FortuneCookies


 * Stupidity is always a capital crime --Larry Niven, The Fourth Profession


 * Haskell tends to be part of the solution for a problem, not a part of the problem itself. --http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Why_Haskell_Matters


 * For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.


 * "It's a dangerous business going out your front door". J. R R. Tolkien


 * There is a very fine line between "hobby" and "mental illness." - Dave Barry


 * Well, any time you find a community whose overall Humor Level is rated at "Homeland Security", it's a pretty good indicator that you don't ever want to have to deal with them. Ever. - Steve Yegge (referring to the Churchhttps://gettingreal.37signals.com/ of Agility http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/10/egomania-itself.html)


 * The best way to accelerate a computer running Windows is at 9.81 m/s² (from an opensuse developers sig)


 * http://www.makezine.com/blog/306528267_7bb0ac881a-1.jpg


 * Brooks's Law: "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."


 * Charles Simonyi's Rosenberg's Law: "Software is easy to make except when you want to make something new. And then, of course, there is the corollary. The only software that's worth making is software that does something new."


 * More Charles Simonyi: "...Programmers today, he often says, are "unwitting cryptographers": they gather requirements and knowledge from their clients and then, literally, hide that valuable information in a mountain of implementation detail--that is, of code...". See http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18021/page4/, penultimate paragraph.


 * The world is divided into two groups of people. Those who have no idea what their doing, and those of us who work for them. Anonymous.


 * ERROR: src/plugins/alsa/alsa.c:603: Could not set hwparams, consult your local guru for meditation courses.


 * Idiot-safe is nice, but it's also expert-proof.


 * "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan


 * Hehe, troll attack on Trolltech :D (on qtopia-announce)


 * In 1969, Goodwin and colleagues published two of the most influential studies in the literature on blackouts (Goodwin et al. 1969a,b). Based on interviews with 100 hospitalized alcoholics, 64 of whom had a history of blackouts, the authors posited the existence of two qualitatively different types of blackouts. People experiencing the first type, en bloc blackouts, are unable to recall any details whatsoever from events that occurred while they were intoxicated, despite all efforts by the drinkers or others to cue recall. Referring back to our general model of memory formation, it is as if the process of transferring information from short-term to long-term storage has been completely blocked. En bloc memory impairments tend to have a distinct onset. It is usually less clear when these blackouts end because people typically fall asleep before they are over. Interestingly, even in the midst of an en bloc blackout, people appear able to keep information active in short-term memory for at least a few seconds. As a result, they can often carry on conversations, drive automobiles, and engage in other complicated behaviors. Information pertaining to these events is simply not transferred into long-term storage.


 * It is recommended that a graphics manufacturer go beyond the strict letter of the specification and provide additional content-protection features, because this demonstrates their strong intent to protect premium content -- http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html


 * Alan Perlis quote: “A programming language that doesn’t change the way you think about programming is not worth knowing” (quoted from [|andy wingos blog]


 * (from www.kernel.org, an email sig) This space intentionally has nothing but text explaining why this space has nothing but text explaining that this space would otherwise have been left blank, and would otherwise have been left blank.


 * from [|oprofile] (they have more): Rules of Optimization: Rule 1: Don't do it. Rule 2 (for experts only): Don't do it yet. - M.A. Jackson


 * The early bird catches the early worm -- Garfield.


 * There is a theory which says that only crazy people work on version control system. There is another theory which says that the first theory gets the causality backwards. - Anonymous


 * PROFESSOR HANSEN: "The technology community has, what, radical elements who want free copying; Open Source people who are barely sane... Thank God for open source. If it weren't for open source, these people would be creating viruses. I consider it basically occupational therapy for these people: to keep them at least not committing serious crimes on the Internet"


 * Python is faster than assembly. Really. Speed is measured as distance divided by time. Someone at CERN said that only 4% of the matter in the universe is known. Well, we can say that there are a few things that don't exist: the tooth fairy, santaclaus and completely specified projects. So the only distance points that really matter are the business idea and the process is implemented, revenue is created. The time python takes between those points way less than with assembly or C, so python is faster than assembly.


 * I think I just had an evilgasm [|oots]


 * One must learn to think well before learning to think. Afterward it proves too difficult. -A. France (from an [|essay] "A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages by Alan C. Kay, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 1972)


 * The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence -- attributed to Edsger Dijkstra


 * I don't trust everybody. In fact I am a very cynical and untrusting person. I think most of you are completely incompetent, right? ... -- Linus Torvalds, excerpt (28:05) taken from From a Google Talk about Git and Source Code Management (SCM) systems sometime in 2007.


 * Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. Donald Knuth (http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html)


 * I may make you feel but I can't make you think -- Jethro Tull, Thick as a brick


 * The Matrix is a system, Neo. The system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around. What do you see? Business people, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of the system, and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.
 * 'Beware,' she recited a personal beatitude, 'those who hunger and thirst after justice, for we /will/ be satisfied'. 'And beware the meek,' she continued, 'for we shall attempt to inherit the Earth'. -- The Dream Master, Roger Zelazny.


 * What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love -- Dostoevsky


 * Server Core comes up with a blank desktop and a single command line window. There's no shell, Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, or any other pointless graphical applications. Indeed, even Notepad--which is available in Server Core--had to be hacked so that it could present an ancient version of the Open Save dialog. -- review of Windows Server 2008 beta 3 from [|winsupersite]


 * "Nell," the constable continued, indicating through his tone of voice that the lesson was concluding, "the difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people - and this is true whether or not they are well-educated - is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations - in fact, they expect them and are apt to be become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward. -- Nell/Constable, Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson


 * Call no man happy until he is dead, Herodotus. (I read it in American Gods, Neil Gaiman. I like authors with first name Neil :).


 * It's always a good idea to replace an infinite set of candidates by a finite set, provided the latter contains the ones we're interested in. -- From Computational Geometry, Chapter 8, page 165-166


 * On the one hand, information wants to be expensive because it is so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other. -- Stewart Brand, circa 1984


 * The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese. -- Jon Hammond


 * Copy from one, it’s plagiarism; copy from two, it’s research. — Wilson Mizner (quote found in Numpy book).

such people shouldn't be allowed to program. -- Linus Torvalds, from [|git] mailing list
 * Some people don't think performance issues are "real bugs", and I think


 * Take all the web usage and YouTube video data Google has been acquiring about us all, glue it to our data down at the credit bureau, tie it to our mobile phone number and our mobile activity, then use the resulting product as both an information service and a database for targeting ads and you have Super Google — the most valuable company on Earth and entirely based on metadata. -- [|Robert X. Cringely, The Pulpit] (a.k.a. Mark Stephens)


 * you're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on - Dean Martin


 * The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance - Robert R. Coveyou ([|rand31])


 * According to legend, in 1876 the first sounds transmitted down a wire were Alexander Graham Bell saying "Mr. Watson, come here. I want you." Compared with Morse's "What hath God wrought!" this is disappointingly banal - as if Neil Armstrong, setting foot on the moon, had uttered the words: "Buzz, could you toss me that rock hammer?" -- [|Neal Stephenson quoting, wired article, circa 1996]


 * .. warranty is void when NOT opened. (about openmoko, from a [|post] by Holger "zecke" Freyther)


 * Suddenly the Dungeon collapses!! - You die... (not original, but seen on my employers ssh login when they kill my "cpu zealous" processes).


 * It occurred to me the other day that I am rather accurately modeled by a thunk -- I frequently need to be forced to completion. -- paraphrased from a plan file. (copied from [|Theodor Tso's thunk.org])

"Master, does Emacs possess the Buddha nature?" the novice asked. "I don't see why not," replied the master. "It's got bloody well everything else." Several years later, the novice suddenly achieved enlightenment. -- John Fouhy


 * Her name was Xaphania. She told me many things... She said that all the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity. She and the rebel angles, the followers of wisdom, have always tried to open minds; the Authority and his churches have always tried to keep them closed. She gave me many examples from my world. -- Serafina Pekkala to Mary Malone, pp 482, The Amber Spyglass, part 3 of His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman.

Someone: Why do you always think you're right? House: I don't, I just find it hard to operate under the opposite assumption" House M.D. Yes, the T.V. Series.


 * Delay is the deadliest form of denial.  -- C. Northcote Parkinson (taken from email sig, unsure of authenticity)


 * Whether you think you can, or think you can't... you're right! / Henry Ford (


 * My thoughts are more in line with those of Jaron Lanier, who points out that while hardware might be getting faster all the time, software is shit (I am paraphrasing his argument). And without software to do something useful with all that hardware, the hardware's nothing more than a really complicated space heater. -- Neal Stephenson, from an on  (paraphrasing Jaron Lanier)


 * I see you like to CHEW, why don't you CHEW on my FIST? -- KUNG FU PANDA


 * On the day *I* go to work for Microsoft, faint oinking sounds will be heard from far overhead, the moon will not merely turn blue but develop polkadots, and hell will freeze over so solid the brimstone will go super conductive. -- Erik Raymond, 2005


 * אלון מעבד עצמו לדעת -- חנן


 * Efficiency, which is doing things right, is irrelevant until you work on the right things. -- Peter Drucker


 * Matt was a very poor student and never went to college. When he got older, he was pleased to discover that no one actually cares. Matt doesn't want to imply that college is bad or anything. He's just saying is all. There's other ways to fill your head. -- (presumably written by [|Matt Harding])


 * The fundamental economics of software developments leads you to open-source software -- David Rivas, quotes by Jonathan Erickson, on DDJ0109


 * "Control of attention is the ultimate individual power," he wrote. "People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them." -- Columnist David Brooks, commenting in yesterday's New York Times on a book by Malcolm Gladwell called "Outliers,"

Yeah, there are legal problems. Yeah, it’s hard to figure out how people are gonna make money doing it. Yeah, there is a lot of social upheaval and a serious threat to innovation, freedom, business, and whatnot. It’s your basic end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenario, and as a science fiction writer, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenaria are my stock-in-trade."
 * Cory Doctorow, Down and out in the magic kingdom, introduction (from 2003, not the newer one), about releasing the book's source:

We have... maybe an hour before the end of the world. Which is cool. That's about when I would /usually/ start cramming for a final
 * Parson Gotti, aka Lord Hamster, Erfworld, the battle of Gobwin Knob, [|Page 124]. (author Rob balder, illustrator Jamie Noguchi)


 * "yeah, I've seen editors like that, but I don't feel a need for them, I don't want to see the state of the file when I'm editing" - Attributed (paraphrased) to Ken Thompson, how em became vi, http://web.archive.org/web/20080103071208/http://www.dcs.qmul.ac.uk/~george/history/


 * Giving a multicore CPU to a programmer is like giving a drink to an alcoholic. Saint Knuth taught us that premature optimization is the root of all evil. I’m here to tell you that virtually all of programming is premature optimization -- [|Jonathan Edwards]


 * אדון סעדי, אין לי סמכות להוציא אותך, אז אני אוציא אותי. -- היו"ר השופט מישאל חשין
 * Out of the [|transcript] of a request to not allow balad and Azmi Bassara to participate in the 2002 elections, from the knesset site


 * -- [|interview] with [|Haruki Murakami]
 * Murakami: I will go on running for as long as I can walk. You know what I would like to be written on my tombstone?
 * SPIEGEL: Tell us.
 * Murakami: "At least he never walked."


 * Life is a chaplet of little miseries which the philosopher counts with a smile. -- Athos, Alexandre Dumas The Three Musketeers.


 * I couldn't really choose, so here is a collection of quotes: http://www.cs.yale.edu/quotes.html


 * Optimize for Happiness - [| 37signals, in the book Getting Real, title of chapter 10].

T. E. Lawrence (http://jyro.blogspot.com/2008/03/clutter-webkit.html)
 * “All men dream; but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.”


 * They didn't have silicon, well, they did have silicon but it was in the form of sand" -- Mehran Sahami, in Stanford / Computer Science, lecture on [|The History of Computing]

Debugging ========= Design - Architect Coding - Engineer Testing - Vandal Debugging - detective
 * Board Quote! http://academicearth.org/lectures/a-wrap-up-of-multi-dimensional-arrays 20:21 Mehran Sahami


 * I think the more time you spend around computers, the more you get impatient with other people, impatient with their errors, you get impatient with your own errors. -- [|Ellen Ullman]


 * מסיבת מפתחות זה הסוג של משחק מלים סבנטיז סליזי שמזכיר לכולנו שאת תת-תרבות הקוד הפתוח הקימו היפים חרמנים. -- Dotan Dimet (Facebook, August Penguin 2009 event wall)


 * A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren't flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it. -- [programming is--.html|Why Programming is a good medium for expressing poorly understood and sloppily formulated ideas] / Marvin Minsky


 * There is the perception that anyone who's got money should throw money at a problem, but I've some experience with that and it's really not a good way for trying to solve problems. -- Mark Shuttleworth, in an [|interview with Andreas Proschofsky from derStandard.at]


 * "... . You can see that, after a while, the civilizations with only short-term perspectives just aren't around. They work out their destinies also. " -- Outsider, Office of the Galactic Census, to Dr. Ellie Arroway. page 361, Contact / Carl Sagan, published 01985.


 * No country for old man. Carlan Jean Moss (~) and Anton Chigurh.
 * C: No -- I ain't gonna call it.
 * A: Call it.
 * C: The coin don't have no say. it's just you.
 * A: I got here the same way the coin did.


 * Another advantage of telling the truth is that you don't have to remember what you've said. You don't have to keep any state in your head. It's a pure functional business strategy. (Hackers will get what I mean.) -- Paul Graham, interview with Jessica Livingston in "Founders at Work" by same (2008).


 * There are two ways to slide easily through life: Namely, to believe everything, or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking - Manhood of Humanity/Alfred Korzybski ([|gutenberg])


 * As for manufacturing details for the XO-3, Forbes further quotes Negroponte as saying. "We don't necessarily need to build it. We just need to threaten to build it." -- Negroponte


 * It is the job that is never started that takes longest to finish. -- J.R.R Tolkien


 * Ah, well. So be it. A convincing veil of sanity was all that most people could manage, anyway. -- Jack Snipe, fictional character from Erf World [|Book 2 Text 21]


 * Successes only last until someone screws them up. failures are forever. (House, Season 6, Opening Chapter, 59:18)


 * ...the general feeling at the time that programming was something that should be doable by uneducated morons picked from the street... -- An interview with Edsger Dijkstra, referring to the american (IBM) attitude to programming during the 1960's (and still relevant today) ([|link])


 * Every application must have an inherent amount of irreducible complexity. The only question is who will have to deal with it. -- Larry Tesler


 * We may continue to think that programming is not essentially difficult, that it can be done by accurate morons, provided you have enough of them, but then we continue to fool ourselves and no one can do so for a long time unpunished. -- Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, EWD273: The Programming Task Considered as an Intellectual Challenge (1969); available from http://userweb.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD02xx/EWD273.html. (read in DijkstraCrisis_LeidenDRAFT.pdf August 2010)
 * At the time the 80387 was introduced, Intel attempted to correct a serious flaw in the design which arose from the fact that it was impossible for someone in Santa Clara and someone in Israel to be awake at the same time. -- William Kahan when interviewed by [|DDJ]


 * many eyes may make for shallow bugs, but many hands make for shitty design - Jacob Kaplan-Moss


 * I was not aware irony had military usage - Posca sasses, From the TV series Rome, season 1, chapter 6, quote of Julius Ceaser's main slave.


 * רוב האנשים מאוד קשובים. אם הרופא שלהם אומר להם ללכת הביתה למות הם הולכים לבית ומתים. -- 29:40
 * גראס באישור רופא, החבר המטפס של אברי גלעד.


 * Complexity, as it turns out, is not particularly viral. -- Evegeny Morozov, The Meme Hustler


 * What do you make of a society that is so primitive that it clings to the belief that certain words in its language are so powerful that they could corrupt you the moment you hear them -- Swenson, John (March 1980), Frank Zappa: America's Weirdest Rock Star Comes Clean, High Times


 * Finally, crowd sourced science is winning, justice shouldn't be too far behind. Justice Brandise was right: The states are the laboratories -- http://www.webmd.com/news/breaking-news/marijuana-on-main-street/lundberg-marijuana 1:25 Dr. George Lundberg at large for Medscape, Marihuanna on Main street.