Category: Computers

"As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications."

~~Dave Parnas

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"Without SPAM we wouldn't have been able to feed our army."

~~Nikita Khrushchev

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"This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin colour, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.
"Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.
"My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for. I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike."

~~The Mentor, "The Conscience of a Hacker"

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Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.

~~Putt's Law

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Sending a good link to a nice juicy shocker of a website is the net equivalent of bumping into a celebrity or bedding someone desirable. You get massive kudos from your peers. People are impressed. They're suddenly interested in you. They imagine you're some kind of wild Internet frontiersman / treasure hunter for whom the Web is like some small, easily explored patio. You're on a one-man USS Enterrprise out on a mission to discover strange new pictures of really fat people and to send them back to entertain us, mere mortals.

~~Focus, Aug 1999

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C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg.

~~Bjarne Stroustrup

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"Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is better than nothing."

~~Dick Brandon

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"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

~~Charles Babbage, father of the computer

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"Hey, I bought a cool 3D Pinball game and got an operating system with it!"

~~Simon Hackett

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Real Programmers consider "what you see is what you get" to be just as bad a concept in Text Editors as it is in women. No, the Real Programmer wants a "you asked for it, you got it" text editor -- complicated, cryptic, powerful, unforgiving, dangerous.

~~Ed Post, letter to the editor of Datamation, volume 29 no 7, July 1983

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"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked."

~~John Gall

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A Law of Computer Programming:
Make it possible for programmers to write in English, and you will find that programmers cannot write in English.

~~anon

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"A good programmer is someone who looks both ways before crossing a one-way street."

~~Doug Linder

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"The last time somebody said, 'I find I can write much better with a word processor.', I replied, 'They used to say the same thing about drugs.'"

~~Roy Blount Jr.

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"When I took office, only high energy physicists had ever heard of what is called the Worldwide Web.... Now even my cat has its own page."

~~Bill Clinton

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"The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents."

~~Nathaniel Borenstein

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"There are two ways to write error-free programs. Only the third one works."

~~anon

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"Things like autosmileys are the direct result of allowing peons onto the internet."

~~Tosh Murchison

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"It's like watching Pokemon with one eye while someone rubs salt in the other."

~slashdot poster, on poor website design

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"Hard Drive: The part of the computer that stops working when you spill beer on it."

~~Dave Barry

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I code therefore I exist - somewhere between heaven and html.

~~Ad Hales

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The New Testament offers the basis for modern computer coding theory, in the form of an affirmation of the binary number system:
"But let your communication be Yea, yea; nay, nay:
for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil."

~~anonymous, referencing Matthew 5:37

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"SCSI is _not_ magic. There are _fundamental technical reasons_ why it is necessary to sacrifice a young goat to your SCSI chain now and then."

~~John Woods

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"If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside."

~~Robert X. Cringely, InfoWorld magazine

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"I want you to graph your homework solutions for Monday. You don't have to use Matlab. You can use Maple if you want. Or if you want, you can program it in C because you are stubborn, or in Java because you are trendy. I don't really care."

~~Dr. Narcowich, Diff Eq. Professor at Texas A&M Unversity

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"Real programmers don't work from 9 to 5. If any real programmers are around at 9am it's because they were up all night."

~~anon

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"The most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is that if they foul up there's no law against wacking them around a little."

~~Porterfield

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"The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance."

~~Robert R. Coveyou, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

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"Just ignore him; He missed his prescription this morning and so he's failing parity checks."

~BOFH

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One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs.

~~Robert Firth

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In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.
"What are you doing?", asked Minsky.
"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe", Sussman replied.
"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.
"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes.
"Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.
"So that the room will be empty."
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

~~AI Koan

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The General disliked trying to explain the highly technical inner workings of the U.S. Air Force.
"$7,662 for a ten cup coffee maker, General?" the Senator asked.
In his head he ran through his standard explanations: "It's not so," he thought. "It's a deterrent." Soon he came up with, "It's computerized, Senator. Tiny computer chips make coffee that's smooth and full-bodied. Try a cup."
The Senator did. "Pfffttt! Tastes like jet fuel!"
"It's not so," the General thought. "It's a deterrent."
Then he remembered something. "We bought a lot of untested computer chips," the General answered. "They got into everything. Just a little mix-up. Nothing serious."
Then he remembered something else. It was at the site of the mysterious B-1 crash. A strange smell in the fuel lines. It smelled like coffee. Smooth and full bodied...

~~Another Episode of General's Hospital

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