"Life would be so much easier if we only had the source code. "If brute force doesn't solve your problems, then you aren't using enough. "To err is human... to really foul up requires the root password. "Some things Man was never meant to know. For everything else, there's Google." "If at first you don't succeed; call it version 1.0" “The computer was born to solve problems that did not exist before.”– Bill Gates “Software is a gas; it expands to fill its container.”– Nathan Myhrvold "Press CTRL-ALT-DEL now for an IQ test." — (At the time of Win95/98/ME) If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders... ...Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. - Antoine St. Exupery Expert Users: people who break other people's computers. — From the Jargon File. "Do you have a sledgehammer or a brick handy ?" — Top thing you don't want to hear from Tech Support. h “In the future, computers may weigh no more than 1.5 tonnes.” – Popular mechanics, 1949 If you help enough people get what they want, you can have anything you want. -Zig Ziglar “I do not fear computers. I fear lack of them.”– Isaac Asimov Computers can figure out all kinds of problems, except the things in the world that just don't add up. -James Magary I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them. -Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992) "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." -E. W. Dijkstra "Like car accidents, most hardware problems are due to driver error." "The computing field is always in need of new cliches." -Alan Perlis "If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a committee - that will do them in."-Bradley's Bromide "The great thing about a computer notebook is that no matter how much you stuff into it, it doesn't get bigger or heavier." -Bill Gates "Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done." -Andy Rooney "A printer consists of three main parts: the case, the jammed paper tray and the blinking red light" “Programming is like sex, one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life.” — Michael Sinz "To err is human... to really foul up requires the root password." I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them. -Isaac Asimov "Foolproof systems don't take into account the ingenuity of fools." — Gene Brown Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -Pablo Picasso If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into committees. That'll do them in. ~Author Unknown “The computer was born to solve problems that did not exist before.”– Bill Gates "Do you have a sledgehammer or a brick handy ?" — Top thing you don't want to hear from Tech Support A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. -Emo Phillips “Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” \n– Abelson And Sussman “Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.” \n– Alan Bennett “To our human minds, computers behave less like rocks and trees than they do like humans, so we unconsciously treat them like people…. In other words, humans have special instincts that tell them how to behave around other sentient beings, and as soon as any object exhibits sufficient cognitive function, those instincts kick in and we react as though we were interacting with another sentient human being.” \n– Alan Coope “Run for your lives–the computers are invading. Awesomely powerful computers tackling ever more important tasks with awkward, old-fashioned interfaces. As these machines leak into every corner of our lives, they will annoy us, infuriate us, and even kill a few of us. In turn, we will be tempted to kill our computers, but we won’t dare because we are already utterly, irreversibly dependent on these hopeful monsters that make modern life possible.” \n– Alan Cooper “I think it is inevitable that people program poorly. Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.” \n– Alan Perlis “If you have a procedure with ten parameters, you probably missed some.” \n– Alan Perlis “One day ladies will take their computers for walks in the park and tell each other, “My little computer said such a funny thing this morning.” \n– Alan Turing “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.” \n– Albert Einstein “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.” \n– Albert Einstein “Code generation, like drinking alcohol, is good in moderation.” \n– Alex Lowe “If you don’t handle [exceptions], we shut your application down. That dramatically increases the reliability of the system.” \n– Anders Hejlsberg “Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don’t need to be done.” \n– Andy Rooney “Now they can do all these magic things with computers. So you think you get to do something in a movie and you find out you don’t get to really do it.” \n– Angelina Jolie “Don’t document the problem, fix it.” \n– Atli Björgvin Oddsson “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” \n– Benjamin Franklin “In a room full of top software designers, if two agree on the same thing, that’s a majority.” \n– Bill Curtis “Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don’t think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without the talking about the other.” \n– Bill Gates “The computer was born to solve problems that did not exist before.” \n– Bill Gates “The Internet? We are not interested in it.” \n– Bill Gates “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” \n– Bill Gates “How rare it is that maintaining someone else’s code is akin to entering a beautifully designed building, which you admire as you walk around and plan how to add a wing or do some redecorating. More often, maintaining someone else’s code is like being thrown headlong into a big pile of slimy, smelly garbage.” \n– Bill Venners “Pessimists, we’re told, look at a glass containing 50% air and 50% water and see it as half empty. Optimists, in contrast, see it as half full. Engineers, of course, understand the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.” \n– Bob Lewis “On two occasions I have been asked, ‘If you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.” \n– Charles Babbage “Mostly, when you see programmers, they aren’t doing anything. One of the attractive things about programmers is that you cannot tell whether or not they are working simply by looking at them. Very often they’re sitting there seemingly drinking coffee and gossiping, or just staring into space. What the programmer is trying to do is get a handle on all the individual and unrelated ideas that are scampering around in his head.” \n– Charles M. Strauss “Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don’t let anybody else use it, and get a new one every six months.” \n– Clifford Stoll “It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.” \n– Clive James “Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.” \n– Confucius “It’s hardware that makes a machine fast. It’s software that makes a fast machine slow.” \n– Craig Bruce “Looking at code you wrote more than two weeks ago is like looking at code you are seeing for the first time.” \n– Dan Hurvitz “Sometimes … dreams are all that separate us from the machines.” \n– Dan Simmons “Programming without an overall architecture or design in mind is like exploring a cave with only a flashlight: You don’t know where you’ve been, you don’t know where you’re going, and you don’t know quite where you are.” \n– Danny Thorpe “Database: the information you lose when your memory crashes.” \n– Dave Barry “Hardware: where the people in your company’s software section will tell you the problem is. Software: where the people in your company’s hardware section will tell you the problem is.” \n– Dave Barry “I regularly read Internet user groups filled with messages from people trying to solve software incompatibility problems that, in terms of complexity, make the U.S. Tax Code look like Dr. Seuss.” \n– Dave Barry “Spreadsheet: a kind of program that lets you sit at your desk and ask all kinds of neat “what if?” questions and generate thousands of numbers instead of actually working.” \n– Dave Barry “User, n. The word computer professionals use when they mean “idiot.” \n– Dave Barry “As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications.” \n– Dave Parnas “The best way to predict the future is to implement it.” \n– David Heinemeier Hansson “We need above all to know about changes; no one wants or needs to be reminded 16 hours a day that his shoes are on.” \n– David Hubel “Industry executives and analysts often mistakenly talk about strategy as if it were some kind of chess match. But in chess, you have just two opponents, each with identical resources, and with luck playing a minimal role. The real world is much more like a poker game, with multiple players trying to make the best of whatever hand fortune has dealt them. In our industry, Bill Gates owns the table until someone proves otherwise.” \n– David Moschella “Truth is, I wouldn’t know a gigabyte from a snakebite.” \n– Dolly Parton “Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.” \n– Donald E. Knuth “Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind.” \n– Donald Knuth “Home computers are being called upon to perform many new functions, including the consumption of homework formerly eaten by the dog.” \n– Doug Larson “I wrote an ad for Apple Computer: “Macintosh – We might not get everything right, but at least we knew the century was going to end.” \n– Douglas Adams “If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as ‘lines produced’ but as ‘lines spent.’” \n– Edsger Dijkstra “Program testing can be a very effective way to show the presence of bugs, but is hopelessly inadequate for showing their absence.” \n– Edsger Dijkstra “Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.” \n– Edsger W. Dijkstra “The question of whether computers can think is just like the question of whether submarines can swim.” \n– Edsger W. Dijkstra “A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.” \n– Emo Philips “The most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is that if they foul up, there’s no law against whacking them around a little.” \n– Eric Porterfield “Computers can figure out all kinds of problems, except the things in this world that just don’t add up.” \n– Evan Esar “The computer saves man a lot of guesswork, but so does the bikini.” \n– Evan Esar “One of the best things to come out of the home computer revolution could be the general and widespread understanding of how severely limited logic really is.” \n– Frank Herbert “Rebooting is a wonder drug – it fixes almost everything.” \n– Garrett Hazel “In a software project team of 10, there are probably 3 people who produce enough defects to make them net negative producers.” \n– Gordon Schulmeyer “Computers are finite machines; when given the same input, they always produce the same output.” \n– Greg M. Perry “There are three kinds of death in this world. There’s heart death, there’s brain death, and there’s being off the network.” \n– Guy Almes “Where is the ‘any’ key?” \n– Homer Simpson “All parts should go together without forcing. You must remember that the parts you are reassembling were disassembled by you. Therefore, if you can’t get them together again, there must be a reason. By all means, do not use a hammer.” \n– Ibm Manual “Today, most software exists, not to solve a problem, but to interface with other software.” \n– Io Angell “Considering what human beings do and have done to human beings (and to other living things as well) … I can never imagine what the devil people think computers can add to the horrors.” \n– Isaac Asimov “With both people and computers on the job, computer error can be more quickly tracked down and corrected by people and, conversely, human error can be more quickly corrected by computers. What it amounts to is that nothing serious can happen unless human error and computer error take place simultaneously. And that hardly ever happens.” \n– Isaac Asimov “I do not fear computers. I fear lack of them.” \n– Isaac Asimov “There is only one satisfying way to boot a computer.” \n– J.H. Goldfuss “Chess is one thing, but if we get to the point computers can best humans in the arts–those splendid, millennia-old expressions of the heart and soul of human existence–then why bother existing? to produce human art a computer would have to find, feel, absorb reality to the point it is overcome, to the point it sobs for release. A computer perhaps could replicate every possibility but could never transfer the energy art requires to exist in the first place.” \n– Jason Lee Miller “Computers creating art is an upsetting concept mostly because of what it means about humans.’ \n– Jason Lee Miller “We have to stop optimizing for programmers and start optimizing for users.” \n– Jeff Atwood “Hardware: the parts of a computer that can be kicked.” \n– Jeff Pesis “There are two major products that came out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We do not believe this to be a coincidence.” \n– Jeremy S. Anderson “Low-level programming is good for the programmer’s soul.” \n– John Carmack “Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all.” \n– John F. Kennedy “After growing wildly for years, the field of computing appears to be reaching its infancy.” \n– John Pierce “Simplicity, carried to the extreme, becomes elegance.” \n– Jon Franklin “If you think you are worth what you know, you are very wrong. Your knowledge today does not have much value beyond a couple of years. Your value is what you can learn and how easily you can adapt to the changes this profession brings so often.” \n– Jose M. Aguilar “Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.” \n– Joseph Campbell “A computer will do what you tell it to do, but that may be much different from what you had in mind.” \n– Joseph Weizenbaum “Computers, huh? I’ve heard it all boils down to just a bunch of ones and zeroes…. I don’t know how that enables me to see naked women, but however it works, God bless you guys.” \n– King Of Queens “Programming can be fun, so can cryptography; however they should not be combined.” \n– Kreitzberg “I think it’s a new feature. Don’t tell anyone it was an accident.” \n– Larry Wall “The computer is incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Man is unbelievably slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. The marriage of the two is a force beyond calculation.” \n– Leo Cherne “If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it.” \n– Linus Torvalds “If people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.” \n– Ludwig Wittgenstein “The best way to accelerate a Macintosh is at 9.8m/sec/sec.” \n– Marcus Dolengo “Less than 10% of the code has to do with the ostensible purpose of the system; the rest deals with input-output, data validation, data structure maintenance, and other housekeeping.” \n– Mary Shaw “The best way to get accurate information on Usenet is to post something wrong and wait for corrections.” \n– Matthew Austern “Your computer is a backup of your soul, a multi-layered, menu-driven representation of who you are, who you care about, and how you sin.” \n– Michael Marshall “Good specifications will always improve programmer productivity far better than any programming tool or technique.” \n– Milt Bryce “There is only one problem with common sense; it’s not very common.” \n– Milt Bryce “A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history – with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.” \n– Mitch Ratcliffe “Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.” \n– Mitchell Kapor “Software is a gas; it expands to fill its container.” \n– Nathan Myhrvold “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.” \n– Nathaniel Borenstein “It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.” \n– Nathaniel S. Borenstein “Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living.” \n– Nicholas Negroponte “It’s not computer literacy that we should be working on, but sort of human-literacy. Computers have to become human-literate.” \n– Nicholas P. Negroponte “If the code and the comments do not match, possibly both are incorrect.” \n– Norm Schryer “Software is like entropy: It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the Second Law of Thermodynamics; i.e., it always increases.” \n– Norman Augustine “From a programmer’s point of view, the user is a peripheral that types when you issue a read request.” \n– P. Williams “But they are useless. They can only give you answers.” \n– Pablo Picasso “Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.” \n– Pablo Picasso “Everyone by now presumably knows about the danger of premature optimization. I think we should be just as worried about premature design — designing too early what a program should do.” \n– Paul Graham “We used to have lots of questions to which there were no answers. Now, with the computer, there are lots of answers to which we haven’t thought up questions.” \n– Peter Ustinov “Before software should be reusable, it should be usable.” \n– Ralph Johnson “The human brain has about 100 billion neurons. With an estimated average of one thousand connections between each neuron and its neighbors, we have about 100 trillion connections, each capable of a simultaneous calculation … (but) only 200 calculations per second…. With 100 trillion connections, each computing at 200 calculations per second, we get 20 million billion calculations per second. This is a conservatively high estimate…. In 1997, $2,000 of neural computer chips using only modest parallel processing could perform around 2 billion calculations per second…. This capacity will double every twelve months. Thus by the year 2020, it will have doubled about twenty-three times, resulting in a speed of about 20 million billion neural connection calculations per second, which is equal to the human brain.” \n– Ray Kurzweil “There is a popular cliché … which says that you cannot get out of computers any more than you put in. Other versions are that computers only do exactly what you tell them to, and that therefore computers are never creative. The cliché is true only in the crashingly trivial sense, the same sense in which Shakespeare never wrote anything except what his first schoolteacher taught him to write–words.” \n– Richard Dawkins “The difference between theory and practice is that in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.” \n– Richard Moore “There is a computer disease that anybody who works with computers knows about. It’s a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you ‘play’ with them!” \n– Richard P. Feynman “When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove defective code.” \n– Richard Pattis “In the old days, people robbed stagecoaches and knocked off armored trucks. Now they’re knocking off servers.” \n– Richard Power “Don’t explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin.” \n– Robert A. Heinlein “If you automate a mess, you get an automated mess.” \n– Rod Michael “Commenting your code is like cleaning your bathroom — you never want to do it, but it really does create a more pleasant experience for you and your guests.” \n– Ryan Campbell “As network administrator I can take down the network with one keystroke. It’s just like being a doctor but without getting gooky stuff on my paws.” \n– Scott Adams “If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how it’s done.” \n– Scott Adams “Something else has happened with computers. What’s happened with society is that we have created these devices, computers, which already can register and process huge amounts of information, which is a significant fraction of the amount of information that human beings themselves, as a species, can process. When I think of all the information being processed there, all the information being communicated back and forth over the Internet, or even just all the information that you and I can communicate back and forth by talking, I start to look at the total amount of information being processed by human beings — and their artifacts — we are at a very interesting point of human history, which is at the stage where our artifacts will soon be processing more information than we physically will be able to process.” \n– Seth Lloyd “The more you know, the more you realize you know nothing.” \n– Socrates “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” \n– Stephen Hawking “We think that computers are the most remarkable tools that humankind has ever come up with, and we think that people are basically tool users. So if we can just get lots of computers to lots of people, it will make some qualitative difference to the world.” \n– Steve Jobs “It’s OK to figure out murder mysteries, but you shouldn’t need to figure out code. You should be able to read it.” \n– Steve Mcconnell “When you are stuck in a traffic jam with a Porsche, all you do is burn more gas in idle. Scalability is about building wider roads, not about building faster cars.” \n– Steve Swartz “Physics is the universe’s operating system.” \n– Steven R Garman “The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.” \n– Sydney J. Harris “A program is never less than 90% complete, and never more than 95% complete.” \n– Terry Baker “A picture is worth a thousand words but it takes 3,000 times the disk space.” \n– Unknown “A user and his leisure time are soon parted.” \n– Unknown “Apathy Error: Don’t bother striking any key.” \n– Unknown “At least my pencil never crashes!” \n– Unknown “Back up my hard drive? How do I put it in reverse?” \n– Unknown “Computers are like air conditioners. They work fine until you start opening windows.” \n– Unknown “Computers have lots of memory but no imagination.” \n– Unknown “Do files get embarrassed when they’re unzipped?” \n– Unknown “Don’t anthropomorphize computers – they hate it.” \n– Unknown “I haven’t lost my mind; I have a tape back-up somewhere.” \n– Unknown “I just wish my mouth had a backspace key.” \n– Unknown “If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.” \n– Unknown “If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into committees. That’ll do them in.” \n– Unknown “If it draws blood, it’s hardware.” \n– Unknown “In God we trust, all others we virus scan.” \n– Unknown “Jesus saves! The rest of us better make backups.” \n– Unknown “My computer kept beating the pants off me at chess, until I discovered that it was no match against me at kickboxing.” \n– Unknown “Never let a computer know you’re in a hurry.” \n– Unknown “RAM disk is not an installation procedure.” \n– Unknown “The attention span of a computer is only as long as its power cord.” \n– Unknown “The problem with troubleshooting is that trouble shoots back.” \n– Unknown “There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don’t.” \n– Unknown “Those parts of the system that you can hit with a hammer (not advised) are called hardware; those program instructions that you can only curse at are called software.” \n– Unknown “What do you call a doctor that fixes websites? A URLologist.” \n– Unknown “Windows is just DOS in drag.” \n– Unknown “It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.” \n– Unknown