Ten years ago I was hacking MCI. Now they’re giving me free accounts. I must be getting old or something.
— Anonymous
The irony of the Information Age is that it has given new respectability to uninformed opinion.
— Unknown
The price of reliability is simplicity, and for many engineers that is too high a price to pay.
— Unknown
- Motto of the Electrical Engineer:
- Working computer hardware is a lot like an erect penis: it stays up as long as you don’t fuck with it.
— Unknown
No plain fanfold paper could hold that fractal Puff —
He grew so fast no plotting pack could shrink him far enough.
Compiles and simulations grew so quickly tame
And swapped out all their data space when Puff pushed his stack frame.
Puff the fractal dragon was written in C,
And frolicked while processes switched in mainframe memory.
Puff the fractal dragon was written in C,
And frolicked while processes switched in mainframe memory.
Puff, he grew so quickly, while others moved like snails
And mini-Puffs would perch themselves on his gigantic tail.
All the student hackers loved that fractal Puff
But DCS did not like Puff, and finally said, “Enough!”
(chorus)
Puff used more resources than DCS could spare.
The operator killed Puff’s job — he didn’t seem to care.
A gloom fell on the hackers; it seemed to be the end,
But Puff trapped the exception, and grew from naught again!
(chorus)
— Unknown
The goal of Computer Science is to build something that will last at least until we’ve finished building it.
— Unknown
I believe that Perl was written by a Lisp programmer who felt that the parens were making the rest of the puctuation feel jealous.
— Allison Andrews
We the unwilling, led by the unknowing,
have been doing the impossible, for the ungrateful.
We have done so much with so little, for so long,
that we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.
And we do it for nothing!
— Robert Bonomi (seen in a “data processing center” in the mid ’60s)
Once a new technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road …
— Stewart Brand, The Media Lab
Smileys. Learn to use them. :-) <---that’s a smiley … look at it sideways.
— Dan “Yippee” Calle
Fuck you too, smileymonger!
— bbz (John Jantos)
It’s so sad when the only birthday greetings you get are from your mom, your wife, and the software you wrote …
— Jules Cisek
If you haven’t trashed your computer while doing something questionable, then you’re not a computer scientist – you’re just an arts grad who didn’t get laid.
— Dominic Connor, “CompSci Graduates More Skills,” The Register
Any content-based regulation of the Internet, no matter how benign the purpose, could burn the “global village” to roast the pig.
— U.S. District Court Justice Stewart Dalzell (in his ruling to grant a preliminary injunction against the CDA)
If you don’t know what your program is supposed to do, you’d better not start writing it.
— Edsger Dijkstra
gdb … . is a god.
— Rob Earhart
If you mean it hurls thunderbolts at you for no reason, and then seduces your wife, then yeah, I guess.
— Zarf (Andy Plotkin)
Programming is an exercise in overcoming how wrong you’ve been in the past. At first you’ll overcome the syntax errors, then you’ll overcome the structural errors, and then you’ll come to align your code with the standards of a greater community and you’ll feel safe and like you’ve made it. You haven’t – you’re still wrong because you’re always wrong. You are playing a game you cannot win. And let’s face it – if it was a game you could win you’d not be playing at all.
— Guy English, “I’ve Been Wrong Before,” Kicking Bear
I used to be a pacifist, then I started MUSHing.
— Alex Feely
The temptation to push the degauss button continuously is hard to resist.
— Steve Gifford
The Net interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it.
— John Gilmore
If your sysadmin’s not being fascist, you’re paying him too much.
— Sam Greenfield
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.
— Doug Gwyn
I’d prefer voice-activated controls, too; I just don’t think I can implement that in my attention span.
— Heath Hunnicutt
There is no CyberSpace, just a lot of people pretending.
— Samuel John Kass I (Am)
Any medium powerful enough to extend man’s reach is powerful enough to topple his world. To get the medium’s magic to work for one’s aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.
— Alan Kay, “Computer Software,” Scientific American
It’s a UNIX utility - it has to give you the means to shoot yourself in the foot. It’s to encourage natural selection …
— Seth LaForge (on one of the more asinine idiosyncracies of CVS)
One of the best things about X is being able to cut and paste between windows with as close to 0 effort as you can get without using telepathy.
— Jason M. Laughman
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
— Stanislaw Lem, Cyberiad
Isn’t software just science fiction?
— Spence Murray
Now, that brings up an interesting idea. I wonder if I could explain to a luser that we equipped all the computers with video cameras, and in order to log in your password must be accompanied by performing the YMCA dance.
— Gian-Paolo Musumeci
- ErikOgan:
- mmm … 802.11a
- NeverReadsEmail:
- where?
- ErikOgan:
- just thinking about going wireless
- NeverReadsEmail:
- get a couch first.
- ErikOgan:
- damn you. I just don’t know you anymore. ;)
- NeverReadsEmail:
- dude your couch sucks worse than your lan.
- ErikOgan:
- ;-D rotfl
- NeverReadsEmail:
- besides, 802.11a isn’t useful to me.
— Erik Ogan and Allison Andrews
Cobol has almost no fervent enthusiasts. As a programming tool, it has roughly the sex appeal of a wrench.
— Charles Petzold, “Programming Languages: Survivors and Wannabes,” The New York Times
Look at it this way: MSDOS is an overgrown program loader; the MacOS is an overgrown user interface. Neither is an operating system, but the second is better for running applications.
— Paul Placeway
New UI like having sex with brand-new partner, while blindfolded and wearing mittens and half-drunk so you can’t remember what goes where.
— Zarf (Andy Plotkin) (on OS X)
If C++ has taught me one thing, it’s this:
Just because the system is consistent doesn’t mean it’s not the work of Satan.
— Zarf (Andy Plotkin)
Zephyr is the perfect transport agent for stupid little shit …
— John Prevost
“I [Darl McBride, President & CEO of SCO] am also disappointed that you have chosen litigation rather than [Roll over and die].”
Consider this a declaration that the Open Source Community does not negotiate with terrorists.
— Stephen Samuel, “Re:good faith discussions,” Slashdot (on McBride’s reaction to Red Hat seeking an injunction against SCO’s libelous smear campaign against Linux (emphasis his))
We are Borg. Resistence is futile. You will be assim — AWWWWWWW … Token Ring!?!?!?
— Joshua Eli Schachter
If we insist on creating programs smart enough to make up for the deficiencies of lusers, we end up fighting with both lusers and programs.
This is not progress.
— skeeling@mts.net
hacker Instance
who really gives a fuck about Tonya Harding
Date: 18:39:27 on Sun Feb 6
TV really needs killfiles …
— Geoff Spear
that’s us — cryptopunks and cryptofreaks, road warriors on the information superhighway
— roo (Andrew Stellman)
I am the rumble strips of the information superhighway!
— Dmitri Schoeman
i am the ‘travel bingo’ of the information superhighway
— Chad McDaniel
I'm the state trooper of the information superhighway.
Pay me $40 or lose your accounts :-)
— Rob Earhart
C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg.
— Bjarne Stroustrup
- First Corollary of Taber’s Second Law:
- Machines that piss people off get murdered.
— Pat Taber
If there’s something cooler than RPN, it has to be sex.
— Tomy Tucker (on Reverse Polish Notation)
The woman of my dreams knows how to break into systems.
— Doug Tygar
What I need is a two-way pager and a cron job waiting to send my resignation …
“Do you want to quit today? [Y|n]”
— Salim Virji
I don’t network for jobs, I network for meals …
— Salim M. Virji (on a “re-employment” seminar)
… the internet is a hairy reminder of how utterly mundane everyone’s weirdness really is …
— Salim Virji
Well, you could probably do my taxes with a regular expression, but the rest of us still need nested if’s
— Joe Wells
There is No God but Sendmail and SMTP is Its Prophet
— Alistair Young
Dear DEC:
Sending me the README from the patch is not going to fix my problem. It will only anger me. Much like waving a steak just out of reach of a hungry bear.
Yer buddy,
jim
— Jim Zelenka
Damn, lotsa places in Pgh want AS/400 programmers.
Paying a lot, too.
Too bad I’d rather eat a live cow than work on a 400 again.
— Jim Zelenka