Quotes

Last Updated: Wednesday, July 9 2008

There's a great selection of zen-like Steven Wright quotes at ESR's site. Hackers will probably derive the most enjoyment out of them :)

"Well, I was looking in the bush, but then I rolled a 20 :("

"There are Klingons on the starboard bow, starboard bow, starboard bow! There are Klingons on the starboard bow, scrape them off, Jim!"

"Holyfuckingshit!"

"So like, when it says `cannot find root filesystem', that's good, right?"

"How much bandwidth do you need?"
"All of it."

"I got up and decided to go back to bed after I noticed that everyone at the party was butt naked."

"Yeah, he's a brilliant guy, but he needs to learn how to zip up his pants."

"Oops."
"What happened?"
"typedef void (* func)(void); char * p = malloc(SZ); write_chunk(p); free(p); ((func) p)();"
"... and it lets you do that?!"

"Hey man, f*ck RedHat."

"What language was that those two were speaking?"
"I think it was Swedish. Those Swedes are such nice fellows."

"The last owner of the SUV twisted those bolts on waaaaay too tight. I tried all my wrenches, and finally had to get the Bloody Big Bar before I could get the damn head bolts off."

"I was out in my jeep today, and I hit a roo."

"Please do not make fun of my virginity, it is a sacred thing to me."
"Liar, liar, pants on fire!"

"Whenever you do not see a situation you do not understand, look for the financial interest."

"I'm Neelix... and I'm Tuvok?!"

"Resolve to be thyself; and know, that he who finds himself, loses his misery."

"So that's your plan? Nuke the psycho? That's original."

"All right! Badass is going to get it on with Pod Man!"

"Peter, why can't we find an Anime with an ending that makes sense?"

"I'm shocked. *bzzt*"

"This is not necessarily guaranteed to contribute to the readability of your program. But it can be used to create some cool entries in an Obfuscated Perl contest."

"It doesn't have a hardware FPU? How does it signal a divide-by-zero exception?"
"It bursts into flame and eats your program."
"Do I have to restore the stack after that?"

"Another important trend is that the dot-coms are laying off their people in a vain attempt to reach profitability. The majority of the people laid off are returning en masse to their former car sales positions..."

"Father Christmas, give us some money / Don't waste our time with those silly toys / We'll beat you up if you don't hand it over / We want your bread, so don't make us annoyed / Give all the toys to the little rich boys"

"It's so weird. My kid is asking me if I really didn't have Yahoo when I was a kid. I told him that we had libraries, and he asked me what a library was."

"Yeah. I keep bothering him to get Ordo and encrypt his e-mail, but he won't."
"That is really unprofessional," Avi grumbles. "He needs to be more paranoid."
"He's so paranoid that he doesn't even trust Ordo."
Avi's scowl eases. "Oh. That's okay then."

Any thought that this was just a joke evaporated when he saw the quantity of armaments they were being issued. Shaftoe has found that, for an organization devoted to shooting and blowing up people on a large scale, the military is infuriatingly reticent about passing out weapons. And most of the weapons they do pass out are for shit. It is for this reason that Marines have long found it necessary to buy their own tommy guns from home: The Corps wants them to kill people, but they just won't give them the stuff they need! But this Detachment 2702 thing is a whole different outfit. Even the grunts are carrying trench brooms! And if that didn't get their attention, the cyanide capsules sure did. And the lecture from Chattan on the correct way to blow your own head off ("you would be astonished at how many otherwise competant chaps botch this apparently simple procedure").

"Why don't you just tell the computer what you want it to do instead of having it second-guess you all the time?"
"Here, have a lollipop."

<timtowdee>"Hey, this channel is for perl discussion only."
<traVesty>"Perl? Ok... *fart* unless ( $ip eq '0.0.0.0' || $svc_acct->slipip eq '0e0' ) { print ACP_DIALUP $svc_acct->username, "\t*\t", $svc_acct->slipip, "\n"; }"
*traVesty was kicked (Fart at me, will you?)*
*traVesty joined #perl*
<traVesty>"Hey! I was just farting in your general direction, a la PYTHON"

"See, when I have my headphones on, it's just like coming into the bathroom at your apartment. Sometimes your buddy is in there and he's brushing his teeth. Sometimes he's not there at all. But sometimes you open the door and he and his girlfriend are having kinky sex with an assortment of garden-fresh vegetables and a midget or two. And sometimes you interrupt me when I'm coding financial routines, and it's like that."

"Let's try this one... *scribble scribble* that one's bad *toss* ... how about this one... *scribble scribble* hmm, that one too..."
"Here, try this ballpoint. Cheap pens are better."

"What are the three parts of a wood stove?"
"I don't know Matt, what are the three parts of a wood stove?"
"Lifter, leg, and poker."

"Then, if you plug the Ethernet cable into the Ethernet interface, the LED on the switch will light up *bzzt* OW!!! G*ddammitsonofab*tch"
"Does it zap you if you plug the cable in backwards?"
"No, but this is probably a good time to skip ahead to static electricity and grounding procedures."

"D00d!! I found this 31337 warez site !!! It's at ftp://2130706433/!!! You don't even have to be plugged into the network to see it!!!! !!!!!"

"You don't install Linux on the desktop for the same reason you don't stick table saws in your kids' bedrooms, or give a contractor a squeeky hammer to build your house. Real men use the table saws, and let the kids use the squeeky hammer to bonk each other on the head."

"Bark, bark!"
"Oh, what a cute little aibo!"
*kaboom*

"Welcome to Special Chicken, what would you like?"
"Umm... what are the 911 special hot wings?"
"Oh, you want the 911 special? Here, sign this release form please."

"The press? It's like a big dinosaur with a tail that swings back and forth and indiscriminately knocks things over. It knocks good things and bad things. That's part of the freedom of the press."

"The <SPAN> tag is a lot like ... um, it's a lot like malodextrin. Wait, that's a bad analogy... well, it's a lot like chow mein."

"It isn't the stone you see that trips you on your nose."

"We took both pills."

"NEVER write your own software while you are an employee of someone else, EVEN if you do it in your own time. While technically you might be within your rights, your employer most likely has far more resources to fight you than you do to defend yourself. I don't care how nice you think your employers are, they are not nice, okay? When there is money involved, everyone is ravenous and you are the meat in the sandwich. Furthermore, there will be no second thoughts about eating you alive and uncooked (that just makes you all the more tender and juicy)."

"USA Intellectual Property Laws: 5 monkeys, 1 hour."

<keebler> asr: no, i think you're a freak for word processing in emacs instead of vim
<asr> some people like text editors that are also web browsers, salad shooters, cake mixers, and paint removers

"So how are you testing the bit error rates of these T1s? Are you using a SunSet or a T-bird?"
"Well, you see this here paper clip?"

Nanau taught me the Second Clue. If you make a decision under pressure, and someone who's never been in the same position decides at leisure to criticise without being polite and asking questions, make sure that the person understands the absolute inappropriateness of this as hard as possible. If someone with more technical experience wants to suggest how you should handle it next time, that's okay fine.

Needless to say, that was before I inadvertantly took the vows of poverty and chastity that resulted in being admitted to the Most Holy Order of the Keepers of the Secret Words of Root.

In the future, there will be giant robot wars...

Things shouted at Hacker Jeopardy at DefCon 9:
"Andy Rooney!"
"Strip!"
"Drink!"
"Daily Double!"
"Drunken Whores!"
"256!"

"Did he go around saying 'bless you, my son'?"
"No, he just looked like Jesus. And he had a skateboard."

Ok. We're all done here. Check things over very carefully.
Conversion is an unproven science.

"wow! he actually has hopes and dreams! I remember when I had those!"
"he's 21"
"oh. <pause> give him a few years. <longer pause> that was probably
cruel and curmudgeonly but g_ddammit..."
 
                            [i ask, sie turns out to be 35!
                              me: I guess I don't expect people to be over 32
                                 "this isn't logan's run!"      ]

"Oh, what was the name of that comic?"
"I dunno..."
"Well, you know the pope?"
"Huh?"
"You know, the old guy with the funny hat?"

Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs.

Saying Windows 95 is equal to Macintosh is like finding a potato that looks like Jesus and believing you witnessed the Second Coming.

In the console space, where the potential audience is in the tens of millions, the field is dominated by instantly identifiable, engaging personalities, intrinsically linked to their parent console. Nintendo has Mario; Sega, at the peak of its console dominance, had Sonic the Hedgehog. And for its own billion-dollar system, Microsoft leads off with ... a guy in a boxy outfit with a title for a name, his humanity masked off by a faceplate of tinted glass.

Come to think of it, for a Microsoft product, this is the perfect figurehead.

"Here, I'll take this one."
"Oh, that's a good anime."
"Yeah, but does the ending make any sense?"
"No, of course not! It wouldn't be an anime if the ending made any sense."

/*
**      IMAP sucks.  Here's why.
*/

"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."

<farker> So sometimes... eh,you're not vanilla, right?
<farker2> no, not vanilla
<farker2> I am all xrated
<farker> I thought so
<farker2> #fark...c'mon

> I keep seeing this word "wink" when reading telco material.  Do you
> know the etymology of the word?

Thats what switches do when they want to get each other's attention.
You know, if that Harris 20/20 thinks the husky young Excel2000 down
the way is really hot.  That kind of thing.

<greycat> Sometimes I feel like this channel is a pop quiz.  "You
have a Torx screwdriver, a #2 pencil, and a soldering iron.  Hack into
First National Bank's lending department with this Vic 20 and install
nethack 3.4 for the employees.  Without using a floppy diskette."

I mean, the world is much weirder than it was 10 years ago. Think about it: if in 1992 the weirdness factor was 1.0 and it increased exponentially every year, then the weirdness factor could be 512.0 now! Or maybe it's linear, then the weirdness factor would only be 10.0. Even still, that's pretty f*cking weird.

"We're going to do some crazy s---," Ozzy's wife and manager Sharon Osbourne said in a statement.

"Hmm, what else can we get rid of? Visual Studio, eh? We'll have to do something about that..." *clicks on Add and Remove Programs*

"Images stimulate desire."

(00:09:19) thalakan: And I REALLY want to know why the sparc isn't powering up


(00:12:21) thalakan: Urrgh this is one of the ultra's with the transsexual serial port


(00:12:27) Effugas: ahhahhhahhahahhahaha

(21:16:39) Effugas: think i found the problem...
(21:16:47) Effugas: ding ding ding
(21:16:53) Effugas: SENT:     64.81.64.164:3306  [00]   0.008s Sent 40 on ipsec0:
(21:17:10) thalakan: Ehh ipsec0 doesn't do anything on this box
(21:17:14) thalakan: ... oh

On December 3, 1888, President Grover Cleveland delivered his annual address to Congress. Apparently the President had taken notice of the Santa Clara County Supreme Court headnote, its politics, and its consequences, for he said in his speech to the nation, delivered before a joint session of Congress: "As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters."

Which brings us to today.

Within the space of less than 40 minutes, we have witnessed a truly remarkable process: the transformation of soybeans into milk. Its consistency and appearance resembling that of creamy, fresh dairy milk... Nutritionally, soymilk compares very favorably with dairy milk... it strikes us as a deeply mysterious coincidence that the substance of a simple seed, ground and cooked with water, should be so similar to the life-giving milk produced in the bodies of mammals and used to suckle their young.

"Jason, I'm hungry. Let's get food."
"Well, cows are food."
"Do eggs come from cows?"

1:59 p.m. Inadvertantly creating a serviceable metaphor for contemporary civilization, a woman vomited uncontrollably near the everything's-a-dollar store.

PJ: "What's it doing now?"
Temtel: "It's reading your hard drive, formatting your refrigerator, and dating your sister."
Me: "Oh."

"I used to hack. Then I got a life."

"There is now an increasing awareness that the use of the computer stimulates and modifies intellectual processes, and as a result makes it possible for people to expand their intellectual capabilities. This added dimension -- the extension of human intellect -- must be part of any program in computer science or information systems."

"Big things are made of little things."

Me: "I thought we already agreed it was going to be DDR [ed: disk disk revolution]."
Dan: "I don't want to imagine people dancing to the FAT table."

"A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops."
"On my desk I have a workstation..."

3.5 How to Document Wisely

Life is too short to write crap nobody will read.

"Referring to the random, homeless, snippets of video have been gaining huge popularity on the net (much to the chagrin of commercial interests that would kill for that kind of following), the comment reads 'The Web makes it possible for an independent artist to gain a global following for no commercial purpose whatsoever.'"

"Hacking the teacher's system wasn't wrong. When the ASL interpreter started signing the stuff coming out of the projector and the speakers - that was wrong."

"For one thing, though, I strongly suspect Her Majesty of wanting to play the same 'Let's surprise poor Honor!' game Benjamin's having so much fun with," she went on darkly after a moment, "and that scares me. She's got a lot bigger toy box."

"Speaking of wireless, I need you to fix my phone."
"What's wrong with it?"
"I need to put it back into English..."
"What the hell does La Optinona mean?"

"You know what I think you need?"
"The wakey wakey prescription."
"Well yeah, but you know what else I think you need?"
"Two of them?"

"That's also why the Internet feels to so many of us like a natural resource. We have flocked to it as if it were a part of human nature just waiting to happen -- just as speaking and writing now feel like a part of what it means to be human."

"Uh, we accidently turned off the network interface on blue - can you go reboot it?"
"Sure... *clickety clickety* ... uh, what's the root password?"

"No, he didn't drink 8 double shots, he just kinda borrowed them."

"It doesn't actually say GHI on my ass, does it?"

"No, really! I thought it was Zima, not vodka!"

"Yeah, he was pretty out of it; he was trying to type shell commands into Microsoft Word. But then he fell over."

"I'm going to make your shit work if I have to rip out the hard drive and scratch bits on the platter by hand, goddamnit."

"Long-term, I expect security will become like the pharmaceutical and aviation industries. Regulations and liability would improve safety, but would also make product development hugely expensive. Regardless of whether this would be better or worse than the current state of affairs, it looks inevitable."

While we're on the subject of static typing, identifying with the makers will save us from another problem that afflicts the sciences: math envy. Everyone in the sciences secretly believes that mathematicians are smarter than they are. I think mathematicians also believe this. At any rate, the result is that scientists tend to make their work look as mathematical as possible. In a field like physics this probably doesn't do much harm, but the further you get from the natural sciences, the more of a problem it becomes.

A page of formulas just looks so impressive. (Tip: for extra impressiveness, use Greek variables.) And so there is a great temptation to work on problems you can treat formally, rather than problems that are, say, important.

If hackers identified with other makers, like writers and painters, they wouldn't feel tempted to do this. Writers and painters don't suffer from math envy. They feel as if they're doing something completely unrelated. So are hackers, I think.

You should only use ssh and your own ssl'd proxy from the con. Any laptop should have a fresh and patched install of everything... Just don't go to the Kinko's down the street. They get 0wned early.

"What do you mean, he's 'interesting'?"
"He's the only guy I know with a hard drive full of Icelandic death metal."
"Huh?"
"Yeah, he asked me 'You vant to heer my daeth maetal?'"

"The other day I found out that the Britney Spears' official site was running a possibly vulnerable version of ssh... it's times like that that I really really wished I was a black hat."

"Are you guys up yet?! We need more development box- er, worthy opponents..."

"ASCII is a method of assigning numbers to letters, and a few funny faces."

"I'm now in the very bizarre position of having to beg for people to download porn."

Regarding Hello Kitty: "In the quarter-century plus that this Feline Merchandise-ball has rolled back and forth across Japan, it's only stressed the obvious: Japanese are weird, strange people who do odd things in large groups."

"... and then I worked until 2:30 in the morning."
"Dude."
"Yeah, I'm a studly programmer now."
"You sure are, look at all those keyboard muscles!"
"Yeah, I still have trouble lifting my hands up to the keyboard, but I can crush a volkswagon in my fingers now."

"I'm afraid your son has... the knack."
"The knack?"
"The knack. It's a rare condition characterized by an extreme intuition about all things mechanical and electrical... and utter social ineptitude."
"Can he live a normal life?"
"No. He'll be an engineer."

"SCSI is *not* magic. There are *fundamental* *technical* *reasons* why you have to sacrifice a young goat to your SCSI chain every now and then."

For anybody implementing or otherwise working with a network protocol, the relevant RFCs are required reading. ... except for a bit of a licensing problem. ... the Debian Project takes its social contract seriously, and that contract requires that the distribution be "100% free software." Since the RFCs do not meet the DFSG (though there is not a complete consensus on that point), they have been evicted from the Debian distribution. Debian users wanting to install the doc-rfc package will have to look for it in the non-free area.

To many, Debian's uncompromising stance on licensing seems like a pedantic exercise carried out by people with nothing better to do with their time. But Debian is serving an important role in the community by serving as its conscience and early warning system. As recent events have shown, licensing is important. Every set of bits comes with its own copyright and its own restrictions. Failure to pay attention to those restrictions can lead to unwanted contact with lawyers, and is best avoided.

"So at the end of the tour, the guy said 'well, we'll throw it in the shredder here.' He went on and said 'if you want, we can throw a can of propane in there so you get a big explosion when it goes through the shredder.' We thought about it and said 'yes, we'd like that very much!' We ended up with this huge, million dollar explosion shot for, like, eight bucks." [ed: I don't know about the million dollar part, but it was about five stories high...]

Dave: "So help me out here - what's a good line?"
Don: "Line?"
Dave: "Yeah, you know... a pick up line. For the ladies."
Don: ... "Hi."

"There's a time and a place for everything, and it's called 'college'."

"I mean, these low riders are great, but you can't concentrate when people are running around with these things. They should at least put, like, economic news or facts or something on that midriff there. No one is going to come back from Mardi Gras with the cure for world hunger."

"Bad monkey, no crackpipe!"

"This one time? ... at CTF camp? ... I used this sploit? And rooted your box."

"You know what I want? A drink called Liquid Root."
"Heh, Liquid Sploit."
"Guaranteed to 0wn."

"Um, I'm not sure what pronoun to use to address you with."
"Huh?"
"Are you a guy or a girl?"
"I'm a girl. You know, I get that a lot. I should just start sitting on people's faces :P"

"Yeah, so I grabbed the hat and ran off with it, but he must have really wanted it bad, because then he threw me in the pool."
"Didn't your suit get messed up?"
"Well yeah, the suit and the phone and the other stuff is pretty broken right now, but the important thing is the hat's ok."

"You were going to bring *what* to Defcon?!"

"Well, all the misinformation is kind of annoying."
"I'll try to work on that for next year."
"See? It's so bad that I can't even trust you when you say that!"

"You mean the magic sacs of fat?" *jiggles boobies*

"Hmm, too fruity."
"Nah, that's ok - we'll make that one a chick bomb."

"Well, it's quite a bit of money if you don't spend it all on booze and hookers."
... silence...
"What?"

"More like Vodka Armageddon."

"Ok," *hands me a sheet of paper covered in handwritten text* "here's my proof. You can't do it, the constraints proposed by the problem make it impossible. Can we go see boobies now?"

"Yes, I do have the shortest email address in the world."

"Holyshitthepoweroutletsaresmokingturnitoffturnitof-"
"NO! LEAVE THEM ON! Don't worry about the smoke, it'll stop after a while."

"The Feds came and booted us out of our room."
"Why would the Feds do that?"
"Not those feds."

"Morning, bitches."

"Holy shit, I just rooted the mud."

"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."

"If you're wondering whether or not there will be a Matrix 4, picture 2.5 billion dollars (that's what the first trilogy will make when all is said and done). If you're having trouble picturing this, it's three stacks of 100-dollar bills, each stack as tall as the Empire State Building. Now picture someone offering that money to a Multinational corporation like Time-Warner, and then imagine that corporation not taking it."

"At one point we were going to make up a PDF of the exceptions hierarchy, akin to the one done for the I/O class hierarchy. Time was our enemy. Since then we've moved to Doxygen, which has the useful property of not sucking."

In any event, don't forget that readability is the goal (at least it's one of the goals). Your goal should not be to avoid certain syntactic constructs such as ?: or && or || or if or even goto. If you sink to the level of a "Standards Bigot," you'll ultimately embarass yourself since there are always counterexamples to any syntax-based rule. If on the other hand you emphasize broad goals and guidelines (e.g., "major on the majors," or "put the most important thing first on the line," or even "make sure your code is obvious and readable"), you're usually much better off.

Code must be written to be read, not by the compiler, but by another human being.

[ed: note that this rule itself has counterexamples, which is the point.]

... "A pointer-cast says to the compiler, 'Stop thinking and start generating code; I'm smart, you're dumb; I'm big, you're little; I know what I'm doing so just pretend this is assembly language and generate the code.' The compiler pretty much blindly generates code when you start casting -- you are taking control (and responsibility!) for the outcome. The compiler and the language reduce (and in some cases eliminate!) the guarantees you get as to what will happen. You're on your own.

By way of analogy, even if it's legal to juggle chainsaws, it's stupid."

"I think guys who want you to make fun of their penis are strange."

Jackson notes that many of the spokespeople who speak on his behalf are not even part of his organization. "You are right to be skeptical of some of the individuals who are being identified in the mass media as my friends, spokespeople, and attorneys" he says. "With few exceptions, most of them are simply filling a desperate void in our culture that equates visibility with insight."

"You will often feel that the debates we examine are tangled messes and you don't know whose argument to believe. There's no escaping this. I feel this way all the time. All I can say is, if you work hard, you will be able to make some sense of the mess. You'll start to get a sense of how the different views relate to each other and what their pros and cons are. Eventually, you may realize that things are even messier than you thought, which will be frustrating, and you'll have to go back to the drawing board. This can happen over and over again. You may never reach any definitive conclusion. But each time you try to make sense of the debate, you'll find you understand the issues a little bit better. That's the way we make progress in philosophy. It never gets easier than that."

"There's another consequence when your revenue and earnings are growing off the charts. At first that makes you like a little bunny rabbit: Everybody wants to play with you, everybody wants to talk to you, everybody admires you, you're up on a stage getting interviewed and all that.

And then within a year, you've got about eight really fearsome competitors shooting at your head with high-powered ammunition. Because you've created this huge profit stream that other people want."

"At Netscape, I was not in an operational role for the first three years. I don't have the temperament for it.

[...] Being a CEO is very lonely. Who do you talk to? Who do you bounce ideas off of? You can't really bounce ideas off of your board, because that's exposing vulnerabilities. You can't open up with your employees because you have to be a strong leader for them. You can't talk to other CEOs.

I have no interest in being the CEO of Opsware. But I have every interest in having the company be successful."

"SPAM is reality ..."

"I, for one, do not welcome our Robotic Geisha Cheerleader Dancing Overlords."

That's right... you and I are to blame for the fact that hundreds if not thousands of animals will have to be destroyed because of the threat of BSE. We are to blame because our culture has come to value two qualities above all else: "cheap", and "more".

If you're not in control, your attacker is.

America's most visionary leaders have long warned against allowing corporate power to dominate the political landscape. In 1863, in the depths of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln lamented, "I have the Confederacy before me and the bankers behind me, and I fear the bankers most." Franklin Roosevelt echoed that sentiment when he warned that "the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism -- ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any controlling power."

"alpha software using alpha software is a recipe for ... entertainment."

"Naturally, the common people don't want war, but after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a facist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country."

"First you save the attachment.
Then you unzip it.
Then you execute it.

Why do the virus writers even bother writing code? If people are willing to do all that, it sounds like the next virus will consist solely of the text:

'Pick a friend at random. Go over to his house and bash his computer with a sledge hammer.'"

"Hofstede's study of IBM employees, however, showed a high degree of cultural differences: The French are better at object-oriented development; the Japanese are better at metrics; Belgians hold closely to process methods; and U.S. 'cowboys' code first and design later."

"The fact of the matter is, most people treat computers like a glorified appliance. A computer should more aptly be treated like a motor vehicle; yeah, you can go have some fun in it but you'd better drive defensively and know how to operate the thing properly. You don't just take it out of the box and start pressing buttons"

"Use the telephone test for readability. If someone could understand your code when read aloud over the telephone, it's clear enough. If not, then it needs rewriting."

"Word of 'Sky Captain' began to spread around the Internet only after Conran finished primary shooting in London last spring -- extraordinarily late for the Internet, which often seems invented specifically to track movies with giant robots in them."

"If there's one fear that's real in 'Dawn of the Dead,' one terror that's presented without smirking irony, it's the terror of civil chaos -- of waking up to the clock-radio one morning and finding out that it's all gone to hell."

Analysts have pounded on Sinegal to trim the company's generous health benefits and to otherwise reduce labor costs. But he's taken only limited steps in that direction, like modestly increasing employees' share of health-insurance premiums. That doesn't satisfy critics like Deutsche Bank analyst Bill Dreher, who recently wrote, "Costco continues to be a company that is better at serving the club member and employee than the shareholder."

Sinegal just shrugs. "You have to take the shit with the sugar, I guess. We think when you take care of your customer and your employees, your shareholders are going to be rewarded in the long run. And I'm one of them [the shareholders]; I care about the stock price. But we're not going to do something for the sake of one quarter that's going to destroy the fabric of our company and what we stand for."

"You know, when you have a program that does something really cool, and you wrote it from scratch, and it took a significant part of your life, you grow fond of it. When it's finished, it feels like some kind of amorphous sculpture that you've created. It has an abstract shape in your head that's completely independent of its actual purpose. Elegant, simple, beautiful.

Then, only a year later, after making dozens of pragmatic alterations to suit the people who use it, not only has your Venus-de-Milo lost both arms, she also has a giraffe's head sticking out of her chest and a cherubic penis that squirts colored water into a plastic bucket. The romance has become so painful that each day you struggle with an overwhelming urge to smash the fucking thing to pieces with a hammer."

"So I'll build this robot, which will roll around the parking lot and take pictures of anyone who tries to mess with either the car or the robot. Eventually the robot will know everyone who's a potential vandal and I'll arm the robot so it can disable them, at which point I'll hand them over to the local authorities."

"I don't think that's such a good idea."

"Why not?"

"Everyone's going to mess with the robot!"

"Huh? That doesn't make any sense; why would everyone fuck with a robot that's just rolling around minding its own business?"

"Well, if I was walking down the sidewalk and saw a robot with the camera and the lights, I'd kick it."

"What?! Why would you do that?"

"Wouldn't you?"

When you win a war,
you preside over a funeral.

"The GI-Joe movies are, like, the best anti-drug commercial ever. I guess the idea is that you shouldn't take drugs, or you'll produce crap like this."

"Heh, we rooted the Navy."

$ vi TooDrunkToCod
$ vi ToDrunkToc^H^H'
> ^X^F^C^C
$ iv ToDrunkTooCode
iv: Command not found.
$ vi ToDrunkTooCode
$ ./ToDrunkTooCode
./ToDrunkTooCode: Permission denied.
$

"A 'zero draft' is my term for a throwaway -- a piece of freewriting that allows you to warm up, get into the flow, work past your inhibitions, bust through your writer's block, etc. This will take just 20 minutes. Surely you can afford that. And of course you don't have to throw it away later -- you just need to pretend that you will." [ed. Note that this goes for code as well.]

"I work better professionally when my views are crowded and challenged, for I recognize that out of antagonism comes quality, which is why the best sculptures are of marble, not of soap."

RPG Office Supplies

11. Striped Tie of Resist Management
10. Mouse of Negate Firewall
9. Large Potion of Replenish Toner
8. Blinking Hub of Brilliance
7. Rusty Wand of Postpone Deadline
6. Potion of Manager Detection
5. Amulet of Blame Reflection
4. Ring of Pager Control
3. Scroll of Create Intern
2. Coffee Cup of Holding
1. Wand of Project Cancellation

"There was a review of 'Cryptonomicon' with a line in it that struck me as interesting. The guy said, 'This is a book for geeks and the history buffs that they turn into.' I'm turning into one. I'm in this history book club, which is not all geeks but it's definitely got some serious geeks in it. It's been going for four or five years maybe. We're all consistently dumbfounded by how interesting history is when you read it yourself compared to how dull it was when they made you study it in school. We can't figure out why there's that gap. I think they try to cover too broad a sweep at once so you never get down to the individual people and their stories."

On women's experiences dating Computer Science majors:
"The odds are good, but the goods are odd."

"The principal goal of this tool is to make the proper crediting of information property so easy that it becomes a habit, not a laborious task that we stop doing outside of school. This is a literacy issue, because SOMEDAY THE INFORMATION THAT THE TEACHER, STUDENT, OR OTHER INFORMATION USER IS CITING WILL BE YOURS."

"WARNING: Do not insert Remote Terminal Unit into rectum."

"In the whole history of the human race, from Adam until now, Tyranny has never come to live with any people with a placard on his breast bearing his name. He always comes in deep disguise, sometimes proclaiming an endowment of freedom... But Tyranny is always a wolf in sheeps' clothing, and he always ends by devouring the whole flock."

"When I was a teenager, as soon as I finished reading Peter Norton's famous guide to programming the IBM-PC in Assembler, I was convinced that I knew everything there was to know about software development in general. Heck, I was ready to start a software company to make a word processor, you see, and it was going to be really good. My imaginary software company was going to have coffee breaks with free donuts every hour. A lot of my daydreams in those days involved donuts.

When I got out of the army, I headed off to college and got a degree in Computer Science. Now I really knew everything. I knew more than everything, because I had learned a bunch of computer-scientific junk about linear algebra and NP completeness and frigging lambda calculus which was obviously useless, so I thought they must have run out of useful things to teach us and were scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Over the next decade I proceeded to learn an incredible amount about software development and all the things it takes to produce software. I worked at Microsoft on the Excel team, at Viacom on the web team, and at Juno on their email client. And, you know what? At every point in the learning cycle, I was completely convinced that I knew everything there was to know about software development.

There's something weird about software development, some mystical quality, that makes all kinds of people think they know how to do it. I've worked at dotcom-type companies full of liberal arts majors with no software experience or training who nevertheless were convinced that they knew how to manage software teams and design user interfaces. This is weird, because nobody thinks they know how to remove a burst appendix, or rebuild a car engine, unless they actually know how to do it, but for some reason there are all these people floating around who think they know everything there is to know about software development.

And then, one day, finally, perhaps when it's too late, you'll wake up and say, 'Hmm. Maybe I really don't know what it really takes to develop software.' And on that day only, and not one minute before, but on that day and from that day forward, you will have earned the right to call yourself a software developer."

/*
 *  Check for clue free BIOS implementations who use
 *  the following QA technique
 *
 *      [ Write BIOS Code ]<------
 *               |                ^
 *      < Does it Compile >----N--
 *               |Y               ^
 *      < Does it Boot Win98 >-N--
 *               |Y
 *           [Ship It]
 */

"Gigli is like the movie equivalent of Daikatana."

"I'm not 100% sure what these functions are for, but I'm implementing them goddamnit!"

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."

So last night I ended my sabbatical and began my new career doing something I've always felt passionate about: cooking. I'm working in the kitchen of a restaurant called Fifty-Six Union here on Nantucket. Yesterday at 3 PM I put on my black chef's clogs, my black pants and white t-shirt, pulled my Red Sox cap over my hair and got to work peeling and deveining shrimp. Seven hours later, sweatily scrubbing the kitchen floors, I was still smiling.

I've learned a lot this summer during my sabbatical but it all can be summarized in three words: follow your heart.

"Practicing analog design doesn't have to be boring at all. Like, you've seen these new solid state gyros and accelerometers? Two words: guided missiles."

On Ghost and the Shell 2: Innocence:

"I have to use the word dense. Except this time not only visually, but plot-wise as well. The level of detail in every frame is just astounding; through the whole movie I kept wanting to pause and single-step it, because there's just so much going on. On the surface, the plot is a detective story ('why are robots going nuts and killing people?') but that's just an excuse for a pair of cops to spend the movie talking about the nature of humanity (oh, and also blowing things up. Blowing things up real good.)"

kttydoggy: l33tness limit has been exceeded. Please deposit 25c.

Get out and enjoy yourself. You have the rest of your life for LAN parties and coding sessions. If you're in college and not working, you are likely never to have the same freedom that you do now. (Excepting unemployment...) Get out, go hiking, meet people of the appropriate sex, see concerts, learn to cook. Virtually no one dies wishing they'd spent more time in front of an LCD screen.

For all that, these books are like a good curry. They're mild and interesting when you first taste them, but after you've swallowed, they grow on you, spreading a warm fire throughout your digestive system, making beads of sweat appear on your forehead. Since finishing the first two books, I've been practically haunted by them. Ever time I spend money, or walk through London, or see a ship, or think about math and science, some snippet of those books springs to mind, a lens through which to reexamine my thinking and assumptions.

"Everyone I know in college that got bad grades was either playing Counter-Strike or doing drugs. Come to think of it, the ones playing Counter-Strike did worse than the ones that were always high..."

"Red Hat is kind of like a Fisher Price My First Linux."

"If you find that surgeons are butchering people, it is inappropriate to replace their scalpels with something 'safer'. That is not where the problem lies.

What is this tendency to blame tools rather than hold people responsible for doing things right in a way that the tools fully support?

C lets you build and use safe buffer managers. If you don't do so, it isn't C's fault."

"Newmark echoed the sentiment of creating mutual faith between sites and customers. He said the success of Craigslist, an advertising-free classifieds site in which eBay now holds a 25 percent stake, could be channeled into Internet politics.

'It's an issue of moral values,' Newmark said. 'People want to know the truth and be treated fairly--that's the American dream.'"

"I asked my friend Greg Robbins to help me. His contract in another division at Apple had just ended, so he told his manager that he would start reporting to me. She didn't ask who I was and let him keep his office and badge. In turn, I told people that I was reporting to him. Since that left no managers in the loop, we had no meetings and could be extremely productive."

Like many geeks in the '90s, Cohen coded for a parade of dotcoms that went bust without a product ever seeing daylight. He decided his next project would be something he wrote for himself in his own way, and gave away free. "You get so tired of having your work die," he says. "I just wanted to make something that people would actually use."

First rule of relativity club is the speed of light is the same for all observers.

That's nothing. Not only can you read for free at your local library, but if you go to the desk and sign up for a special card (just like signing up for a preferred shopper card!) you can also take books home with you! For free! Lots of them! And when you're done you can bring them back and get more!

Consider a simple electrical circuit comprising two wires with electrical potentials of 5 volts and 0 volts connected by a resistor of 10 ohms. The direction of current flow is shown as from positive to negative. This may seem strange, as we know that current actually consists of electrons migrating from a negative source to a positive target. The reason for this inconsistency is that the existence of electricity was discovered long before it was fully understood. Electro-plated artifacts have been discovered in Egyptian pyramids, but it wasn't until the early part of the 20th century that George Thomson proved the existence of the electron at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. The men who established the original electrical theories had to make decisions about things they didn't fully understand. The direction of current flow is one such example; for a variety of reasons it was originally believed that current flowed from positive to negative. As you may imagine, this inconsistency can, and does, cause endless problems.

I kind of think that Japanese watched the movie X-Men/X2, and thought "Wow! Captain Picard is a telepath! All Gaijin must be telepaths!"

"Many believe that if we could just get programmers to quit 'hacking' and 'build' the designs as given to them (and in the process, make fewer errors) then software development might mature into a true engineering discipline. Not likely to happen as long as the process ignores the engineering and economic realities...

If we learn nothing else from Japanese management techniques, we should learn that it is counter-productive to blame the workers for errors in the process. Instead of continuing to force software development to conform to an incorrect process model, we need to revise the process so that it helps rather than hinders efforts to produce better software. This is the litmus test of 'software engineering.' Engineering is about how you do the process, not about whether the final design document needs a CAD system to produce it."

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.

Students who should never have graduated from their (Westchester or Long Island, usually) high schools with such appalling language skills -- and then make it through three years at university before running into me -- are sometimes struck dumb looking at their returned work. I mark everything, all the misspellings and improper punctuation, capitalization, use of quotes, missing words, misused words, obvious hyperbole and other factual errors.

You know what helps keep me going? (Besides the cash.) The two or three students every semester that really get it, and blossom over the course of the semester. Sometimes they're the ones who started out with the most editing marks.

One time one of them actually said: "I never had a teacher care enough to point out everything I did wrong."

That made me ponder a bit.

The second thing in favor of the BFS approach is reliability. It's a simple fact of life that file system driver code is held to a higher standard than almost any other code -- even kernel code. Certainly application code can afford to be much more lax. If an application crashes, it's annoying, but an application can always be relaunched. If the kernel crashes, well, that's pretty bad, but at least you can reboot.

But if a file system driver has a bug, it could potentially corrupt or destroy all of your data.

I'm just waiting for the day when scientists around the world announce that "America causes cancer" which leads to the requirement for all Americans to go around with a big Surgeon Generals' Warning sewed into the seat of their pants. "Interacting with this person could contain carbon monoxide and may complicate pregnancy." Seems rather inevitable.

"So what do you think about math?"
"You mean potato chips?"

"My laptop smells like fire :("

"If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside."

When companies buy startups, they're effectively fusing recruiting and product development. And I think that's more efficient than doing the two separately, because you always get people who are really committed to what they're working on.

Plus, this method yields teams of developers who already work well together. Any conflicts between them have been ironed out under the very hot iron of running a startup. By the time the acquirer gets them, they're finishing one another's sentences. That's valuable in software, because so many bugs occur at the boundaries between different people's code.

There's a reason you don't see reruns of reality TV shows.

If you have the means, I do so recommend picking up a bouncy castle. And I will let you in on a little secret: like many things, bouncy castles are much more fun once you start using them not as directed.

So far, it has been an outstanding success - second only to Hubble, in the sense that Hubble generates better pics for the press and the average space geek. As far as I know, SWIFT was not designed to really record much in the way of actual hard data (other than location), it was more an early-warning system for giant space explosions.

"The most reliable part is one that's not present."

user1: Senator Napoli's idea of someone who should still be allowed to get an abortion is as follows: "A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life."

user2: Sodomy leads to pregnancy now?

user3: Where do you think lawyers come from?

pthreads is what you get when a cow pees on the string your computers are using to communicate.

This planet, this universe, is drenched, shimmering, throbbing with energy, from thousands of sources. Sunlight is beating down ferociously 365/24/7, the oceans are surging with untamable force, winds are rushing across every exposed surface. Thousands of plants are producing flammable substances. A single nuclear fission reactor, if properly directed, can boil water for a thousand years continuously to run a turbine.

It is ridiculous, obscene, that anybody should fight a war over energy. If the human race slaughters themselves over oil, without attempting to harness the endless clean energy available all around them every second of the day, then that would be the crowning stupidity of the race. We would not die of lack of oil-produced energy. We would have died of stupidity.

21:52 < cybernmd> well i have some mixed feelings right now about spending all this time in school
21:53 < cybernmd> i think it was worth it, i hope it was worth it
21:53 < cybernmd> ;\
21:53 <@jspence> do you feel it has made you l33ter?
21:54 < cybernmd> ha!
21:55 < cybernmd> sure, i got to learn about anal sex in africa

SwitcherCAD III is designed to be used by three different types of design engineers: those who know what they're doing, those who think they know, and those who are sure they know absolutely nothing about switching regulator design. The experienced designer needs a "what if" program that allows him to quickly alter aspects of a circuit to find an optimum design. The neophyte needs a cookbook approach that yields a reliable design based on the simplest of inputs. The "loose cannon" designer needs a program that will allow him to exercise his free will, but will be intelligent enough to alert him to fatal design flaws.

"My opinion of the consumer credit industry is that it works well in the formation of credit, but it's really a problem by the time it gets to the consumer," he says. "You have consumers being misled, it's too expensive, not very transparent, and not very open." He adds, "Access to credit is right up there with healthcare and education in terms of being fundamental to a society. You have so many bad things going on in the current system, so many bad things."

Japan's third largest import, behind Uselss Techno-Shit You Don't Need, and Helpful Techno-Shit You Actually Do Need, is Weird Cartoony Things.

When we finally got the agreement to interview the president, we had five Republicans and five Democrats in the Oval Office, I looked out at the Washington Monument -- out the window -- and the president said, I'll answer anything you have to ask, you can stay as long as you want. No other country in the world would have allowed ... 10 unelected citizens to do that. And I felt pretty good about the country at that point.

I' thought I'd want to have lots of sex. Meaningless, multipartnered, degrading sex. After all, if Second Life is a virtual community in which you can look however you want, do whatever you want, and use the fake name you want, then I could make all my fantasies come true. And as I quickly learned, having sex is exactly what many of the people on the site spend their time doing. Occasionally, it seemed, with characters that look like giant fluffy squirrels -- which is wonderful, because there is nothing like the warm flush of superiority you feel when discovering a fetish you don't have.

When someone is successful, there's always a feeling that they were lucky. Luck plays a part, sure, but to be successful, you must have iron discipline. You must have energy and hunger and desire and honesty.

If you have to trust someone, make it a quirky computer genius.

If all you have are plans for a brick, the best you can hope to do is make a fancy brick.

Sometimes, an employee will come to you and say, well, I'd like you to spend some money on this thing, because it will make me more productive. How can you tell if they're serious or merely looking to get free toys?

It's simple: find a non-exempt contractor working on some project, then suggest that giving them the widget will make them more productive. See, unlike the other guy, the contractor is paid by the hour, so increased productivity means less money for him. If the first guy was serious, any contractor worth his salt is going to argue against the widget.

The U.S. company Orient Express complained when Tata tried to buy it, that any association with the Indian company would damage the Orient Express's premium brand.

Responding, R K Krishna Kumar, a senior Tata executive, thundered that "Indian companies ... will take their rightful place in the international arena.

"Enterprises and individuals must recognise and adapt to these fundamental economic changes. We believe that those with a fossilised frame of mind risk being marginalised."

In a world in which we are no longer masters, it is a warning that we ignore at our peril.

For I, who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college.

Network security administrators really get the heebie-jeebies when you say "untrackable and unattributable action".

"It is true that Sepa has a lot of things that aren't generally associated with the stereotypical San Francisco homeless person - like a full-time job. [...] It is also worth noting that Sepa couldn't have done this five years ago. With his Wi-Fi card, cell phone, and PayPal account, he can conduct business, collect a paycheck and apply for his next job from a laptop in a tent in the park.

"This is the most liberating thing of the Internet," he said. "The birdcage is open."

This is of the most-prodigious mysteries of the gamer soul. Theoretically, we love multiplayer games because they offer a dramatic alternative to our shades-of-beige meatspace lives. They let us cast off our mundane existence and become a colorful, empowered hero. And what do we do with this second life?

We behave like obedient workers in a Soviet collective outside Stalingrad, circa 1971. Comrade, your job is to collect potatoes. For seven years. We pay $20 a month for this privilege.

"Being a hedonist is not a disability in San Francisco. That's what the city is all about. You can get loaded every single night of the week, and as long as you show up crisp and ready for work each morning, that's what people care about."

It's time for a reversal of course. Stringent re-regulation of FIRE is not enough anymore. Washington's mission may, at this late date, be an even greater one than Roosevelt's New Deal faced. The government must figure out how to deploy its power to shift the flow of investment capital out of the mine-fields of speculative paper transactions and back into productive channels that will help meet the material needs of American society. Real value must be created in place of chimeras. In the meantime, we all have ringside seats -- in fact, far too close to the action for comfort -- as another gilded age is ending. What comes after is, in part, up to us.

"But why do you need guns?"
"They make it a lot safer to use ammo."

Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute, puts it this way: "Most of the time what [the acquisition process] is trying to achieve is only partially 'equipping a soldier in the field.' It is also concerned with getting a congressperson reelected, advancing the career of a bureaucrat, and making certain that the defense-industrial base is sustained during periods of low demand."

Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.