|
Memories are meant to fade. They were designed that way for a
reason. |
|
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Time has a way of taking time. |
|
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"It's a craaaazy world, man." "Somebody ought to sell tickets." "Sure, I'd buy one." |
|
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Inside every small problem is a large problem struggling to get out. |
|
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Try moving off NT easily. You can move from Solaris to HP/UX to AIX or
DEC easily-- relative to moving off of NT, which is like a Roach
Motel. Once you check in, you never check out. |
|
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|
You just can't polish a turd. |
|
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But you can promote the hell out of it. |
|
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Men were sent to the moon while FORTRAN and COBOL ruled the roost,
which proves that you can get a whole lot done if you don't indulge in
language wars. |
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#else
if((!r->args) || (!r->args[0]) || (ind(r->args,'=') >= 0))
execle(r->filename, argv0, NULL, env);
else
execve(r->filename, create_argv(r->pool, argv0, r->args), env);
#endif
/* Uh oh. Still here. Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an
* EARTH-shattering kaboom!
*
|
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No, I can NOT write that in C. I still have my dignity! |
|
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We hold village meetings to boast of our skills and curse the
devil-spawned end-users... Sometimes we juggle... At the last minute
we slam out some code and go roller skating. |
|
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You motherfuckers in Congress have dropped over the edge of the earth this
time ... But if I called you a bunch of goddam motherfucking cocksucking
cunt-eating blue-balled bastards with the morals of muggers and the
intelligence of pond scum, that would be nothing compared to this
indictment, to wit: you have sold the First Amendment, your birthright
and that of your children. The Founders turn in their graves. You have
spit on the grave of every warrior who fought under the Stars and
Stripes. |
|
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|
The weasels don't want Play-doh for Christmas. They want Legos so they
can build small towns. |
|
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Some effort was expended to tune the software so that instead of being
intolerable, it was back to merely unacceptable performance. |
|
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|
SGI used to ship their machines with "xhost +" by
default. The idea was to make things "easy" for people,
never mind the consequences in safety or reliability. SGI was the
Microsoft of the Internet, before Microsoft came along to claim their
rightful throne. |
|
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|
During the heights of some of the recent viruses, I was discarding
30Mb of email per day -- all of it viruses. And I should point out --
viruses for Windows. There have been something like 100,000 viruses
for MS operating systems, only about 50 for the Mac, and about 3 for
commercial Unix systems. That difference isn't because of a difference
in the prevalence of the machines -- there are basic architectural
differences. |
|
|
|
... within the former Digital, issuance of a project-related coffee
cup was a sign of imminent cancellation. This apparently extended all
the way up to the corporate level - the Compaq acquisition was
presaged by the issuance of coffee mugs that simply said, "digital."
(They're quite nice; I got one as a going-away present.) |
|
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|
In Netscape 4.0, the new team went both C++ and Database happy, threw
away the tightly-tuned mail summary files I had designed, and
generally screwed the pooch raw. |
|
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| What we did was just providing a additional ways for the programmer to shoot himself in the foot, and nothing else. The so-called "flexibility" is in fact only in the bullet's caliber. |
|
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|
Yeah man, I tell ya what, man.....That dang ol' Internet,
man.....You just go on there and point and click.....Talk
about W-W-dot-W-com....An' lotsa nekkid chicks on there,
man... Click... Click... Click... Click.. Click.. It's real
easy man. |
|
|
| Many modern games must be played multiplayer. And those you encounter online are, almost as a rule, complete and utter cockmongers. |
|
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|
Most of what you can find on the Net about how to make a bomb is
available somewhere in a library and, candidly, if your child is down
in the basement making bombs, the Internet is probably not the biggest
contributor to that problem. |
|
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|
If you had to choose between protecting children and protecting
Hollywood, you would think you would make an exception (to the law) to
protect children. But, perversely, our legal system has said children
are going to be left to the winds of the Internet and parents have to
take care of that themselves [witness pornography], but we're going to
march in and back up the power of Hollywood with the courts as quickly
as we can to make sure that copyright interests aren't
invaded. [witness Napster] |
|
|
| I am not optimistic, however. Those who get it (e.g., you) are pathetically apolitical. You're proud of your apathy. You're disgusted with people who try to persuade politicians. So am I. But while you do nothing, the future of creativity and innovation is sold in DC - typically to the highest, and most disgusting bidder. |
|
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|
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of
one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that
oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the
beginning if it is to be stopped at all. |
|
|
| See Lisa, instead of one big shot controlling all of the media, now there are a thousand freaks Xeroxing their worthless opinions. |
|
|
| People seem to think that by posting in threads and agreeing with other people they are changing the world. They are not. They are posting in threads online. The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. Being outraged online is a form of entertainment, and refreshing a thread to receive a hit of consensus packs the thrill of genuine activism without requiring any sweat. |
|
|
|
... computers are, unsurprisingly, getting faster every year. The
average desktop that's sold to Joe User for doing word processing,
email, and Web browsing can, when properly configured, deliver
hundreds of thousands of email messages a day, serve millions of Web
pages, route Internet traffic for tens of thousands of users, or serve
gigabytes of files a day. (Joe probably isn't aware of this and will
still kick it when Word takes five minutes to load.) ... In short,
Average Joe's computer resembles one of the best Internet servers of
yesteryear. |
|
|
|
The internet works because despite the best efforts of the suits the
technical people still talk to each other across vendors and try and
make sure everything interworks well. |
|
|
|
Whereas the goal of user interface design is to help the user succeed, the
goal of social interface design is to help the society succeed, even if it
means one user has to fail. |
|
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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. |
|
|
|
I am delighted to know that Principia Mathematica can now be done by machinery.
I wish Whitehead and I had known of this possibility before
we both wasted ten years doing it by hand....I am delighted by your
example of the superiority of your machine to Whitehead and me. |
|
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|
I do strongly think that people, when they start throwing computers at
something, they think that it's a whole new ballgame, so why should
they study the past. I think that is a terrible mistake. |
|
|
|
HTTP was an answer to a question no one was asking yet, and when
someone finally did get around to asking the question... HTTP turned
out to be the wrong answer. |
|
|
|
... future distributed systems will have been built by vastly diverse,
dispersed, and different-minded people--and massive numbers of
them. Each such system will never go down, cannot be recompiled from
scratch, and can never be in total version coherence. |
|
|
|
In programming, an "error trap" is jargon for code which
catches an asynchronous error event - because it "traps" the
error and handles it. The phrase became generalized to other
asynchronous event handlers: interrupt traps and so on. SNMP's
decision to call the asynchronous event itself a "trap"
could be considered dubious use of terminology - although no more
dubious than anything else that SNMP does. |
|
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|
God put me on Earth to accomplish a certain number of things. Right
now I am so far behind that I will never die. |
|
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|
Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor pale in significance. |
|
|
|
I think about the great things humanity has accomplished. Higher
mathematics, atomic physics. Trips to the moon. Great works of art
that explore the depths of the soul. Then I look at WWF Smackdown and
think "Well... we broke even." |
|
|
|
When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a
conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get
a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business
to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing
thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have
a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what
they want. It's the truth. |
|
|
|
As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable
to dispense it. |
|
|
|
BSE or "mad cow disease" results when the people who raise
cattle feed them chow that includes the brains of other cattle that were
infected. Why would anyone want to feed cattle to cattle? Economics of
course... it's a cheap way to bulk up feed. And why would someone want to
do that? To get the price of beef down. Why? Because we like it that
way. You think wanting "more" for "less" is just good
sense? Well let me tell you what you get: more of less. By demanding the
cheapest beef (and food in general) we announce to all that we don't place
much value on our bodies, or the bodies of our children. We don't value
the pleasure of flavor, and we don't value life. If we placed a little
value on the life of the animal who's dying for our dinner, maybe we
wouldn't demand that it be cheapest, and in many cases lowest quality,
meat on Earth. Maybe, just maybe if we ate beef once or even twice a week
rather than making daily pilgrimages through the fast food, drive thru,
biggie-size feed lot, we'd be able to afford quality meat from an animal
that was raised on honest to goodness grass. |
|
|
|
Good. Fast. Cheap. Choose two of the three. |
|
|
|
The problem with Microsoft is that they're bad, slow, and expensive. |
|
|
|
I was on hold [with Microsoft support] for about twenty minutes before I
realized that their purpose was not to help me. Their purpose was to crush
my spirit so I would never call them again. |
|
|
|
The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to
lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the
fact that it was he, by peddling second-rate technology, who led them into
it in the first place. |
|
|
|
One of the causes of unhappiness among intellectuals in the present
day is that so many of them [...] find no opportunity for the
independent exercise of their talents, but have to hire themselves out
to rich corporations directed by Philistines, who insist upon their
producing what they themselves regard as pernicious nonsense. |
|
|
| After a summer of limbo, Steve Jobs stood up at a board meeting and announced that he was off to start a new company. ... He called his new computer company Next. It made no dent in the universe. |
|
|
| In fairness to Steven Levy, no one in 1994 would have anticipated the Apple/Next merger, Jobs back at the lead of Apple, and the incredible success of merging those technologies. |
|
|
|
I understand there may be many of you who think I've gone to the Dark
Side. I think maybe the only reason Luke never went to the Dark Side
was that they never offered actual money! |
|
|
|
Sometimes it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken. |
|
|
|
Applications create possibilities for millions of credulous users,
whereas OSes impose limitations on thousands of grumpy coders, and so
OS-makers will forever be on the shit-list of anyone who counts for
anything in the high-tech world. |
|
|
|
I brought a USB keyboard on site, but I didn't bring a mouse... That's a
Unix mentality mistake. Bringing a keyboard to a Mac is like bringing a
knife to a gun fight - you may think you're equipped but you're going to
get your ass kicked. |
|
|
| ... Sure it's `easier' but this is in the same way that Windows is easier than Unix: it's faster to learn, but eventually you just get so frustrated you have to take an angle-grinder to the computer, and it really takes ages to get all the little bits of computer out of the carpet. |
|
|
|
The closest counterpart to the American SysAdmin is probably in the
UK. That famed British "humour", soured by years of exposure
to luser after luser, makes for some dark biting wit and some really
beautiful frothing bilious fits of rage. |
|
|
|
Three-fifty a head and your body free. |
|
|
|
But where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of
understanding?... No mention shall be made of coral, or of pearls: for
the price of wisdom is more than rubies. |
|
|
|
"Please Aslan," said Polly, "could you say something to
unfrighten him?" "I cannot tell that to this old sinner," said Aslan, "and I cannot comfort him either; he has made himself unable to hear my voice. If I spoke to him, he would hear only growlings and roarings. Oh Adam's sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good!" |
|
|
| "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." |
|
|
| The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient; the work of progress so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope. |
|
|
|
God runs the world, and I write programs. That works better than the
other way around... I bet He would write really good code, though. |
|
|
|
Religion is for people who are afraid of going to Hell. Spirituality
is for people who have been there. |
|
|
| ... Enlightenment cannot be communicated, only the way to Enlightenment. This doctrine of the incommunicability of the Truth which is beyond names and forms is basic to the great Oriental, as well as to the Platonic, traditions. Whereas the truths of science are communicable, being demonstrable hypotheses rationally founded on observable facts, ritual, mythology, and metaphysics are but guides to the brink of a transcendent illumination, the final step to which must be taken by each in his own silent experience. |
|
|
|
There's a million fine women in this world, dude. But not all of them
bring you lasagna at work. Most of them just cheat on you. |
|
|
|
Smithers, I'm beginning to believe Homer Simpson was not the brilliant
tactician I thought he was. |
|
|
|
And that goes for you too, Lisa... In this house we obey the
laws of thermodynamics! |
|
|
|
But the deal is, you put something out into the world, you make
something, you let something go, and it has a life of its own. |
|
|
|
If you find a watch in a desert, you don't assume it was spontaneously
created. You figure someone made it. That there's a watchmaker... And
if the watch has stopped, you repair it. |
|
|
| I think the reason American cars aren't as good as Japanese cars is due to the difference in dinosaurs. Any clunker with a motor can outrun Barney, but it takes a real speedster to escape Godzilla. |
|
|
|
To go faster, slow down. Everybody who knows about orbital mechanics
understands that. |
|
|
|
Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings, they did it by
killing all who opposed them. |
|
|
|
No taste for blood, eh? They've taken the animal out of you. |
|
|
|
It's that whole MacBeth thing. Behind every great evil bastard
- is a bitch, egging him on. |
|
|
|
... this is just another area where Xt based stuff suffers from an
extreme excess of ill-defined knobs, and further confuses the issue by
having the knobs connected in non-obvious ways so that when you turn
what seems like an appropriate knob, it actually doesn't do anything.
You have to turn a different knob which by some strange magic turns
the knob that you wanted turned, but also turns four other seemingly
unrelated knobs. Don't even think about pulling any of the levers! |
|
|
|
Some people, when confronted with a Unix problem, think "I know,
I'll use sed." Now they have two problems. |
|
|
|
Bear in mind that, for a publicly-traded company, if a CEO makes a
decision because it's the right thing rather than because
it's the most profitable thing for the shareholders, he can
go to jail. That's the way the rules work. |
|
|
|
In the early 1980s, following the amazing success of Seagate, more
than a hundred hard disk companies were found AND FUNDED, each one
saying in their business plan that two years out they would have 15
percent market share. Why didn't the VCs see that? Well VCs aren't
very original and they also aren't very smart. |
|
|
|
Automating a dysfunctional process will not fix it. |
|
|
|
It's like being a doctor, but without the job satisfaction. I just
keep the porn flowing. |
|
|
|
Maybe, you saved a life [with porn] and just don't know it. |
|
|
|
RMS is this great programmer. He's got GCC. He's got Emacs. He's got
the MacArthur. He's got this luxurious pad on the fourth floor of posh
NE43. I go to work for him, hoping some of that will rub off. It turns
out that the single most common theme in his thought is, "That's
too much work." "That's going to take too long."
"Don't bother."
Is that what it takes? Is this the punchline of my lifelong pursuit of
hackerdom? I'm apprenticing myself to a blacksmith, just in case. :-) |
|
|
|
A programmers' skill that I find rarer and more precious than gold is
the ability to forsee the future. Humans do it all the time. It works
quite well out to about 15 or 20 seconds (unless your keys are still
in the car). A programmer/designer I prize most highly is the one who
has their ear to the wall (in a metaphorical sense) and can guess the
top ten perversions that some tie-wearing maniac will want applied to
the code before or after it ships, and allows for it. |
|
|
|
I am neither labor nor management. I am a butt in a chair collecting
checks. |
|
|
|
When you realize you're standing in shit, you don't jump up and down
to punish it. You just walk away. |
|
|
| If science were explained to the average person in a way that is accessible and exciting, there would be no room for pseudoscience. But there is a kind of Gresham's Law by which in popular culture the bad science drives out the good. And for this I think we have to blame, first, the scientific community ourselves for not doing a better job of popularizing science, and second, the media, which are in this respect almost uniformly dreadful. Every newspaper in America has a daily astrology column. How many have even a weekly astronomy column? And I believe it is also the fault of the educational system. We do not teach how to think. This is a very serious failure that may even, in a world rigged with 60,000 nuclear weapons, compromise the human future. |
|
|
|
That's the problem with science. You've got a bunch of empiricists
trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder. |
|
|
|
All life is suffering. All suffering comes from desire. Eliminate desire to eliminate suffering. Eliminate desire by the Eightfold Path. |
|
|
|
I feel like I'm slowly sliding down the side of the big toilet bowl of
life. |
|
|
|
...She dances while her father plays guitar She's suddenly beautiful And we all want something beautiful Man, I wish I was beautiful |
|
|
|
Strange how laughter looks like crying with no sound Raindrops taste like tears, without the pain |
|
|
|
Time heals. |
|
|
|
And so does ice cream. |
|
|
|
"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked. "Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "We're all mad here. I'm mad, you're mad." "How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice. "You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here." |
|
|
|
Even if you can deceive people about a product through misleading
statements, sooner or later the product will speak for itself. |
|
|
|
The Microsoft interpretation of "mobile code" is more like a
"mobile home": oversized, awkward, and difficult to move. |
|
|
|
I know, referring to Windows 95 as a stable system is criminal. I
meant stable in the "steady-state" sense, not the
"doesn't crash every few minutes" sense. |
|
|
|
3Com's PalmPilot-- a device that met a need rather than creating
one--took off, while most OEMs eyed and investigated and researched
the market to death while they awaited papal approval from
Microsoft. |
|
|
|
C++ is an attempt to fit a square peg (C) into a round hole
(object-oriented programming). Its solution is to add more and more
facets to the polygon until it fits the hole. What you get is
something that approximates OOP but if you look closer, the peg isn't
round at all. |
|
|
|
Don't get me wrong, I like C. C is very useful. There's a great need
in the world for square pegs. C++ ... well, I haven't yet in my young
career encountered any forty-eight-sided holes. |
|
|
|
Learn how to think in C++ but don't ever program in it. |
|
|
|
Now this is the law of the jungle As old and as true as the sky. And the wolf that will keep it may prosper But the wolf who breaks it must die. |
|
|
|
Kipling was an idiot. There are no wolves in the jungle. |
|
|
|
Like a door which was locked, I opened Oh, now I've paid that price, tenfold over Knowledge Was it worth such torment Oh - to see the far side of shadow? |
|
|
|
Those who are skilled in combat do not become angered, those who are
skilled at winning do not become afraid. Thus the wise win before the
fight, while the ignorant fight to win. |
|
|