Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. -Unknown % Connect and let go. That's flirting. Don't connect then forget to let go. That's stalking. -Ginie Sayles % A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history, with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila. -Mitch Ratcliffe, Technology Review, April 1992 % Let's give out a bootable, stand-alone version of GNU emacs, then come back in 9 months and find whoever's using it--and kill them. -Keith Bostic % Subject: SETI@home Or perhaps a better subject title would be, "Watching paint dry, but geekier." -Brian Menyuk % Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' Now they have two problems. -Jamie Zawinski, on comp.lang.emacs % We are in fact well and truly doomed. -Jamie Zawinski http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html % Linux is only free if your time has no value. -Jamie Zawinski % Temporary tattoos are a CRITICAL ELEMENT of our security strategy. To suggest otherwise is sheer lunacy. -Reid Fleming, cDc % Love is like a snowmobile flying over the frozen tundra that suddenly flips, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come. -Matt Groening % There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. -Dr. Hunter S. Thompson % Consulting: the art of calling someone a "fucking idiot" without using the word "fucking" or the word "idiot." -Donald B. Marti Jr. % I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone. -Bjarne Stroustrup % What we need is either less corruption, or more chance to participate in it. -Unknown % The world needs more people like us and fewer like them. -Unknown % Success is something I will dress for when I get there, and not until. -Unknown % str->str_pok |= SP_FBM; /* deep magic */ s = (unsigned char*)(str->str_ptr); /* deeper magic */ -Larry Wall in util.c from the perl source code % We don't understand the software, and sometimes we don't understand the hardware, but we can *see* the blinking lights! -Unknown % C combines the power of assembler language with the convenience of assembler language. -Unknown % When your hammer is C++ everything starts to look like a thumb. -Unknown % Software is like sex - the best is for free. -Linus Torvalds % Q: how does a unix guru have sex? A: unzip;strip;touch;finger;mount;fsck;more;yes;fsck;fsck;fsck;umount;sleep -Unknown % Those who do not understand unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. -Harry Spencer % Grad school is fun just like playing Tetris all night is fun. In the morning you realize that it was sort of enjoyable, but it didn't get you anywhere and it left you very very tired. -Michael Booth % UPDATE: OUR PLAN HAS FAILED STOP JOHN DENVER IS NOT TRULY DEAD STOP HE LIVES ON IN HIS MUSIC STOP PLEASE ADVISE FULL STOP SENDING ANOTHER COMET STOP DO NOT REPEAT DO NOT GO AGAIN TO SAN DIEGO FOR HENCHMEN STOP EFFICIENCY REQUIRES ALSO MOP UP ABBA ON THIS ROUND FULL STOP -crackmonkey.org % Unrequited love is neat because it lasts so much longer. -Woods Tea Company % Be careful who you pretend to be because you are who you pretend to be. -Kurt Vonnegut % Life without music would be a mistake. -Nietzsche % My pid is Inigo Montoya. You kill -9 my parent process. Prepare to vi. -Unknown % Nondeterminism means never having to say you're wrong. -Unknown % It is not enough to succeed, others must fail. -Gore Vidal % I don't have to take this abuse from you -- I've got hundreds of people waiting to abuse me. -Bill Murray, Ghostbusters % The IQ of the group is the lowest IQ of a member of the group divided by the number of people in the group. % It's always darkest just before it gets pitch black. % I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when looked at in the right way, did not become still more complicated. -Poul Anderson % Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit. -W. Somerset Maugham % If you use pico in a professional setting, first they will talk about you. Then they will laugh at you. Then they will fire you, and then you lose. -crackmonkey.org % The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armor to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who, by peddling second-rate technology, led them into it in the first place. -Douglas Adams, on Windows 95 % I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day. -Frank Sinatra % Don't anthropomorphize computers. They hate that. -Anonymous % Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. -William Shakespeare, _Macbeth_, act 5, sc. 5 % Man, being reasonable, must therefore get drunk. -Byron % What's money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do. -Bob Dylan % Anyone who can't laugh at himself is not taking life seriously enough. -Larry Wall % God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh. -Voltaire % If two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it. -Hemingway % Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love. -Charlie Brown [Charles Schultz] % I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it. -Groucho Marx % 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 % Please, please, please, do not let your first object oriented programming experience be in C++. It will make it *so* much harder for you to really learn how to program properly. There will be so much that you need to un-learn. -Jamie Zawinski % No lusers were harmed in the creation of this usenet article. AND I WANT TO KNOW WHY NOT! -glmar0@twirl.mcc.ac.uk in alt.sysadmin.recovery % Monday is an awful way to spend one seventh of your life. -Unknown % Should we throw another human wave of structural engineers at stabilizing the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or should we let the damn thing fall over and build a tower that doesn't suck? -Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning Was the Command Line % Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it. -Richard Feynman % I think Java is the best language going today, which is to say, it's the marginally acceptable one among the set of complete bagbiting loser languages that we have to work with out here in the real world. -Jamie Zawinski, http://www.jwz.org/doc/java.html % Never criticize anybody until you have walked a mile in their shoes, because by that time you will be a mile away and have their shoes. -email sig, Brian Servis % Every now and then, when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas ... with the music at top volume and at least a pint of ether. -Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" % Michael Corleone: Soldiers are paid to fight; the rebels aren't. Hyman Roth: What does that tell you? Michael Corleone: It tells me the rebels could win. -"The Godfather, Part II" % UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. -Doug Gwyn % The underlying assumption that everyone must "respect everyone else's views" is wrong. Each featherless biped is entitled to decide that anyone else's views are without merit, and might also elect to state this position along with reasons for thinking so. Don't like it? Better luck next universe. -Rick Moen % Should the phrase 'anal retentive' be hyphenated, or not? Always when it's used as a compound adjective. Never when it's a compound noun. -Rick Moen % Understanding is a three-edged sword % Committee: a group of the unfit appointed by the unwilling to do the unnecessary. -Stewart Harrol % The only difference between a Republican and a Democrat is that I'd fuck a Democrat. -Sarah Michelle Gellar % What you end up with, after running an operating system concept through these many marketing coffee filters, is something not unlike plain hot water. -Matt Welsh % #define BITCOUNT(x) (((BX_(x)+(BX_(x)>>4)) & 0x0F0F0F0F) % 255) #define BX_(x) ((x) - (((x)>>1)&0x77777777) \ - (((x)>>2)&0x33333333) \ - (((x)>>3)&0x11111111)) -really weird C code to count the number of bits in a word % Hackers do it with fewer instructions. % Trying to be happy is like trying to build a machine for which the only specification is that it should run noiselessly. % The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was. % God is big, so don't fuck with him. % It's a very puzzling spectacle and I'm sure psychologists have a a word for your condition which is hard to pronounce. -Jordan Hubbard, email to freebsd-chat@freebsd.org % Message passing as the fundamental operation of the OS is just an exercise in computer science masturbation. It may feel good, but you don't actually get anything DONE. -Linus Torvalds % There are people who are good at doing things. There are people who are good at kissing ass and taking credit. These bundles of skills seem to be at odds so that one rarely finds them in the same person. In most areas of human endeavor, if you want to become famous or just put food on the table and are forced to choose between the skills bundles, it is much better to pick ass-kissing and credit-taking. -Philip Greenspun, http://www.photo.net/samantha/FAQ/wilcox.html % f u cn rd ths, u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgrmmng. % Everyone always coming to Zathras with problems. Great responsibilities. But Zathras does not mind. Zathras trained in crisis management. -Zathras, Babylon 5 % Thirsty, I come. In Bacchus' name, I take the drink which has been prepared for me. I am drunk. I stand between the pitcher and the toilet. We are drunk. We stand between the table and the floor. -Babylon 5 Drinking Game % The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote. -Kosh, Babylon 5 % I've watched threads get "resolved" in all the *BSD mailing lists over the years and if I had to characterize the differences in style, I'd say they boil down to wielding a big stick vs pleading with cause. It may be a lot quicker and in some cases more ``effective'' to say "LOOK, you're WRONG WRONG WRONG and your changes DIE RIGHT NOW. Any disagreement with that? See this stick? *WHAM* *WHAM* *WHAM*. I didn't think so." ... -jkh@freebsd.org % "slicker than two eels screwing in a bucket of snot" -jkh@freebsd.org % The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components of a computer system are those that aren't there. -Gordon Bell, DEC % If all you use is DJB's software and only do things his way, things work great. The minute you deviate from that, you're fucked in a way that only 15 year old Thai whores and haggard system administrators who've spent years writing sendmail cf by hand can truly comprehend. -Kevin Doherty, post to crackmonkey mailing list % This discussion is reinventing the wheel, the lever, and the inclined plane. -Mitchell Blank Jr, linux-kernel mailing list % Any sufficiently large C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally- specified, bug-ridden, slow implimentation of half of Common Lisp. -Philip Greenspun % It's not brain surgery, it's just kernel code. -Louis Gerbarg % The length of your signature is an offense before god. Please trim it to something just a little less impractical or at least be unsurprised if people treat you with a comeasurate lack of respect for failing to use your mailer responsibly. Thank you. -jkh@freebsd.org - freebsd-hacker's mailing list % I really think all of this theory of computing is some sick joke that's perpetuated for no reason. -Tom Smith % Somewhere between Hell and Georgia, there's Florida. -Doug, in his shining moment of insight for the decade. % What is a long term future scenario like in which hardware keeps getting better and software remains mediocre? The great thing about crummy software is the amount of employment it generates. If Moore's Law is upheld for another 20 or 30 years, there will not only be a vast amount of computing going on Planet Earth, but also the maintenance of that computation will consume the efforts of almost every living person. We're talking about a planet of helpdesks. -Jaron Lanier, One Half of a Manifesto % Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves. -Gandalf, in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings % Memory is like an orgasm. It's a lot better if you don't have to fake it. -Seymour Cray, commenting on virtual memory. % For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong. -H. L. Mencken % We prefer "free, do as you like, incorporate it into a baby mulching machine if that turns your crank". -Theo De Raadt, Regarding BSD/GPL % You all know what "in-person" is: it's where the person stands in front of you, in the same room, and presses air past some finely-controlled muscles in his throat to drive a protocol known as "speech", which consists of vibrations in the ether. These vibrations are demodulated by some loose flaps that are connected to nerve cells, all located in peoples' upper sensory clusters. After some processing, the vibrations of the flaps lead to modifications to the receivers' internal data structures (the data structures are actually versioned, though in a somewhat lossy way). -Karl Fogel, subversion-dev mailing list % C++ is like teenage sex: * It's on everyone's mind all the time. * Everyone talks about it all the time. * Everyone thinks everyone else is doing it. * Almost no one is really doing it. * The few who are doing it are: * Doing it poorly. * Sure it will be better next time. * Not practicing it safely. * Everyone is bragging about their successes all the time, although few have actually had any. % You see my friend, it's a changing world and all that we love must go. Yesterday the grass was green; tomorrow it may snow. Like the seasons in their cycles, or the sun going round and round, you've just got to try to hold on to the few good friends you found. -from "Changing World", by Roy Atkinson % ech`echo xiun|tr nu oc|sed 'sx\([sx]\)\([xoi]\)xo un\2\1 is xg'`ol % [11:17] .-------------------------------. [11:17] | x x x -%-%-%- BSD| [11:17] | x x /^\ BIKESHED CARD | [11:17] | /__^\ Get out of x | [11:17] |blue-> ||| | shed *FREE* x x | [11:17] `-------------------------------' % Historically speaking, the presence of wheels in Unix has never precluded their reinvention. -Larry Wall % "...the Jedi learned early on what language the universe was programmed in. Then they took advantage of an accident of language to obscure this fact from the unwashed. They all affected an inverted lisp. so, a Jedi to be, you the Forth must use." % So, is there any way to be 100% certain your packets got through? Somebody said simple checksums, someone else said digital signature... Let's just go with 'no.' -Dave Hollinger % So in C++ 'this' is an argument too, except you don't pass it in the normal way, you pass it in the object dot blah crap. -Dan Manthey % +------------------------------------------------------------+ | Your email is about to be sent to several hundred thousand | | people, who will have to spend at least 10 seconds reading | | it before they can decide if it is interesting. At least | | two man-weeks will be spent reading your email. Many of | | the recipients will have to pay to download your email. | | | | Are you absolutely sure that your email is of sufficient | | importance to bother all these people ? | | | | [YES] [REVISE] [CANCEL] | +------------------------------------------------------------+ +------------------------------------------------------------+ | Warning: You have not read all emails in this thread yet. | | Somebody else may already have said what you are about to | | say in your reply. Please read the entire thread before | | replying to any email in it. | | | | [CANCEL] | +------------------------------------------------------------+ +------------------------------------------------------------+ | Warning: Your mail program have not even shown you the | | entire message yet. Logically it follows that you cannot | | possibly have read it all and understood it. | | | | It is not polite to reply to an email until you have | | read it all and thought about it. | | | | A cool off timer for this thread will prevent you from | | replying to any email in this thread for the next one hour | | | | [Cancel] | +------------------------------------------------------------+ +------------------------------------------------------------+ | You composed this email at a rate of more than N.NN cps | | It is generally not possible to think and type at a rate | | faster than A.AA cps, and therefore you reply is likely to | | incoherent, badly thought out and/or emotional. | | | | A cool off timer will prevent you from sending any email | | for the next one hour. | | | | [Cancel] | +------------------------------------------------------------+ % Underneath every Cynic is a disappointed Idealist. -George Carlin % No trees were killed in sending this message. However, a large number of electrons were seriously inconvenienced. % I spent half my time on wine, women and song ... and like a fool I squandered the rest! % "I'm really glad I came here, you know? I've been all wrongheaded about this. Weeping, crawling, blaming everybody else. I want Dru back, I've just gotta be the man I was, the man she loved. I'm gonna do what I shoulda done in the first place: I'll find her, wherever she is, tie her up, and torture her until she likes me again." -Spike, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Lover's Walk" % Spike: What do you know? It's your fault, the both of you! She belongs with me. I'm nothing without her. Buffy: That I'll have to agree with. You're pathetic, you know that? You're not even a loser anymore, you're a shell of a loser. Spike: Yeah. You're one to talk. Buffy: Meaning? Spike: The last time I looked in on you two, you were fighting to the death. Now you're back making googly-eyes at each other like nothing happened. Makes me want to heave. Buffy: I don't know what you're talking about. Spike: Oh, yeah. You're just friends. Angel: That's right. Spike: You're not friends. You'll never be friends. You'll be in love till it kills you both. You'll fight, and you'll shag, and you'll hate each other till it makes you quiver, but you'll never be friends. Love isn't brains, children, it's blood... blood screaming inside you to work its will. I may be love's bitch, but at least I'm man enough to admit it. % Every non-insignificant program can be shortened by at least one instruction, and has at least one bug. From this, it can be inferred that such programs can be reduced to one instruction, which is the bug. % I once saw a piece of code written for an early C++ compiler, where the programmer had been having some obvious problems with a copy-constructor. There was a function with a lot of assembler in it called 'fucking_copy_dammit()' :-) -DevRandom on #bsdcode % it's like this: even samurai have teddy bears and even teddy bears get drunk % Don't get me started on libtool (aka 'Hey, let's write a complex library dependency processing application, which needs to be using graph algorithms, in a huge shell script that actually travels backwards in time because it's moving so slow") -Dan Berlin on the subversion development mailing list % If there was a FreeBSD bikeshed, it would be paint splattered in every shade. Bde would constantly complain that using red next to blue is a style violation, and Terry would spend all day trying to convince everyone to paint it black because he needs a black bikeshed. -ashp on #bsdcode % That's the $64k question. Our current worst case is the "rock tumbler" school of management. You put everybody together in one big hopper and spin. This knockes the rough edges off people. However, it doesn't take into account differing "hardness" of the material that people are made from so sometimes you end up with a hard rough rock and dust, which is not a desirable outcome. -Warner Losh, freebsd-current mailing list % If the FreeBSD team could get away with it, they would probably use warnings like "Contains live plague bacteria. Beware the Rabid Hippopotami. May cause nausea and vomiting." -Michael Lucas, re: FreeBSD-CURRENT % 'Twas the night before Christmas, and all round the Earth Not a hacker was coding, except the Perl Serf. All the Mongers were snoring in dishevelled beds As visions of obfu-sigs scrolled through their heads. And their mail apps were scanning their server's POP node In the hope that some Perl content soon would download When out on the Net arose such excitations That they leapt from their beds -- with obscene protestations. On their web browser windows they clicked in a flash, To download the new data before Windows could crash. When, what should their caffeine-shot eyes then peruse, But a miniature sleigh, pulled by eight kangaroos. And a miniscule driver, with an accent so rough, In an instant they knew it must be Perl's Mad Prof. More rapid than T1 his modules they came, And he pinged them, and scanned them, and grepped them by name; "Now, Inflect! Now, Parse::Rec! Now, Class::Delegation! On, NEXT! Bleach! Switch! LexWrap! on Superpositions! Go, Balanced! Go, Reform! Go, Coy! Go Class::Contract! Run, Lingua::Romana! Fly, Text::Autoformat!" As they clicked on their reload, and the icon spun around, Down their ADSL Damian came with a bound. He was dressed all in leather, his wrapshades bodacious Like a sawn-off Keanu (but far more loquacious). He spoke many words, and he cut lots of code, And gave lectures designed to make their heads explode, And he worked on Perl 6, and wrote long explanations, And travelled the world meeting JAPHs of all nations. Now his work of the past year was finally completed And the funds they'd donated were all but depleted. He'd been busy, productive, had given his best; Surely now it was time for their Villein to rest. But his eyes -- how they gleamed with new code ideas wicked! By design plans most fell how his face was disfigured! The wild stare of his eyes and a shake of his head, Soon gave them to know they'd still plenty to dread. For he laughed when they mentioned his year was now done And he asked why they thought that he'd stop at just one? Were there not more weird modules that had yet to be authored? And still plenty of minds he had not yet contorted? So he sprang to his sleigh, to his 'roos gave a whistle, And bounded away, till his next Net epistle. But they heard him confirm it, their single worst fear: "HAPPY HACKING TO ALL, AND I'LL BE BACK NEXT YEAR! -Damian Conway, Journal Entry, Dec 24, 2001 % If C gives you enough rope to hang yourself, think of Subversion as a sort of rope storage facility. -Brian Fitzpatrick , in #svn % If a scheduler has a time quantum that is too small no real work can get done, that's how I feel. -Rob Jennings , in -asdf on lily % We have a special climate-controlled room that keeps the worms at a low enough temerature so that they remain dormant. If the temperature varies by more than +-0.73K, the worms either freeze to death, or eat throught the CrTiAl alloy of the airlock doors. Dicey. -Branko Cibej , concerning the can of worms % If you think C++ is not overly complicated, just what is a protected abstract virtual base pure virtual private destructor, and when was the last time you needed one? -Tom Cargill % I absolutely fail to see how we can keep our growing programs firmly within our intellectual grip when by its sheer baroqueness the programming language -our basic tool, mind you!- already escapes our intellectual control. -Edsger W. Dijkstra % So put 'CSTD?=c99' in /etc/make.conf and let those of us who are more interested in parking our bikes than in admiring the paint job get on with our lives. -Dag-Erling Smograv , on the freebsd-arch list % I'd like to propose abandoning the bikeshed concept entirely, and instead redesigning the bike to be rain-resistant. -Dave Cridland , on the subversion dev list % iBooks are the gateway drug of the mac world -Rob Jennings % I tried to explain to rzr_grl what Debian was, and the best I could come up with was that they're like the Radical Fundamentalist nutjob faction of Linux: people for whom Red Hat is insufficiently extremist. At this point she looks at me as if to say, ``you mean the nutjobs have their own nutjobs??'' I suspect she thought I was making the whole thing up. -jwz, http://www.livejournal.com/users/jwz/204780.html % If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how it's done. -Scott Adams, Dilbert newsletter 3.0, 1994 % It's unfair how one extraneous semi-colon can cause so much grief. -Mike Makonnen , in a cvs commit log. % Compromise [n.] -- A state of affairs where all parties in a negotiation are unsatisfied, but with the consolation that at least they screwed the other guy, too. % and tho' We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,-- One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. -Ulysses, Alfred Lord Tennyson % Money in the bank is like a pet fish. Sure, it's a pet, but it doesn't do anything. -Rob Jennings % Wait.. I have a brilliant idea forming. A whole new methodology we can ALL use! We'll type on KEYBOARDS and enter CODE into COMPUTERS. The CODE will operate on DATA, which will just be sequences of 1s or 0s, and the CODE will DO THINGS. -GArrow, in -coding on lily % 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. % All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost, The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not reached by frost, From ashes a fire shall be woken, A light from the shadows shall spring, Renewed shall be the blade that was broken, The crownless shall again be king. -J.R.R. Tolkien % Who the fuck cares which one is faster? Evidently it's important to you to get the wrong answer as quickly as possible. -Mark Jason Dominus % Well, If you don't know what it does, why did you put it in your code? -Mark Jason Dominus % You can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo! -Mark Jason Dominus % Perhaps you have forgotten that this is an engineering discipline and not some sort of black magic. -Mark Jason Dominus % Well, it might be more intuitive that way, but it would also be useless. -Mark Jason Dominus % So, you threw in some random Function for no particular reason, and then you didn't get the result you wanted. What a surprise. -Mark Jason Dominus % You said "It didn't work," but you didn't say what it would have done if it HAD worked. -Mark Jason Dominus % You Are A Stupid Asshole. Shut The Fuck Up. -Mark Jason Dominus % I used to be a highly respected watcher. Now I'm a wounded dwarf with the mystical strength of a doily. -Giles, Buffy the Vampire Slayer