Home computers are being called upon to perform many new functions, including th e consumption of homework formerly eaten

by the dog. ~Doug Larson If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into committees. That'll do them in. ~Author Unknown The problem with troubleshooting is that trouble shoots back. ~Author Unknown Never let a computer know you're in a hurry. ~Author Unknown To err is human, to really foul things up requires a computer. ~Bill Vaughan, 1 969 (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!) Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don't let anybody else use it, and ge t a new one every six months. ~Clifford Stoll User, n. The word computer professionals use when they mean "idiot." ~Dave Bar ry Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. ~Edsger W. Dijkstra Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy. ~Joseph Camp bell Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living. ~Nicholas Negro ponte Three things are certain: Death, taxes, and lost data. Guess which has occurred. ~David Dixon, 1998, winning entry of the Haiku Error Messages 21st Challenge by Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau, sponsored by Salon.com 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. ~From the television show King of Queens, spoken by the cha racter Doug Heffernan After growing wildly for years, the field of computing appears to be reaching it s infancy. ~John Pierce 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 wil l tell you the problem is. ~Dave Barry, Claw Your Way to the Top

But they are useless. They can only give you answers. ~Pablo Picasso, about co mputers Computers have lots of memory but no imagination. ~Author Unknown Chaos reigns within. Reflect, repent, and reboot. Order shall return. ~Suzie Wagner, 1998 As network administrator I can take down the network with one keystroke. It's j ust like being a doctor but without getting gooky stuff on my paws. ~Scott Adam s ("Dogbert") If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how it's done. ~Scott Adams Database: the information you lose when your memory crashes. ~Dave Barry, Claw Your Way to the Top A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human histor y - with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila. ~Mitch Ratcliffe Back up my hard drive? How do I put it in reverse? ~Author Unknown 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 Don't anthropomorphize computers - they hate it. ~Author Unknown Hardware: the parts of a computer that can be kicked. ~Jeff Pesis I haven't lost my mind; I have a tape back-up somewhere. ~Author Unknown I just wish my mouth had a backspace key. ~Author Unknown 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 actua lly working. ~Dave Barry, Claw Your Way to the Top Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin. ~Robert A. Heinlein If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first w

oodpecker that came along would destroy civilization. ~One of Murphy's Laws of Technology A picture is worth a thousand words but it takes 3,000 times the disk space. ~A uthor Unknown If it draws blood, it's hardware. ~Author Unknown In God we trust, all others we virus scan. ~Author Unknown It's not computer literacy that we should be working on, but sort of human-liter acy. Computers have to become human-literate. ~Nicholas P. Negroponte Rebooting is a wonder drug - it fixes almost everything. ~Garrett Hazel, "Help Desk Blues," 2002 Jesus saves! The rest of us better make backups. ~Author Unknown Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all. ~John F. Kennedy RAM disk is not an installation procedure. ~Author Unknown The attention span of a computer is only as long as its power cord. ~Author Unk nown The best way to accelerate a Macintosh is at 9.8m/sec/sec. ~Marcus Dolengo The most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is that if they foul up, ther e's no law against whacking them around a little. ~Eric Porterfield Industry executives and analysts often mistakenly talk about strategy as if it w ere some kind of chess match. But in chess, you have just two opponents, each w ith identical resources, and with luck playing a minimal role. The real world i s 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 tabl e until someone proves otherwise. ~David Moschella Yesterday it worked Today it is not working Windows is like that ~Margaret Segall, 1998 The question of whether computers can think is just like the question of whether submarines can swim. ~Edsger W. Dijkstra

The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers. ~Sydney J. Harris There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and tho se who don't. ~Author Unknown There are three kinds of death in this world. There's heart death, there's brai n death, and there's being off the network. ~Guy Almes Truth is, I wouldn't know a gigabyte from a snakebite. ~Dolly Parton Computers are like air conditioners. They work fine until you start opening win dows. ~Author Unknown Windows NT crashed. I am the Blue Screen of Death. No one hears your screams. ~Peter Rothman, 1998 Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don 't think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without the talking about the o ther. ~Bill Gates There are two major products that came out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We do no t believe this to be a coincidence. ~Jeremy S. Anderson My computer kept beating the pants off me at chess, until I discovered that it w as no match against me at kickboxing. ~Author Unknown Stay the patient course Of little worth is your ire The network is down ~David Ansel, 1998 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 tro uble with computers is that you 'play' with them! ~Richard P. Feynman There is only one satisfying way to boot a computer. ~J.H. Goldfuss Those parts of the system that you can hit with a hammer (not advised) are calle d hardware; those program instructions that you can only curse at are called sof tware. ~Author Unknown 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. ~Dave Barry

A file that big? It might be very useful. But now it is gone. ~David J. Liszewski, 1998 A user and his leisure time are soon parted. ~Author Unknown Apathy Error: Don't bother striking any key. ~Author Unknown At least my pencil never crashes! ~Author Unknown There is a chasm of carbon and silicon the software can't bridge ~Rahul Sonnad, 1998 DOS computers manufactured by companies such as IBM, Compaq, Tandy, and millions of others are by far the most popular, with about 70 million machines in use wo rldwide. Macintosh fans, on the other hand, may note that cockroaches are far m ore numerous than humans, and that numbers alone do not denote a higher life for m. ~Author Unknown Home is where you hang your @. ~Author Unknown To have no errors Would be life without meaning No struggle, no joy ~Brian M. Porter, 1998 I wish life had an Undo function. ~Author Unknown In a few minutes a computer can make a mistake so great that it would have taken many men many months to equal it. ~Author Unknown If Bill Gates had a dime for every time Windows crashes... oh, wait a minute, he already does. ~Author Unknown In the old days, people robbed stagecoaches and knocked off armored trucks. Now they're knocking off servers. ~Richard Power Mac users swear by their computers. PC users swear at their computers. ~Author Unknown 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." ~Douglas Adams

Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft... and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor. ~Werner von Braun Microsoft, where quality is job 1.1. ~Author Unknown Software is slowing faster than hardware is accelerating. ~Martin Reiser, quote d by Nicklaus Wirth, 1995, which spawned "Grove giveth, and Gates taketh away," author unknown, referring to CEOs of Intel and Microsoft Some people can hack it, others can't. ~Author Unknown The inside of a computer is as dumb as hell but it goes like mad! ~Richard Feyn man Unix was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would a lso stop you from doing clever things. ~Doug Gwyn Unix is simple. It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity. ~Dennis R itchie Unix never says "please." ~Rob Pike The Unix philosophy basically involves giving you just enough rope to hang yours elf. And then a couple of feet more, just to be sure. ~Author Unknown Unless in communicating with it one says exactly what one means, trouble is boun d to result. ~Alan Turing, about computers What boots up must come down. ~Author Unknown Windows is just DOS in drag. ~Author Unknown Computers must be female. No one but the creator understands their internal log ic. The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incompr ehensible to everyone else. The message "Bad command or file name" is about as informative as, "If you don't know why I'm mad at you, then I'm certainly not go ing to tell you." Even the smallest mistakes are stored in long term memory for later retrieval. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself sp ending half your paycheck on accessories for it. ~Author Unknown Computers must be male. As soon as you commit to one you realize that if you ha d waited a little longer, you could have obtained a better model. In order to g et their attention, you have to turn them on. Big power surges knock them out f or the rest of the day. ~Author Unknown

The Internet is the world's largest library. It's just that all the books are o n the floor. ~John Allen Paulos The Internet is just a world passing around notes in a classroom. ~Jon Stewart Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant. ~Mitch Kapor, variation of a quote by Jerome Weisner (Getting an education fro m MIT is like taking a drink from a fire hose.) The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow. ~B ill Gates Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach that person to use the I nternet and they won't bother you for weeks. ~Author Unknown National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway. ~Tim May Nowadays, anyone who cannot speak English and is incapable of using the Internet is regarded as backward. ~Al-Waleed bin Talal Looking at the proliferation of personal web pages on the Net, it looks like ver y soon everyone on Earth will have 15 megabytes of fame. ~M.G. Sriram A journey of a thousand sites begins with a single click. ~Author Unknown What, exactly, is the Internet? Basically it is a global network exchanging dig itized data in such a way that any computer, anywhere, that is equipped with a d evice called a "modem" can make a noise like a duck choking on a kazoo. ~Dave B arry I have an almost religious zeal - not for technology per se, but for the Interne t which is for me, the nervous system of mother Earth, which I see as a living c reature, linking up. ~Dan Millman The Internet isn't free. It just has an economy that makes no sense to capitali sm. ~Brad Shapcott While you are destroying your mind watching the worthless, brain-rotting drivel on TV, we on the Internet are exchanging, freely and openly, the most uninhibite

d, intimate and, yes, shocking details about our config.sys settings. ~Dave Bar ry The Internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it is a c omplete substitute for life. ~Andrew Brown Internet: absolute communication, absolute isolation. ~Paul Carvel The Internet is clearly about more than sports scores and email now. It's a pla ce where we can conduct our democracy and get very large amounts of data to very large numbers of people. ~Frank James Advances in computer technology and the Internet have changed the way America wo rks, learns, and communicates. The Internet has become an integral part of Amer ica's economic, political, and social life. ~Bill Clinton One of the Internet's strengths is its ability to help consumers find the right needle in a digital haystack of data. ~Jared Sandberg We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the comp lete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true . ~Robert Wilensky, 1996 You can't take something off the Internet - it's like taking pee out of a pool. ~Author Unknown, 1995 Information on the Internet is subject to the same rules and regulations as conv ersation at a bar. ~George Lundberg Television to brainwash us all and Internet to eliminate any last resistance. ~ Paul Carvel The Internet is based on a layered, end-to-end model that allows people at each level of the network to innovate free of any central control. By placing intell igence at the edges rather than control in the middle of the network, the Intern et has created a platform for innovation. ~Vinton Cerf Hooked on Internet? Help is a just a click away. ~Author Unknown Entire new continents can emerge from the ocean in the time it takes for a Web p age to show up on your screen. Contrary to what you may have heard, the Interne t does not operate at the speed of light; it operates at the speed of the Depart ment of Motor Vehicles. ~Dave Barry, Dave Barry in Cyberspace The Internet has been the most fundamental change during my lifetime and for hun dreds of years. ~Rupert Murdoch

The advent of electronic mail is fostering a revival of "the familiar letter." ~Author Unknown My favorite thing about the Internet is that you get to go into the private worl d of real creeps without having to smell them. ~Penn Jillett The Internet is a giant international network of intelligent, informed computer enthusiasts, by which I mean, "people without lives." We don't care. We have e ach other. ~Dave Barry The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't un derstand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had. ~Eric Schmid t The Internet is a telephone system that's gotten uppity. ~Clifford Stoll Warning: the Internet may contain traces of nuts. ~Author Unknown Twitter is just a multiplayer notepad. ~Ben Maddox The big dispute between the government and Microsoft concerns the Internet "brow ser," which is the piece of software that puts a message on your computer screen informing you that the Internet is currently busy and you should try again late r. As you can imagine, the potential market for this service is huge, so Micros oft would like you to use its browser, and not somebody else's. ~Dave Barry, 19 98 Science fiction does not remain fiction for long. And certainly not on the Inte rnet. ~Vinton Cerf Blogs seem to have two magnetic poles, one attracting friends, the other repulsi ng relatives. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com Sometimes I imagine a get-together where I introduce my family to my blogger fri ends and my blogger friends introduce my family to me. ~Robert Brault, www.robe rtbrault.com Five years ago, we thought of the Web as a new medium, not a new economy. ~Clem ent Mok The Internet is the most important single development in the history of human co mmunication since the invention of call waiting. ~Dave Barry The Internet is the most powerful magnifier of slack ever invented. ~Author Unk nown

Almost overnight, the Internet's gone from a technical wonder to a business must . ~Bill Schrader Laying in bed this morning contemplating how amazing it would be if somehow Osca r Wilde and Mae West could twitter from the grave. ~Dita Von Teese (@DitaVonTee se), May 7, 2009 on Twitter Cutting through the acronyms and argot that littered the hearing testimony, the Internet may fairly be regarded as a never-ending worldwide conversation. The g overnment may not, through the CDA, interrupt that conversation. ~Stewart Dalze ll, ruling on the constitutionality of the Communications Decency Act, 1996 The Net treats censorship as a defect and routes around it. ~John Gilmore, 1993 #undernocircumstances shud sum1 feel its ok 2 tlk lik this. You have 140 charact ers. Use them and stop typing like you're illiterate. ~@Lord_Voldemort7 A computer terminal is not some clunky old television with a typewriter in front of it. It is an interface where the mind and body can connect with the Univers e and move bits of it about. ~Douglas Adams The Internet interprets the US Congress as system damage and routes around it. ~Jeanne DeVoto, take-off on a quote by John Gilmore I believe that social media's greatest gift is in providing every person the for um to be themselves, speak their heart & soul. ~Jeb Dickerson, April 25, 2009 o n Twitter (@JebDickerson), www.howtomatter.com The Internet is full. Go away. ~Author Unknown If addiction is judged by how long a dumb animal will sit pressing a lever to ge t a "fix" of something, to its own detriment, then I would conclude that netnews is far more addictive than cocaine. ~Rob Stampfli A Mission Statement is a dense slab of words that a large organization produces when it needs to establish that its workers are not just sitting around download ing Internet porn. ~Dave Barry If you have a web site, it makes your small business look big. ~Natalie Sequera The Internet is not just one thing, it's a collection of things - of numerous co mmunications networks that all speak the same digital language. ~Jim Clark The Internet is like alcohol in some sense. It accentuates what you would do an yway. If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone. If you want to connect , it makes it easier to connect. ~Esther Dyson

The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. ~William Gibson Every bit of software wants you to be "social." What ever happened to being gru mpy and alone in your writer's fugue? ~Doug Green On Twitter we get excited if someone follows us. In real life we get really sca red and run away. ~Author Unknown No matter how well you know the rules of netiquette, you will eventually offend someone who doesn't. ~Don Rittner There are 5,000 great people for every jerk on Usenet. But that still is a lot of jerks. Proceed with caution and eyes wide open. ~Don Rittner The greatest thing about the internet is that you can quote something and just t otally make up the source. ~Benjamin Franklin I'm a woofer, not a tweeter; a writer, not a telegrapher; an essayist, not an ap horist. ~Richard Turner [W]e're into a whole new world with the Internet, and whenever we sort of cross another plateau in our development, there are those who seek to take advantage o f it. So this is a replay of things that have happened throughout our history. ~Bill Clinton The only social networking I did this weekend was with my family. I actually let the battery on my laptop completely die. ~Betsy Caas Garmon, www.wildthymecreati ve.com A blogger is constantly looking over his shoulder, for fear that he is not being followed. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com After all, it was designed to withstand nuclear war, not just the puny huffs and puffs of politicians and religious fanatics. ~Denise Caruso, about the Interne t And bring me a hard copy of the Internet so I can do some serious surfing. ~Sco tt Adams First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII - and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discover ed graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure. ~Douglas Adams

I had a life once... now I have a computer. ~Author Unknown Just as we could have rode into the sunset, along came the Internet, and it trip led the significance of the PC. ~Andy Grove Sooner or later the Internet will become profitable. It's an old story played b efore by canals, railroads and automobiles. ~Paul A. Samuelson When I took office, only high energy physicists had ever heard of what is called the World Wide Web.... Now even my cat has its own page. ~Bill Clinton, 1996 Using Twitter like a dandelion uses the wind... Spreading messages, not exactly knowing where they might go, some taking roots and blossoming, some making a adv enturous journey through the air but not falling on fertile ground. So what? A process of beauty and joy. ~Detlef Cordes, detlefcordes.org The message for business people contemplating their place in cyberspace is simpl e and direct: get linked or get lost. ~Vic Sussman and Kenan Pollack I calculated the total time that humans have waited for web pages to load. It c ancels out all the productivity gains of the information age. Sometimes I think the web is a big plot to keep people like me away from normal society. ~Scott Adams In cyberspace, the First Amendment is a local ordinance. ~John Perry Barlow A blog is a message in a bottle, both in purpose and likely readership. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com The Internet is an important cultural phenomenon, but that doesn't excuse its fa ilure to comply with basic economic laws. The problem is that it was devised by a bunch of hippie anarchists. ~Thomas Nolle There are three kinds of death in this world. There's heart death, there's brai n death, and there's being off the network. ~Guy Almes The trouble with the Internet is that it's replacing masturbation as a leisure a ctivity. ~Patrick Murray Internet users are flocking to the Vatican's new website (so they say). It turn s out though, that most visitors are there to confess after visiting the Cindy C rawford site. Now, the faithful don't have to kiss the Pope's ring - you just d ouble click on it. ~Author Unknown If Al Gore invented the Internet, I invented spell check. ~Dan Quayle, attribut ed

Describing the Internet as the Network of Networks is like calling the Space Shu ttle a thing that flies. ~John Lester A blogger is an average person who happens to have a need to count his friends e very half hour. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com The Internet is the trailer park for the soul. ~Marilyn Manson The world is poised on the cusp of an economic and cultural shift as dramatic that of the Industrial Revolution. (OK, it doesn't take a genius, or even a litician, to figure out that big changes are afoot when we have a medium that ts someone throw up a virtual storefront on the Web and instantly gain access the global market.) ~Steven Levy, 1997 as po le to

The Internet is a shallow and unreliable electronic repository of dirty pictures , inaccurate rumors, bad spelling and worse grammar, inhabited largely by people with no demonstrable social skills. ~Author Unknown We have technology, finally, that for the first time in human history allows peo ple to really maintain rich connections with much larger numbers of people. ~Pi erre Omidyar America Online customers are upset because the company has decided to allow adve rtising in its chat rooms. I can see why: you've got computer sex, you can down load pornography, people are making dates with 10-year-olds. Hey, what's this? A Pepsi ad? They're ruining the integrity of the Internet! ~Jay Leno 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. ~Dave Barry Spending an evening on the World Wide Web is much like sitting down to a dinner of Cheetos... two hours later your fingers are yellow and you're no longer hung ry, but you haven't been nourished. ~Clifford Stoll Chances are, you now know that the marriage of the computer and the telephone is one of the century's seismic technical and economic developments. In terms of potential social and economic impact, it is often likened to the introduction of assembly-line manufacturing or to the invention of the computer itself. ~Autho r Unknown It was a typical net.exercise - a screaming mob pounding on a greasy spot on the pavement, where used to lie the carcass of a dead horse. ~Author Unknown As the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed, the Internet deserv es the highest protection from government intrusion. ~Stewart Dalzell

Few companies that installed computers to reduce the employment of clerks have r ealized their expectations.... They now need more, and more expensive clerks eve n though they call them "operators" or "programmers." ~Peter F. Drucker Programmer - an organism that turns coffee into software. ~Author Unknown Programming is like sex. One mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life. ~Michael Sinz All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors. ~Author Unk nown Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent ps ychopath who knows where you live. ~Martin Golding Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you are as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you e ver debug it? ~Brian Kernighan Sometimes it pays to stay in bed in Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday's code. ~Dan Salomon [A]nd then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the abilit y to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people wit h the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect mat ch. ~Bill Bryson Another effective technique is to explain your code to someone else. This will often cause you to explain the bug to yourself. Sometimes it takes no more than a few sentences, followed by an embarrassed "Never mind, I see what's wrong. S orry to bother you." This works remarkably well; you can even use non-programme rs as listeners. One university computer center kept a teddy bear near the help desk. Students with mysterious bugs were required to explain them to the bear before they could speak to a human counselor. ~Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike, ab out debugging A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-wa y street. ~Doug Linder All programmers are optimists. Perhaps this modern sorcery especially attracts those who believe in happy endings and fairy godmothers. Perhaps the hundreds o f nitty frustrations drive away all but those who habitually focus on the end go al. Perhaps it is merely that computers are young, programmers are younger, and the young are always optimists. ~Frederick Brooks, Jr. Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand. ~Martin Fowler

Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature. ~Rich Kulawi ec Beta. Software undergoes beta testing shortly before it's released. Beta is La tin for "still doesn't work." ~Author Unknown Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming. ~Brian Kernighan Don't argue with people who write with digital ink and pay by the kilowatt-hour. ~Don Rittner From a programmer's point of view, the user is a peripheral that types when you issue a read request. ~Peter Williams At Group L, Stoffel oversees six first-rate programmers, a managerial challenge roughly equivalent to herding cats. ~The Washington Post Magazine, 9 June 1985 It's not a bug - it's an undocumented feature. ~Author Unknown Version 1 of any software is full of bugs. Version 2 fixes all the bugs and is great. Version 3 adds all the things users ask for, but hides all the great stu ff in Version 2. ~Fred Blechman Writing the first 90 percent of a computer program takes 90 percent of the time. The remaining ten percent also takes 90 percent of the time and the final touc hes also take 90 percent of the time. ~N.J. Rubenking Good code is its own best documentation. As you're about to add a comment, ask yourself, "How can I improve the code so that this comment isn't needed?" ~Stev e McConnell Great software, likewise, requires a fanatical devotion to beauty. If you look inside good software, you find that parts no one is ever supposed to see are bea utiful too. I'm not claiming I write great software, but I know that when it co mes to code I behave in a way that would make me eligible for prescription drugs if I approached everyday life the same way. It drives me crazy to see code tha t's badly indented, or that uses ugly variable names. ~Paul Graham, "Hackers an d Painters," 2003 I really hate this darn machine; I wish that they would sell it. It won't do what I want it to, but only what I tell it. ~Author Unknown One man's crappy software is another man's full time job. ~Jessica Gaston

He who hasn't hacked assembly language as a youth has no heart. He who does so as an adult has no brain. ~John Moore If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the proce ss of putting them in. ~Edsger Dijkstra If you cannot grok the overall structure of a program while taking a shower, e.g ., with no external memory aids, you are not ready to code it. ~Richard Pattis It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consen t 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. ~Nathaniel S. Borenstein It's easy to cry "bug" when the truth is that you've got a complex system and so metimes it takes a while to get all the components to co-exist peacefully. ~Dou g Vargas It's okay to figure out murder mysteries, but you shouldn't need to figure out c ode. You should be able to read it. ~Steve McConnell It's the only job I can think of where I get to be both an engineer and an artis t. There's an incredible, rigorous, technical element to it, which I like becau se you have to do very precise thinking. On the other hand, it has a wildly cre ative side where the boundaries of imagination are the only real limitation. ~A ndy Hertzfeld, about programming We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. ~C.A.R. Hoare, quoted by Donald Knuth Programming is like sex. One mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life. ~Michael Sinz Programming is similar to a game of golf. The point is not getting the ball in the hole but how many strokes it takes. ~Harlan Mills Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of feature , but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features appear necessary. ~Author Unknown Programming languages, like pizzas, come in only two sizes: too big and too sma ll. ~Richard Pattis 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 b etter idiots. So far, the Universe is winning. ~Rich Cook

Programs for sale: fast, reliable, cheap - choose two. ~Author Unknown Ready, fire, aim: the fast approach to software development. Ready, aim, aim, aim, aim: the slow approach to software development. ~Author Unknown Reusing pieces of code is like picking off sentences from other people's stories and trying to make a magazine article. ~Bob Frankston Program, n. A magic spell cast over a computer allowing it to turn one's input into error messages; v. tr. To engage in a pastime similar to banging one's head against a wall, but with fewer opportunities for reward. ~Author Unknown Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without , I thought, proper consideration. ~Stan Kelly-Bootle The best performance improvement is the transition from the nonworking state to the working state. ~J. Osterhout The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct i ncantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things tha t never were nor could be.... The computer resembles the magic of legend in this respect, too. If one character, one pause, of the incantation is not strictly in proper form, the magic doesn't work. Human beings are not accustomed to bein g perfect, and few areas of human activity demand it. Adjusting to the requirem ent for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program. ~Frederick Brooks The only way for errors to occur in a program is by being put there by the autho r. No other mechanisms are known. Programs can't acquire bugs by sitting aroun d with other buggy programs. ~Harlan Mills There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works. ~Ala n J. Perlis One man's constant is another man's variable. ~Alan J. Perlis There does not now, nor will there ever exist, a programming language in which i t is the least bit hard to write bad programs. ~Lawrence Flon We don't manage our time as well as we manage our space. There's an overhead of starting and an overhead of stopping a project because you kind of lose your mo mentum. And you've got to bracket and put aside all the things you're already d oing. So you need reasonably large blocks of uninterrupted time if you're going to be successful at doing some of these things. That's why hackers tend to sta y up late. If you stay up late and you have another hour of work to do, you can just stay up another hour later without running into a wall and having to stop. Whereas it might take three or four hours if you start over, you might finish if you just work that extra hour. If you're a morning person, the day always in

trudes a fixed amount of time in the future. So it's much less efficient. Whic h is why I think computer people tend to be night people - because a machine doe sn't get sleepy. ~Bill Joy When a programming language is created that allows programmers to program in sim ple English, it will be discovered that programmers cannot speak English. ~Auth or Unknown When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove defective code. ~Richard Pattis When you catch bugs early, you also get fewer compound bugs. Compound bugs are two separate bugs that interact: you trip going downstairs, and when you reach for the handrail it comes off in your hand. ~Paul Graham, "The Other Road Ahead ," 2001 You cannot teach beginners top-down programming, because they don't know which e nd is up. ~C.A.R. Hoare In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn. ~Alan J. Perlis The New Testament offers the basis for modern computer coding theory, in the for m of an affirmation of the binary number system. "But let your communication be Yea, yea; nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." Matthew 5:37 ~Author Unknown What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your o wn mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to brea k things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little step s that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've certainly learned something a bout it yourself. ~Douglas Adams

All of the biggest technological inventions created by man - the airplane, the a utomobile, the computer - says little about his intelligence, but speaks volumes about his laziness. ~Mark Kennedy Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and spr ings, and believes it civilization. ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary Modern technology Owes ecology An apology. ~Alan M. Eddison

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. ~Albert Einstein One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work o f one extraordinary man. ~Elbert Hubbard, The Roycroft Dictionary and Book of E pigrams, 1923 For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled. ~Richard P. Feynman If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger. ~Fra nk Lloyd Wright Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation...tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his eg o. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vege tation. ~Jean Arp Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for goin g backwards. ~Aldous Huxley Technology... the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experien ce it. ~Max Frisch Do you realize if it weren't for Edison we'd be watching TV by candlelight? ~Al Boliska Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that i s quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the dut y to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered , without respect to their human consequences. ~Lewis Mumford God never made his work for man to mend. ~John Dryden It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to th e same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome. ~T.S. Eliot, about radio Technology... is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other. ~C.P. Snow, New York Times, 15 March 197 1 Don't get smart alecksy With the galaxy

Leave the atom alone. ~E.Y. Harburg, "Leave the Atom Alone," 1957 The drive toward complex technical achievement offers a clue to why the U.S. is good at space gadgetry and bad at slum problems. ~John Kenneth Galbraith The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-a djusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology. ~E.F. Schumacher, Small is B eautiful, 1973 I am sorry to say that there is too much point to the wisecrack that life is ext inct on other planets because their scientists were more advanced than ours. ~J ohn F. Kennedy The most important and urgent problems of the technology of today are no longer the satisfactions of the primary needs or of archetypal wishes, but the reparati on of the evils and damages by the technology of yesterday. ~Dennis Gabor, Inno vations: Scientific, Technological and Social, 1970 This is perhaps the most beautiful time in human history; it is really pregnant with all kinds of creative possibilities made possible by science and technology which now constitute the slave of man - if man is not enslaved by it. ~Jonas S alk Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps i ts brain. ~J.K. Rowling As far as I'm concerned, progress peaked with frozen pizza. ~From the movie Die Hard 2, spoken by the character John McClane regarding technological advances, screenplay by Steven E. de Souza and Doug Richardson, based on the novel 58 Minu tes by Walter Wager I like my new telephone, my computer works just fine, my calculator is perfect, but Lord, I miss my mind! ~Author Unknown The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people. ~K arl Marx The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster th an society gathers wisdom. ~Isaac Asimov, Isaac Asimov's Book of Science and Na ture Quotations, 1988 When a machine begins to run without human aid, it is time to scrap it - whether it be a factory or a government. ~Alexander Chase, Perspectives, 1966 We are becoming the servants in thought, as in action, of the machine we have cr eated to serve us. ~John Kenneth Galbraith

Man is a slow, sloppy and brilliant thinker; the machine is fast, accurate and s tupid. ~William M. Kelly I'm struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity. Th e transfer is not paying off. Sure, muscles are unreliable, but they represent several million years of accumulated finesse. ~Brian Eno, Wired, January 1999 Use of advanced messaging technology does not imply an endorsement of western in dustrial civilization. ~Anonymous email sig line Once upon a time we were just plain people. But that was before we began having relationships with mechanical systems. Get involved with a machine and sooner or later you are reduced to a factor. ~Ellen Goodman, "The Human Factor," The W ashington Post, January 1987 I think I should not go far wrong if I asserted that the amount of genuine leisu re available in a society is generally in inverse proportion to the amount of la bor-saving machinery it employs. ~E.F. Schumacher Technology presumes there's just one right way to do things and there never is. ~Robert M. Pirsig It is difficult not to wonder whether that combination of elements which produce s a machine for labor does not create also a soul of sorts, a dull resentful met allic will, which can rebel at times. ~Pearl S. Buck The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do. ~B.F. Skinne r, Contingencies of Reinforcement, 1969 The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges h im more deeply into them. ~Saint-Exupry, Wind, Sand, and Stars, 1939 What the country needs are a few labor-making inventions. ~Arnold Glasow Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons. ~R. B uckminster Fuller The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they o ught to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men. ~Havelock Ellis The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The ma n will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from tou ching the equipment. ~Warren G. Bennis It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the

day's toil of any human being. ~John Stuart Mill Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. ~Arthur C . Clarke You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steam-rolle r will not plant flowers. ~Walter Lippmann We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which h ardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. ~Carl Sagan Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains. ~Eric Hoffer We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend o n science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one un derstands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We migh t get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces. ~Carl Sagan Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we c an perform without thinking of them. ~Alfred North Whitehead Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machin es. ~Erich Fromm Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but t hen, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower. ~Alan C. Kay Lo! Men have become the tools of their tools. ~Henry David Thoreau For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three. ~Alice Kahn The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers. ~Sydney J. Harris