Article 42637 of comp.sys.cbm: Xref: undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca comp.sys.cbm:42637 Newsgroups: comp.sys.cbm Path: undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca!csbruce From: csbruce@ccnga.uwaterloo.ca (Craig Bruce) Subject: Re: Questions, Questions, Questions Sender: news@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca (news spool owner) Message-ID: Date: Sun, 24 Sep 1995 09:58:07 GMT References: Nntp-Posting-Host: ccnga.uwaterloo.ca Organization: University of Waterloo, Canada (eh!) Mark Perrego writes: >"The sum total of all intelligence in the world is a constant. The population > is increasing" >Guess I got the short end of the stick on that one. :) >BTW. Speaking of PostScript, is there a program that will put PostScript to >the screen? That would be quite nice. Anyone :) >- Mark >perregom@delphi.com >myp99@uno.cc.geneseo.edu >"Variables won't, constants aren't." > - The same book In a similar vain, I recently compiled a list of programmer-isms from the long list of quotations that I have collected over the years. It is included below for those interested... Keep on Hackin'! -Craig Bruce csbruce@ccnga.uwaterloo.ca -----=----- "On-line, adj.: The idea that a human being should always be accessible to a computer." -----=----- "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes." -- Dr. Warren Jackson, Director, UTCS -----=----- "Everything should be built top-down, except the first time." -----=----- "God did not create the world in 7 days; he screwed around for 6 days and then pulled an all-nighter." -----=----- "Real programmers don't draw flowcharts. Flowcharts are, after all, the illiterate's form of documentation. Cavemen drew flowcharts; look how much good it did them." -----=----- "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth -----=----- "Stupidity got us into this mess -- why can't it get us out?" -----=----- "F u cn rd ths u cnt spl wrth a dm!" -----=----- "Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft ... and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor." -- Wernher von Braun -----=----- "Meskimen's Law: There's never time to do it right, but there's always time to do it over." -----=----- "My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right." -----=----- "Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter's Law into account." -----=----- "Unnamed Law: If it happens, it must be possible." -----=----- "Rocky's Lemma of Innovation Prevention Unless the results are known in advance, funding agencies will reject the proposal." -----=----- "The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And littered with sloppy analysis!" -----=----- "The C Programming Language -- A language which combines the flexibility of assembly language with the power of assembly language." -----=----- "Garbage In -- Gospel Out." -----=----- "Real Users are afraid they'll break the machine -- but they're never afraid to break your face." -----=----- "Watson's Law: The reliability of machinery is inversely proportional to the number and significance of any persons watching it." -----=----- "Those who can, do. Those who can't, simulate." -----=----- "Real programmers disdain structured programming. Structured programming is for compulsive neurotics who were prematurely toilet- trained. They wear neckties and carefully line up pencils on otherwise clear desks." -----=----- "Niklaus Wirth has lamented that, whereas Europeans pronounce his name correctly (Ni-klows Virt), Americans invariably mangle it into (Nick-les Worth). Which is to say that Europeans call him by name, but Americans call him by value." -----=----- "Variables don't, constants aren't." -----=----- "Hlade's Law: If you have a difficult task, give it to a lazy person -- they will find an easier way to do it." -----=----- "By doing just a little every day, you can gradually let the task completely overwhelm you." -----=----- "Glib's Fourth Law of Unreliability: Investment in reliability will increase until it exceeds the probable cost of errors, or until someone insists on getting some useful work done." -----=----- "Bolub's Fourth Law of Computerdom: Project teams detest weekly progress reporting because it so vividly manifests their lack of progress." -----=----- "Real computer scientists don't comment their code. The identifiers are so long they can't afford the disk space." -----=----- QUOTE OF THE DAY: ` -----=----- "A student who changes the course of history is probably taking an exam." -----=----- "Imagine that Cray computer decides to make a personal computer. It has a 150 MHz processor, 200 megabytes of RAM, 1500 megabytes of disk storage, a screen resolution of 4096 x 4096 pixels, relies entirely on voice recognition for input, fits in your shirt pocket and costs $300. What's the first question that the computer community asks? 'Is it PC compatible?'" -----=----- "As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error." -- Weisert -----=----- "Every program has at least one bug and can be shortened by at least one instruction -- from which, by induction, one can deduce that every program can be reduced to one instruction which doesn't work." -----=----- "You can't make a program without broken egos." -----=----- "Consultants are mystical people who ask a company for a number and then give it back to them." -----=----- "When in doubt, use brute force." -- Ken Thompson -----=----- "Sex is the mathematics urge sublimated." -- M. C. Reed. -----=----- "The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from." -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum -----=----- "Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's supposed to do." -- R. A. Heinlein -----=----- "One learns to itch where one can scratch." -- Ernest Bramah -----=----- "Deliver yesterday, code today, think tomorrow." -----=----- "No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife in the shoulder blades will seriously cramp his style." -----=----- "Tussman's Law: Nothing is as inevitable as a mistake whose time has come." -----=----- "Fellows' Law: All fixed-size fields are too small." -----=----- "Sometimes the front wheels of the car will turn instantly when you turn the steering wheel, sometimes two seconds later, sometimes ten. It all depends on how many other people are using the road at the same time." - ~Prof. W.B. Cowan, Real-Time prof., in a sardonic tone -----=----- "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is." -----=----- "Operating System: A seething mass of linked lists." - ~David Fellows -----=----- "MACINTRASH /mak'in-trash`/ n. The Apple Macintosh, as described by a hacker who doesn't appreciate being kept away from the {real computer} by the inter- face. The term {maggotbox} has been reported in regular user in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina. Compare {Macintoy}. See also {beige toaster}, {WIMP environment}, {point-and-drool interface}, {drool-proof paper}, {user-friendly}, {user-obsequious}." - _The_New_Hacker's_Dictionary_, 2nd edition, E.S. Raymond (ed.). -----=----- "A distributed system is one in which I cannot get something done because a machine I've never heard of is down" --Leslie Lamport -----=----- "50MHz 486 + Microsoft Windows = 4.77MHz 8088." - Max_Exter@amsbbs.bc.ca -----=----- "C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success." - Dennis M. Ritchie -----=----- "PC Bulletin: Henceforth, sentient computers would like to be known as 'Silicon Intelligences.' 'Artificial Intelligence' is a pejorative term invented by humans based on the mistaken belief that computers are some- how not 'natural.'" - elf@halcyon.com -----=----- "keyboard not connected -- press F1 to continue" -----=----- "Life starts at '030, fun starts at '040, impotence starts at '86" - walter.harms@arbi.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de -----=----- "..the variable PI can be given that value [3.141592653589793] with a DATA statement... This simplifies the modifying of the program, should the value of PI ever change." -Xerox -----=----- "Who is this General Failure and why is he reading my disk?" - uhhjh@alf.uib.no -----=----- "Now is the time for the quick brown fox to jump over the moon." - rblander@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca -----=----- /* Try me and stagger. With x size as parameter! y size=auto scaling!*/float R, y=1.5,x,r,A,P,B;int u,h=80,n=80,s;main(c,v)int c;char **v;{s=(c>1?(h=atoi(v[1] )):h)*h/2;for(R=6./h;s%h||(y-=R,x=-2),s;4<(P=B*B)+(r=A*A)|++u==n&&putchar(*((( --s%h)?(u -----=----- "This msg is shareware. If you like it, and read it often, please send $15..." - Bret Hoeffler -----=----- "Make it possible for programmers to write programs in English, and you will find that programmers cannot write in English." - Hinds' Seventh Law "Make it possible for programmers to write programs in C, and you will find that programmers cannot write in C." - Bruce's Seventh Law -----=----- "I prefer dark chocolate, especially with nuts, but that doesn't mean I should legislate that you have to eat it." --Bjarne Stroustrup -----=----- "Bub*ba (buh' ba) n. Do not use this term to refer to the customer." - Actual entry in AIX Information Development Dictionary. -----=----- "Rolling balls, naturally, won't just stop in mid-track because an XOFF character has been received." - Mark Tildon -----=----- "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo." -----=----- "Two months in the lab can save you two hours in the library." -----=----- "The two most renowned products to come out of Berkeley are LSD and UNIX... I don't think this is just coincidence." - Anonymous -----=----- "... Two most common elements in the universe: Hydrogen & Stupidity." -- QWK -----=----- "Intel Inside: It's not a trademark, it's a warning." -- Maxwell Daymon? -----=----- "... USER ERROR: Replace user and press any key to continue." -----=----- "Over the modem, through the phone line, nuthin' but net!" - Christie Daniels? -----=----- "... Windows NT - from the people who brought you EDLIN!" -- Tommy Hallgren(?) -----=----- "" -- Gregory Seid(?) -----=----- 10 PRINT "HI THERE! WHAT'S YOUR NAME?" 20 INPUT A$ 30 PRINT "FUCK YOU, "; A$ 40 GOTO 30 -- Itay Chamiel(?) -----=----- 'Condition "BRAIN_OVERLOAD$" raised at 5412(0)/12234' -----=----- "No one will ever need more than 640K." - Bill Gates -----=----- "If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy." -- Philip Zimmermann -----=----- Date: Sat, 7 Jan 1995 17:27:43 -0800 From: eee@netcom.com (Mark Thorson) Subject: Revision Level, What Does It Mean??? How should a revision level be interpreted? Here's a quick guide for anyone short of a clue: 0.1 WE GOT A REALLY GREAT NEW WAY TO DO THINGS !!! <0.9 Not ready for prime time. 0.9 We think it works, but we won't bet our lives on it. 1.0 Management is on our case; seems like a low risk. 1.01 Okay, we knew about that. All known bugs are fixed. 1.02 Fixes bugs you won't see in 27,000 years, i.e. more than three times the age of the universe. 1.03 Fixes bugs in the bug fixes. 1.04 All right, this REALLY fixes all known bugs. 1.05 Fixes bugs introduced in rev 1.04. 1.1 A new crew hired to write documentation. 1.11 From now on, no comma after "i.e." or "e.g.". 1.2 Somebody actually changed a functional feature. 2.0 New crew hired to write software. Old crew blamed for bugs. 2.01 New crew sending out resumes to placement agencies. 3.0 Re-write the software in another language, go back ten squares. ... return to line 0.1 -----=----- "If anyone had realized that within 10 years this tiny system that was picked up almost by accident was going to be controlling 50 million computers, considerably more thought might have gone into it." -- Andy Tanenbaum, talking about MS-DOS -----=----- "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." -- Howard Aiken -----=----- "Maxwell's rules of precision: 1: Measure with a micrometer 2: Mark with chalk 3: Cut with an axe" -----=----- "C:\WINDOWS> del *.*" -----=----- "An operating system without virtual memory is an operating system without virtue." - Ancient Inca Proverb -----=----- I am the terror, that flaps in the night! I am the net.failure that eats your e-mail. I, am, Darkw^6%#^ b~=:sY65^% NO CARRIER -----=----- "It's crowded, it's noisy, the music sucks, the food is greasy, the beer tastes like water, there's a high cover charge but the bouncers let their friends in for free, decent conversation is impossible, and you keep getting interrupted by drunken strangers shouting in your ear." -- Prof. Prabhakar Ragde, describing Usenet News -----=----- "Books: You can't grep dead trees." -- Dion Favors(?) -----=----- "Patterns of light On the video screen. Images bright Flow in an endless stream. Bits of information, Logic black and white. Bits and bytes of information Turning darkness to light." -- Bits and Bytes, TVO -----=----- "The correct-English way of expressing the common phrase in Computer Science is 'DATUM structures'." -- ~Prof. David Taylor -----=----- "POINT-AND-DROOL INTERFACE, n. Parody of the techspeak term 'point-and-shoot interface', describing a windows, icons, and mouse-based interface such as is found on the Macintosh. The implication, of course, is that such an interface is only suitable for idiots. See {for the rest of us}, {WIMP environment}, {Macintrash}, {drool-proof paper}. Also {point-and-grunt interface}." - _The New Hacker's Dictionary_, E.S. Raymond (ed) -----=----- "...and remember, the phrase 'software flow control' is only an abbreviation for the phrase 'software flow control problem'." -- Bruce McFarling -----=----- -----=----- "AARGH Captain Kirk! I dinna know if the spell checker can take much more of this" --Douglas Morton(?) -----=----- "We the unwilling, led by the unknowing Are doing the impossible, for the ungrateful We have done so much, for so long, with so little We are now qualified to do anything with nothing" --Tim Goss(?) -----=----- "I know things look good from the top, but decay always travels from the bottom up." --Mr. Poster Children -----=----- "Linux: Choice of a GNU Generation!" --John M. Morris(?) -----=----- "Near as I can tell, complaining about not getting the latest version of Windows is like complaining about not getting the latest version of influenza." --James Nicoll -----=----- "Backups? We doan *NEED* no steenking baX%^~,VbKx NO CARRIER" --H. Lesser -----=----- "From each according to his ability, to each according to his ability." -- Craig Bruce -----=----- "'Programming' is a four-letter word." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "The difference between being able to understand something and inventing it in the first place... is called genius." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "It's hardware that makes a machine fast. It's software that makes a fast machine slow." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "Think Tank, noun: The shower." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "Yeah, but my mousetrap will crawl into the hole, hunt down and corner the mouse, and then pound the crap out of him." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "Yes, but how well does it work for N less than 100000000000?" --Craig Bruce -----=----- "Research: thought for food." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "Necessity is the mother of all reinvention." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "Brucify, verb: To remove all arbitrary limits from a design at great expense and complication." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "Five more... Four more... Keep it going, three more... Two more, almost there... One more... Okay, click and drag... Five more... Mousercising." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "Proposed standard unit of data storage: the 'Virtual Tree', equivalent to 120.8 megabytes." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "Damn! There's a bug in the Quantum Mechanics subroutine. Oh well, maybe they won't notice." - God -----=----- "If God had decided to go with solid state electronics rather than slimy meat and chemicals, we would all have died from boredom long ago while waiting for our limbs to move." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "Whoever invented double clicking should be shot in the head! Twice!!" --Craig Bruce -----=----- "We'll have us a good old fashion 'Bit Burning'!" --Craig Bruce -----=----- "Power interrupts. Uninterruptable power interrupts absolutely." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "Nothing surpasses the beauty and elegance of a bad idea." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "The problem of research is that someone, somewhere, has already done what you are proposing to do. The challenge is to make sure that you don't find out about this other guy's work until after you have graduated." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "Anything on paper is obsolete!" --Craig Bruce -----=----- "Computer Graphics: Painting by numbers... and formulas, and laws of physics, and polygon meshing, and quadrilateral meshing, and ray tracing, and radiosity, and area subdivision, and antialiasing, and fractals, and geometric transformations, and bump mapping, and texture mapping, and splines, and orthographic projections, and Gouraud shading, and Phong shading, and solid modelling, and..." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "When times get tough, the first thing that a company must do is cut all of its research staff. This will remove any doubt about the company's future." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "Books burn at Fahrenheit 451; at what temperature do bits burn? Fahrenheit 98.6." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "Bachelor: learning to get results; Master : mastering getting results; Ph.D. : learning to doctor results." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "At least I know that I had some good original ideas; this other famous guy had them eight years ago." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "System Documentation: A seething mass of inanimate-possive forms." -----=----- Coach to Player: "There's no 'I' in 'TEAM'!" Player to Coach: "Yeah, well there's no 'U' in 'WIN'!" --Craig Bruce -----=----- "You know that your motives aren't entirely pure when you say 'Take THAT!!' when you press the RETURN key to post a news article." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "Pissy, noun: An easier pronunciation of 'P.C.': an MS-DOS Personal Computer." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "...but then, Mathematics is just applied Computer Science anyway..." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "If, after extensive tweaking, your program is still too slow, try dropping a few 'sleep(-1)'s into it." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "Yes, despite its simplicity, your test case is indeed UG-LY-complete." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "Metric Meg, noun: A unit of 1,000,000 bytes of computer storage, as opposed to a standard Meg, which stores 1,048,576 bytes." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "Eureka!! I've found it, a proof that P = NP! And it's so simple. But, unfortunately, there's not quite enough room to fit it in this quotation..." (Bruce's Last Theorem) -----=----- "The Dark Side of _The Source_: inline documentation." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "It may not be such a terrible tragedy if, while cleaning a frying pan, you accidentally scrape off some of the teflon that your food is sticking to." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "A bomb that can destroy an entire city!?? Ridiculous!!" "Men walking on the moon!?? Preposterous!!" "People flying between the stars!?? Absurd!!" --Craig Bruce -----=----- "Mental Inertia: A mind in motion will tend to stay in motion, and a mind at rest will tend to stay at rest, unless acted upon by some outside kick in the ass." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "His mind is like a steel cage: Nothing gets in and nothing gets out." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "Join the Long-Line Boycott. Don't read any line of electronic text that has more than 80 characters on it!" --Craig Bruce -----=----- "My Internet includes anarchy." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "I'd say the odds are about 50/50, plus or minus four percentage points, nineteen times out of twenty, assuming we have a perfectly random sample, and assuming that the sample comes from a mathematically perfect normal distribution." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "But that's bullshit!... er, I mean, requires additional research."--Craig Bruce -----=----- "The Fast Bruce Transform: 'due to time constraints' --> 'because of our poor time management...'." -----=----- "Magalomaniacs of the 20th century: Adolf Hitler, Walt Disney, and Bill Gates. Hard to say which one of them has had the most destructive impact on human society, although one of them is still alive..." --CSB -----=----- "The moral of the 20th Century: 'Do not underestimate the power of electronic telecommunications!'. The moral of the 21st Century: same as for the 20th, except with three exclamation marks instead of one." -----=----- "[Insert random business name here], how can you expect me to take you seriously if you don't even have an Web page?!" --Craig Bruce -----=----- "Here is my bid to save the Internet: its : belonging to 'it' it's : contraction of 'it is' there : not here, but... there their : belonging to 'them' they're : contraction of 'they are' argument : no E after the U John's : belonging to 'John' different : should be followed by 'from' affect : not to be confused with 'effect' 'i.e.,' : 'ie.' is wrong high-school students : the hyphen needs to be there!" --Craig Bruce -----=----- "Bruce's Law: If *nothing* can go wrong, IT WILL!" -----=----- "And then on the eighth day, God said, 'Let there be Internet'. And there was, and God was pleased." -- A passage from _The Revised Bible_ of the year 3995. -----=----- "Bruce's Law: If computing capacity is doubling every year, then software bloat is tripling." -----=----- "If the World-Wide Web is a highway, then Netscape is the toll booth." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "If God had intended for us to fly, He would have given us large enough brains to be able to build airplanes." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "They don't call it a 'noose server' for nothing..." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "The Programmer's Mantra: 'Why? Because it _wasn't_ there.'" -----=----- "Interesting: I don't actually know any doctors who debug _people_."-Craig Bruce -----=----- "My personal design philosophy: 'No compromises, no apologies.'" --Craig Bruce -----=----- "Kids today have video games where we had inexpensive 8-bit computers to play with when we were young. I wonder if they are going to have the same deep technical understanding of how computers work when they get to university that we had, in addition to an incredible eye-hand coordination." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "The Internet has two things in abundance: CRAP ...and wisdom." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "Insight don't come cheap." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "Linux: Ask not what your operating system can do for you; ask what you can do for your operating system." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "Programmer A, after several seconds of thinking: '...Nope, we don't have to worry about that because it can't possibly happen.' Programmer A and Programmer B in unison: 'Better put in an assert()'!" -----=----- (After spending several hours figuring out a stupid bug): "Why does fate have to be so God-damned petty?!" --Craig Bruce -----=----- "Work, n.: That which happens when one's level of frustration exceeds one's tendency for procrastination." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "Life is too short to deal with fucking newbies." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "Battles are not won on the battlefield; battles are won in the laboratory." --Craig Bruce -----=----- "...and since it's done at a lower level of software, it's done at zero cost..." --Craig Bruce