poe
'The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is
comprehensible.'
-- Albert Einstein
"Fragmentation is like classful addressing -- an interesting early
architectural error that shows how much experimentation was going
on while IP was being designed."
-- Paul Vixie
Dinosaurs aren't extinct. They've just learned to hide in the trees.
"The greatest evils in the world will not be carried out by men with
guns, but by men in suits sitting behind desks"
-- C. S. Lewis
The point is, that geeks are not necessarily the outcasts
society often believes they are. The fact is that society
isn't cool enough to be included in our activities.
fork() is the Unix programmer's hammer. Because it's available,
every problem looks like a nail.
"if it is relevant there is always somebody else out there."
-- Linus Torvalds
"Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied
mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure
mathematicians."
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than
the question of whether a submarine can swim.
-- E.W. Dijkstra
Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about
telescopes.
-- E.W. Dijkstra
Hardware is the part of a computer system that can be kicked and software is
the part that can only be screamed at.
-- Unknown
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice,
there is."
-- Yogi Berra
We're sysadmins. To us, data is a protocol-overhead.
Don't put off for tomorrow what you can do today, because if you enjoy
it today you can do it again tomorrow.
"you can have peace. or you can have freedom.
don't ever count on having both at once."
-- LL (RAH)
"Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If
you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying
"End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH," the paint wouldn't even
have time to dry."
-- Terry Pratchett
(Thief of Time)
I am concerned about any program, any piece of hardware, any treaty,
any law that treats me as a consumer, not a citizen
-- dowobeha on Slashdot
Those who do not understand end-to-end are doomed to reimplement it,
poorly.
-- Greg Maxwell on NANOG
"Laws are like cobwebs; strong enough to detain only the weak, and too
weak to hold the strong"
-- Anacharsis
"The internet is a reflection of our society and that mirror is going to be
reflecting what we see," he said. "If we do not like what we see in that
mirror the problem is not to fix the mirror, we have to fix society."
-- Vint Cerf
If you have the ivory tower view that the internet is good only if everything
on it is good you are mistaken."
-- Vint Cerf
A deep, unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
You can make any computation go faster if you don't care if it gives
the right answer.
"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of
life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be
enthusiastic about."
-- Albert Einstein
"Preferences are bad solutions to performance problems."
-- Havoc Pennington
"Stupid people surround themselves with smart people. Smart people
surround themselves with smart people who disagree with them."
-- Aaron Sorkin
Self documenting code:
#define ITERATE for
#define THROUGH (int i
#define THIS = 0;
#define LOOP i <
#define TIMES ; ++i)
ITERATE THROUGH THIS LOOP 3 TIMES
{
doit();
}
-- Post by "astrosmash" on Slashdot.
We want to use computers, because they're so fast, but we don't
have to think like they do.
-- Bill Richter on comp.lang.scheme discussing pointers.
One of the fundamental problems is that security is very hard. And what makes
it hard is that it’s a negative deliverable. You really don’t know when you
have it. You only find out belatedly when you’ve lost it.
-- Jeff Schiller (Network Manager at MIT)
"The mark of an immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while
the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one."
--W. Stekel
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it."
-- Brian W. Kernighan
"Push the responsibility to the edges, where it belongs".
-- Steve Bellovin
Think of the Nets infrastructure as a source of natural building resources.
Linux is not growing on the trees - it is the trees.
-- Doc Searls
Digital files cannot be made uncopyable, any more than water can be made not
wet.
-- Bruce Schneier
life, n.: A whim of several billion cells to be you for a while.
For those who live in the past, there is no future. "If you take no part in
the design of your future, it will be designed for you by others.”
-- Edward de Bono
"Any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can't think
of how to break it."
-- Schneier's Law
"the Web is the sum of all human knowledge plus porn."
-- Ron Gilbert
For however much the state may gain by not having to fund roads on its own,
society would lose in aggregate if the open commons of transportation were
lost.
-- Lawrence Lessig - The Future of Ideas - Page 174
I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the
time to make it shorter.
-- Blaise Pascal (translation from the original French)
everyone connected to the internet acts globally. it is wildly foolish to
think locally.
-- Paul Vixie
Indeed one of the best ways to deflect attacks is to make it look like they're
succeeding. It's the software equivalent of playing dead.
-- Joel Spolsky
Morality must always be based on practicality.
-- Baron Vladimir Harkonnen
Build a man a fire, he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire, he's warm for the
rest of his life...
-- Terry Pratchett
Nearly every electrical engineer believes deep in his heart that he is better
at writing computer software than any computer programmer, and can show as
proof the fact that he has written a number of small applications, each of
which was done quickly, easily, and exactly met his needs.
-- Unknown source
I'm waking up to say I tried, instead of waking up to another TV guide.
-- Avril Lavigne (Mobile)
"Snow and adolescence are the only problems that disappear if you ignore
them long enough."
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you
win."
-- Ghandhi
common programmer thought pattern: there are only three numbers: 0, 1, and n.
-- Joel Spolsky (User Interface Design for Programmers, Ch 7).
Only failure makes us experts.
-- Theo de Raadt
If you look at software today, through the lens of the history of engineering,
it's certainly engineering of a sort - but it's the kind of engineering that
people without the concept of the arch did. Most software today is very much
like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other,
with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of
slaves.
-- Alan Kay, ACM Queue, Vol 2. No. 9
Occupying a third place in human intellectual culture, computing is not bound by
the need to describe what does exist (as in natural science) or what can be built
in the real world (as in engineering).
-- John Crowcroft, Communications of the ACM, Vol 48. No. 2
When a stupid man is doing something is he ashamed of, he always
declares that it is his duty.
-- George Bernard Shaw
When you hear voices in your head that tell you to shoot the pope, do you do
what they say? Same thing goes for customers and managers. They are the crazy
voices in your head, and you need to set them right, not just blindly do what
they ask for.
-- Linus Torvalds
Just because the person you are arguing with is wrong, it does not therefore
follow that you are right.
-- Unknown
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
-- George Santayana
You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested
in money, compliments or publicity.
-- Thomas Wolfe, The Sun, July 2005.
We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and
running code.
-- Dave Clark
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple
system that worked….A complex system designed from scratch never works and
cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a
working simple system.
-- John Gall
There is no future in which bits will be harder to copy than they are today ...
Any business model that based on the idea that bits will be harder to copy is
doomed.
-- Cory Doctorow (2006 RedHat summit in Nashville)
Analogy is a poor tool for reasoning, but a good analogy can be very effective
in developing intuition.
-- Barbara Simons and Jim Horning
(Communications of the ACM, Sept 2005, Inside Risks)
If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?
-- Albert Einstein
If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.
-- Albert Einstein
blogging is a way of sending emails that go "cc:world"
-- Doc Searls
The function of genius is not to give new answers, but to pose new questions
which time and mediocrity can resolve.
--Hugh Trevor-Roper in "Men and Events"
I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a
good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more
important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about
data structures and their relationships.
-- Linus Torvalds
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends
upon his not understanding it.
-- Upton Sinclair
Great programmers learn how to program their tools, not just use them.
-- Steve Yegge
the way to do good basic design isn't actually to be really smart about it,
but to try to have a few basic concepts.
-- Linux Torvalds
So, it’s important for us to acknowledge that we’re prone to be conservative,
and in turn surround ourselves with individuals who will help break down our
conservatism.
— Shigeru Miyamoto, on designing the Wii controllers
Others inspire us, information feeds us, practice improves our performance,
but we need quiet time to figure things out, to emerge with new discoveries,
to unearth original answers.
- Dr. Ester Buchholz
Politics is the struggle between those who want to make their country
the best in the world, and those who believe it already is. Each group
calls the other unpatriotic.
We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action
always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.
— Frank Tibolt
The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is,
in fact, a return to the idealised past.
-- Robertson Davies
Judge a man by his questions, rather than his answers.
-- Voltaire
Even if you're are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit
there.
-- Will Rogers
You're not old until regret takes the place of your dreams.
"Christians, like slaves and soldiers, ask no questions."
-- Jerry Falwell (August 11, 1933 - May 15, 2007)
"Ideas are a dime a dozen. It's execution that counts."
-- Frank Herbert
"There are only two hard things in CS: cache invalidation and naming things."
-- Phil Karlton
Free software is part of a broader phenomenon, which is a shift toward
recognizing the value of shared work. Historically, shared stuff had a very
bad name. The reputation was that people always abused shared things, and in
the physical world, something that is shared and abused becomes worthless. In
the digital world, I think we have the inverse effect, where something that is
shared can become more valuable than something that is closely held, as long
as it is both shared and contributed to by everybody who is sharing in it.
-- Mark Shuttleworth
This is an important part of the Internet Dynamic – providing opportunity and
not guarantees.
-- Bob Frankston
"knowledge workers" are simply those people whose job consists of having
interesting conversations.
-- The Cluetrain Manifesto. Page 123.
Find the simplest model that is not a lie is the key to better
software design.
-- David Lorge Parnas (CACM June 2007 - Forum)
"Love" is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential
to your own.
Stranger in a Strange Land
A programming language that doesn't change the way you think about programming
is not worth knowing.
-- Alan Perlis
"People are much more likely to act their way into a new way of thinking, than
think their way into a new way of acting."
-- Richard Pascale
"Don't change the man. Change his environment."
-- Buckminster Fuller
Money corrupts the process of reasoning.
-- Lawrense Lessig
Most of us human beings tend to be parochial in our perceptions. What happens
is that we have a very limited and narrow view of our self interest and do not
adequately weight the price that has to be paid on the other side for any of
these measures we are promoting.
-- Alan Borovoy on CBC's Cross Country Checkup (2008-03-09)
If you want to create new markets, or disrupt old ones, you create ubiquitous
infrastructure.
-- Doc Searls