From: jeff@visix.com (Jeff Barr)
Subject: Quotes...
Date: Mon, 28 Dec 1992 21:35:35 GMT
Distribution: alt
Organization: Visix Software Inc., Reston, VA

Based on the "quantity could be better than quality" theory, here is
my entire collection of quotable quotes:

======================
"DEC is to software as McDonalds is to fried chicken."

I firmly believe that Bill Gates has single-handedly put
personal computers back ten years or more by his actions.
							Peter da Silva

======================

"If you believe the sky is falling, you are doomed to an eternity
 of fighting silly patents."

"You can't seriously expect people to help you, based on a nearly
 content-free statement like this."

"One thing failing is a nightmare?  You must have very gentle dreams."

"The inanity we have to put up with is constantly amazing."

"Well geez, why didn't you solve all the world's problems in 30 seconds
 when I wished on a star three years ago?"

"I told myself to ignore this message.  I told myself to ignore this message."

"I must say, I am continually amazed at the willingness of the public to
 demand arbitrary amounts of work from other people."

"Haven't you learned yet that X is a vendor conspiracy to sell more memory and
 disks?

"I'd like unmarked $20's in used suitcases, please."

"Many people out there seem to feel that we're public servants and should
 be willing to go to arbitrary lengths to do whatever is demanded in the
 way of providing public services.  Sorry, that isn't the case."

~I find the Mac quite difficult to deal with, but then perhaps I'm weird."

"It doesn't seem like that much of a hack to me, but then I'm jaded by the
 rest of X."

"Xt has plenty of routines that are not required to be used (or that should 
never be used :-), I suppose one or two more won't kill us."

"Formal standardization is supposed to stop useful changes."

"With the Consortium income this year, perhaps it is just as well that
 I not venture near Las Vegas."

"My how time flies when you're close to a release."

"Somebody has to do some work Vania, we can't just depend on magic."

"The more time I have to spend composing responses, the less time there
will be to implement anything you might convice me of."

"I suspect Motif will not run on a pdp11."

"It is generally impossible to preclude vendors from doing whatever
 evil they feel is inappropriate."

"Its not clear that I want X to be my life's work."

"I believe there are about 10^10 more fruitful discussions we could have
 than this one."

"I think you're going off the complexity scale again. "

"Standards are pretty useless if you have to carve them up into random
 subsets not defined by the standard in order to write portable code."

"I think it's all psychological."

"I don't really see this as a problem."

"I am not interested in catching up deficient operating systems; perhaps 
 you have rws confused with rms."

"I'd prefer to avoid standardization by implementation donation."

"I guess I'll take your word for it, but it sounds completely broken to me."

"Bug reports are not the mechanism to get the specification changed."

"All of these trivial amounts of code are adding up fast, though."

"I agree that it isn't as simple as it seems."

"Not even Maxwell Smart would be fooled."

"I prefer not to predict the future too far in advance."

"The history of i18n is that most people look for every possible excuse to
 avoid the issue."

"Let's be pragmatic here."

"Is this discussion is helping anyone?"

"This is too abstract for me to deal with."

"Except I have no idea what an object is."

"You say potato, I say potatoe, I guess."

"I'll see your object, trade a process, and raise you a Thing."

"If your users expect new functionality can always be magically added to
 old applications, you need to educate your users."

"You appear to want an instantaneous answer to a problem that has 
existed for 4 years. One might question how important this problem 
can be if it has taken you 4 years to find it!" 

"I'm not convinced of the truth of this statement."

							Bob Scheifler

"You must live in a simple environment if nothing made you think of it
until now. :-)"
						Bob to Clive Feather
						of IXI about portability

"When you guarantee perfection in all OSF software, I will think about using
 the word "guarantee"."
 
"I am absolutely not going to start exporting random C library
 functions out of libX11.a, just because you haven't figured out how to
 deal with multi-platform configuration yet."
 
			                        Bob Scheifler to 
						Vania Joloboff of OSF 

======================

An architecture in hand is worth 4 or 5 in vapor."

"Programming would be a more respectable profession if evolution worked on us."

							Eugene Miya

======================

"I prefer to put the open-brace on a separate line."

"Please don't ask when version 2 will be released; we generally don't
know the answer to questions of that sort."

"Software hoarding is not a victimless crime."

"Boycotting everyone is not practical."

							Richard M. Stallman

======================

"Why would anyone need a computer of their own?"

"Software comes from heaven when you have good hardware." 1978

							Ken Olsen

======================

"If Ken Olsen's quote is true, then where does software come from when
you have bad hardware?"
							Gordon Bell '90

"In ten years, computers will just be bumps in cables."
						        Gordon Bell (Feb 90)



======================

"If a compiler emits correct code purely by divine guidance and
has no memory at all, it can still be a C compiler."

"Oops.  My brain was on fire.  Sorry about that."

"They were supposed to be green."

"Being in print does not make it true."
							Chris Torek

======================

"Only the bad guys are allowed to have guns in D.C."

"Without computers you're nothin in the 90's."

"Theory, Shmeory.  You don't need no theory.  You just want to pop the
lid and replace the right widget."

"In life you don't get what you deserve.  You get what you negotiate."

"TV - The best babysitter ever invented."

"West Virginia is the place to be.  Folks are closer there genetically."

"By the way if you are hating life because you are hating your job, you are 
 doing the wrong job, plain and simple."

"If you could be riding in a limousine, sipping champage, and bitching
 over a cellular phone how miserable life is, something's wrong."

							Greaseman

======================

"Hey Steve, just because you broke into Xerox's store before I did and took
the TV doesn't mean I can't go in later and take the stereo."

"I've been in this industry 15 years and I've made more mistakes than
anybody else I know."

"Who was that guy -- Paul Heckel -- who thought that having a couple of
 cards on the screen at a time is a breakthrough idea?  My mom's recipe
 cards work like that too."

"The worst thing that could happen is that I could trip on the steps
 of the FTC and kill myself."

"My job is to worry.  Pick any year and you'll find 10 people going
 for my throat."

"I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating
 system, and possibly program, of all time."

"IBM is in a class of its own in terms of spending money in inefficient ways."

"I think it would be pretty bizarre if OS/2 finds any popularity."

"How many companies can stay around if they're selling state-of-the-art
 operating systems for under $50?  I do the math, and it comes out to
 be about one."

"Size works against excellence."

"There's no reason the CEO has to write C code."

"Man, I'd give anything to be as articulate as Steve Jobs."

"Unix has more different user interfaces than there are in every other
 operating system put together.  It's a great surprise how fragmented the
 Unix world is."

"An important thing to keep in mind is that the ordinary TV set that will
 be on the shelves later this decade will be a more powerful computer
 than today's workstations."
							Bill Gates

======================


"IBM is going to have an impossible job doing a great Windows clone
without our cooperation--and I'm not cooperating."

							Steve Ballmer
======================

"I used to be disgusted; now I'm just amused."

"As I walk through this wicked world - searching for light in the
 darkness of insanity - I ask myself is all hope lost?  Is there
 only pain and hatred and misery?"

"What's so funny about peace, love and understanding?"

"Where is the harmony?"

"If you're out of work or out of luck - we could send you to 
 Johannesburg."

"And I would rather be anywhere else but here today."

"I've got a feeling -- I'm gonna get a lot of grief."

							Elvis Costello

======================

"I wouldn't be surprised if the architecture of Intel's microprocessors
were eventually linked to the eventual fall of mankind."

"It's nothing short of sheer, unadulterated lunacy to even briefly 
 entertain the notion that anything useful could ever possibly evolve from
 this ill-begotten and desperate shotgun marriage between IBM and Apple."

							Steve Gibson

"Is Bill Gates worried?  Hah! He's probably dancing on his rooftop and
ordering another 40-car garage for his home."

					Steve Gibson on the IBM/Apple alliance
======================

"Parity is for farmers."
	-- Seymour Cray, when asked why he didn't have parity in his 
	   machines.

"I guess farmers buy a lot of computers."
	-- Seymour Cray, when asked why he put parity into his next
	   generation of computers.

======================

"For historical reasons, these hints are indicated by names that contain
the word "Blue."

	-- Adobe Type 1 Font Format

======================

"Once you've offered a feature you can never, never take it away again.  Or
at least, not for 10 to 15 years."

"Say that we produce a new DOS that won't run Lotus 123.  Inside every pack,
we'll include a piece of paper that says,
	"Lotus 123 doesn't run because they used a feature 4 years ago
		that we warned them we would drop.  And so we did.  So it's
		their fault, not ours.""

"You guys have too Machiavellian a model of Microsoft's approach."

"The OS/2 API will fail."
	-- Gordon Letwin

======================

"The problem with X is that it's overadequate"

"Steve Jobs said two years ago that X is brain-damaged and it will be gone
in two years.  He was half right."

	-- Dennis Ritchie

======================

"We all know UNIX can do anything, because its NP-complete."
	-- Ray Anderson

======================

"I think there's something to be said for a completely random user-interface
policy - it keeps the users guessing, making life more interesting for people
who deal with the casual X users.  As for the screen display, at least you
can't claim that people are mesmorized by sexy glitz which distracts them from
the work at hand."

"If you've got the time, we've got the tapes."

	-- Keith Packard


======================

"The viability of standards is inversely proportional to the number of people
on the committee."

	-- James Warner


======================

"Dennis Ritchie is twice as bright as Steve Jobs and only half wrong."

	-- Jim Gettys

======================

"I have never seen anything fill up a vacuum so fast and still suck."

	-- Rob Pike on X

======================


"99% of all statistics are made up on the spot."

 	-- Bruce Karsh


======================


"Rule:  It is a mistake to use the manufacturer's special call instruction".

	-- Ken Thompson


======================


"It turns out that a decimal point by itself is equivalent to '0.0'.  Let's
 hope people don't use that fact".

	-- Don Knuth (Somewhere in the TEX source)


======================


"If you reinvent the square wheel, you will not benefit when someone else
rounds off the corners."

"Those who do not understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it -- badly."

	-- Henry Spencer


======================

"That's what happens when you give girls computers."

"Once you know the outcome, the problem is no longer interesting."

"I'll leave.  That'll be one less cook to spoil the broth."

"Whatever happened to function?"

"You're making the same mistake that I did -- assuming people are capable of
figuring out obvious behavior when in practice they're not."

"I'd rather not get it on than not get it off."

	-- Eric Wiseblatt

"Did I write that?"
	
	-- Eric Wiseblatt, when he saw the following code:

		   if (_gsScriptFile)
		   {
		      _gsScriptFile = NULL;	 
		      free(_gsScriptFile);
		   }

======================

"I would rather be stranded on a desert island with Roseanne Barr than use
 C++, but many of you are giving it a whirl."

	-- Steve Jasik

=====================

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence
over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."

	-- Dick Feynman

=====================

"Excuse me while I open Pandora's box."

	-- Ed Berard

=====================

"It would have been cheaper to mount one of our regular telescopes on 
a 81 mile high stack of $50 bills."

	--  Dave Barry on the Hubble Telescope  

=====================

"Congratulations.  You aren't running Eunice."

	-- The Configure script by Larry Wall

=====================

"When's the last time you read an X header for documentation?"

"The best way to keep me out your code is to fix it yourself."

"Blech."

	-- Andrew Bernard


=====================

"100 pages of comments will not make a poorly written page of code not suck"

	-- Robert Mollitor

=====================

"64-bit integers aren't silly.  For instance Bill Gates, of Microsoft
fame, is now worth more than $4 billion.  You can't represent his net
worth in 32 bits in dollars, let alone cents."

	-- Charlie Price

=====================

"The Color Manager is your friend."

"I'm not object oriented."

"We don't know anything."

	-- Chad Bisk
=====================
"I'd be glad to throw the ANSI C committee a retirement party, if they
 won't ever meet again for the next 10 years.  I'm serious."

	-- John Gilmore

=====================
"Every mistake in the computer industry gets made at least 3 times: once 
by mainframe folks, once by minicomputer folks, and at least once by 
microprocessor folks."

"Fortunately, all of this good stuff that makes computers easier to use
 just burns up mips like crazy, which always makes me happy :-)"

	-- John Mashey

=====================

"The problem with being the company wizard is that when things like
 this happen there is only one person who could have pulled it off."

	-- Joe Newcomer

=====================

"Those that can do, do; that that cannot form consortia."

"The only form of strategic partnership that works is a purchase order."

"I'd rather have needles stuck in my eyes than to have NextStep run on
 Sun workstations."

	-- Scott McNealy

=====================

"You may argue this philosophy is broken. But this is the way it is.
 Hundreds of DEC-Windows programmers have lived with it, some of them 
 even like it."

	-- Vania Joloboff

=====================

"Nobodys perfect--certainly not me."

"The need for maintenance and support is a bug, not a feature."

"I'll be damned if I'm going to let the success of my talk depend on 
 a piece of mechanical equipment."

	-- Amanda Walker

=====================

"My life that is lived is no more than a token."
	
	-- Midnight Oil


======================

"What about the poor mouseless keyboard user (that one fella for whom
 we have all spilled so many tears and so much blood :-)."

	-- Libby Hanna

======================

"Guys, just remember, if you get real lucky, if you make a lot of money,
 if you go out and buy a lot of stuff-- it's gonna break.  You got your 
 biggest, fanciest mansion in the world.  It has air conditioning.  It's
 got a pool.  Just think of all the pumps that are going to go out.  Or
 go to a yacht basin any place in the world.  Nobody is smiling, and I'll
 tell you why: something broke that morning.  The generator's out; the 
 microwave oven doesn't work; the captain's gay; the cook's quit.  Things
 just don't mean happiness."

"Washington's principal contribution to American industry is to try to 
 break its legs every day."

	-- H. Ross Perot


======================

"A bill has passed in the assembly that would require the licensing of
computer programmers -- to protect the public interest, of course.
Lord knows the number of times I've been accosted in pizza parlors,
late at night, by renegade bands of unlicensed programmers. Well, now
we'll be able to control these low-lifes."

			-- John M. Ritter

======================

"The real hand is better than the virtual one."
			
			-- Barry Hunter

======================

"My experience has been that creating a compelling new technology is so much
 harder than you think it will be that you're almost dead when you get to 
 the other shore."

"Bill will tell you Windows can do everything, what do you expect him to
 say?"

			-- Steve Jobs

"When monopolies come into play, innovation slows down."

			-- Steve Jobs on why he is porting NeXStep to
			   Intel hardware to compete with Windows.

"We don't want just anybody putting software on this machine."

			-- Steve Jobs, on why there is no Floppy on
			   the NeXT cube.

"It's sitting on someone's desk today who thinks its a dirt clod and doesn't
 realize there's a diamond inside."

		-- Steve Jobs on why IBM never released NextStep for AIX

======================

"Hi there."
			-- Peter Gabriel



======================

>> >From THE ECONOMIST, 14 September 1991, p. 106:
>>     "The Russians were rooked."  The KGB paid several thousand
>>     dollars for a word processor, called GNU Emacs, which is widely
>>     distributed free in western universities.

======================

"You want to feel good about where you shop, and we respect that."

			-- President of K-Mart

======================

"Luckily, most people aren't so stupid as to believe that copying a
 letter will bring them good luck."

			-- Gene Spafford

======================

"Motorola spends more on scrap than MIPS Computer Systems spends on
 its RISC development".
			
			-- Ron Skates

 
======================

"The two main design principles of the NeXT machine appear to be revenge 
 and spite."
			-- Don Lancaster

======================

"Knowledge is power.  Power is 110VAC, 60 Hz."

"The more things change, the bigger the diffs."

"Nothing beats a Bug."

"If you don't like the way I program stay out of my core dumps."

"Nobody wants to be first but everyone wants to be second."

"It takes a long time to be an instant success."

			-- Jeff Barr

======================

"Who'd have thought a nuclear reactor could be so complicated?"

			-- Homer Simpson
======================

"DEC didn't know what C was when they wrote their compiler, so it
 implements a language closely resembling, but not identical to, K&R C,
 or perhaps ANSI C, or something like that."

			-- Joe Newcomer
======================

"Russia was bound to fall.  It was already on the edge of the map."

"What do I look like, an idiot?"

			-- Kelly Bundy
======================

"Are you so jaded that even the new TV season doesn't get you going?"

			-- Peg Bundy
======================

"Remember -- illiterate people can't read these suggestions."

			-- Marilyn vos Savant

======================

"If you put a bowl of nuts in your living room for company to munch on, 
 do you throw it in the trash after they leave? Of course not: you dump 
 the unused nuts back in the bag and put the bowl away."

" Since I took the job of Product Manager, I am ipso facto the dumbest 
 person here..."

			-- Mark Myers
======================

"Do.  Or Don't do.  There is no try."

		 	-- Yoda
=====================

"Even the greatest stars lives their lives in the looking glass."

			-- Kraftwerk

=====================

"I'm an anomaly." 

"I'm a rip their eyeballs out, suck their skulls dry kind of guy."

			-- Barry Libenson

=====================

"I Think I need a Lear Jet."

"Don't be afraid to care."

"And then one day you turn to find -- ten years have gone behind you."

			-- Pink Floyd
=====================

"COBOL makes instant programmers out of permanent idiots."

"Before we work on artificial intelligence why don't we do something
 about natural stupidity?"

			-- Steve Polyak

=====================

"I am getting convinced that OSF has decided to do a mercy killing of Motif."

			--Martin Brunecky

=====================

"I always wear pants."

			-- Mark Dalrymple

====================

"You can't make cheese without sheep?"

			-- Tom Carstensen

"I know nothing."

			-- Tom Carstensen
			   Witnessed by Linda Thomas
==================== 

"To think of numbering the whole thing sequentially would definitely
make me jump off a bridge."

			-- Denise Kirwan, on why the Galaxy manual is
			   numbered per-chapter

==================== 

"California tumbles into the sea.  That'll be the day I go back to
 Annandale."
			-- Steely Dan

====================

"I'm not into your past or future.  I just like your nose."
			-- The Who
====================

"PL/I and Ada started out with all the bloat, were very daunting
languages, and got bad reputations (deservedly).  C++ has shown that
if you slowly bloat up a language over a period of years, people don't
seem to mind as much."

			-- James Hague

=====================

"Windows was supposed to be a stepping stone to OS2.  In fact, it stepped all
 over OS2."

			-- Tom McConnell

====================
"If the committee members insist on standardizing on bugs, there is 
 nothing the rest of us can do about the situation -- except point out 
 the stupidity of such actions."

			-- Jim Adcock
=====================

"I'm not a Unix historian.  I don't care."

"I was a piece of yogurt."


			-- Roell Pieper, USL CEO

=====================

"Its better to starve than to eat poison."

			-- Jay Wettlaufer on why we didn't hire Drake Byrum
====================

"And they sit and the bar and put bread in my jar and say, Man what are
 you doing here?"

			-- Billy Joel

====================

"Note that we do not claim that *all* Self programs are x% of C - just the
 benchmarks."

			-- Urs Hoelzle

====================

"But it sure is easier just to sit back and bitch than to actually try to
 make yourself heard."

			-- Jim Edwards-Hewitt

====================

"If a company is stupid enough to go to sleep on the floor of the elephant's
 cage, then it deserves to be stepped on."

			-- Mark Eppley

====================

"Mice are not good for signing your name."
			-- Adam Kao

====================

"Subclassing: a legal means by which a programmer can appropriate and use
 code and objects developed by others."
			-- Mike Klein

====================

"While Mother Nature doesn't publish source, she winks benignly at all
 those physicists who spend all their time reverse engineering."

			-- Stephen J. Turnbull

====================

"Most programmers are pretty good at estimating their programming
 time, but don't seem to realize that they may only get half of their
 day to program in."

			-- Rolf Wilson

====================

"Crazy on a ship of fools."
			-- Robert Plant

====================

"Maybe my definition of \"Open\" is different than OSF's."

"Sorry for the religion."
			-- Tom LaStrange
====================

"A world where Bill Gates controls all of our choices really does scare me."

			-- Will Estes

===================

"Apple is like the Chinese Cultural Revolution conducted by people in
 three-piece suits."

			-- John Barlow
===================

"In a nutshell, I started this little company called Lotus and made
 this software product that several million people wound up buying.  The
 little company turned into this enourmous thing with thousands of employees
 making hundreds of millions of dollars a year.  And it felt awful to
 me.  so I left.  I just walked away one day."
		
			-- Mitch Kapor

===================

"Information can't be stolen."

"I'm an information addict."

			-- R.U. Serius

===================

"The more digital society gets, the more we'll be able to completely
 change money.  We'll be able to change a date on a document.  We'll be
 able to add a figure to a bank balance.  We'll be able to change a 
 'No' to a 'Yes'.  How do you trace things like that?  If you're a good
  programmer, there are no fingerprints."

			-- Emmanuel Goldstein, publisher of 2600

====================

"I've been watching all this, and am thoroughly confused."

			-- Clive Feather

====================

"No architecture, no matter how many fortunes it has built, lasts
 forever."
			-- Jim Manzi

====================

"There is too much stupidity in this world, and laziness is its best
 friend."

			-- Dennis Tabuena
====================

"If there are any more ways I can make this more confusing, please 
 let me know."

			-- Robert Dorsett

====================

"You just flunked Economics."
			-- Rick Schaut

====================

"Why don't we fire the salespeople?"

			-- Nik Ivancic
====================

"I try to act like this is a skilled career."

			-- Howard Stern
====================


Enjoy,

Jeff;

\\\ Jeff Barr      \\\	  "If you reinvent the square wheel, you 
/// Visix Software ///     will not benefit when someone else
\\\ 703.758.2740   \\\	   rounds off the corners."
/// jeff@visix.com ///	  		-- Henry Spencer