Chris Ball's quotesfile. This quotesfile is now organised into three sections: 1) McQuary-compatible; no more than four lines of eighty columns each. 2) Free text. 3) ASCII art. Each quote is separated by '\n%\n'. % McQuary-compatible; no more than four lines of eighty columns each: =================================================================== % whose? my your his her our their _its_ who's? I'm you're he's she's we're they're _it's_ % I must not edit articles with vi. I must not editarticles with thvi. I must not editarticles with vi. I must not editarticles with thvi. jI must not editarticles with vi:wq:wq1 % trj: I'm fat, bloated and lazy. I am a living mozilla. % "If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don't deal in lies, Or being hated, don't give way to hating..." -- Rudyard Kipling, "If." % "The best index to a person's character is a) how he treats people who can't do him any good and b) how he treats people who can't fight back." -- Abigail Van Buren % | "Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ``I know, I'll use | regular expressions.'' Now they have two problems." -- Jamie Zawinski % we must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart. -- h. l. mencken (1880-1956) % "A. No. Q. Can I post at the top?" -- bbc-micro mailing list % "Hi, Dan's answerphone is not in right now. This is his fridge. Please leave a message, and I'll stick it to myself with one of those little magnets." % "I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she's too young to have logged on yet. Here's what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say 'Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?'" --Mike Godwin % To pub.me.chris@ofb.net [noise] Fugu/1.1.7 "If you use pico in a professional setting, first they will ignore you, then they will laugh at you, then they will fire you and then you lose." -- Gandhi -- Nick at 12-02 22:41:43 % Q: How many OO Perl programmers does it take to change a light bulb? A: HASH(0x870bf8) -- Tim Sweetman, on london-pm. % Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur. % i hate the fact that i've spent the past hour fiddling with this and that, never accomplishing anything more than creating error messages that man was not meant to see. % I create nice things...because it pleases the Author of my story. -- Larry Wall % Them: Pshaw. We solved [parrot's current] problems thirty years ago. Us: Yes, but your solutions are unpublished, unadvertised, impossible to comprehend and applied solely to ML or Scheme. Them: So? -- Simon Cozens summarising a conference at MIT % <@lathos> Paul Graham's a nice guy. I met him at LL1 and he wasn't a fuckhead, which is the nicest thing I can say about an academic computer scientist. % < jillzilla> oops, must not use the word "fux0red" in work email. % <@jwz> The human genome is about 3 gigabases long, which boils down to 750 megabytes. Depressingly enough, this is only 2.8 Mozilla browsers. % <@lathos> Sport is just a milder form of killing people. % 15:03 -!- Topic for #perl: When asked to rank emacs and vim in alphabetical order, 12.5% of geeks put vim first 15:03 -!- Topic set by evilgwynie [Sun Jun 9 09:26:35 2002] % "So, if a country's destroyed by nuclear weapons, who gets the TLD?" "The invading party, as long as they have a flag. No flag, no country code." -- Chris Ball and Jon Topper, on UA. % "There arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind." -- Francis Bacon % "Children need encouragement. If a kid gets an answer right, tell him it was a lucky guess. That way he develops a good, lucky feeling." -- Jack Handey % men++ what have men done? Been nice to me and made me happy (yes, men plural, three of them tonight so far (no not like that (well not all of them))) % "How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!" -- Tennyson, "Ulysses" % <@lathos> The only commitment I need right now comes from CVS. % War is God's way of teaching geography to Americans. -- Ambrose Bierce, writer (1842-1914) % In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. -- Douglas Adams % What should rt do with HTML mail? Send a reply in DVI % As to luck, there's the old miners' proverb: Gold is where you find it. -- Neal Stephenson, _Cryptonomicon_. % "Being a System Administrator is like being the phone company. Nobody ever calls up to say 'you know, this thing works great. Thanks!" % "Hrm. I wonder if the emacs gnu is supposed to look like RMS, or if that's just a coincidence." -- Dan Sugalski. % | "> Banks use perl? Let me take my $money out. | Only banks for rich people. Banks for people like you use COBOL." | -- gale:pub.british@ofb.net, 2002-08-26. % IF YOU CAN'T SSH TO IT, IT'S NOT THERE, GOT THAT? -- Dag, on just how much of an NT admin he isn't. % It typically takes 25-30 gallons of petrol/diesel to fully consume an average-sized body under ideal conditions. That I am conversant with this level of detail should serve as an indication of why the wise man does not ask me questions about Windows." -- Tanuki the Raccoon-dog. % DON'T CRY FOR ME, ARGENTINA THE TRUTH IS, I NEVER SMURFED YOU % It's is not, it isn't ain't, and it's it's, not its, if you mean it is. If you don't, it's its. Then too, it's hers. It isn't her's. It isn't our's either. It's ours, and likewise yours and theirs. -- Oxford University Press, Edpress News % "What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?" -- Karsten Self % < lathos> Bush isn't like Hitler at all. < lathos> For starters, Hitler was democratically elected. % < lathos> There are only around 1,000 real people in the world. < lathos> The rest are just NPCs. % "This is a job for BOB VIOLENCE and SCUM, the INCREDIBLY STUPID MUTANT DOG." -- Bob Violence % "Simon, meet Peter. Peter, meet Simon. Peter, Simon, meet a shared goal. You may engage your keyboard and brain now." - Jarkko Hietaniemi. % "That's just kitten-eating wrong." -- Richard Henderson, on linux-kernel. % "Today is the car of the cdr of your life." % "Lisp: Where death is just a 'cdr of an atom' exception." % < AccordionGuy> Hmmm..apparently at my interview, they want me to recite the Lord's Prayer backwards whilst standing inside an inverted pentagram. < jillzilla> AccordionGuy: Oh, doing Microsoft work again? % <@dngor> Eh. Find someone reasonably interesting looking, and hang out with them for a bit. Once the shareware period ends, ask if they'd like to register. -- (Dating advice in #perl.) % | "You're still hoping for a new, good Star Trek series? | You must be a Cubs fan." - Michael G. Schwern % "vi has two modes; the one that beeps and the one that doesn't." -- unknown. % | / "Isn't it dangerous to use one's entire vocabulary in a \ | \ single sentence?" -- Francis, _Oliver and Company_ / % To: pub.movies.conversations-in-limbo@ofb.net "You're so deep in the closet you're a C.S. fuckin' Lewis novel." % | "We just typed make" -- Stephen Lambrigh, Director of Server Product | Marketing at Informix about porting Informix to Linux. % | Q. How do you tell an extrovert techie from an introvert techie? | A. He looks at your feet rather than his own. % "Any setuid root program that does an exec() somewhere is just a less user friendly version of su." -- Olaf Kirch. % "It's not pedantry if you're wrong." -- Bryan Fullerton. % "The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." -- Bill Gates, "The Road Ahead," p. 265. % "Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining or testing your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live." -- David Carhart. % "I needn't fear this Santa. If he were truly OMNIPOTENT he'd have the TESTICULAR FORTITUDE to show himself!" - Stewie meets Zippy the Pinhead. % "There's no blood here; just caffeine and sugar, fighting for precedence." % <@Fmh> purl, be fmh <@purl> It's not actually an opinion if you're wrong. % "Master, what's the difference between mystical wisdom presented as riddles and a bunch of nonsense made up on the fly?" "A fish." % "A good language allows people to say "pshaw" and "ain't" and "Barbara Streisand", no matter how unpleasant the words may sound." -- Pudge. % | No trees were destroyed in the sending of this message. We do concede, | though, that a large number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced. % | "Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff | on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds. % | Do not dangle the mouse by the | Do not expose your LaserWriter | cord or throw it at coworkers. | to open fire or flame. | -- SGI Indy manual | -- Apple Laserwriter manual % | double value; /* or your money back! */ | short changed; /* so triple your money back! */ | -- cons.c, Perl 4 source. % "Common sense won't tell you. We have to tell each other." -- DNA. % "Unix is very simple, but it takes a genius to understand the simplicity." -- Dennis Ritchie. % | II. Impact Non-privileged primitive users can cause the total | destruction of your entire invasion fleet and gain unauthorized | access to files. -- CERT Advisory CA-96.13 % | Why waste time reinventing the wheel, when you could be reinventing | the engine? -- Damian Conway % | "If my son wants to be a pimp when he grows up, that's fine with me. I | hope he's a good one and enjoys it and doesn't get caught. I'll support | him in this. But if he wants to be a network administrator, he's out of | the house and not part of my family." Steve Wozniak, http://www.woz.org % | "Well, okay. The network's the network, the computer's the computer. | Sorry for the confusion." -- Sun Microsystems % Hi, I'm Debian. You might know me from other useful utilities, such as "start-stop-daemon", and "dpkg". % | "A sendmail buffer exploit? That must be a glitch in the matrix." % "Keeping UUCP running is starting to seem a lot like keeping a 130-year-old man who smokes 4 packs a day on life support because he's the last person on Earth who knows how to do the cha-cha, but he won't tell anyone." -- Ryan Tucker, in a.s.r % "Why do I want to give chess lessons?" -- Bobby Fischer, on why he didn't have a chess trainer. % "Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it." -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. % "The most gifted members of the human species are at their creative best when they cannot have their way, and must compensate for what they miss by realizing and cultivating their capacities and talents." -- Eric Hoffer. % "Tonight, I am playing against the black pieces." -- Akiba Rubinstein (on being asked who his opponent was) % "This is yet another instance where everything goes to hell because people aren't enough like me." -- http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/quotes.html % "All programs are poems, it's just that not all programmers are poets." -- Jonathan Guthrie % (when the flanges on the etymotics suddenly ease past a tricky bit of ear canal and go *flumph* inside your ear and the music gets louder) % "That which does not kill me, mightily FUCKS ME RIGHT OFF AND MAKES ME CUNTING MOODY." -- The Dweller, on UA. % "The sort of people with the creativity for sigfile quotes wouldn't put them in a sigfile." -- Chris Ball. % | OCCAM'S ERASER: | The philosophical principle that even the simplest | solution is bound to have something wrong with it. % "Don't tell my momma I'm a sysadmin, she thinks I play piano in a whorehouse." -- Alan J Rosenthal, ASR % local $variable for local @people; # -- Michael G. Schwern. % "I forgot that I was *that* smart!" -- Ilya Zakharevich % Your font is: brok^Wproportional fixed ^ | % | "Q. Where did the names 'C' and 'C++' come from? | A. They were grades." | -- Jerry Leichter, quoted in _The UNIX-HATERS Handbook_. % "I like how, in software, 'gracefully' means not exploding and destroying everything." - gale:pub.comp.configure, 2003-04-29. % "Be conservative in what you generate, and liberal in what you accept" -- Matthew 10:16 (l.trans) % | "If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that | is where they should be. Now put foundations under them." -- Thoreau % | I want a t-shirt. "Shut up and hack." | Art, make it or shut up. % <@bob> iw sinformed they were fgood for pratcial physics <@lathos> ic ouerlhyd teeyype lke thosu alth thetme, brbgt nuulke smet pple I PREFER TO PUT SOME FUCKING EFFORT INTO COMMUNICATING WITH OTHER HUMANS. % "[It is] best to confuse only one issue at a time." -- K&R % "Good judgement comes with experience. Unfortunately, the experience usually comes from bad judgement." % 'This is elevated to "I can no longer live without it" status, and I only applied it two minutes ago.' - readams@hmc.edu, GNOME Bugzilla. % "Tell someone who doesn't regard you as an argument for compulsory sterilization." -- TISM % "My other car is a cdr." % "The world will end in 5 minutes. Please log out." % "I often reflect that if "privileges" had been called "responsibilities" or "duties", I would have saved thousands of hours explaining to people why they were only gonna get them over my dead body. -- Lee K. Gleason, in comp.org.decus % "I offer you a new vision of Hell: Watching an entire ISO committee trying to agree on what wine to have with their meal." -- Tanuki the Raccoon-dog, ASR. % | Welcome to the Department of Redundancy Department. % | "Emacs running on the JVM just seems... weird. The JVM running on | emacs doesn't, though." -- Dan Sugalski, on ll1-discuss. % | What's the ref of one hash colliding? % | > This is why the BOFH is fiction. | If the BOFH did not exist, we would have to invent him. | -- Malcolm Ray and rone. % | "Can God make a stone so heavy he can't lift it?" | "Can emacs make a core dump it can't edit?" | -- Simon Cozens and RDD. % "The Internet is totally out of control, impossible to map accurately, and being used far beyond its original intentions. So far, so good." -- Dr. Dobb's Journal, May 1993. % [the average computer user] has been served so poorly that he expects his system to crash all the time, and we witness a massive worldwide distribution of bug-ridden software for which we should be deeply ashamed. -- Edsger Dijkstra. % "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." -- Edsger Dijkstra. % "Men are from Earth. Women are from Earth. Deal with it." % maybe if FFR was an irritator i read FFR and thought "France France Revolution" % | "ActiveX as a security component? Isn't that like Ben and Jerry's ice | cream as a diet component?" -- Bill Unruh, sci.crypt, 2003-07-18. % | "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?" -- Peter van der Linded. % 13:46 Q: "What do you do if you see 10 dead bloggers" 13:46 A: "Stop laughing and reload" % Getting a SCSI chain working is perfectly simple if you remember that there must be exactly three terminations: one on one end of the cable, one on the far end, and the goat, terminated over the SCSI chain with a silver-handled knife whilst burning *black* candles. -- Anthony DeBoer. % "Reverse engineering is so moreish." -- Steven Murdoch. % "Thou shalt not kill. Except when thine opponent has j'adoubed both thy knights to face backwards." -- _The Ten Chess Commandments_, . % "One of the problems of being a Scot (which I am) is that the Scots accent makes people sound truly stupid." - John M Dow "Research has shown that people really like Scots accents, which is why many companies' call centres are in Scotland." - David Richerby % "May the typos of a thousand spammers infest your resume." -- Peter da Silva, 2003-09-27. % "If I have pinged farther than others, it is because I routed upon the T3s of giants." -- Greg Andrews. % "Get 'yer internet here, electrons so fresh the emitter hasn't realised they're missing. newsgroups, muds, email in a bun" -- Cut Me Own Electrode Dibbler % "Oh, it's a /scythe/." -- Dave Richerby, quoting Blackadder II whilst losing at chess. % "Those who do not learn from Dilbert are doomed to repeat it." -- Bob Dowling. % Log message: This bug was so much fun to fix the first time that I decided to fix it again. 2000-07-11 Dan Winship % He's an immortal vegetarian ex-con gone bad. She's a time-travelling African-American widow on the trail of a serial killer. They fight crime! -- Alexander Larsson. % sweet rattle of disk: a new locatedb comes; cherry blossoms fall. -- Chris Ball. % "Boys will be boys, hackers will be hackers, geeks will be geeks, and cyberpunks will always just be ravers with Macintoshes." -- Monkey Master, Crackmonkey % "Oh, I see dark days ahead. Anyone got any spare Middle Eastern countries?" -- Simon Cozens. % Around computers it is difficult to find the correct unit of time to measure progress. Some cathedrals took a century to complete. Can you imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long? -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982. % "If anyone disagrees with any statement I make, I am quite prepared not only to retract it, but also to deny under oath that I ever made it." -- T. Lehrer. % "Linux is not like Novell, it isn't going to run out of money - it started off bankrupt, in a way." -- Steve Ballmer. % "I hate Go." -- Cho Chikun (ex Meijin-Honinbo), when asked on TV why he liked Go so much. % "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." -- Einstein. % 15:16 A curse on gnome-terminal and all its widgets. % Checkers is for tramps. -- Paul Morphy. % If you never go off on tangents, you keep going around in circles. -- David Silberstein. % "Gnus is another 11,000 lines..." "Yeah, 10,000 of which is a delay loop." -- Laurion Burchall/Brian Cantrell. % "She looked at me with this huge-eyed, `you just mke2fs'd an active mount!' stare. Slowly she explained to me that I had ordered pan-fried African earthworms on a bed of exotic vegetables." -- slashdot:technos % "I don't fancy Legolas but I become deeply envious when I compare the amount of time he has to spend sorting his hair out after, say, fighting a gazillion orcs and the time I have to spend sorting my hair out after, say, I sleep for a few hours." -- David Richerby. % "Why the underscore? Well, mostly because an initial underscore already conveys strong feelings of magicalness to a C programmer." -- Perl OO Tutorial. % "He's just whining because his Turing Test came back negative." % "The Right Hon. was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say 'When'." -- _Very Good Jeeves_, P.G.Wodehouse. % "Anyone attempting to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin." -- John Von Neumann. % "Light stupidity decays into heavy stupidity. This violates energy conservation, but that's stupidity for you." -- Rich Holmes % Pah. Where's a decent Laplacian stencil when you need one? * Kosai decides not to make a joke answer with "prior" in. So that's okay. % "If I had all the money I'd spent on drink... I'd spend it on drink." -- Sir Henry Rawlinson. % "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the road less traveled by and they CANCELLED MY FRIKKIN' SHOW. I totally shoulda took the road that had all those people on it. Damn." -- Joss Whedon, on the cancellation of _Angel_. % "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with backup tapes." -- Jim Gray. % "d4 players play e4 like Michael Jordan plays baseball." -- GM Roman Dzindzihashvili, on chess.fm. % Contrary to popular belief, the apostrophe does not mean "Look out, here comes an 's'!" -- Peter Seebach. % "Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi." -- Larry Wall. % "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. % "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken. % "If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets." % 100G is just... so big. You could build... "popular" desktop environments without running out of room. Probably both of them, even. % "People who make no mistakes do not usually make anything." % "The English people are like the English beer -- froth on top, dregs at the bottom; the middle, excellent." -- Voltaire. % "I believe the apparent legitimacy [of the curve] is enhanced by the fact that I used a complicated computer program to make the fit. I understand this is the same process by which the top quark was discovered." -- Lucas Kovar. % "KDE is technically FAR superior. It's so much superior that comparing KDE and GNOME is plain wrong. It's like comparing a Ferrari with an Austin Mini." -- oGALAXYo, osnews. % "A mathematician is a machine for converting coffee into theorems." -- Paul Erdos. % "When my niece was only a year old, she tore some pages out of my Ada book. That's when I first realized how smart she is." -- Shaun McCance. % "It is simple to make things. It is hard to make things simple." -- Wichert Akkerman. % "Rabelais was gloriously learned because learning amused him, and so far as I am concerned that is learning's best justification." -- Robertson Davies. % There was an old man Said with a laugh, "I From Peru, whose lim'ricks all Cut them in half, the pay is Look'd like haiku. He Much better for two." -- Emmet, cited by cortese(at)netcom.com. % "The condition of man is already close to satiety and arrogance, and there is danger of destruction of everything in existence." -- a Brahmin to Onesicritus, 327 BC, reported in Strabo's Geography. % "lpr is great for streaming mp3s across a network to a queue that's pretending to be a printer. [..] Wouldn't use it for printing, though." -- Simon Cozens. % "Funny, I thought countries were formed by the biggest warlords eating all the smaller warlords until they ran into a warlord they couldn't run over, and called the place they met the natural border, while the peasants tried to avoid getting killed in the process." -- Peter da Silva. % "The only talent I believe in is the ability to persevere in one's studies." -- Miyagawa 6-dan. % "Go is to Western chess what philosophy is to double entry accounting." -- from _Shibumi_, by Trevanian. % "Anyone who slaps a "this page is best viewed with Browser X" label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network." --timbl, 1996/07. % "If you're really good at math, `telnet server 22` works OK." -- Joe Moore % "I bet those wacky tradition-steeped European schools have highly unique and arbitrary but cherished graduation ceremonies, where all the graduates suddenly step on the grass they are now free to walk on, or something." -- gale:pub.edu, 2004/04/23. % "ignorami: n: The BOFH art of folding problem lusers into representational shapes." % "What, you don't think "insmod emacs" is a good idea?" -- Joe Moore. % "The plural of lego is legouch, from when you tread on those plural on the floor in bare feet." -- Telsa Gwynne. % "A bad analogy is like leaky screwdriver." % > Then again, this is still an Internet where the appropriately named > Domino server It's not appropriately named; it should be called Lotus House of Cards. -- Steve Sobol, in response to Alan Brown. % "Let him that is without gote place the first stone." -- Simon Goss. % Hmmm. I almost labelled my application for appointment of examiners to the 'bored of graduate studies'. % "Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration." -- Stan Kelly-Bootle. % Wanted: cute .sig for long-term relationship. -- Bill Cole. % "People keep talking about this "life" thing, but when I Google for it, all I get is references to a cellular automaton designed by a guy who also does tiling." -- Mike Andrews. % "BUGS: It is not yet possible to change operating system by writing to /proc/sys/kernel/ostype." -- Linux sysctl(2) manpage % "#ifndef I_WISH_WORLD_WERE_PERFECT" -- /usr/src/linux/net/ipv4/ip_gre.c % panic("esp: what could it be... I wonder..."); -- /usr/src/linux/drivers/scsi/NCR53C9x.c % "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I've found it!), but 'That's funny...'" -- Isaac Asimov % "The first rule of holes is: when you find yourself in one, stop digging." -- Pamela Jones, Groklaw. % "If I could add one operator to [Perl], it would be: x ||| y meaning defined(x) ? x : y". "I was just sitting here thinking about perl's legendary poverty of operators." -- John Meacham and Jill Lundquist. % "Under Capitalism, man exploits man. Under Communism, the reverse is true." -- seen in Sebastian Bleasdale's .sig. % "I don't care what Livejournal community you belong to, you are not secretly a dragon." -- seen in Steven Kitson's .sig. % "We have a C compiler, the rest is details." -- Matthew Crosby. % "An anecdote is worth a thousand benchmarks." -- Con Kolivas, linux-kernel. % "I don't want the world, I just want your half." -- TMBG. % "The views expressed might not represent those of NCSU. They are, however, correct." -- Andrew Schultz. % "Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change." -- Karen Murphy. % "Do you run fsck and just say yes to everything?" "Do you conduct your personal relationships in the same way?" -- Vicki Brown and Blake Jones, "Sysadmin Purity Test". % "If there are aliens, they play Go." -- Edward Lasker. % "Homeland Freedom and Homeland Patriotism Act Of Homeland Freedom and Homeland Patriotism and Homeland America and Mom and Homeland Apple Pie -- For Homeland Freedom! With EXTRA Freedom and Homelands." -- David Richerby. % "Complete the following sentence: People *ought* to weigh bricks, cats and cinnamon in the same units because..." -- Ian Johnston. % "Grr... don't get me started on Wagner. The man couldn't resolve a dominant seventh to a tonic with two musical dictionaries open to the word "resolution", and a copy of anything by Muddy Waters." -- Eric the Read. % "The Bible contains 6 admonishments to homosexuals and 362 to heterosexuals. This doesn't mean God doesn't love heterosexuals, it's just that they need more supervision." -- Lynn Lavner. % "Attacking GNU/Linux is like boxing with a waterfall. It doesn't stop it." -- Pamela Jones, Groklaw. % "So, once again, so that misinformation doesn't grow legs, I hop on my white horsie and ride in the cause of truth and justice." -- Pamela Jones, Groklaw. % "Warning! /var running out of spac -- apparently seen in /var/log/messages, passed on by Malcolm Tredinnick. % "The copyright file is for everyone. That we make it available in plain-text, uncompressed form rather than in spinning, throbbing OpenGL-rendered 3D text over a thumping dance music soundtrack is a feature, not a bug." -- Branden Robinson. % "...I'm not one of those who think Bill Gates is the devil. I simply suspect that if Microsoft ever met up with the devil, it wouldn't need an interpreter." -- Nick Petreley. % "Well, blessings to the chap who invented ice cream, ginger-pop and the rest! I'd rather invent things like that any day than rockets and bombs." -- Julian, _Five on Finniston Farm_. % "Of course the US Constitution isn't perfect; but it's a lot better than what we have now." -- Eric Sheppard. % "The best book on programming for the layman is "Alice in Wonderland"; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman." -- Alan Perlis. % "one could claim that an // undocumented feature // has no semantics." -- Larry Wall haiku. % "I'm afraid that as the trademark holder on "Perfect", I'm the only one who can write "Perfect(tm)" code. Yours can at most be "Pretty Good(tm)"." -- Linus Torvalds, to Dave Jones. % "I wouldn't trust [Jörg Schilling] to interpret the meaning of a bowl of oatmeal, much less EU Authors' Rights law." -- Brian Sniffen, on debian-legal. % "If chess is a vast jungle, computers are the chainsaws in a giant environmentally insensitive logging company." -- GM Nigel Short. % "I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it." -- Jack Handey. % "I go through laptops like a transvestite goes through nylons." -- Randy, _Cryptonomicon_. % "Can I LART an aol'r for attempting to subscribe to a majordomo list with their street address, or should I wait for a second offence? -- Allan Stojanovic. % "If I had to deal with you professionally, I would have told you to hold the onions and give me large fries. -- Erik Naggum. % > According to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language I'm sorry, but that's like quoting Bjarne Stroustrup on correct ISO C usage. -- "Richard", comp.lang.c. % A. It should be obvious. Q. How is it hard? A. Because it makes it hard to follow conversations. Q. Why is top-posting bad? % "WARNING: RAID-6 is currently highly experimental. If you use it, there is no guarantee whatsoever that it won't destroy your data, eat your disk drives, insult your mother, or re-appoint George W. Bush." -- linux-2.6/drivers/md/Kconfig. % /* So there I am, in the middle of my `netfilter-is-wonderful' talk in Sydney, and someone asks `What happens if you try to enlarge a 64k packet here?'. I think I said something eloquent like `fuck'. */ -- linux/net/ipv4/netfilter/ip_nat_ftp.c. % "An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a very narrow field." -- Niels Bohr (1885-1962). % "The official state religion of France is Bureaucracy. They've replaced the Trinity with the Triplicate." -- Dave Richerby. % "A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God." -- Alan J. Perlis. % "However desirable conservation may be in theory, in practice the struggle of man against fish can only have one result." -- Rory O'Kelly, on the 1971 Varsity chess match. (Cambridge won 5-2.) % "Emacs? You want emacs? Vi was good enough for the bastard that trained me, and the bastard that trained him! You want emacs, you build it yourself, college boy. You go to hell! Do you hear me? You go to hell and you die!!!" -- Mike Sphar. % "In a similar vein, the hybrid Toyota Prius is classed in California as a "Partial Zero Emission Vehicle", a phrase that makes me want to bang my head against something." -- Kevin Bracey, in cam.transport. % "10 million is not as big a number as it used to be." -- Prof. Eric Lander, MIT Intro to Biology 7.012 % "In protocol design, perfection has been reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -- RFC 1925. % "C isn't that hard: void (*(*f[])())() defines f as an array of unspecified size, of pointers to functions that return pointers to functions that return void." -- Paul Tomblin. % "A mathematician is someone for whom mathematics is a soap opera." -- Keith Devlin. % "Contrary to popular opinion there often is a right answer." -- Alan G. Carter and Colston Sanger, _Thinking about Programming_. % "Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so." -- Henry James. % "curses: May you be forced to grep the termcap of an unclean yacc while a herd of rogue emacs fsck your troff and vgrind your pathalias!" -- David Nolan. % "The only problem with troubleshooting is that trouble sometimes shoots back." -- Joe Zeff. % "BUGS: Never use these functions." -- man 3 strtok. % "f u cn rd ths, u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgrmmng." -- Simon Cozens, ox.os.linux. % "What I really want is "apt-get smite" to kill the people who packaged this so dreadfully badly." -- Rob Partington. % "It is more complicated than you think." -- RFC 1925. % "BASH is great, it dumps core and has clear documentation." -- Ari Suntioinen. % "echo 'echo sleep 1 >> .profile' >> .profile" "alias man='export PS1="Formatting page, please wait..."'" -- Jurgen Nickelsen and Calle Dybedahl, on things to put into the .profile of someone who leaves their Unix session unlocked. % > ...Hires Root Beer... What we need these days is a stable, fast, anti-aliased root beer with dynamic shading. Not that you can let just anybody have root. -- John M. Ford. % "To this day, many C programmers believe that 'strong typing' just means pounding extra hard on the keyboard." -- Peter van der Linden. % "This version has many new and good features. Sadly, the good ones are not new and the new ones are not good." -- seen on GCC bugzilla. % "In addition to these ample facilities, there exists a powerful configuration tool called gcc." -- Elliot Hughes, author of the lwm window manager. % "What's zero times infinity? Well, one answer to that question is kind of '1'." -- John Daugman, trying to explain the Dirac delta function. % "Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect." -- Linus Torvalds. (New York Times, 2003-09-28.) % "A man, a plan, a canoe, pasta, heros, rajahs, a coloratura, maps, snipe, percale, macaroni, a gag, a banana bag, a tan, a tag, a banana bag again (or a camel), a crepe, pins, Spam, a rut, a Rolo, cash, a jar, sore hats, a peon, a canal -- Panama!" - Guy L. Steele Jr. % "Any man who isn't a socialist at twenty has no heart. Any man who's still a socialist at thirty has no brain." -- Sean Stewart, in Perfect Circle. % "We must believe in free will. We have no choice." -- Isaac B. Singer. % "The board is a mirror of the mind of the players as the moments pass. When a master studies the record of a game he can tell at what point greed overtook the pupil, when he became tired, when he fell into stupidity, and when the maid came by with tea." -- An anonymous Go player. % "I see people didn't read the smiley I didn't include." -- John W. Baxter. % "There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'. It is 'dead'." -- Jack Cohen. % "Man, if everything were object-oriented then rsync could do this already. Of course, if everything were object-oriented I'd have a bushy moustache and be wearing flares, which would suck." -- Sean Neakums. % "But then it dawned on me that the opinion of someone who is /always/ wrong has its own special utility to decision-makers." -- Berkshire Hathaway's 2004 Annual Report. % From a Sun Microsystems bug report (#4102680): "Workaround: don't pound on the mouse like a wild monkey." % "The man who is clever and lazy however is for the very highest command; he has the temperament and nerves to deal with all situations. But whoever is stupid and industrious is a menace and must be removed immediately!" -- General Kurt Hammerstein-Equord (1878-1943). % `It's as bizarre an intrusion as, I don't know, the hobbits coming home to find that the Shire has been taken over by gangsta rappers.' -- Nix. % Ha. Segmentation fault. I know! I'll drink gin! % sweet Interrobang! beckoning curve of query backbone emphatic -- Jill Lundquist. % "Jill has--with this haiku--become the single most prolific and respected interrobang haiku authoress of all time. The vivid imagery, unfolding drama of the love for the character, and magnificent satori-factor of the last line turn a series of words into a masterful paean." -- Sean B. Palmer. % "Since you have changed your login shell to zsh, I am confident you know what you are doing." -- Fink (fink.sf.net) installer. % >We typically have 4-8 people in the Liverpool room (95% of them are >actually from Liverpool too) I knew that the average British family has 2.2 children. Now I know where to find one of these .2s. -- Peter Allen/Nick Wedd, rec.games.go. % "You didn't want software written by a calm, happy, non-paranoid individual to be answering port 25 anyway." -- Anthony DeBoer. % "Paging Dr Wheel. Dr Wheel to the reinvention suite. Dr Wheel." -- Rob Partington. % "Genius is 50% inspiration and 50% expiration." -- Frederik Eaton. % Student: Master, what is the greatest game invented by man? Master : Chess! Student: What about Go? Master: There was Go before there were men. -- Chad Miller. % "faster than C++, more concise than Perl, more regular than Python, more flexible than Ruby, more typeful than C#, more robust than Java, and has absolutely nothing in common with PHP." -- what Haskell is, from Autrijus Tang. % /* This will not be on the exam. */ % i think it would be really funny if you were hiring for an HR interviewer position, and when the interview began, you said, "okay, go." It would be extra funny if, at the end of the interview, the prospective hire thanked you and dismissed you, and never called you back. % Do you know how Firefox picks the Industrial theme? No, but I'll bet it involves RDF! % She said, "English people don't really pay attention to themselves." "Huh?", he said. "Like, if you ask them how they feel about something, they won't know." -- Clint Adams. % >...you need at least 3 layers of prophylactic to use the net (with Windows). * Stick a copper IUD in through the PSU fan holes * Wrap an extra-large condom around the whole computer * Abstain from using it -- Jan Ingvoldstad and Anthony de Boer. % "Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelangelo would have had to be taught how not to. So it is with the great programmers." -- Alan Perlis. % ..is referencing to SCO in licensing discussion equal to godwins law? % "If I were Secular Dictator of the World, I'd hold Christians accountable to their book and if they didn't feed the starving, clothe the naked, and visit people in prison, I'd eliminate their tax exempt status and call them a country club." -- Rebecca Ore. % "But I don't _want_ functional programming!" -- Sarah Peyton Jones, age 11, upon hearing the rules of Go. % /* This is elegant, but correct. */ % "To put it in mathematical terms: "The Intersection of all Majorities is the empty set", or its corollary: "The Union of even the smallest minorities is the universal set". -- Linus Torvalds. % "Here's another one: "As the number of options approaches infinity, the number of users approaches 1"." -- Christopher Blizzard. % Move 1 pdcawley [11k]: This is, of course, where it all started to go wrong. % "If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders." -- Hal Abelson. % "In computer science, we stand on each other's feet." -- Brian K. Reid. % "What is the sound of Perl? Is it not the sound of a [Ww]all that people have stopped banging their head against?" -- Larry Wall. % "This great college [Trinity], of this ancient university [Cambridge], has seen some strange sights. It has seen Wordsworth drunk and Porson sober. And here am I, a better poet than Porson, and a better scholar than Wordsworth, somewhere betwixt and between." -- A.E. Housman. % "A mouse is a device used to point at the xterm you want to type in" - A.S.R. % "They've implemented Yet Another IEEE802.11 stack instead of embracing and extending the Intel one we already have, and are hence urinating into the atmospheric disturbance." -- David Woodhouse. % "The Linux philosophy is 'Laugh in the face of danger'. Oops. Wrong One. 'Do it yourself'. Yes, that's it." -- Linus Torvalds. % "(I was) my own teacher and pupil, and thanks to the efforts of both, they were not discontented with each other." -- Andres Segovia, classical guitarist. % "Java 18:20 -- For wherever two or three are gathered on my website, there I am, consuming all the heap and CPU." -- Dan Sheppard. % "Equations are the Devil's sentences." -- Stephen Colbert. % code code code code code code code code code code code code code bug code co de code code code bug code code code code code code code code code code code code code code code code code code code code code code code code code code c -- Mark Mackey. % "I spoke a little bit about the network effects involved in the success of the LAMP stack. Just in case anyone in the crowd was unaware of the LAMP acronym, I spelt it out for them: Linux, Apache, Most of our cool scripting languages start with P, PostgreSQL." -- Jeff Waugh. % "Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out." -- Vaclav Havel. % "Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You did not place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible." -- Jamin Raskin. % "Simplify, simplify, simplify." -- Henry David Thoreau. "Simplify." -- Wendy McElroy. % "On a scale of 1-10, X's "brokenness rating" is 1.1, but that's only because bringing Windows into the picture rescaled "brokenness" by a factor of 10." -- Peter da Silva. % "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 deficiencies." -- C.A.R. Hoare. % "If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as lines produced but as lines spent." -- Edsger Dijkstra. % Old Japanese proverb: There are two kinds of fools -- those who never climb Mt. Fuji, and those who climb it twice. % There are many of us in this old world of ours who hold that things break about even for all of us. I have observed, for example, that we all get about the same amount of ice. The rich get it in the summer and the poor get it in the winter. -- Bat Masterson. % "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". % "Give me the knowledge to change the code I do not accept, the wisdom not to accept the code I cannot change, and the freedom to choose my preference." -- Groklaw, user:greyhat. % "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery. % "You aren't supposed to learn that dedicated, committed effort can bring about significant changes of consciousness and understanding. That's a very dangerous idea, and therefore it's been wiped out of history." -- Noam Chomsky. % "Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the results." -- Richard Stallman. % printk(KERN_WARNING "Hey who turned the DMA off?\n"); linux-2.6.6/drivers/net/wan/z85230.c % "In a spherical world, the way this would work is [...]" -- Adam Jackson. % "Carefully crafted initial estimates reward you not only with reduced computational effort, but also with understanding and increased self-esteem." -- _Numerical methods in C_., % "Make no small plans." -- Daniel Burnham. % "I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." -- Stephen Roberts. % sorry to sound harsh, but you'll note that your bug number is #17126; you'll forgive us if we can't just drop everything to figure out why your machine is crashing. % "We need a special holiday to honor the countless kind souls with unsecured networks named 'linksys'." -- Randall Munroe. % "There are two types of people in the world: those who can't tell the difference between Arial and Helvetica, and those who despise Arial." -- John Gruber. % "I have a truly marvellous patch that fixes the bug which this signature is too narrow to contain." -- Avi Kivity. % "Any language where the expression 2 + 3 * 4 has the value 20 isn't going to be a commercial success." -- Mark Bessey on Smalltalk. % "As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand." -- Josh Billings. % "Feminism is the radical notion that women are people." -- Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler. % "The point called. It misses you." % "When you aren't practicing, someone else is. When you meet him, he will win." -- Martial Arts proverb. % "idempotent" is a good word. you can say that again. % "I can't understand why people are afraid of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." -- John Cage % "When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." -Asimov, Relativity of Wrong. % The only problem with haiku is that you just get started and then -- Roger McGough % "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me dozens of times, I'm an Apple customer." % "If I were wrong, then one would have been enough." -- Einstein, on being informed of the publication of "100 Authors Against Einstein". % tenía la cabeza tan pero tan pequeña que no le cabía la menor duda % Free text: ========== % I think Travis are lyrical geniuses[1]. Take, for example, the lyrics from their song 'Turn': "Turn, turn, turn, turn, turn", or the lyrics from their recent hit 'Sing': "Sing... sing, sing, sing". [1] Except I don't really, do I? No. -- Dan Ellis, on UA. % Once upon a time, a king carried by his slaves wanted to cross a rope bridge. He called all his slaves and asked, "Is it safe? Someone go ahead and cross." All but one stared at each other and began to point and say, "Your excellency, send him, he is wisest and can tell you if it is safe." Each poor slave pointed at another, and another. Finally, one said, "Let me go across, sire." Having crossed the bridge, he cut the rope. -- http://www.venona.com/rdl/ % Actually the most common form of time estimation in computer science is the asymptotic time complexity analysis, which tells you how long your code will take compared to other code solving the same problem for sizes of the problem you don't actually care about. Computer scientists, realising the uselessness of this, often use a WAG to estimate how long it will actually take, but they won't admit to this in papers. -- someone on (void), sometime. % Date: Wednesday, 24 October 2001 - 16:28 From: Topper To: FatBoyClam Subject: Job goin'. In-Reply-To: 491115, 491101, 491098, 490880 All-Replies: 5 > See 491098 in a 'your answer was somewhat vague' kind of way. *french shrug of dismissal* :) It's an underpaid job on the frontline of $company's operation, dealing with clueless f**knuts who can't design web pages for toffee, never mind s**t. The successful candidate will have to be able to translate vague waffling spattered with incorrectly-used technical terms into a sensible request for technical help, then sit and 'listen' to the clients' life story for ten minutes whilst waiting to tell them what the problem was. In addition the candidate may also be involved in writing documentation, and the occasional piece of development work, all to unlikely deadlines. Candidate will be expected to take their turn in being the unlucky c**t woken up at 4am to reboot a server that some fool has dragged to its knees by spawning millions of processes from their badly-written worsely-tested Perl, co-written by "their mate Dave, who saw Hackers once." and is thus a world authority on how to write code. % > >>"No good" is idiomatic. In this case, it means the same as "not > >>good", which is sometimes used, but "no good" is more common. > > I should have qualified that I'm writing from Australia, where > "no good" would be accepted, if not used, by almost everyone. It's not used at all in UK for this sense, I think. "Not good", "not very well", "not up to much today" would be possible; but most adult Brits would reply "Oh, not so bad, thanks", even if they were in agony and dying. If, on the other hand, they had some minor and passing complaint (a headache, perhaps, after a drop too much the previous night) they'd complain vociferously and with disgusting self-pity. -- Alan Jones, in % To: pub.me.chris@ofb.net | Fugu/1.1.7 "Rar" sounds much like I imagine what an as-yet-unportrayed alien villain on an old Dr Who program I've never seen would say, if it talked. -- -tomy. at 11-19 01:33:53 % Aw, man. I work *all night long* to come up with "A +2 Staple Remover of Bipartisan Disunity" *with Roquefort dressing*, and I get quoted for some lame-o Dr Who reference? It's almost but not quite entirely unlike being burned alive in reverse-video effigy. Dang. -- -tomy. at 11-19 01:39:41 % To pub.noise@ofb.net gsend/0.99egg Do people ever ask EE-type questions on gale? -- Madeleine at 11-25 23:31:15 To pub.noise@ofb.net Fugu/1.1.6 I can't recall any. But if you post an EE question, I'm sure everyone will move just as rapidly to pretend they know the answer as if it were a CS question. -- Dan at 11-25 23:31:45 % Message: Sad/539887+ (50th/54) at 14:24, Sun 23/12 From: Dizzy Subject: Oh dear All-Replies: 4 You know you've spent too much time on UA when you wake up from a nightmare banging your fists against the wall because you've fallen out of a Telnet window and the admin won't let you back in.... % To: pub.soc.geek-culture@ofb.net But the sign of true geekliness is when hangups over details turn normal conversations, like, where to go for dinner, or whether or not the President is an idiot, into exercises in second-order predicate calculus. -- Chris at 12-24 05:03:59 % To: pub.web.crashme@ofb.net I get plenty of death/legal/etc. threats for remailer.havenco.com, but unfortunately I have enough guns and distance that threats don't have much impact. I want *real* death threats. They need to be credible to be exciting. -- Ryan at 01-01 21:32:17 % I'm sure that their customer support are wonderful people. On the other hand, getting through to them involves a race condition with the heat-death of the universe.... Bitter, me? -- Kieran, about Scan.co.uk, on GLLUG. % Dude. These folks ran a Java obfuscator on their classes. And they deleted all their .java files. But they forgot one .java~ (emacs backup) file! Which happens to be the main class. kl00++ -- Dan at 01-24 03:29:48 -- I think their code looks better when obfuscated. -- Dan at 01-24 03:30:17 -- % To: pub.gale.time.format@ofb.net OK, I'm gonna have to lay down laws here. Nobody is ever allowed to accuse anyone of blowing things out of proportion any more. Things blow up to their appropriate proportion, as bounded by energy and depth of feeling. Nobody here is stupid, with a couple of exceptions; all "you're blowing this out of proportion" means is that the speaker wants to give himself some sort of masturbatory pat on the back for his emotional distance from the issue. -- JTR at 01-31 00:53:49 -- % 22:18 <@delYsid> I started hacking as I was 12 22:20 < choric> Brent Dax - one of the key implementors for perl6 - is 16. 22:20 < choric> I wish jwz still hacked emacs. He'd have something very witty and perl-derogatory to say about that. 22:33 < shapr> he'd say "that guy is part of the core team so they can test against their target demographic" -- #emacs, OPN, 05/02/02. % Message: Computers/573815+ (352nd/420) at 16:51, Fri 08/02 From: Zath to EnhCat Subject: Oops. In-Reply-To: 573546, 573495, 573493... (39 more) All-Replies: 2 What I think they're trying to say is this: * If you write code in your favourite language and... * You compile on a decent compiler and ... * That compiler takes full advantage of CPU specific stuff then... .. if you have CPU A that goes at wibble flibble/sec and CPU B that goes at wobble flibble/sec and wobble > wibble, but A can do more things in a flibble that CPU B can do in a flibble, then if things / flibble for A > things / flibble for B, then if the above stuff is true then the same code when compiled for architecture A and compiled for archtecture B will be quicker on A since things A / flibble * wibble flibble / sec > things B / flibble * wibble flibble / sec if (things A / flibble) / (things B / flibble) sufficiently > (wobble / wibble) to outweigh wobble > wibble. They said it far less clearly though. % "The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then -- to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you." -- T.H. White, "The Once and Future King" % To: pub.me.egnor@ofb.net /tangent Moral absolutes don't apply well to a complex world. Large organizations are not monolithic entities and cannot necessarily be classified as uniformly "good" or "evil". You have to evaluate what you are yourself doing in the context of whatever social, moral, ethical context you have. -- Dan at 04-23 21:37:36 -- ---- To: pub.me.egnor@ofb.net /troll Especially if you work at Microsoft. -- Chris Ball at 04-23 21:38:33 -- % To: pub.me.chris.work@ofb.net But the interview's in the UK, so they probably won't ask you about that, instead they'll play psych games with you and ask you whether or not you would press a button to give a monkey a banana if that button would also give an electric shock to your mother, with someone from HR role-playing the monkey, the banana, and your mother and trying to argue you out of your decision, and then they'll extrapolate from your responses to your C++ ability. -- Dan at 08-21 15:53:47 % "No, you mean that the _reduction_ is more than half of itself, not the number." "For all those who do not understand my ambiguous grammar below (and to halt any further complaints), what I mean is that our problem count is at a stage of nonhomogenous paratropological convergence in respect of - and, of course, notwithstanding - the influence of orthogonal unbridged n-spaces on the code." -- Chris Ball and a silly colleague, 8/2002. % Yes, such toys are ``unprofessional.'' I wear my unprofessionalism as a badge of honor. Professionalism has no place in art, and hacking is art. Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer. - http://www.jwz.org/doc/easter-eggs.html % "But a real man don't make his livin' wit' his ass parked in front of a computa all day, know what I'm sayin'? It one thing to use a computa to assist you in yo' day-to-day bidness, but when tha computa be yo' whole hustle, that shit be WACK. Ever see what them computa bitchez do to numbas? It ain't natural. Numbas ain't supposed to be code, they supposed to quantify shit." - The Onion % bc Augh. Yow! Am I ARBITRARY PRECISION yet? N, YM "Do they serve ABSTRACT TRUTH at BETTIES?" Ooh, you win. - Wrong xterms and zippy in ThatPlace, 2002-11. % To: pub.me.silly@ofb.net /noise Life is nasty, brutish, and short, and any flashy entertainment capable of distracting us from our woes and letting us forget this vale of tears for a few short minutes is clearly worth whatever money we earn performing meaningless abstract actions at the bidding of faceless superorganisms. -- Dan at 12-22 00:57:41 -- % /* Roy owes Rob beer. */ /* Rob owes Roy dinner. */ /* These legacy comments would make a lot more sense if Roy hadn't * replaced the old later_than() routine with util_date.c. * * Well, okay, they still wouldn't make any sense. */ -- Apache 1.3.4, src/main/util.c % this Op at a tech chanel was telling everyone how he cracked the header format of a firmware ROM, when in reality, the firmware used a well documented S-record format. .. and then I said, "Oh, please. This is _clearly_ a 1968 Chateau-Neuf!" *snort* % ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: pub.comp.linux@ofb.net /noise /noise Programmers usually aspire to be wizards. Wizards, magicians, practitioners of magic. What is magic? Knowledge is power, and magicians are the incarnation of that power. It's not just a matter of knowing the right words to mumble so that fireballs fly from your fingers, it's knowing what's going on and how things work and the wherefore and the why. One of the subtler aspects of the Gandalf character in _The Hobbit_ and _LOTR_ is that in addition to being this kick-ass guy who could do whatever, he also knew what was happening. He might not tell you about it, but you knew he knew, and that more than flying fireballs was how he did most of what he did. Anyway, hackers want to be like that, and computers should be magic. That means they shouldn't be toasters. When you look at the screen of a hacker, you shouldn't be like, "oh, he bought a copy of Microsoft Visual DevStudio and read the manual and also a copy of Learn C++ Fast", you should be like, "what the fuck is THIS shit, you can DO that, no way, that's impossible, I've never seen anything remotely like that". Because software *is* magic, it's not just about operating a complex toaster, it's about taking raw power and molding it into forms that have never before been seen on the surface of the Earth and using that power to strike terror into the hearts of Muggles who happen to glance at your screen and realize that what they thought was a toaster actually turns into a FLYING TOASTER with LASER BEAMS made out of LIQUID TITANIUM that TALKS TO YOU if you just press the toast lever and turn the "darkness" knob in a slightly different way than the Muggle ever thought to do. -- Dan at 2003-01-23 01:26:12 -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: pub.comp.linux@ofb.net /noise /noise /projection And that's why JTR runs Ion. -- Dan at 2003-01-23 01:27:00 -- % > [Notepad] should be able to edit text in an easy fashion. This is not > the case. Since when? You type, words appear. I realise this breaks the vi standard of "you type, nasty beeping noises ensue", but you can't have everything in a small application. -- EnhCat, on UA. % Chess is erroneously described as a gentlemans' passtime. In reality, it combines the spanish inquisition with a puritan witch-burning, preserving the most exquisite tortures of both. It can never appeal to the masses until the masses learn that pulling out an enemy's toenail with red-hot pincers is child-like in comparison with wringing a pawn from your opponent in the 10th move and forcing him -- for want of that pawn -- to resign in the 87th. -- Jidan, on FICS. % It has only been in recent years that psychologists have moved away from the one-dimensional measure of IQ towards recognition of the multifaceted aspects of intelligence. Chess players have known of this for centuries. Athletes stretch their body's limits, chess players stretch their minds. We are sensitive to its nuances; understanding both its weaknesses and strengths. A chess player learns the smell of self-deception the way a runner learns to anticipate leg cramps. We know the blinding effects of greed, and the difference in the textures of confidence and cockiness. We understand careful analysis, but can also trust our intuition and spontaneous insight. -- Robert Morrell % * Overfiend sighs Netscape sucks. It is a house of cards resting on a bed of quicksand. during an earthquake in a tornado % To: pub.me.chris.book-fragments-in-limbo@ofb.net [noise] ``It felt plausible to begin with, but the realisation soon came that such relationships come to consume more time and energy with every breath, imbuing themselves with stored pressure and difficulties until you wonder why you're there in the first place. Joe thought to himself that this was much like the OpenBSD ports system, where you want to install wget, but then you have to install gettext and gmake and iconv and before you know it you're in FUCKING GNU DEPENDENCY HELL HLAGHLAGHLAGH. Joe sighed.'' -- Chris Ball at 2003-05-13 23:38:33. % The Practice of Programming, page 123: Another effective technique is to explain your code to someone else. This will often cause you to explain the bug to yourself. Sometimes it takes no more than a few sentences, followed by an embarrassed "Never mind, I see what's wrong. Sorry to bother you." This works remarkably well; you can even use non-programmers as listeners. One university computer center kept a teddy bear near the help desk. Students with mysterious bugs were required to explain them to the bear before they could speak to a human supervisor. % There was a lovely kerfuffle on LKML awhile back when HPA released klibc under the BSD license, the hounds of the GPL started baying for blood, and Linus once again pointed out that the author gets to decide. Then Larry McVoy announced that future revs of Bitkeeper would be linked against klibc, and that's the closest I've come to wetting myself while reading that list. -- Anthony de Boer % *** choric (chris@void.printf.net) has joined channel #emacs Cool hostname. Thanks. Printf isn't void though. :) (Most people who say that add "You know, printf returns int, not void.") It returns an int. % | "On a certain occasion when Father Nicanor brought a checker set to the | chestnut tree and invited him to a game, Jose Arcadio Buendia would not | accept, because according to him he could never understand the sense of | a contest in which the two adversaries have agreed upon the rules." | -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, _100 Years of Solitude_. % "Better men than you, men who could believe and obey, twisted the entrails of iron and preserved the legend of fire. There is not a street you walk on, there is not a thread your wear, that was not made as this lantern was, by denying your philosophy of dirt and rats." -- Thursday in _The Man Who Was Thursday_, G.K. Chesterton. % 20:36 HeLlo , I aM a 26 yEars OlD sHy CaNaDiAn GirL. NeEd SoMeoNe to HelP mE oUt oF mY sHell. I loVe to tRaveL. SeNd Me a LiNe oR twO iF yOu waNt to KnOw mOre. LAtely IvE beEn wOnderInG ... Are thEre AnY RoMantic MeN oUt thEre??,.... 20:36 sheriff: They're going to find out you're not a girl. 20:37 If I see the profile of another person who describes themselves as 'crazy', I'm going to start stabbing things with my fork 20:38 If you don't want to meet crazy people, don't use dating sites. 20:38 yeah, meet cute people somewhere safe and normal like livejournal % "Somewhere deep inside the secret headquarters of the RedHat/GNOME/Ximian /Mozilla Cabal, there's a hidden document with a list of everything in Unix you know and love, marked with a date for its final expurgation. I think 'ls' is slated to be finally replaced with a symlink to 'nautilus' in 2007. Except that symlinks will have been replaced by ".shortcut" files, which are interpreted by the Mono implementation of GNOME-VFS." -- Dan Egnor. % "Whenever someone thinks that they can replace SSL/SSH with something much better that they designed this morning over coffee, their computer speakers should generate some sort of penis-shaped sound wave and plunge it repeatedly into their skulls until they achieve enlightenment." -- Peter Gutmann, . % "In 1965 the Russian mathematician Alexander Kronrod said "Chess is the Drosophila of artificial intelligence." However, computer chess has developed as genetics might have if the geneticists had concentrated their efforts starting in 1910 on breeding racing Drosophila. We would have some science, but mainly we would have very fast fruit flies." -- John McCarthy, _Science_, 6-June-1997. % > So throwing Verisign, its officers, employees, equipment, property, > and premises into the Sun is right out, then? Verisign have already damaged one critical piece of infrastructure; I'm not sure we should risk damaging another. -- Mike Andrews and Dave Richerby, 2003-10-17. % The Smurfs got so popular because they stuck the word 'smurf' in their vocabulary as much as possible. As a result they made a smurferrific amount of money smurfing every kind of merchandise smurfable. Sun has obviously Javaed the smurfs, and wants to make a Javalicious Javatop that will make Javatastic sums of money. -- Ilan Volow, December 02 2003, Slashdot. % > It takes a long time and a lot of dedication to play postal chess. It also requires a fez and smoking jacket, a scrimshaw letter opener, and a moustache grown out in handlebars. "Is that the morning post, m'dear? What does Cecil have for me? Red pawn threatens white bishop? What bosh!" -- Jud McCranie and nowonmai, in rec.games.chess.misc. % To: pub.comp.emacs@ofb.net How do I call a function in my .emacs.el file if and only if that function is defined? To: pub.comp.emacs@ofb.net ((cond vax-accumulator (ifq (31-postulate-calculus-lqefpp) (semcop ,,,,func 'diff-space-thing ,(impq defq thingp ,sexp-evaluator)) :floating-point-regularize)) -- gale:pub.comp.emacs, 2004-02-10. % "The idea that the kernel should exist as a kind of onion, depicted by child college professors in their children's coloring books, is wrong. The optimum operating system will always be the one that performs its functions in the most expedient way, not the one that is the "prettiest" or easiest to understand." -- Dick Johnson, linux-kernel. % You see, for a long time I toyed with the idea of putting a disclaimer into Devel::Pointer explaining that it was a joke module. Then I realised that the joke was even funnier if there actually were people thinking that in an ultra-high-level language like Perl they had any business fucking around with pointers. Now I think maybe I should have put the disclaimer on after all. % "Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception." -- Mark Twain % Hobbes: Do you have an idea for your story yet? Calvin: No, I'm waiting for inspiration. You can't just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood. Hobbes: What mood is that? Calvin: Last-minute panic. -- From "Calvin and Hobbes" by Bill Watterson. % Logic sucks. It's just not how the world works. There's no such thing as a predicate or an object or a postulate or a variable. These are all wrong abstractions we plaster over the world. It's this fun little chess game we've invented for ourselves. The difference is that chessmasters know they're only good at chess; logic masters think they know something real. But the logic masters build a world full of grey bricks and blocks that are well aligned with the wrong abstractions, so now everyone has to learn chess just to cross the street. I mean, just look at that. "Cross the street". As if the street were some sort of geometric line and there were some sort of group theory operator where you just pop from one side to the other in some kind of ideal bitspace of states. And then a truck runs you down, did you cross the street or not? Where's your Manhattan routing now? Eat rubber squishing death, math geeks. -- Dan in gale:pub.me.sarah.grad, 2004-04-13. % Now, I don't know who coded the spooler service, um, but, you know, I really, really wish they'd finished kindergarten. (Jeremy Allison, SAMBA team) % "Intuition, like a flash of lightning, lasts only for a second. It generally comes when one is tormented by a difficult decipherment and when one reviews in his mind the fruitless experiments already tried. Suddenly the light breaks through and one finds after a few minutes what previous days of labor were unable to reveal." -- William Friedman. % "When I was heavily into some work in Forth on the PDP-11, doing real-time control work, I dreamed that I'd locked myself out of the bathroom. I couldn't remember the right calling sequence to open the door. The device driver for the door, as I dreamed it, was clearly in PDP-11 assembly code. Later on on the same project I had what is the most frustrating dream I have ever suffered through I'd screwed up the device drivers for my eyelids. AND I COULDN'T FIX THEM BECAUSE I COULDN"T OPEN MY OWN EYES!" -- Peter da Silva. % As the office attorney, I am often asked by people who have gotten jury summonses if there's some way they can "get out" of jury service. I respond that it is their right, their duty, and their privilege to serve on a jury, and they shouldn't be *looking* for ways to get out. (I *always* go.) Then I tell them that I have never been selected for a jury, because I am always challenged during voir dire, because if I am asked if I can disregard my conscience and vote the way the judge tells me the law says I have to vote even if I don't agree with the law, I say, "Of course not." -- Dreamer, rec.arts.sf.written. % "The problem with waiting for clean solutions is that you never get anything done, you get all wrapped up in your little code-world, it never occurs to your that your entire overall model is completely bankrupt, and the world completely passes you and your circle-jerk friends by. Consider, for example, BSD." -- Dan Egnor. % I remember Elwyn Berlekamp describing what goes on at computer go tournaments (where computer programs play go against each other) - unlike at computer chess tournaments where the programs far surpass their creators, at go tournaments the creators sit there and look at a game in play and say things to each other like, "Gosh, I wonder if my program will repair that weakness before your program notices it." % On Thu, 16 Jul 1998, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > Kubys Kubys is my evil twin brother. Sorry about that. Linus % "Yes, you're probably right. In theory the Pulitzer is supposed to reward good journalism, and good journalism is supposed to reflect the truth. I... why am I arguing a point I don't even understand? Because I feel like someone dropped the rope and you fell off the other side of the platform, that's why. Stop jerking your knee, white boy." -- Dan Egnor. % Our father who art in CVS, STABLE be thy name, Thy sourcetree come, thy code be comitted, in /usr as it is in the repository. Give us this day our daily snapshots. And forgive us our deltas, as we forgive thous who back out our changes. And lead us not into forking, deliver us from exploits, for thine is the codebase, and the executables, and the distributions for ever, Amen. -- Peter da Silva. % "In apparel, Fruit of the Loom increased unit sales by 10 million dozen, or 14%, with shipments of intimate apparel for women and girls growing by 31%. Charlie, who is far more knowledgeable than I am on this subject, assures me that women are /not/ wearing more underwear. With this expert input, I can only conclude that our market share in the women's category must be growing rapidly. -- Berkshire Hathaway's 2004 annual report. % "The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him." -- Robert McHenry, _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ editor-in-chief. % "In general, it seems to be designed for you to steer it gracefully around with your mouse as an elegant little tiller, puttering about the desktop-sea on your little pointer-boat. Not to be an underpaid assistant in another room that you bark urgent commands at over your shoulder and it gives you the finger when you're not looking and does a half-assed job of things because it hates you, like Unix is." -- Dan Egnor, on Mac OS X. % "When you learn to capture you are a soldier on the go board. When you learn to count you become a businessman. Knowledge of shape and tesuji makes you an engineer, aware of structural matters in the building of groups. But mastery of sabaki qualifies you as an alchemist, able to transform the fundamental nature of positions." -- Charles Matthews, _Shape Up_. % "One time I called in to the central system and started working on a big thick 'sed' and 'awk' heavy duty data bashing script. One of the geologists came by, looked over my shoulder and said 'Oh, that happens to me too. Try hanging up and phoning in again.'" --Beverly Erlebacher % Somone asked me why I work on this free (http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/) software stuff and not get a real job. Charles Schulz had the best answer: "Why do musicians compose symphonies and poets write poems? They do it because life wouldn't have any meaning for them if they didn't. That's why I draw cartoons. It's my life." -- Charles Schulz -- Kyle Moffett % > Does Moore's Law not apply to cablemodems? Yes, however people fail to allow for the other half (which doesn't have a name that I know of) which is that there's a minimum cost that devices can get to, at which point they just start gaining "features" to keep the cost up. -- (Jonathan) Amery's Corollary. % Richard M. Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and Donald E. Knuth engage in a discussion on whose impact on the computerized world was the greatest. Stallman: "God told me I have programmed the best editor in the world!" Torvalds: "Well, God told *me* that I have programmed the best operating system in the world!" Knuth: "Wait, wait - I never said that." - Erik Meltzer, rec.humor.funny % "Every time I write about the impossibility of effectively protecting digital files on a general-purpose computer, I get responses from people decrying the death of copyright. "How will authors and artists get paid for their work?" they ask me. Truth be told, I don't know. I feel rather like the physicist who just explained relativity to a group of would-be interstellar travelers, only to be asked: "How do you expect us to get to the stars, then?" I'm sorry, but I don't know that, either." -- Bruce Schneier. % ASCII Art: ========== % /* Amuse the user. */ printk( " \\|/ ____ \\|/\n" " \"@'/ .. \\`@\"\n" " /_| \\__/ |_\\\n" " \\__U_/\n"); -- arch/sparc64/kernel/traps.c:die_if_kernel(), Linux 2.6.6. % *woooooooooosh* ----------------------> ^ _ +--- This was the point. / \ \_/ / \ | | <-- This is you. HTH, HAND :-) -- jason, compsoc secretary. % Sigh. Having restrained myself several times already, I tried to put together an eloquent response which would make you understand just how you've been coming across. But I can't do it. I really can't. So... just... just look what you made me do. . . : . | . clue : clue | . the abundance | , clue | of incoming clues clue e c clue u lu cl __,__e . ,-'.^|^.`-.cl c/__/__|__\__\ ue ___ | c l / __\| ? |c/o o|? l \ _ | ? your good self u / --'| on the defensive / , (3 u | |,'`' | _/ | e e -' -- Do you see? -Rus. % .-------------------------------. | 1 .d888b. ONE| | d8' )8b INTERNET CLUEPON | | ' .d8P' good for | | 88' One *FREE* Clue | | | |ONE 88 1| `-------------------------------' % From: Khendon To: Thoric Subject: Random shell script In-Reply-To: 440550, 440548, 440547, 440543 All-Replies: 3 > Easiest way is to use perl +--------------+ | | ----------------------+ | ----------------------+ perl | | | +--------------+ . <-- the problem HTH ;-) % 03:54 <+polaris> on the full of himself meter: 0% [==============]=100%=====> %