c IS to software as McDonalds is to fried chicken." I firmly believe that Bill Gates has single-handedly put personal computers back ten years or more by his actions." Peter da Silva "If you believe the sky is falling, you are doomed to an eternity of fighting silly patents." "You can't seriously expect people to help you, based on a nearly content-free statement like this." "One thing failing is a nightmare? You must have very gentle dreams." "The inanity we have to put up with is constantly amazing." "Well geez, why didn't you solve all the world's problems in 30 seconds when I wished on a star three years ago?" "I told myself to ignore this message. I told myself to ignore this message." "I must say, I am continually amazed at the willingness of the public to demand arbitrary amounts of work from other people." "Haven't you learned yet that X is a vendor conspiracy to sell more memory and disks? "I'd like unmarked $20's in used suitcases, please." "Many people out there seem to feel that we're public servants and should be willing to go to arbitrary lengths to do whatever is demanded in the way of providing public services. Sorry, that isn't the case." "I find the Mac quite difficult to deal with, but then perhaps I'm weird." "It doesn't seem like that much of a hack to me, but then I'm jaded by the rest of X." "Xt has plenty of routines that are not required to be used (or that should never be used :-), I suppose one or two more won't kill us." "Formal standardization is supposed to stop useful changes." "With the Consortium income this year, perhaps it is just as well that I not venture near Las Vegas." "My how time flies when you're close to a release." "Somebody has to do some work Vania, we can't just depend on magic." "The more time I have to spend composing responses, the less time there will be to implement anything you might convice me of." "I suspect Motif will not run on a pdp11." "It is generally impossible to preclude vendors from doing whatever evil they feel is inappropriate." "Its not clear that I want X to be my life's work." "I believe there are about 10^10 more fruitful discussions we could have than this one." "I think you're going off the complexity scale again. " "Standards are pretty useless if you have to carve them up into random subsets not defined by the standard in order to write portable code." "I think it's all psychological." "I don't really see this as a problem." "I am not interested in catching up deficient operating systems; perhaps you have rws confused with rms." "I'd prefer to avoid standardization by implementation donation." "I guess I'll take your word for it, but it sounds completely broken to me." "Bug reports are not the mechanism to get the specification changed." "All of these trivial amounts of code are adding up fast, though." "I agree that it isn't as simple as it seems." "Not even Maxwell Smart would be fooled." "I prefer not to predict the future too far in advance." "The history of i18n is that most people look for every possible excuse to avoid the issue." "Let's be pragmatic here." "Is this discussion helping anyone?" "This is too abstract for me to deal with." "Except I have no idea what an object is." "You say potato, I say potatoe, I guess." "I'll see your object, trade a process, and raise you a Thing." "If your users expect new functionality can always be magically added to old applications, you need to educate your users." "You appear to want an instantaneous answer to a problem that has existed for 4 years. One might question how important this problem can be if it has taken you 4 years to find it!" "I'm not convinced of the truth of this statement." "I find your example to be bizarre." "The developer might also want cows to jump over the moon." "You seem to be suggesting that whatever you define must be right. " "I am not so convinced." "My compatibility alarm went off while brushing my teeth this morning." "I would like to know why X is the right answer, or why non-X is the wrong answer." "Zowie. These unstated basic premises keep popping up. Got any more up your sleeve, or do we have to resort to reading code? " "I'll stop now, I promise." "This proposal seems to sweep a lot of complexity under the rug." "I apologize that I cannot always personally keep track of and solve every problem that arises in the X environment." "I am the Voice Of Compatibility. " "I think it's worse than ugly, because it doesn't conform to the specification you proposed." "If you'd done it instead of argue about doing it, you might almost be done by now." "This is a theoretical problem, I think the question is whether it is a practical problem, or whether it is a problem in search of a need." "You'll really have to convince me why. This sounds like a total hack." "I don't understand why you need explicit sequence numbers in a reliable transport connection. Are you afraid one of the computers can't count reliably?" "It's sad if we have to continue to invent wrong solutions to the right problem." "We can't really have this discussion." "OK, I'll act confused again." "Unix != X." "I took a detour from my own work to build a multiwindow interface. I thought it would only take a few months, but here I am, still working on it." "X/Open & UniForum are working jointly in this area, we might see a standard in our lifetime." "You are welcome to go on a crusade to solve all the world's problems. Maybe you'd like to become one of the technical leads at the X Consortium." "This is a feeble excuse, not a justification." "Now I'm baffled." "Now I'm baffled again. I have little idea from moment to moment what problems you are trying to solve." "Sorry, my haste and the number of years since going to school are providing a big hole for me to insert my foot in." "Any weekend I have to work is a bad weekend; I have a lot of bad weekends." "I'm glad you've finally stated what you really want." - Bob Scheifler "You must live in a simple environment if nothing made you think of it until now. :-)" Bob to Clive Feather of IXI about portability "When you guarantee perfection in all OSF software, I will think about using the word "guarantee"." "I am absolutely not going to start exporting random C library functions out of libX11.a, just because you haven't figured out how to deal with multi-platform configuration yet." "Perhaps you have been a manager too long." Bob Scheifler to Vania Joloboff of OSF "You are good at twisting things to your point of view; perhaps as good as I am." Bob Scheifler to Dan Heller == An architecture in hand is worth 4 or 5 in vapor." "Programming would be a more respectable profession if evolution worked on us." Eugene Miya == "I prefer to put the open-brace on a separate line." "Please don't ask when version 2 will be released; we generally don't know the answer to questions of that sort." "Software hoarding is not a victimless crime." "Boycotting everyone is not practical." "One thing about patents is that you can *never* be sure you are safe." "I'm not surprised patent holders advise people to relax until they themselves are actually attacked. No sensible marauder wants potential victims to take precautions in advance." "There's a limit to how far the GNU project should go to cater to deficiencies in operating systems, especially rare ones." "This is a rather strange attitude, I would think." Richard M. Stallman == "Why would anyone need a computer of their own?" "Software comes from heaven when you have good hardware." Ken Olsen == "If Ken Olsen's quote is true, then where does software come from when you have bad hardware?" "In ten years, computers will just be bumps in cables." Gordon Bell (Feb 90) "DEC Bet the company on Alpha and I believe it lost." "The Internet is reallt the Game-Boy for adults, without the attendant improvement in hand-eye coordination." Gordon Bell == "If a compiler emits correct code purely by divine guidance and has no memory at all, it can still be a C compiler." "Oops. My brain was on fire. Sorry about that." "They were supposed to be green." "Being in print does not make it true." Chris Torek == "Only the bad guys are allowed to have guns in D.C." "Without computers you're nothin in the 90's." "Theory, Shmeory. You don't need no theory. You just want to pop the lid and replace the right widget." "In life you don't get what you deserve. You get what you negotiate." "TV - The best babysitter ever invented." "West Virginia is the place to be. Folks are closer there genetically." "By the way if you are hating life because you are hating your job, you are doing the wrong job, plain and simple." "If you could be riding in a limousine, sipping champagne, and bitching over a cellular phone how miserable life is, something's wrong." "You should have to have a permit to have children." Greaseman == "Hey Steve, just because you broke into Xerox's store before I did and took the TV doesn't mean I can't go in later and take the stereo." "I've been in this industry 15 years and I've made more mistakes than anybody else I know." "Who was that guy -- Paul Heckel -- who thought that having a couple of cards on the screen at a time is a breakthrough idea? My mom's recipe cards work like that too." "The worst thing that could happen is that I could trip on the steps of the FTC and kill myself." "My job is to worry. Pick any year and you'll find 10 people going for my throat." "I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time." "IBM is in a class of its own in terms of spending money in inefficient ways." "I think it would be pretty bizarre if OS/2 finds any popularity." "How many companies can stay around if they're selling state-of-the-art operating systems for under $50? I do the math, and it comes out to be about one." "Size works against excellence." "There's no reason the CEO has to write C code." "Man, I'd give anything to be as articulate as Steve Jobs." "Unix has more different user interfaces than there are in every other operating system put together. It's a great surprise how fragmented the Unix world is." "An important thing to keep in mind is that the ordinary TV set that will be on the shelves later this decade will be a more powerful computer than today's workstations." "Who would want to stay at the Ramamda Inn?" "You have to remember, when you talk about Macintosh, Microsoft still makes more money for every Macintosh that ships than for every PC that ships." "640K ought to be enough for anybody." "If you can't make it good, make it look good." "In fact, I don't think 7-11s even take coupons. I should check that out..." "In order for self-categorization to be effective, the sources of information on a network must be authenticated so that people and companies can be held accountable for the information they distribute electronically. Today there is no such protection. I know this well because people pretend to be me all the time. Impostors sometimes do incredibly nasty things, such as sending electronic mail in my name that promises people jobs or money or that criticizes the Apple Macintosh." "If I had kids I wouldn't let them roam today's Internet completely unsupervised. But I wouldn't deny them access, either." "This word open gets a lot of interesting definitions nowadays. I always think of it in terms of customer choices - under Windows the customer gets to choose their hardware supplier. Under Mac and Windows customers have a wide choice of software products." "The future is what matters, which is why I don't look back too often. It's just the way I am - even at the ripe old age of 40." "When you think about all the revenues that people have made on the Internet, we've captured a small portion of that. Gee, we could've made another $30 million in revenues. That's like a rounding error to us, and I missed it." Bill Gates "It's the one thing I understand, I guess." Bill Gates on BASIC "They're sitting on some good assets. They can afford to take a long-term approach. They're the leaders. They're number one. Their biggest competitor just folded. It's unbelievable!" Bill Gates on the US Government == "IBM is going to have an impossible job doing a great Windows clone without our cooperation--and I'm not cooperating." "If we really wanted to be Machiavellian jerks, there's a lot more stuff we'd do." "That's one of the biggest pieces of hogwash known to man." Steve Ballmer == "I used to be disgusted; now I'm just amused." "As I walk through this wicked world - searching for light in the darkness of insanity - I ask myself is all hope lost? Is there only pain and hatred and misery?" "What's so funny about peace, love and understanding?" "Where is the harmony?" "If you're out of work or out of luck - we could send you to Johannesburg." "And I would rather be anywhere else but here today." "I've got a feeling -- I'm gonna get a lot of grief." Elvis Costello == "I wouldn't be surprised if the architecture of Intel's microprocessors were eventually linked to the eventual fall of mankind." "It's nothing short of sheer, unadulterated lunacy to even briefly entertain the notion that anything useful could ever possibly evolve from this ill-begotten and desperate shotgun marriage between IBM and Apple." "The sad and sobering fact is, our current personal computers -- the Macintosh included -- are amazingly fragile nightmare kludges of delicate interactions that only barely work right most of the time." "Microprocessors cost $700 -- far too much for a tiny slice of refined, impurity-laced beach sand." Steve Gibson "Is Bill Gates worried? Hah! He's probably dancing on his rooftop and ordering another 40-car garage for his home." Steve Gibson on the IBM/Apple alliance == "Parity is for farmers." -- Seymour Cray, when asked why he didn't have parity in his machines. "I guess farmers buy a lot of computers." -- Seymour Cray, when asked why he put parity into his next generation of computers. == "For historical reasons, these hints are indicated by names that contain the word "Blue." -- Adobe Type 1 Font Format == "Once you've offered a feature you can never, never take it away again. Or at least, not for 10 to 15 years." "Say that we produce a new DOS that won't run Lotus 123. Inside every pack, we'll include a piece of paper that says, "Lotus 123 doesn't run because they used a feature 4 years ago that we warned them we would drop. And so we did. So it's their fault, not ours."" "You guys have too Machiavellian a model of Microsoft's approach." "The OS/2 API will fail." -- Gordon Letwin == "The problem with X is that it's overadequate" "Steve Jobs said two years ago that X is brain-damaged and it will be gone in two years. He was half right." -- Dennis Ritchie == "We all know UNIX can do anything, because its NP-complete." -- Ray Anderson == "I think there's something to be said for a completely random user-interface policy - it keeps the users guessing, making life more interesting for people who deal with the casual X users. As for the screen display, at least you can't claim that people are mesmorized by sexy glitz which distracts them from the work at hand." "If you've got the time, we've got the tapes." -- Keith Packard == "The viability of standards is inversely proportional to the number of people on the committee." -- James Warner == "Dennis Ritchie is twice as bright as Steve Jobs and only half wrong." -- Jim Gettys == "I have never seen anything fill up a vacuum so fast and still suck." -- Rob Pike on X == "99% of all statistics are made up on the spot." -- Bruce Karsh == "Rule: It is a mistake to use the manufacturer's special call instruction". "When in doubt, use brute force" "Maybe I should have screwed up." "SCCS is the source-code motel -- your code checks in but it never checks out." "I know nothing." "Timesharing just doesn't work." "Just think -- IBM and DEC in the same room -- and we did it. Makes you feel warm inside." "If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there." -- Ken Thompson == "It turns out that a decimal point by itself is equivalent to '0.0'. Let's hope people don't use that fact". -- Don Knuth (Somewhere in the TEX source) "It's impossible to shut email off! You send a message to somebody, and they send it back saying "Thank you", and you say "OK, thanks for thanking me..." -- Don Knuth == "If you reinvent the square wheel, you will not benefit when someone else rounds off the corners." "Those who do not understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it -- badly." "Despite its reputation as a hotbed of software re-use, UNIX is actually hostile to some of these activities." -- Henry Spencer == "That's what happens when you give girls computers." "Once you know the outcome, the problem is no longer interesting." "I'll leave. That'll be one less cook to spoil the broth." "Whatever happened to function?" "You're making the same mistake that I did -- assuming people are capable of figuring out obvious behavior when in practice they're not." "I'd rather not get it on than not get it off." "I think you'd have to be a knucklehead to actually do this." "Somehow, I am sure I had something in mind when I started that post. It seems really stupid in hind sight." "I will tell you that it is at home, but then I will know to bring it in." "The current drivers set the hostname, but they document this saying that this behavior isn't really documented." "Everything is stupid. Which stupid thing are you referring to?" "If you are worried about your application crashing, making it distributed is going to add many more opportunities." "The answer to your question is a deceptive yes." "I cannot find a line to scroll to where there is not some piece of code on the screen that makes me gag. Not just because it is bad, but because there are even better ways of doing it incorrectly." "Here is where it gets interesting or queasy depending on your perspective." "You're looking at the glass half empty as you compare apples and oranges." -- Eric Wiseblatt "Did I write that?" -- Eric Wiseblatt, when he saw the following code: if (_gsScriptFile) { _gsScriptFile = NULL; free(_gsScriptFile); } "And I respect that." -- Eric Wiseblatt on hearing that we need a new Help Server and that we don't want to ship the LG version with Galaxy version 1.2. == "I would rather be stranded on a desert island with Roseanne Barr than use C++, but many of you are giving it a whirl." -- Steve Jasik "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." -- Dick Feynman "Excuse me while I open Pandora's box." -- Ed Berard "It would have been cheaper to mount one of our regular telescopes on a 81 mile high stack of $50 bills." -- Dave Barry on the Hubble Telescope "Congratulations. You aren't running Eunice." -- The Configure script by Larry Wall "When's the last time you read an X header for documentation?" "The best way to keep me out your code is to fix it yourself." "Blech." "No wonder Bob Scheifler hates OSF. They want to do everything from the keyboard and he can't type." -- Andrew Bernard "100 pages of comments will not make a poorly written page of code not suck" -- Robert Mollitor "64-bit integers aren't silly. For instance Bill Gates, of Microsoft fame, is now worth more than $4 billion. You can't represent his net worth in 32 bits in dollars, let alone cents." -- Charlie Price "The Color Manager is your friend." "I'm not object oriented." "We don't know anything." "The question is incorrect." "The only problem with that theory is that I can't get it to happen." -- Chad Bisk "I'd be glad to throw the ANSI C committee a retirement party, if they won't ever meet again for the next 10 years. I'm serious." -- John Gilmore "Every mistake in the computer industry gets made at least 3 times: once by mainframe folks, once by minicomputer folks, and at least once by microprocessor folks." "Fortunately, all of this good stuff that makes computers easier to use just burns up mips like crazy, which always makes me happy :-)" "SOMETIMES, companies are doing RESEARCH ... but think they are doing development. This is usually disastrous." -- John Mashey "The problem with being the company wizard is that when things like this happen there is only one person who could have pulled it off." -- Joe Newcomer "Those that can do, do; that that cannot form consortia." "The only form of strategic partnership that works is a purchase order." "I'd rather have needles stuck in my eyes than to have NextStep run on Sun workstations." "Mo, Mo, Motif." -- Scott McNealy "You may argue this philosophy is broken. But this is the way it is. Hundreds of DEC-Windows programmers have lived with it, some of them even like it." "You are re-opening a can of worms." -- Vania Joloboff "Why do you always ask these nasty questions :-(" -- Vania Joloboff to Bob Scheifler "Nobodys perfect--certainly not me." "The need for maintenance and support is a bug, not a feature." "I'll be damned if I'm going to let the success of my talk depend on a piece of mechanical equipment." "Skill is often not the scarce resource, but time." -- Amanda Walker "My life that is lived is no more than a token." -- Midnight Oil == "What about the poor mouseless keyboard user (that one fella for whom we have all spilled so many tears and so much blood :-)." -- Libby Hanna == "Guys, just remember, if you get real lucky, if you make a lot of money, if you go out and buy a lot of stuff-- it's gonna break. You got your biggest, fanciest mansion in the world. It has air conditioning. It's got a pool. Just think of all the pumps that are going to go out. Or go to a yacht basin any place in the world. Nobody is smiling, and I'll tell you why: something broke that morning. The generator's out; the microwave oven doesn't work; the captain's gay; the cook's quit. Things just don't mean happiness." "Washington's principal contribution to American industry is to try to break its legs every day." -- H. Ross Perot == "A bill has passed in the assembly that would require the licensing of computer programmers -- to protect the public interest, of course. Lord knows the number of times I've been accosted in pizza parlors, late at night, by renegade bands of unlicensed programmers. Well, now we'll be able to control these low-lifes." -- John M. Ritter == "The real hand is better than the virtual one." -- Barry Hunter == "My experience has been that creating a compelling new technology is so much harder than you think it will be that you're almost dead when you get to the other shore." "Bill will tell you Windows can do everything, what do you expect him to say?" "I've told Bill that I think it's in Microsoft's best interest if NeXT becomes successful because we'll give him something to copy for the rest of the decade." "Being successful in something generally involves accumulating a certain amount of scar tissue to figure out what you're doing." -- Steve Jobs "When monopolies come into play, innovation slows down." -- Steve Jobs on why he is porting NeXStep to Intel hardware to compete with Windows. "We don't want just anybody putting software on this machine." -- Steve Jobs, on why there is no Floppy on the NeXT cube. "It's sitting on someone's desk today who thinks its a dirt clod and doesn't realize there's a diamond inside." -- Steve Jobs on why IBM never released NextStep for AIX == "Hi there." "The place where I come from is a small town. They use small words. But not me. I'm smarter than that. I worked it out. I'll be stretching my mouth to let those big words come right out." -- Peter Gabriel == >> >From THE ECONOMIST, 14 September 1991, p. 106: >> "The Russians were rooked." The KGB paid several thousand >> dollars for a word processor, called GNU Emacs, which is widely >> distributed free in western universities. == "You want to feel good about where you shop, and we respect that." -- President of K-Mart == "Luckily, most people aren't so stupid as to believe that copying a letter will bring them good luck." -- Gene Spafford == "Motorola spends more on scrap than MIPS Computer Systems spends on its RISC development". -- Ron Skates == "The two main design principles of the NeXT machine appear to be revenge and spite." "These days, I don't really understand why perpetual motion is desirable. Since unlimited free energy would hasten the entropic heat death of the planet, perpetual motion is both environmentally unconscionable and socailly reprehensible." "You also might just want to skip mentioning to the local zoning folks that you are busy building miniature hydrogen bombs in your carport." "The one thought that keeps going through my head -- how could they have been so monumentally stupid?" "I am not at all impressed with today's fax machines. In fact, I think they are an outright con. You have grossly overpriced machines which produce an abysmally putrid print quality on ludicrous papers." -- Don Lancaster "There's a convention in any Usenet message. One that must be strictly and rigorously obeyed at all times. Be verbose! A simple \"yes\" or \"no\" answer will never do. There are mostly academic UNIX folks you are dealing with here." "Instead, you'll first describe every wire that your message travels over. Then you give your entire genealogy on back to your great grandmother's cousin twice removed." "Then you quote verbatim anything and everything anyone else has ever said on the subject, back to day one." "Then you say your \"yes\" or \"no\" in as oblique a manner as possible. Then say something that is supposed to be funny. Then quote something long and literate that Chekhov would find totally obtuse." "Finally issue a disclaimer that a gaggle of Byzantine lawyers would find bulletproof. Then say goodbye." "Aim for a bare minimum of half a megabyte per yes-no email message response. Otherwise \"they\" will spot you as a rank outsider." -- Don Lancaster == "Knowledge is power. Power is 110VAC, 60 Hz." "The more things change, the bigger the diffs." "Nothing beats a Bug." "If you don't like the way I program stay out of my core dumps." "Nobody wants to be first but everyone wants to be second." "It takes a long time to be an instant success." "Will work for money." -- Jeff Barr == "Look daddy, Pepsi water." -- Andrew Barr (age 3.5) when he saw Crystal Pepsi "Dad, can you delete my brother?" -- Andrew Barr "I have a dream. That one day all poor children will have skin." -- Andrew's paraphrase of Martin Luther King, after hearing his speech from Encarta. Age 4.25. "Daddy, the CD is stuck in the floppy drive again." "We found some frogs, but they were uncatchable." "Dad, do you consider Garfield funny?" "We don't need a computer for this game. Its in reality." "My dad had a soda in Italy, and it cost 5,000 dollars." "Dad, I brought this for you. You can share it with me if you want." "Dad, I want a color laser printer in my room for Christmas." -- Andrew Barr == "Who'd have thought a nuclear reactor could be so complicated?" "Three Hundred and Fifty dollars. Now I can buy 70 transcripts of Night Line." -- Homer Simpson == "DEC didn't know what C was when they wrote their compiler, so it implements a language closely resembling, but not identical to, K&R C, or perhaps ANSI C, or something like that." -- Joe Newcomer == "Russia was bound to fall. It was already on the edge of the map." "What do I look like, an idiot?" "Hey daddy, we can buy a Mercedes for only 50K. We don't even need money. I have lots of K's upstairs from those letters the school keeps sending, that say 'Kelly is an idiot'." -- Kelly Bundy == "Are you so jaded that even the new TV season doesn't get you going?" -- Peg Bundy == "And in conclusion, the end." -- Al Bundy == "Remember -- illiterate people can't read these suggestions." -- Marilyn vos Savant == "If you put a bowl of nuts in your living room for company to munch on, do you throw it in the trash after they leave? Of course not: you dump the unused nuts back in the bag and put the bowl away." " Since I took the job of Product Manager, I am ipso facto the dumbest person here..." -- Mark Myers == "There is no 'try'. Do, or do not." -- Yoda "Even the greatest stars lives their lives in the looking glass." -- Kraftwerk "I'm an anomaly." "I'm a rip their eyeballs out, suck their skulls dry kind of guy." -- Barry Libenson "I Think I need a Lear Jet." "Don't be afraid to care." "And then one day you turn to find -- ten years have gone behind you." -- Pink Floyd "COBOL makes instant programmers out of permanent idiots." "Before we work on artificial intelligence why don't we do something about natural stupidity?" -- Steve Polyak "I am getting convinced that OSF has decided to do a mercy killing of Motif." "As a widget developer, analyzing Motif source, I am confused even more. Obviously, comments are not a "style" at OSF, so trying to decode what (the hell) is going on resembles sifting through the ash at Waco." --Martin Brunecky "I always wear pants." "Granted, green has an existential beauty all of its own, worthy of reveling in its sheer delight, but in this situation it's not an appropriate color." -- Mark Dalrymple "You can't make cheese without sheep?" "The reason you get the warning is because you are doing a bad thing." -- Tom Carstensen "I know nothing." -- Tom Carstensen Witnessed by Linda Thomas "To think of numbering the whole thing sequentially would definitely make me jump off a bridge." -- Denise Kirwan, on why the Galaxy manual is numbered per-chapter "California tumbles into the sea. That'll be the day I go back to Annandale." -- Steely Dan "I'm not into your past or future. I just like your nose." -- The Who "PL/I and Ada started out with all the bloat, were very daunting languages, and got bad reputations (deservedly). C++ has shown that if you slowly bloat up a language over a period of years, people don't seem to mind as much." -- James Hague "Windows was supposed to be a stepping stone to OS2. In fact, it stepped all over OS2." -- Tom McConnell "If the committee members insist on standardizing on bugs, there is nothing the rest of us can do about the situation -- except point out the stupidity of such actions." -- Jim Adcock "I'm not a Unix historian. I don't care." "I was a piece of yogurt." -- Roell Pieper, USL CEO And they sit and the bar and put bread in my jar and say, Man what are you doing here?" -- Billy Joel "Note that we do not claim that *all* Self programs are x% of C - just the benchmarks." -- Urs Hoelzle "But it sure is easier just to sit back and bitch than to actually try to make yourself heard." "Hmm, considering that you don't seem to know the meaning of *any* of the terms in this discussion, why don't we go and do a little homework, and you go and do a lot of homework, and we'll talk again later." -- Jim Edwards-Hewitt "If a company is stupid enough to go to sleep on the floor of the elephant's cage, then it deserves to be stepped on." -- Mark Eppley "Mice are not good for signing your name." -- Adam Kao "Subclassing: a legal means by which a programmer can appropriate and use code and objects developed by others." -- Mike Klein "While Mother Nature doesn't publish source, she winks benignly at all those physicists who spend all their time reverse engineering." -- Stephen J. Turnbull "Most programmers are pretty good at estimating their programming time, but don't seem to realize that they may only get half of their day to program in." -- Rolf Wilson "Crazy on a ship of fools." -- Robert Plant "Maybe my definition of \"Open\" is different than OSF's." "Sorry for the religion." -- Tom LaStrange "A world where Bill Gates controls all of our choices really does scare me." -- Will Estes == "Apple is like the Chinese Cultural Revolution conducted by people in three-piece suits." -- John Barlow == "In a nutshell, I started this little company called Lotus and made this software product that several million people wound up buying. The little company turned into this enourmous thing with thousands of employees making hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And it felt awful to me. so I left. I just walked away one day." "Competing with Bill Gates is like putting your head in a vise and turning the handle. He doesn't take no for an answer, and he keeps coming back." -- Mitch Kapor == "Information can't be stolen." "I'm an information addict." -- R.U. Serius == "The more digital society gets, the more we'll be able to completely change money. We'll be able to change a date on a document. We'll be able to add a figure to a bank balance. We'll be able to change a 'No' to a 'Yes'. How do you trace things like that? If you're a good programmer, there are no fingerprints." -- Emmanuel Goldstein, publisher of 2600 "I've been watching all this, and am thoroughly confused." -- Clive Feather "No architecture, no matter how many fortunes it has built, lasts forever." -- Jim Manzi "There is too much stupidity in this world, and laziness is its best friend." -- Dennis Tabuena "If there are any more ways I can make this more confusing, please let me know." -- Robert Dorsett "You just flunked Economics." -- Rick Schaut "Why don't we fire the salespeople?" "I am standing here totally beside myself." "We'll talk offline. I'll convince you." -- Nik Ivancic "I try to act like this is a skilled career." "Lawyers -- ruining society." "Maybe I'm not the most sensitive guy in the world." "I know what I'm saying; I'm not a maniac." "Do you think its rational to get up at 4 AM to talk to a bunch of morons stuck in their cars?" -- Howard Stern "Every problem in computer science can be solved by adding another level of indirection" -- Butler Lampson "Politics is for the moment. An equation is for eternity." "Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school." "There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is." "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." -- Albert Einstein "If I'd known you didn't know I would have told you." "Our List Manager is almost a word processor." "Nobody can meet our standards of excellence. I cannot even meet yours." "Enableized." -- George Hoyem "I'm happy with Microsoft, they've never screwed me over as badly as the UNIX vendors have." -- Richard Hoffbeck "You obviously don't know any of the problems involved in doing business in Redmond. Why, to start with, there are already little espresso-stands on every corner in Redmond." -- Craig Dowell "Microsoft has been the single greatest beneficiary of inept competition of any company in the world." -- Vern Raburn "If you sit on your butt for a year and a half, you get speed automatically: the computer gets twice as fast. But if you sit on your butt for a year and a half, you don't get features." -- Richard Brodie "It's in a Chaddish way." -- Jigish Avalani "They did a great service for mankind. They just failed to make money." -- Rick Rashid on PARC "As for my qualifications, I have amassed a book of arcane knowlege, I have a vial of holy water for blessing the specification, so all I would need to become the architect is a whip!" -- Donna Converse "Taken to extremes, this gets real ugly real fast, but politics sometimes win over simplicity..." -- Erik van der Poel "Your suggestion is sickening!!!" -- Courtney Loomis "You can't debug wood." "There's no need to know, that's the whole point." "Actually, without trying to sound cliche, Chad did it." -- Sean Trowbridge "Could it be that somebody else is looking into my mind? Some other place, somewhere, some other time?" "Where all are my friends?" -- Alan Parsons Project "We've got to make a decision: leave tonight or live and die this way." -- Tracy Chapman "I think we have different standards for ugliness, Ellis." -- Mark Manassee "Personally, I am not interested in putting any mental effort into a C++ question asked by someone who appears to be 12 years old and stupid." -- Dave Wilson "The last president [George Bush] ran a milk carton over a grocery scanner and had the same reaction as an ape discovering fire." -- Rep. Edward Markey "The more important question of whether or not systems like C++ and X-Windows cause actual permanent brain damage in humans, will have to wait for the autopsies of human brain doners. That won't be soon, since they're still only in the animal experimentation stages. But I think it's reprehensible how they're exposing all those poor innocent bunnies to shoddy static class libraries without garbage collection, and high doses of raw Motif." -- Don Hopkins "Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process." -- Stephen King "Try not to confuse your career with what you do to survive." "Whatever you might hope to find among the thoughts that crowd your mind, there won't be many that ever really mattered." "I'm going to be a happy idiot and struggle for the legal tender." -- Jackson Browne "Customers spend millions on hardware. They don't care about our software price." -- Ed Zander on why Solaris for Intel costs $795 "This thing's OK but its no vi." -- Gary Gordon on a mouse-based Mac text editor "A stone arch makes a fine bridge across a small stream, but it can't scale up 100-fold to cross the Golden Gate." -- Jon Bentley "Sorry to be dense, but I still don't remember why we thought we needed this." "This is doubly bogus." -- Ellis Cohen "We're not dead, we're just Reston." -- Pat Welsh "We should have realized when we first examined DOS 6.0 that Microsoft was about to hand users a loaded gun. Some of those guns are going off. So we're taking a second look to warn you not to point this gun at your head." "The house of DOS is falling down, and we shouldn't waste more time trying to prop it up. It's time to move on to a real operating system." -- Kevin Strehlo, InfoWorld "Its tough following the wind when someone else has the fan." -- Mark Linton "Few bugs cause panic, panic cause many bugs." -- Ian Falicov "Sorry -- we're closed." -- Sam Malone "Get a life." -- Sharon Stone "Wouldn't it be amusing if some twist of outlawing data encryption made the possesion of large primes a crime?" -- Dave Fischer "Taking a turn at 7.5g's generates enough force to crush Jean-Louis Gassee's ego." -- Guy Kawasaki "Its the income statement, stupid. Fat is oozing out of the buildings at Cupertino." -- Jean-Louis Gassee "Marriage is fine, but when you mix your Lego collections, you're really serious." -- Stefan Gustavson "If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch." -- Thurgood Marshall "Referring to GNU Emacs as an editor is really like calling Chicago a village." -- Eric W. Sink "Applicants must also have extensive knowledge of UNIX, although they should have sufficiently good programming taste to not consider this an achievement." -- Recuiting ad seen at MIT "My impression is that you'd rather spend your time arguing about religion and esoteric technical issues than actually facilitate development and use of X." -- Chan Benson "As it exists, the Finder is simply a very fast file clerk with the IQ of a turnip." -- Don Crabb "There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result." -- Winston Churchill "It's the content, stupid." -- Todd Rundgren "By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it forth to concentrate on more advanced problems." -- Alfred North Whitehead "Everything is temporary anyway." "I quit, I give up, nothing's good enough for anybody else." -- Edie Brickell "Unfortunately, this is the same Justice Department that took five months to fire William Sessions, and that dithered for weeks before killing a hundred people in Waco, Texas. One only hopes that Microsoft, guilty or not, survives." -- Wayne Rash "We defy the reader with an informed but non-specialist programming background to find even a milliwatt of illumination in this triumph of twigs over forest." -- PC Week on the Win32 Programmer's Reference Library "I'm sorry to waste band-width, but as a humble three dimensional differential topologist I have to take issue with this." -- Julian Porter "Some people say I got into politics to escape work." -- Bill Clinton "There would be no Novell if Bill Gates had spent 15 minutes thinking about networking." -- John Gage "It was like building a bowling ball out of 2x4's." -- Jeff Duntemann "A shovel is a tool for moving dirt, but it's not the shovel we're actually interested in, it's the location of the dirt." "I refuse to have my income held hostage by a hard disk drive." -- David Gerrold "Microsoft is the most efficient company in the world right now, because its a total dictatorship. And you can find the equivalent in Hitler and Goebbels and Goering." -- Ray Noorda "We're all a bunch of sissies. We need to stand up to that little squirt." -- Ray Noorda on Bill Gates "Daddy, I want a car." -- Christina Barr's first sentence, one day before her 2nd birthday. "I want some peanut butter, but no bread." "Dad, how do you get money from your computer? Can you get some for me?" -- Christina Barr "Remember that millions of people use the Internet, many of whom do so anonymously. Parents should consider whether to allow children to use Internet communications, and should be aware of whom they correspond with." -- Prodigy message "Some people call me Maurice." -- Steve Miller "What you suggest would be a fine idea if we were desigining C++ from scratch. As it is, though, we have an obligation to combine maximum utility with minimum damage." -- Andrew Koenig "Dad, I lost two teeth. How much money do I get?" "Look Dad, two of the same kid." "Dad, can we get an Internet connection?" "Horoscopes can't be true. If they were, there would only be 11 different kinds of people." "We're watching Street Fighters. One of those extra-violent, no-point movies." -- Stephen Barr "Imagine running a dog mind at very high speed. Would a thousand years of doggy living add up to any human insight?" -- Vernor Vinge "Why do we like sports? Why do we like movies? Why do you spend all of your time doing these stupid things? It's just incredible that a trillion-synapse computer could actually spend Saturday afternoon watching a football game. It's a colossal phenomenon that needs to be explained, and I'm not joking." "It's ridiculous to live 100 years and only be able to remember 30 million bytes. You know less than a compact disc. The human condition is really becoming more obsolete every minute." -- Marvin Minsky "Any customer who says "give me everything, give it to me now, and make it cheap" provides a data point that gets thrown away." -- Bob Alexander "NextStep? Who makes that?" -- DEC Salesperson Witnessed by Art Stine "Can you imagine a more frivolous way to spend billions, hooking up people's homes so that kids can compete playing Marioworld? The Information Highway is a buzzword, created by public-relations people and folks at the White House who want to be seen as technology visionaries." "We already have a way to \"interact\" with the world. It's called the telephone." "Look at other industries that were massively deregulated, where companies started scrwwing around in businesses they didn't understand and had no experience in. The airlines. The savings and loans. Now you have wreckage everywhere. Why will it be any different with the phone companies? Ten years from now, there is going to be a lot of embarassment over who wrecked the phone companies." "Look at the Japanese. They are not worrying about ordering pizzas or watching five movies per week. They're building an Information Highway linking companies,so they will become more powerful in international business." "I don't think the government should screw with it. Microsoft is a national resource, the same as IBM was 20 years ago or GM was 30 years ago. Let it alone. Just let it be a great company. After all, Microsoft will implode at some point, as every technology company does in time. Management gets old. They stop listening. They get concerned about the \"vision\" of the company, or their place in history. Then they crash, and new companies come out of the woodwork. That's my world. Getting them out of the woodwork." "We haven't invested five cents in pen-based computing. It doesn't work. Newton doesn't do anything. I mean, it competes against a wooden pencil and a paper pad, for god's sake." "There are four buildings here at 3000 Sand Hill Road. In these four buildings there's a billion dollars, cash. Now, I'm not sure how many good ideas exist in Silicon Valley, or on the planet. But a billion can finance them all. The problem isn't money; it's the scarcity of good ideas." -- Don Valentine "Yes, that would be magic. That's why it won't work." -- Mike Timbol "It's not that the letters are disappearing, they're just being put in a different place in the dicitionary, I don't think most people are upset." -- Maria Gato "If I remember rightly, dinosaurs were the dominant class of animals for something like 100 million years. Even C++'s best friends wouldn't want C++ to last that long. "I have noted a tendency to treat newer C++ features as if they were some sort of science fiction." -- Bjarne Stroustrup "If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error." -- John Kenneth Galbraith "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend: and inside a dog, it's too dark to read." -- Groucho Marx FOTOMAT BURNS DOWN NO FILM AT 11 "IBM's $77 PC-DOS 6.3, appearing in stores in May, must set some kind of record for preserving every major drawback found in a previous product release." -- PC Week "There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about." --- John von Neumann "I believe every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don't intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises." -- Neil Armstrong "This is a suicidal batch size. I'd start with a gram or two at the most of total composition. Ignition of this much flash would make it hard to find enough of your integral body parts to fill a casket." -- Richard J. Kinch on rec.pyrotechnic "No one really appreciates the dilemmas that face the airplane designer. I know this is true because we never get the hot babes and no one ever buys us a beer." -- Terrell D. Drinkard of Boeing "Client/server is not just a buzzword. It's two buzzwords." "I have more AOL floppy disks than any other kind." -- Bob Metcalfe "Yesterday's teenage hackers, dBASE, 1-2-3, BASIC and C programmers have become today's client/server gurus." "Rightsizing is a euphemism for the phrase 'personal computers are really toys.'" -- David Vaskevitch "The 'real world' is that thing outside your window, it contains all sorts of neat stuff like cars and shops and houses and things. particularly shops. Shops sell things, You know, like, Twinkies, Jolt Cola, that sort of stuff. You'd know that since you probably eat/drink the stuff as you cruise the net looking for people to flame." -- Christopher Cason "I admit that a good interpreted language can make prototyping an easier chore, but I've seen more BAD interfaces created very fast than GOOD interfaces created the slow way." -- Joey Jarosz "As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs." -- Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949 "A witty saying proves nothing." -- Voltaire "Assesing the elegance of a design is not fair unless you also look at the constraints the designers had to work under. " -- Phillip M. Hallam-Baker "Wow, that was extremely intellegent. It must take massive amounts of brain power and a very high IQ to come up with insults like that. " -- Mark R. Spiering "I contend that the biggest advantage of C++ over C is that it forces programmers to think first, rather than just code." -- Frank Greco "\"Makes sense\" and \"Software Design\" may never actually have appeared together in the same sentence until just now." "What I like about the Macintosh: You can have more than one screen and long file names. What I don't like about the Macintosh: anything else." "In Icon Heyday, everything was an icon; each piece of software had its Bird's Nest, Frying Pan, High-Button Shoe and so on. There's less of that now, but icons are still used as if they made the software clearer, whereas they're just a bigger target to point at, and you still take a chance at what's behind the door." "The people who created the Macintosh know better than you. That's what you're supposed to believe." "The Macintosh mouse is really a three-button mouse, except they hid two of the buttons on the keyboard." "In the time it takes to master all the inane quirks of the Macintosh, you could have learned something better." "If you ask me what could possibly be easier and better than the Macintosh, the only appropriate response is a four-letter word: UNIX" -- Ted Nelson "It's a fairly embarrassing situation to admit that we can't find 90 percent of the universe." -- Bruce H. Margon, astrophysicist "A mistake is an opprotunity the full value of which we have yet to realize." -- Edwin Land "Aerodynamics are for people who cannot build engines" -- Enzo Ferrari "I turned over the keyboard and beat on it until some peanut shells fell out, and lo!, all was well." -- Jerry Pournelle "All job security is illusory, but the best insurance policy is to be secure in the fundamentals of what you do." -- Larry Constantine "It's good to be king, whatever it pays." -- Tom Petty "Want watch ET." -- Bianca Barr, aged 20 months "Its a great feeling to be caught with your pants up." "The early Greeks used to sit around for days and debate how many teeth a horse has. They thought they could figure it out by sitting there, instead of checking the horse." -- Peter Lynch "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." -- Thomas Edison "Perverse though it may sound, Bill Gates keeps trying to act like Steve Jobs." "With massive sales, all things become possible." "If you want technical excellence, I'm sure you can do a lot better than Windows. If you want to develop applications that will potentially be used by millions of people, Windows is the way to go. In other words, a massive installed base will get you through times of unimpressive technology better than impressive technology will get you through a small installed base." "When you use one piece of software to examine another piece of software with which it interacts, you must be careful not to build a Heisenberg microscope that changes the behavior of what you're trying to observe." "Microsoft is taking over applications and putting them into the operating system." -- Andrew Schulman "All programmers are optimists." "The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned." "Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them." -- Fred Brooks "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." -- Brook's Law "Don't worry kids, I'll go straight to the source." -- George Jetson "I do not fret over the mysteries. I do not worry whether the heavenly gates swing or slide. I am only concerned that they open." -- Gordon B. Hinckley "Finally, two days ago, I succeeded - not on account of my hard efforts, but by the grace of the Lord. Like a sudden flash of lightning, the riddle was solved. I am unable to say what was the conducting thread that connected what I previously knew with what made my success possible." -- Karl Friedrich Gauss "One of the things they don't teach you in business school is what to do when your company starts to resemble a comic strip." -- Scott Adams "The good news is that in 1995 we will have a good operating system and programming language; the bad news is that they will be Unix and C++. " -- Richard Gabriel "If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability." -- Henry Ford "There are 5.7 billion humans alive today, so 5.5 billion do not have a PC." -- J. Paul Grayson "The final irony is that 20 years after Bill Gates wrote Basic for the Altair, just as he focuses on final domination of every desktop on the planet, he has lost control of the Internet." -- Steve Blank "HTML is the DOS of the Nineties. There are 100 things wrong with it, but just like DOS it is ubiquitous." -- Eric Schmidt "The guy who founded a mainframe database company, the guy who cofounded a workstation company, and the guy who's supposed to turn around the world's largest big-computer company all have trouble figuring out how to use a PC. So their solution is to dumb down the computer to such a degree that an idiot could use it, even if it doesn't do very much." "Trying to simplify a PC is like neutering a bull--nice but kind of pointless." -- Stewart Alsop "Questions to ask caller if you receive a telephoned bomb threat: 1. When is the bomb going to explode? 2. Where is it right now? 3. What does it look like? 4. What kind of bomb is it? 5. Why did you place the bomb? 6. What is your address? 7. What is your name?" -- J.P. Morgan Emergency Procedures "Delivered software can't be displaced by clever metaphors or developer white papers." -- Dave Winer "It seems far too common that computer programmers learn about data structures \"in the halls and back seats,\" to make a crude analogy with sex education." -- Mark Elson "To allow known offenders, like cable companies and the entertainment industry, to jump in and grab what would be the fastest conduit to this new personal medium, the Internet, is a terrifying social prospect." "The Internet is a fabulously rich enviromment for spreading our fears." -- Paul Saffo "There is is again. some clueless fool talking about the \"information superhighway\". They don't know jack about the Net. Its nothing like a superhighway. That's a bad metaphor. But suppose the metaphor ran in the other direction. Suppose the highways were like the Net. All right! A highway hundreds of lanes wide. Most with potholes. Privately operated bridges and overpasses. No highway patrol. Two hundred thirty-seven onramps at every intersection. No signs. Wanna get to Ensenada? Holler out the window to ask directions. Ad hoc traffic laws. Some lanes would vote to demolish single-occupant vehicles. No offramps. Now that's the way to run an interstate highway system." -- Jim Vandewalker "On the Internet, time is calculated in dog years." -- Roger McNamee "Using much of today's software is like driving a car that has previously been rolled down a cliff. You have to climb in through the window; none of the lights seem to work; the engine makes a suspicious clunking noise; great spans of sheet metal fly off at inopportune moments." "No matter how cool your interface is, less of it would be better." "One of the most potent methods for better orchestrating your user interfaces is segregating the possible from the probable." "Dialog boxes have very little right to demand information from humans. They are merely digital scum, and they exist only at the suffrance of the user, and not vice versa." "The two options are insulting, telling me that I can either go ahead and shoot my dog, or admit that I shouldn't be carrying a gun." "My least favorite menus are the File, Edit and Help menus. The File menu is named after an accident of the way our operating systems work. The Edit menu is based on the very weak clipboard. And the Help menu is frequently the least helpful source of insight and information for the befuddled user." -- Alan Cooper "However, I think it may be technically possible but not practical. It certainly couldn't be done by anyone who has to ask if it is possible." -- Tyson Sawyer "It was an accident man, a ghastly mistake. Ask anybody." -- Bart Simpson "Don't be afraid to ask questions. Is there any scalp showing in the back? Is the hairline receding? Is purple really my best color? Be upfront with your barber, and changes are he'll have a solution to whatever's been nagging you." -- Dennis Rodman