Computer Quotes
Internet is a good way to get into the Net
Bob Dole 1996
Someday we'll look back at the videogame era of the 1980s and '90s, and wonder why anyone played solitary games. How dull! How sorry. That episode will be a pathological quirk in the history of games - which have always been multiplayer, and soon will always be so again.
Scott - Netrek player, 1993
111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321
Useless facts
When cryptography is outlawed only outlaws will have cryptography
Tips to make your life and reality more computer-adapted:
- Doubleclick all buttons
- Put bookmarks on your favourite locations
- Check your mailbox every 10 minutes
- Start a newsgroup at the noteboard of your local supermarket
- Recover things from the trashbin that you regret you threw away
- When you show emotions, turn your head vertically and make faces
- When something goes wrong during the day, reboot: go home, go to sleep and start over
Alcatrax: Who the hell is this ISDN guy, and why is everyone looking for him?
Heard on IRC
640K ought to be enough for anybody.
Don't fall asleep. You're face will be full of letters.
1st Law of the Internet states that the answer is on the Internet. Therefore the quest is no longer "Where to find the answer" but "How to word the question".
Randi
A hacker is compulsively curious while a code-cracker is obsessively determined. These personality traits sets them part.
LJSTafford
A computer is like the union, it never works unless you spend money on it.
The Silent Thinker
Windows 95 and Windows 98, the only operating systems that has the year-2000 bug built into the name.
The Internet
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
Andrew Tanenbaum
Artificial intellegence is no match for natural stupidity.
Sarah Chambers
It has been said that if you place an infinite amount of monkies by one typewriter each, one of them will eventually write a literary masterpiece. The Internet has proven that this is not the case.
The Internet
While I don't claim to be a great programmer, I try to imitate one. An important trait of the great ones is constructive laziness. They know that you get an A not for effort but for results [...]
[about programming] "You often don't really understand the problem until after the first time you implement a solution. The second time, maybe you know enough to do it right. So if you want to get it right, be ready to start over at least once."
The moral? Don't hesitate to throw away superannuated features when you can do it without loss of effectiveness. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (who was an aviator and aircraft designer when he wasn't being the author of classic children's books) said:
- "Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away."
Perhaps in the end the open-source culture will triumph not because cooperation is morally right or software "hoarding"' is morally wrong (assuming you believe the latter, which neither Linus nor I do), but simply because the closed-source world cannot win an evolutionary arms race with open-source communities that can put orders of magnitude more skilled time into a problem.
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to build bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning.
Robert Cringley