Smith & Wesson: The original point and click interface.

Between our dreams and actions lies this world.
(Bruce Springsteen, "Dead Man Walking")

Help stamp out, eliminate, and abolish redundancy!

OpenVMS - Where do you want to BE today?

The trick is to keep an open mind,
without it being so open that your brain falls out.

The MS Chant:
One OS to rule them all
One OS to find them
One OS to bring them all
And in the Darkness bind them.
(with apologies to J.R.R. Tolkien)

Gravity is a myth, the Earth sucks!

There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX.
We don't believe this to be a coincidence.
(Jeremy S. Anderson)

There are three kinds of death in this world:
Brain death, Heart death, and being off the Net.

f u cn rd ths, u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgrmmng

At DIGITAL, we don't just make high-performance computers.
We make high-performance customers.
(from a DEC advertisement)

Microsoft: To badly go where more clever people have avoided going.

Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in
the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
(from 'Calvin and Hobbes' by Bill Waterson)

Perfection is reached,
not when there is no longer anything to add,
but when there is no longer anything to take away.
(Antoine de Saint-Exupry)

We the willing, 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.

There are three kinds of death in this world:
Brain death, Heart death, and being off the Net.

The reasonable adapts himself to the world;
the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
(George Bernard Shaw)

The Superior Guide to Using Windows:
1.) Open Windows.
2.) Throw Windows CDROMs out of Windows.
3.) Close Windows.

Information is not knowledge,
knowledge is not wisdom,
wisdom is not truth,
truth is not love,
love is not beauty,
beauty is not music,
music is the best.
(Frank Zappa)

People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because 
it's safer to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs.

Scientists stand on the shoulders of their predecessors,
except for computer scientists, who stand on the toes.

The practical scientist is trying to solve tomorrow's problem
with yesterday's computer;
the computer scientist often has it the other way around.

What on earth would a man do with himself,
if something did not stand in his way?
(H.G. Wells)

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated,
which, when you looked at it in the right way,
did not become still more complicated.
(Poul Anderson)

A neurotic is a man who builds castles in the air,
a psychotic is one who tries to live in them,
and the psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent. 

The body is most fully developed from thirty to thirty-five years of age,
the mind at about forty-nine.
(Aristotle)

I believe there are
15,747,724,136,275,002,577,605,653,961,181,555,468,044,717,914,527,116,709,366,231,425,076,185,631,031,296
protons in the universe, and the same number of electrons. 
(Arthur Stanley Eddington)

One cannot conceive of anything so strange and so implausible
that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another.
(Cicero)

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,
however improbable, must be the truth. 
(Arthur Conan Doyle [Sherlock Holmes in THE SIGN OF FOUR])

I don't fear computers; I fear the lack of them.
(Isaac Asimov)

Most people say that it is the intellect
which makes a great scientist.
They are wrong: it is the character.
(Albert Einstein)

Our age is characterised by perfecting the means,
while confusing the goals.
(Albert Einstein)

The human mind has first to construct forms, independently,
before we can find them in things.
(Albert Einstein)

The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men,
but that men will begin to think like computers.
(S. J. Harris)

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure
and the intelligent are full of doubt.
(Bertrand Russell)

The PC has bred anarchy. Hardware, software, and peripherals
have been thrown together in random configurations at the whim of
any employee with access to an expense voucher and computer
catalogue. The result has been a financial and administrative
night mare for corporations.
(Ken Olsen)

Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating
as reading sex manuals without the software.
(Arthur C. Clarke)

What if there weren't any hypothetical situations?

All primes are odd except 2, which is the oddest of all.
(Donald E. Knuth)

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
(Arthur C. Clarke)

There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.
(Ken Olson, President of DEC, World Future Society Convention, 1977)

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work.
I want to achieve it through not dying.
(Woody Allen)

...he wondered why Digital decided to use the dollar sign as the
default prompt character. It looked like the same dollar sign
that glowed from the Digital salesman's eyes....
(Bruce Ellis, THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO VMS)

The world no longer thinks of America as its policeman,
but as its lifeguard.
(David Hasselhoff)

Fashion is just a set of guidelines for those with no sense of style.
(Stuart Grant)

It is no accident that the world does not appear simple;
if it were simple, then we would be too simple to know it.
(John D. Barrow)

The big difference between the Spice Girls and a porno movie:
a porno movie has better music.
(Phil Spector)

...the three great virtues of a programmer:
laziness, impatience, and hubris.
(Larry Wall, PROGRAMMING PERL)

If you have a difficult task, give it to a lazy person;
he will find an easier way to do it.

3 syncs represent the [Unix] trinity:
init, the child and the eternal zombie process.
(Jordan K. Hubbard)

A free society is one where it's safe to be unpopular.
(Adlai Stevenson)

Blessed be the pessimists for they hath made backups!

My whole house is wired to a PC.
I can get a Windows NT error by flicking on a light.
(Bill Gates, 17-NOV-1997)

If it can't be expressed in figures,
it is not science; it is opinion.

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
(Lazarus Long, courtesy Robert A. Heinlein)

Very funny, Scotty! Now beam down the rest of my clothes.

WWW does <B>not</B> stand for "World Wide Windows"!

It is better to ask a question, and be a fool for a minute,
than to remain silent and remain a fool forever.

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool
than to speak out and to remove all doubt.
(Abraham Lincoln)

If a "religion" is defined to be a system of ideas that contains
unprovable statements, then Goedel taught us that mathematics is
not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself
to be one.
(John Barrow)

Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
(Terry Pratchett [Ridcully in HOGFATHER])

Democracy is the worst system of government -
except for all the others.
(Winston Churchill)

Problems worthy of attack
prove their worth by hitting back.
(Piet Hein)

The person who never made a mistake
never tried anything new.
(Albert Einstein)

Keep things as simple as possible, but no simpler.
(Albert Einstein)

Advertising:
The science of arresting the human intelligence
long enough to get money from it.

MACINTOSH is an acronym:
Most Applications Crash; If Not, The Operating System Hangs.

There will never be enough problems, enough work
for more than one or two of these computers.
(Thomas J. Watson, President of IBM, upon hearing Harvard
mathematician Howard J. Aiken propose building the first
computer, 1939.)

I think there's a world market for four or five computers.
(Thomas J. Watson, President of IBM, 1943)

There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.
(Ken Olsen, 1977)

640 Kilobyte ought to be enough for anybody.
(Bill Gates, 1981)
--
Windows NT addresses 2 Gigabytes of RAM
which is more than any application will ever need.
(Microsoft on the development of Windows NT, 1992)

People don't need faster computers.
They just need to learn patience.
It's much cheaper,
and it works for things besides computers.
(Travis C. Hayes)

Win95 is a 32 bit extension and a graphical shell
for a 16 bit patch
to an 8 bit operating system,
originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor,
written by a 2 bit company
that can't stand 1 bit of competition.

Two rules to success in life:
1. Don't tell people everything you know.

Life is just what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
(John Lennon)

UNIX is akin to a religion to some.
If things aren't done like they are
in UNIX, then they must be bad.
Sorry, I don't believe in this religion.
(Dave Cutler, NT lead Architect in UNIXWorld, FEB-1992)

Mathematics:
That branch of Human Thought which takes a finite set
of trivial axioms and maps them to a countably infinite set
of unintuitive theorems.

Perl is like sex:
If you never had it, you wonder what the fuss is all about.
Once you had it, you never want to be without it again.

In a world without walls and fences who needs windows and gates?

The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected.
(The UNIX Programmer's Manual, Second Edition, June 1972)

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot.
C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg.
(Bjarne Stroustrup)

Software is like sex: It's better when it's free.
(Linus Torvalds, from FSF T-shirt)

Please, Lord, let me prove that winning the lottery won't spoil me.

There are three principal ways to lose money: wine, women, and
engineers. While the first two are more pleasant, the third is
by far the more certain.
(Baron Rothschild, ca. 1800)

Why do most folks hate cynics so much?
Because they are almost always right.

Speed doesn't kill -- Deceleration does.

Beware of companies that claim to be like a family.
They might not be lying.
(Jill Lundquist)

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster
than any other invention, with the possible
exceptions of handguns and Tequilla.
(Mitch Ratcliffe)

OpenVMS is today what Microsoft
wants Windows NT v8.0 to be!
(seen on www.openvms.digital.com, 22-Sep-1998)

Computers will not replace real people,
they will replace mid- and low-level bureaucrats.
(Timothy Leary)

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is no similarity.

If you put three drops of poison into a 100% pure Java, you get ... Windows.
If you put a few drops of Java into Windows, you still have Windows.
(Scott McNealy, CEO Sun Microsystems)

If you're a UNIX user, all UNIX are pretty much the same.
If you're a UNIX programmer, all UNIX are a little bit different.
If you're a UNIX system admin, all UNIX are completely different.
(Bob Koehler on comp.os.vms)

Microsoft programs are generally bug-free. If you visit the Microsoft
hotline, you'll literally have to wait weeks if not months until someone
calls in with a bug in one of our programs. 99.99% of calls turn out to
be user mistakes. [...] I know not a single less irrelevant reason for
an update than bugfixes. The reasons for updates are to present more
new features.
(Bill Gates in an interview by Focus Magazine)

Don't think of it as a new computer -
think of it as obsolete-ready!

There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'.
It is 'dead'.
(Jack Cohen)

It has been discovered that C++ provides a remarkable facility
for concealing the trival details of a program --
such as where its bugs are.
(David Keppel)

de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n. :
Three wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.

Open Systems means no fences.
No fences means no use for Gates.

Microsoft's software of tomorrow will make sure that on your
hardware of tomorrow everything will work at the usual speed.

I bet the human mind is a cludge.
(Marvin Minksy)

England and America:
Two great nations separated by an ocean and a language.
(Oscar Wilde)

If you always do what you always did,
you will always get what you always got.

Garfield's Law:
Cats instinctively know the precise moment their owners will awake;
then they awaken them ten minutes sooner.

The good news is Microsoft got the bugs out of Windows 2000.
The bad news is it won't be released until first quarter 1901.

When I die, I want to go peacefully, in my sleep, like my grandfather.
Not screaming, like the passengers in his car.
(Jack Handey in 'Deep Thoughts')

Computers fall into two of three categories:
Quality, Reliability and Price - pick any two and sacrifice the third.

Microsoft Windows found! Delete? (Y)es, (J)a, (S)i, (O)ui

Windows 98 supports real multitasking:
It can boot and crash simultaneously.

- I hate gramaticle errors!
- Me to!

If Bill Gates had a dime for every time a Windows box crashed...
.... Oh, wait a minute, he already does.
(Tony Hoyle in comp.infosystems.www.servers.ms-windows)

Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.
(Mae West)

Bigamy is having one husband too many.
Monogamy - same thing.

Nuclear war doesn't prove who's right, just who's left.
(ABC news, 13-OCT-1987)

UNIX is user friendly. It's just selective about who his friends are.

Linux is like a wigwam - no windows, no gates, apache inside.

The concept of the web is one of universal readership.
If you publish a document on the web, it is important
that anyone who has access to it can read it and link to it.
(Tim Berners-Lee)

Win Three for the Elvenkings under the sky,
Win Ninety-Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine 5 for mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne,
In the land of Redmond where the shadows lie.
One Win to rule them all, One Win to find them.
One Win to bring them all and in darkness bind them
In the land of Redmond where the shadows lie.
(Randy Hawley in comp.os.vms)

Dave, put those Windows disks down... Dave... DAVE!
(Hal 9000 in der Alternativ-Version von "2001")

One of the symptoms of an impending nervous breakdown
is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
(Bertrand Russell)

I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.
(Albert Einstein)

Television - a medium.
So called because it is neither rare nor well done.
(Ernie Kovacs)

It took humankind a long time to go from cave drawings to written language.
It seems that the Computer Industry will need only a very short time
to take humankind back to the cave drawings.
(Motto des "Order of the Knights of the Command Line")

Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.
(Rich Kulawiec)

Don't call me irrational. It makes me crazy when you do that.
(Niles Crane)

20% of a job take 80% of the time,
the rest takes another 80%.

In Paris, they simply stared when I spoke to them in French;
I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their
own language.
(Mark Twain, The Innocent Abroad, 1869)

The boss isn't always right -- but he always is the BOSS!
(gesehen in einem Pub in D'dorf)

Windows was created to keep idiots away from Unix.
So far it's worked out pretty well. Let's not spoil it.
(Tom Christiansen on comp.lang.perl.misc)

UNIX - Unknown Nasties In eXistence
VMS - Very Much Safer
(Roger Fraser on comp.os.vms)

  UNSTABLE
-   USABLE
----------
        NT
(Thierry Zamofing on comp.windows.x)

The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on.
It is never any use to oneself.
(Oscar Wilde)

Politics is the entertainment branch of the industry.
(Frank Zappa)

I really hate this damn machine,
I wish that they would sell it.
It never does quite what I want,
But only what I tell it.
(programmer's lament; origin unknown)

Unix was not designed to stop people from doing stupid things, because
that would also stop them from doing clever things.
(Doug Gwyn)

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 better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
(Rich Cook)

True research is like fumbling in the dark for the right switches.
Once you've turned the light on everyone can see...

An idiot with a computer is a faster, better idiot.
(Rich Julius)

Beware of bugs in the above code;
I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
(Donald Knuth)

I've never met a human being who would want
to read 17,000 pages of documentation, and if there was,
I'd kill him to get him out of the gene pool.
(Joseph Costello, President of Cadence)

The primary purpose of the DATA statement
is to give names to constants; instead of
referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at
every appearance, the variable pi can be
given that value with a DATA statement and
used instead of the longer form of the constant.
<B>This also simplifies modifying the program,
should the value of pi change</B>.
(FORTRAN manual for Xerox computers)

The use of COBOL cripples the mind;
its teaching should, therefore,
be regarded as a criminal offence.
(E. W. Dijkstra)

It is practically impossible to teach good programming style
to students that [sic] have had prior exposure to BASIC;
as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated
beyond hope of regeneration.
(E.W. Dijkstra)

A system admin's life is a sorry one.
The only advantage he has over Emergency Room doctors
is that malpractice suits are rare.  On the other hand,
ER doctors never have to deal with patients installing
new versions of their own innards!
(Michael O'Brien)

C -
A programming language which combines
the flexibility of assembly language
with the power of assembly language.

Pascal -
A programming language named after a man
who would turn over in his grave if he knew about it.

PROGRAM -
1. n. - A magic spell cast over a computer allowing it
to turn one's input into error messages.
2. v. tr.- To engage in a pastime similar to banging
one's head against a wall, but with fewer opportunities for reward.

An optimist is one who believes that everything is white,
including that which is black.
(Ambrose Bierce)

The optimist believes that we live in the best of all worlds.
The pessimist is afraid that is true.
(Robert Oppenheimer)

How many Unix hacks does it take to change a light bulb?
Let's see, can you use a shell script for that
or does it need a C program?

Work keeps away three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.
(Voltaire)

Men never do evil so completely & cheerfully
as when they do it with religious conviction.
(Blaise Pascal)

Million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.
(Terry Pratchett)

True programmers never die,
they just branch to an odd address...

Computers let you make more mistakes faster
than any other invention in human history,
with the possible exception of handguns and tequila.

Be careful of reading health books, you might die of a misprint.
(Mark Twain)

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.
(Albert Einstein)

A father is someone who carries pictures where his money used to be...

If you can't laugh at yourself, someone else is going to do it for
you - and you're not going to enjoy it nearly as much.

When I die, I want to go peacefully, in my sleep, like my grandfather.
Not screaming, like the passengers in his car.
(Jack Handey in 'Deep Thoughts')

Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped
with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons,
computers in the future may have only 1,000
vacuum tubes and weigh only 1.5 tons.
(Popular Mechanics, March 1949)

Daddy, why doesn't this magnet pick up this floppy disk?

I.R.S.: We've got what it takes to take what you've got.
(I.R.S = Internal Revenue Services - das US-Finanzamt)

Error: no keyboard - press F1 to continue.

Hard work has a future payoff; Laziness pays off now.

Ever notice how fast Windows runs? Neither did I.

Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder.

For people who like peace and quiet:
a phoneless cord.

BREAKFAST.EXE Halted... Cereal Port not responding.

Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.

The behaviour of Microsoft products is
eminently understandable when you realize
that they're a wholly-owned subsidiary
of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation...
(Dan Sugalski in comp.os.vms)

OpenVMS - When you <b>know</b> where you want to go today!
(Hugh Samson in comp.os.vms)

O Lord, won't you buy me
a Compaq OS
its name starts with "Open"
and ends in "VMS" ...
(nach: Wolfgang J. Moeller on comp.os.vms)

Microsoft has titled its next release "Windows 2000", in celebration
of the two biggest disasters in the history of computing.

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 better idiots.
So far, the Universe is winning.
(Rich Cook)

What Yoda <b>meant</b> to say:
"Fear leads to anger.
Anger leads to hate.
Hate leads to using Windows NT for mission-critical applications."

EU heaven: german engineers, french cooks, english police.
EU hell: french engineers, english cooks, german police.

We can ask you to pay the full amount which you owe us if you:
(a) become bankrupt; or (b) die.
(Egg Credit Card Agreement)

One of the universal rules of happiness is:
always be wary of any helpful item
that weighs less than its operating manual.
(Terry Pratchett in "Jingo")

OpenVMS: The operating system God runs the Earth simulation on.

In our world, software has to be small, has to be debugged,
has to ship as part of a major initiative, has to avoid
compatibility problems, has to avoid end user calls.
(Bill Gates)

Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education
and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.
(Marshall McLuhan)

If we shoot deer in dear season,
what do we do during tourist season?

If it's there and you can see it - it's REAL
If it's there and you can't see it - it's TRANSPARENT
If it's not there and you can see it - it's VIRTUAL
If it's not there and you can't see it - it's GONE!
(nach Roy Wilks)

Linux - because life is too short for reboots.

If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the
computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles
per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside.
(Robert X. Cringely, InfoWorld)

If a man speaks in the forest,
and there is no woman to hear him,
is he still wrong?

The 4 most important things in life:
Sex, Money, Power and the Root Password.

In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Internet.
Now the internet was unformed and void,
    and darkness was upon the face of the circuitry.
And God said, 'Let there be Open Source.' And there was Open Source.
And God saw the Open Source, that it was good;
    and God divided the Open Source from the commercial software...


