Quotes tagged “geeky”

← All quotes · All tags

The internet treats censorship like damage and routes around it.

— John Gilmore

Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing

—

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.

— C. A. R. Hoare

If you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.

— blue_beetle

Truth decays into beauty, while beauty soon becomes merely charm. Charm ends up as strangeness, and even that doesn't last, but up and down are forever.

— The Laws of Physics

• To the optimist, the glass is half full.
• To the pessimist, the glass is half empty.
• To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
• To the plumber, any liquid in the glass is potential income.

— John Pettitt

In God we trust -- all others must submit an X.509 certificate.

— Charles Forsythe

Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.

— Arthur C. Clarke

Of course, unless one has a theory, one cannot expect much help from a computer (unless it has a theory)....

— Marvin Minsky

God is real, unless cast to an integer.

—

A hacker is any person who derives joy from discovering ways to circumvent limitations.

— Bob Bickford

Because vitually everyone was against us ... I knew we were on the right track.

— Dr. Marshall T. Rose

/*
 * we mean to emit floating-point code. figure out what we want to do,
 * figure out who we are, and do the right thing.
 */

— comment from the portable C-compiler

We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.

— Werner Von Braun

Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window.

— Steve Wozniak

    Welcome to the Adventure shell!
You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike> fight shell
The shell hits! -more- you lose a file

— Dave Morrison

The lack of these features merely serves to make systems programming for the the Transputer an interesting exercise.

— The Helios Operating System, Prentice-Hall, 1989

Instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change.

— FORTRAN manual

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

— Pablo Picasso

Computer software must not only work, it must also appear to work.

— Carl Hewitt

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

— Rich Cook

In our view, everybody is a potential partner -- until they shoot at us.

— Steve Case

Microsoft has a new version out, Windows XP, which according everybody is the "most reliable Windows ever." To me, this is like saying that asparagus is "the most articulate vegetable ever."

— Dave Barry

Microsoft is known generally for imitation rather than innovation. When Microsoft does something new, its purpose is strategic -- not to improve computing for the users, but to close off future alternatives for them.

— RMS

That's our advantage at Microsoft; we set the standards and we can change them.

— Karen Hargrove

We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.

— Robert Wilensky

The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents.

— Nathaniel Borenstein

• We can walk our road together if our goals are the same.
• We can run alone and free if we persue a different aim.

— Install Notes, NetBSD 0.8, 1993

A program is a spell cast over a computer, turning input into error messages.

— Anonymous

A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.

— Raymond Chandler

LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing.

— Alan Perlis

Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle.

— Steinbach's Guideline for Systems Programming

There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence.

— Jeremy S. Anderson