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- Newsgroups: alt.quotations
- Path: sparky!uunet!psinntp!viper!news
- From: jeff@visix.com (Jeff Barr)
- Subject: Quotes...
- Sender: news@visix.com
- Message-ID: <BzznzB.MHz@visix.com>
- Date: Mon, 28 Dec 1992 21:35:35 GMT
- Distribution: alt
- Organization: Visix Software Inc., Reston, VA
- Lines: 1002
-
- Based on the "quantity could be better than quality" theory, here is
- my entire collection of quotable quotes:
-
- ======================
- "DEC 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 is 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."
-
- 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."
-
- Bob Scheifler to
- Vania Joloboff of OSF
-
- ======================
-
- 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."
-
- Richard M. Stallman
-
- ======================
-
- "Why would anyone need a computer of their own?"
-
- "Software comes from heaven when you have good hardware." 1978
-
- Ken Olsen
-
- ======================
-
- "If Ken Olsen's quote is true, then where does software come from when
- you have bad hardware?"
- Gordon Bell '90
-
- "In ten years, computers will just be bumps in cables."
- Gordon Bell (Feb 90)
-
-
-
- ======================
-
- "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 champage, and bitching
- over a cellular phone how miserable life is, something's wrong."
-
- 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."
- Bill Gates
-
- ======================
-
-
- "IBM is going to have an impossible job doing a great Windows clone
- without our cooperation--and I'm not cooperating."
-
- 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."
-
- 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".
-
- -- 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)
-
-
- ======================
-
-
- "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."
-
- -- 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."
-
- -- Eric Wiseblatt
-
- "Did I write that?"
-
- -- Eric Wiseblatt, when he saw the following code:
-
- if (_gsScriptFile)
- {
- _gsScriptFile = NULL;
- free(_gsScriptFile);
- }
-
- ======================
-
- "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."
-
- -- 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."
-
- -- 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 :-)"
-
- -- 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."
-
- -- 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."
-
- -- Vania Joloboff
-
- =====================
-
- "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."
-
- -- 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?"
-
- -- 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."
- -- 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."
- -- 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."
-
- -- Jeff Barr
-
- ======================
-
- "Who'd have thought a nuclear reactor could be so complicated?"
-
- -- 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?"
-
- -- Kelly Bundy
- ======================
-
- "Are you so jaded that even the new TV season doesn't get you going?"
-
- -- Peg 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
- ======================
-
- "Do. Or Don't do. There is no try."
-
- -- 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."
-
- --Martin Brunecky
-
- =====================
-
- "I always wear pants."
-
- -- Mark Dalrymple
-
- ====================
-
- "You can't make cheese without sheep?"
-
- -- 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
-
- =====================
-
- "Its better to starve than to eat poison."
-
- -- Jay Wettlaufer on why we didn't hire Drake Byrum
- ====================
-
- "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."
-
- -- 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."
-
- -- 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?"
-
- -- Nik Ivancic
- ====================
-
- "I try to act like this is a skilled career."
-
- -- Howard Stern
- ====================
-
-
- Enjoy,
-
- Jeff;
-
- \\\ Jeff Barr \\\ "If you reinvent the square wheel, you
- /// Visix Software /// will not benefit when someone else
- \\\ 703.758.2740 \\\ rounds off the corners."
- /// jeff@visix.com /// -- Henry Spencer
-
-
-