Favorite saying

• ""Do the Right Thing." -- Ken Olsen "That's the biggest varmint removal bill I've ever heard of." -- Merle Insinga (after hearing about the severance pay received by Bob Palmer, the last CEO of DEC) "At times like this, it is important to remember that 'Model Rocketry *Is* *Fun*.'" -- Howard Galloway (after a rain storm had flooded the range and campground at NARAM-13, Aberdeen Proving Grounds) "Heaven is a place where you have nice, detailed specs. Hell is the same except the specs are wrong." -- me "Great literature has spaceships." -- me "As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs." -- Maurice Wilkes (re: 1949) "You could sell a mad dog if you kept him long enough." -- Elmer Gallagher, blacksmith, Delaware. "Don't anthropomorphize robots, they hate it when you do that." -- unknown "Floating point numbers are like piles of sand; every time you move one you lose a little sand and pick up a little dirt." -- Kernighan and Plauger "Whenever anyone says, 'theoretically,' they really mean, 'not really.'" -- Dave Parnas "One hacker's bug is another hacker's feature." -- me "When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes" -- Erasmus “Only your friends steal your books” -- Voltaire "Life's hard, and then you die." -- unknown "Life's hard, and then you get reincarnated." -- unknown Ripley: "I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. [Everybody looks at her.] It's the only way to be sure." -- _Aliens_ Aron: "In the standard, let's just say to leave the extension off of the header name in the #include in the source file, and let the compiler either supply whatever default extension it wants, or use the name as a key in a database of pre-compiled headers [or a text library]." C++ Compiler Writers: "The header is in a file with a name that does not end in dot-something." Aron: *sigh* -- me "We could fit any program we needed in 4kW of core. Of course, when you only have 4kW of core, you don't need programs to do very much." -- me "Every human being has a basic instinct: to help each other out. If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search. If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. If an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies. This is so fundamentally human that it's found in every culture without exception. Yes, there are assholes who just don't care, but they're massively outnumbered by the people who do." -- _The Martian_ "Rajas and maharajas can eat what they want... Rules and restrictions are for ordinary people." -- _The Price of Milk_ (1934) by Munshi Premchand, on p 270 of _Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed The World_ (2017) by Laura Spinney "Last night there seemed to be a chance. Anything was possible last night. That was the problem with last nights. They were always followed by this mornings." -- _Small Gods_ by Terry Pratchett, p. 303 "It turns out, however, that the problem of writing and modifying programs for general-purpose machines is by no means trivial." -- _Theory and Design of Digital Machines_ (1962) by Bartee [Harvard], Lebow [MIT LL], and Reed [Rand], p. 197 ("You don't say." -- my reply) "It's the miracle of software. When software works, it's a miracle." -- AB1OC "Figures Don’t Lie, But Liars Do Figure." "Any job requiring the acquisition of new tools is thereby a good one." -- Unknown"