Quotes

Here is a collection of quotes I have accumulated over time. The vast majority are from people I've met or know.

• Dear Santa, I can explain... -- Shelly
• The mome rath isn't born that could outgrabe me. -- Nicol Williamson
• I'd hate to take a bite out of you; you're a cookie full of arsenic. -- The Sweet Smell of Success
• Cthulu for president -- because why settle for a lesser evil? -- dunno
• Requirements: IBM PC or compatible with USB port / Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP / Pentium 60 MHz or compatible with 16MB RAM / 600 X 800 SVGA monitor / Hard drive with 15MB available / CD-ROM drive / If your computer matches the specs above, please upgrade your computer soon. -- woot.com
• I don't know if you're waiting for those dishes to limit break, or what...but I'm not cleaning them up. -- Anindo
• There's a reason they call it 'healthy,' and not 'tasty.' -- Kobar's Dad
• 'Dangling modifier'...ooh, that sounds fatal! -- Prof. Mikalson, Greek at UVA
• Greek loves participles, so we're going to have to love them too. -- Prof. Mikalson, Greek at UVA
• Imagine for a minute that you're a Greek verb. Now, you don't want to be a liquid verb, let me tell you. -- Prof. Mikalson, Greek at UVA
• It got de-encliticized. Don't let that happen to you. -- Prof. Mikalson, Greek at UVA
• Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away. -- dunno
• If you want, we have a grant that we could take a few dollars out of and buy you some new shoes... -- Professor Humphrey, Distributed Systems at UVA
• I want a secret hidden internet life with places to store downloads and hidden ways to talk to people that no one knows anything about for hours and hours. Then...I want to be all suspicious about it when anyone wonders whats up. -- Quigs
• Because any problem that may come up will result in me being called. The pager's signal to noise ratio is like 1:50 and there is no way to filter it. -- Ravinald
• We must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
• Approach the computer cautiously but with confidence - if it senses you're afraid, it could attack -- Simulation with Arena (Third Edition) (Systems Engineering textbook)
• It's people like you who write programs that end up getting discussed in technology ethics classes. -- me
• The best form of contraception is my personality. -- sharde
• My father taught me three things about plumbing: hot on the left, cold on the right, and shit don't flow uphill. -- CTYaLater
• A brilliant turnabout: detect the detector detectors before they detect you! -- woot.com
• I trust I make myself obscure. -- A Man For All Seasons
• The bigger the car they drive, the bigger the moron is in it. -- Kobar's dad
• Going from A- to B- is dropping a letter grade. Going from A to A- is dropping half-letter grade. If I were to drop 2 half-letters, then A goes to B+? so 3 halfs are 1 full? Someone needs to get dropped a letter grade for that math. -- Shaft
• So much has been given to me. I have no time to ponder that which has been denied. -- Helen Keller
• Arafat should get a 2nd Nobel Peace prize for dying. -- Kirill
• Years ago, someone told me something. That if you play rock, you die at 27. Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix...So I figured, Hell, I'll die at 27 too. But then my 28th birthday came and passed. I was disappointed...shit, I wasn't a rocker after all. -- 20th Century Boys
• No brand says 'I'm a volatile, desperate misfit who sees you in the shower' like Samsung. -- woot.com
• I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. -- dunno
• Winter break and good intentions don't mix well. -- a professor, not sure
• Greed is to the moralists of the left what sex is to the moralists of the right. -- Cathy Young, reason magazine
• The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes, but in liking what one does. -- James M. Barrie
• Well, that takes the cake. Someone stole my underwear. What are they going to do? Use it for a tent? -- Viv
• Their insurance customers look so happy in these pictures, you'd think they were just sniffing nitrous oxide. -- My dad
• The great teachings unanimously emphasize that all the peace, wisdom, and joy in the universe are already within us; we don't have to gain, develop, or attain them. We're like a child standing in a beautiful park with his eyes shut tight. We don't need to imagine trees, flowers, deer, birds, and sky; we merely need to open our eyes and realize what is already here, who we really are -- as soon as we quit pretending we're small or unholy. -- Nirav
• Death is not a problem; nudity is. -- Nico
• I'd say something witty, but I can't think of anything right now...you're a poop. That's witty enough for me. -- Chuckster
• I lost my 'thinking cap' and my 'thinking beret' looks dumb. -- Liz Chen
• In Super Mario Bros., the controls, like Italians, don't work. -- Mike
• Wow, I really like this built-in encyclopedia feature in Trillian. I can totally fraud people into thinking I'm smart. -- MJ
• It was a bad night when the Indo-Europeans were sitting around the fire drinking beer--they didn't have wine yet--and came up with the genitive absolute, thinking, 'how can we mess up students for the next 5000 years?' -- Prof. Mikalson, Ancient Greek at UVA
• In the Greek world, if you didn't speak Greek, you were a βαρβαρος [barbaros], and you needed to get into Greek 101 immediately. -- Prof. Mikalson, Ancient Greek at UVA
• This is not a class to punish you. It's a class to learn something practical, and you pay for that. -- Prof. Liebeherr, Internet Engineering at UVA
• So long as men praise you, you can only be sure that you are not yet on your own true path but on someone else's. -- Nietzsche
• You know, I really don't like computers that talk back. -- Nick
• A watched pot never boils, especially if it freaking isn't on. -- Mike
• I'm convinced topologists are judged by the number of dimensions of their beard. -- Grant
• Anyway, that drawing was like a level 15, and I'm like a level 20 now. -- Leiapico
• Watashi wa blah blah blah -- Leiapico
• Indestructible exoskeleton and utter lack of moral sense make Robosapien the ultimate killing machine. -- woot.com
• MPI takes a basic message passing model and makes it complicated. -- Prof. Grimshaw, Parallel Computing at UVA
• If you think for some reason that your résumé will get more attention if you print it out and send it through the mail, that you'll 'stand out' somehow, disabuse yourself of that notion. Paper resumes can't get into the email folder we're using to keep track of applicants unless we scan them in, and, you know what? The scanner is right next to the shredder in my office and the shredder is easier to use. -- Joel Spolsky
• Most college students, fortunately, are brash enough never to bother asking their elders for advice, which, in the field of computer science, is a good thing, because their elders are apt to say goofy, antediluvian things like 'the demand for keypunch operators will exceed 100,000,000 by the year 2010' and 'lisp careers are really very hot right now.' -- Joel Spolsky
• And while I'm on it, anonymous email accounts and AOL accounts just don't send a good message. They won't exactly disqualify you since so many people use them, but crazydood2004 at hotmail.com does not really impress me as much as name at alumni.something.edu. Do you really need to know if I Yahoo!? -- Joel Spolsky
• People who are very good at tennis play it like it's their job: during the day. -- Mike
• I got a girl's IP address last night...that's almost like a phone number, right? -- JJ
• I love to rock out while coding and designing circuits. I also foresee trouble in my first job. -- G. Burek
• At a career fair you go and pick up your beer holder and drop off your resume, and you're done, right? -- Prof. Liebeherr, Internet Engineering at UVA
• This epitaph starts out, 'ω ξειν' (O stranger!). Greek tombstones like to talk to you. You're walking down the road and it says, 'HI THERE! Here I am, here's my story why I'm dead!' -- Prof. Mikalson, Greek at UVA
• I no longer have anything resembling a sleep schedule. Rather, whether I'm awake or not is governed by some version of the capacitance equation. -- Kirill
• Remember: While root can do most everything, there are certain privileges that only a partner can grant. -- Telsa Gwynne
• I'm installing Unreal 2k4 on my Ipod in the hopes I can take it back and play it on Mike's computer. This is either incredibly ingenious, or incredibly stupid. -- Ems
• Went to sleep: 1200. Woke up: 1945. Being out of phase isn't just for signal processing anymore. -- Kirill
• Yeah...but Apples aren't really computers. -- Me
• Greek gods like winners. -- Prof. Mikalson, Greek at UVA
• Greek restaurants really don't open until about 10 PM, so if you show up at 10, you're obviously a tourist dying of hunger. The Greeks show up at about 11, ready to rock. -- Prof. Mikalson, Greek at UVA
• Distributed computing is when I can't work because some computer I've never even heard of has crashed. -- Leslie Lamport
• But the idea of unifying the mess of Visual Basic and Windows API programming by creating a completely new, ground-up programming environment [.NET] with not one, not two, but three languages (or are there four?) is sort of like the idea of getting two quarreling kids to stop arguing by shouting 'shut up!' louder than either of them. It only works on TV. In real life when you shout 'shut up!' to two people arguing loudly you just create a louder three-way argument. -- Joel Spolsky
• Having bad sequential code makes getting good parallel performance easier. -- Prof. Grimshaw, Parallel Computing at UVA
• It should be an elementary neural networks project to write a program that, given the first 20 Penny Arcade strips, constructs all the rest. -- Kirill
• One out of three people is mentally ill. Ask two friends how they're doing. If they say they're OK, then you're it. -- Michael Crawford
• There's nothing a German likes more than pronouncing a 26-syllable word. -- Prof. Mikalson, Greek at UVA
• When you're talking about sending people off to war to their death, you definitely want a future less vivid clause. -- Mr. Ring, Greek at UVA
• Halo 2 on Legendary is really all about crying in a corner and hoping nobody finds you. -- Ems
• As a mumbler, I'm the last person someone should come to with questions about pronunciation. -- Prof. Humphrey, Distributed Computing at UVA
• Here's some advice for you: don't get old. Now I can't even walk by a weight machine without feeling sore the next day. -- Prof. Humphrey, Distributed Computing at UVA
• You know, sometimes I get the urge to run around naked. But then I drink some Windex. It keeps me from streaking. -- Aprotim
• We're not fast; we're not slow; we do everything half fast. -- Dee Dee's Restaurant, Culpeper, VA
• I'd like to dedicate this book to my parents, Ayn Rand and God. -- Punctuation Ambiguity
• Thank [Gg]od(s?) -- Aprotim
• Dreaming of projects over my head... that is, not hanging over my head--more like passing way over my head. -- Aprotim
• If duct tape won't fix it, a baseball bat will! -- Jason Ferris
• The saddest thing is a retarded man who is crying and promising a broken egg that it will still be a chicken someday...and that they'll play together in a field when it gets better. -- The Lie Bot
• Well, we didn't really mind about the clothes, because we're not going to color code our baby. -- Varsha
• 'God, I'm going to go back to college with my GeForce4 and my 1.8 GHz and--' 'AND... your 1.2 GPA...' -- Ben Chen
• I want to date girls who come from mental wards... all women have issues, at least theirs are documented. -- Azrael-sama's Roomate
• Earth is the cradle of all mankind--but man cannot live in the cradle forever. -- Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
• As I lay down in my bed and look up at the stars, I match each one with a reason why I love you. I was doing great, but I ran out of stars. -- Ricardo Cunha
• I figure it the US Marine Corps wanted me to have a female they would issue me one. -- Grayson Chreitien
• I wonder if all those girls waiting around for prince charming ever think how he probably wants a princess. -- Shelly
• They stared deep into each other's eyes, seeking the truths, the lies, all the things the soul tries to hide, but instead they only discovered their respective eye colors, and the interesting fact that pupils shrink and dilate during transitions from light to darkness. -- Rita
• My gauntlet of exams starts tomorrow. As far as gauntlets go, though, mine's more like a mitten. -- Me
• The most loyal of dogs is the hotdog, which feeds the hand that bites it. -- Unknown
• If there is an angel who records the sorrows of men as well as their sins, he knows how many and deep are the sorrows that spring from false ideas for which no man is culpable. -- Eliot, Silas Marner
• A man falling into dark waters seeks momentary footing even on sliding stones. -- Eliot, Silas Marner
• Men are fools. Men want to be heroes. And their widows mourn. -- Franklin Coen, "The Train"
• Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate. -- Frederick P. Brooks
• The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. -- Frederick P. Brooks
• The textbook for this class is SO good that I'm going to make you read the entire thing. -- Professor David Brogan, Artificial Intelligence at UVA
• My Jesus can take a snack pack and turn it into a banquet. -- Shelly
• I like this programming environment because it's got this nice graphical display, and it's got this built in text editor, and because I really like right clicking on stuff. -- Professor Horton, CS at UVA
• Class, this presentation group has shown us a perfect example of a complete misunderstanding of the material. -- Professor Knight, CS at UVA
• The notion of real numbers only exists in one's imagination, where sets may not be finite. -- Prof. Pfalz, Discrete Mathematics at UVA
• Arguing with an engineer is like mud-wrestling a pig; after a few hours, you realize he likes it. -- G. Burek
• Yes, it is better to watch a man in doubt and danger, see what he is when all's gone wrong; for only then will truth come from the heart, the mask be torn away, the man remain. -- Lucretius, On The Nature Of Things
• If after the first week of class, my doodles-to-notes ratio exceeds 1, then I quit taking notes for that class. -- Kirill
• Conversations tend to be so much more civil when there's a chance that the other person might snap and kill you. -- errantstory.com
• The only things we can't weld are the crack of dawn and a broken heart. -- seen on the door of a Navy ship's welding shop
• Pure libertarianism, like the pure forms of communism, capitalism and anarchism, is predicated on the absense of bastards, and as such is doomed to failure. -- Rogerborg
• 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
• There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state to another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life. -- Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
• There is just one thing I can promise you about the outer-space program: your dollar will go further. -- Wernher Von Braun
• We're a funny people. Running headlong into a future we don't want, wanting things to be the way they were, but unwilling to waver from the path we've set ourselves on. -- Nirav
• Only heartbreak hurts worse than a papercut. -- Shelly
• Being an engineered thing, though, they suffer the same thing any engineering project suffers from: 'You want it fast, cheap, or robust? Pick two.' -- el_guapo
• Good God, it is easy to be kind, the difficulty is to be just. -- Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
• Christians, like snowflakes, are frail, but when they stick together they can stop traffic. -- Vance Havner
• Shelly's School of Dance - now officially open by appointment only. Space is limited, so you better be cute. -- Shelly
• You're absolutely on the right track, but you're 180 degrees out of phase. -- Prof. Ronald Williams, Computer Organization at UVA
• For some of the questions on this test you'll find that you can't use any of the techniques that you know. -- Prof. Aylor, Digital Logic at UVA
• Sure, you can take the final a second time! Just come back next fall at about the same time, and you can take it. As some of you undoubtedly will be doing. -- Prof. Ronald Williams, Computer Organization at UVA
• In Unix there is a command called nice which allows a user to voluntarily lower the priority of his process, for the benefit of all other running processes. No one ever uses it. -- Tanenbaum, Operating System Design and Implementation
• I could have objected-opened my attaché to bring forth my evidence, my facts and figures, my sound truth of mind. But what good could the theory of the mind do under the closed court rules of the heart? Case closed. -- Liz Chen
• I believe—and I want to gather all the facts to illustrate this—that the worst curse on mankind is the ability to consider ideals as something quite abstract and detached from one's everyday life. -- Ayn Rand
• For a number of years I have been familiar with the observation that the quality of programmers is a decreasing function of the density of goto statements in the programs they produce. -- Edsger Dijkstra
• Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten. -- B.F. Skinner
• Do not bother me! In extremely bad mood! Up until 7:30 AM! Do not wake me up unless there is a fire within 3 feet of me! - Thanks. -- Ricardo Cunha
• I have dreams in Chinese. But I don't like them, because everybody is yelling. -- Nancy Yang
• Halo 2 is a lot like Halo, only it's Halo on fire, going 130 miles per hour through a hospital zone, being chased by helicopters and ninjas. And the ninjas are all on fire, too. -- Jason Jones, Bungie Studios
• I find [waiting] to be the perfect part-time job, as it draws upon some of my strongest characteristics: my organizational skills, my people skills, my finance skills, and my balancing large objects skills. -- Ken Quam
• Sincere smiles are a special currency, for which I could always use more. -- Nirav
• If I had to pick a motto, I think it would be 'Live by no words.' -- Nirav
• Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. -- Brian W. Kernighan
• Well, hey, I went through half my life thinking the word 'gullible' wasn't in the dictionary... -- Mike Decker
• Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest race of people on earth. -- Nirav
• Your life flashes before your eyes before you die. We call it living. -- Nirav
• Twins are just a collision of the DNA hash function. -- Ems
• Decisions make themselves when you're coming downhill at seventy kilometres per hour. Suddenly there's an edge of nothingness in front of you. Swerve left? Swerve right? Or think about it and die? In your head, you swerve both ways... -- Michael Frayn, Copenhagen
• Hard means worry: if you're not worrying that something you're making will come out badly, or that you won't be able to understand something you're studying, then it isn't hard enough. There has to be suspense. -- Paul Graham
• NEVER describe your own work as trivial. (and in fact, don't ever describe someone else's work as 'trivial' -- it's disrespectful). If I see the word 'trivial' when someone describes their own work, I immediately toss it aside, assuming that *I* could probably do the equivalent work in a couple of days if I wanted to. -- Prof. Humphrey, Distributed Systems at UVA
• As it turns out, a lot of computer programming consists of building abstractions. What is a string library? It's a way to pretend that computers can manipulate strings just as easily as they can manipulate numbers. -- Joel Spolsky
• The morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed. -- Fletcher, Situation Ethics
• Everyone has always been able to make 'challenging' incoherent art that no-one cared about. And now, with the Internet, more people can not care about it than ever. -- Tycho
• I have a bad habit of typing exit into a Gaim window when I want it to close. -- npj7y
• Nirav has failed his vacation check. Roll 3d8 for hours of work necessary. -- Nirav
• If I were to explain the subjunctive mood, I might do it like this. -- awgsilyari
• Can't you feel the peace and contentment in this block of code? Ruby is the language Buddha would have programmed in. -- Sean Russell (REXML)
• I think foosball is a combination of soccer and shish kabobs. -- Mitch Hedberg
• A severed foot is the ultimate stocking stuffer. -- Mitch Hedberg
• Most libertarians think it should be legal to spray a clip full of bullets into a kindergaten, as long as you miss everyone. -- dunno
• A day without you is like a day without... you. There's no comparison. -- Lidor
• Every dance move is the robot if you can imagine an advanced enough robot. -- Not sure
• If you can get off a Bombay train, you can get out of any situation. -- Vinay
• In a circus, the clown is always the most uncool, because no matter how skilled his act is, at the end he has to fall down. -- Yakitate!! Japan
• Hey, I've met plenty of old people who were 29. -- K. Anderson
• Overloading operators. The poor dears are already so weighed down, that it really is cruel, but there's no choice. The operators must assume more responsibilities. -- Fritz
• Physics is an art of approximation. Computation is all about precision. Quantum Computation bothers me. -- Nirav
• That all men should be brothers is the dream of people who have no brothers. -- Nirav
• 'Deep' is a word like 'theory' or 'semantic' -- it implies all sorts of marvelous things. It's one thing to be able to say I've got a theory', quite another to say 'I've got a semantic theory', but, ah, those who can claim 'I've got a deep semantic theory', they are truly blessed. -- Randy Davis
• I hear [Animal Crossing DS] is about collecting things and trading other things, which may not be up my alley. Like, if you were to encounter a situation that required 'catching them all,' I would not be your guy. -- Ems
• Boil water? What am I, a chemist? -- Ellen
• I kept saying, 'Wikis? Those will never work. Anyone can change the definition of, say, Podcasting, to 'fart fart fart,' and then what happens?' -- Joel Spolsky
• I built the hammer, so everything looks like a nail. -- Eric Lawrence
• Management's primary responsibility to create the illusion that a software company can be run by writing code, because that's what programmers do. -- Joel Spolsky
• And while it would be great to have programmers who are also great at sales, graphic design, system administration, and cooking, it's unrealistic. Like teaching a pig to sing, it wastes your time and it annoys the pig. -- Joel Spolsky
• I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to mis-attribute this quote to Voltaire. --Avram Grumer
• all week long, I've been keeping aN eaGle:eYe for TheSe H-0t St0cKKs as they went ThRou Gh the R(ooF and now I'm rich enough to m0rtgage all my v1agra. -- Kirill
• One does not simply telnet into Mordor. -- the Internet
• It's like a comic book, where the worst supervillains team up to destroy the world, except it's vector<bool> and /Wp64 instead of Lex Luthor and Dark Phoenix. -- STL
• Don't attempt to confuse C++ exceptions with SEH, because someone always ends up crying (and compilers don't cry). -- STL
• The Exchange folks need to fix that bug where 'win32_programming_questions' resolves to my name. -- Raymond Chen
• If I had one wish, it'd be for blessed +2 gray dragon scale mail. If I had two wishes, it'd be for that and the removal of export in C++0x. (My third wish would be for the removal of vector<bool>. Then I guess I'd wish for a kitty.) -- STL
• I'm just going to go with 'export delenda est' from now on. Perhaps a T-shirt... -- STL
• I think it's amusing when people on the internet waste their time talking about how wasting their time on the internet is a waste of time. -- Quagmire4278
• Dude I hate track so much, we have to run around the map like 20 times. -- nbrius
• I can’t even begin to describe how much beer it is going to take for me to find the very last agility orb [in Crackdown]. -- Drew B.
• The frustrated part of me knows a silver bullet to the problem of developer resistance to mainstream techniques: get new devs. -- STL
• It's not because I had enough of it in [previous project] to last until the 64-bit time_t's roll over (although I did). -- STL
• HDMI 1.3 adds ‘deep colour’ which can be dangerous because if you watch your TV from too closely the colours are so deep you fall into the fourth dimension and disappear. -- T. Hal-
• People shouldn't put on [C++] Standard Library implementer hats. They weigh heavily on your shoulders, and they look silly. -- STL
• Detect bad arguments before they cause AVs. It's the difference between 'Stick this knife in your chest. / Okay... OW!' and 'Stick this knife in your chest. / What? No way.' -- STL
• It is perfectly reasonable to catch exceptions you know how to handle. In general, STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION is not one of those. The [warning] is probably justified, though, by the fact that so many people can’t resist the lure of a native version of VB’s OnError Continue. -- RWur-
• Integer overflows aren't all fun and games, but bignums don't solve everything either. Fundamentally, you must validate untrusted data, or you get pwned by the Blight. -- STL
• Unfortunately, the Queen of Egypt dies an early death after misunderstanding IT's call to embrace an ASP solution. -- Mark Brownlow
• The error is correct, but your interpretation of it is incorrect. The compiler is like a puppy: when something is wrong, it will whine helplessly until you figure out what the problem is exactly. -- STL
• Though a forensic compiler/linker specialist can likely deduce the [compiler/linker] settings between the binary and its PDB. That will be one next week's episode of the new CBS show, CSI: Linker. -- michkap
• Air Force Ones is a brand of Nike shoes. It's also by Nelly and the beat is extremely similar to that for Grillz. I find it to be a natural occurrence of the Holy Duality because the first was about feets and the second about teefs. -- Kirill
• STL boggled at a managed struct wrapping a COM object wrapping a managed reference, and decided to not hurt his head by replying. -- STL
• If I see another Person/Employee/Manager example, all of my protons will decay simultaneously. -- STL
• Buy a CD where the music is high quality and I can play it in any CD player, rip it to my computer and play it there and on any device that supports MP3 format... Or buy music online that’s lower quality, is designed not to work on most of the devices I have, and may not work at all in 10 years when DRM formats change? What a bargain! -- AngelaS
• Unfortunately, Tycho from PA hyped it a few weeks back, and since then it’s been nearly impossible to find. -- ericvo
• And in terms of flow of control, nothing could be more straightforward to me than entering a method at the top and leaving it at the bottom. -- SeanE
• As the post-Baby Boom generation assumes those seats of power, their tolerance and acceptance of video games will make these sustained attacks a thing of the past. In 20 years we will have a president that will have grown up playing Grand Theft Auto. That's inevitable. -- Doug Lowenstein
• I used the Phillips CDI system -- it's like trying to read a coffee table book with all of the pages glued together. -- Coupland, Microserfs
• Our species currently has major problems and we're trying to dream our way out of these problems and we're using computers to do it. The construction of hardware and software is where the species is investing its very survival... -- Coupland, Microserfs
• In Los Angeles, everyone's writing a screenplay. In New York, everyone's writing a novel. In San Francisco, everyone's developing a multimedia product. -- Coupland, Microserfs
• A good piece of technology dreams of the day when it will be replaced by a newer piece of technology. This is one definition of progress. -- Coupland, Microserfs
• In 1992, Jim Gosling was sitting in his office at Sun Microsystems. He had been working on a language that was going to be a successor to C++. Gosling's a really smart guy, but not very good at naming things. And so his working title for the language was C++++. -- Crockford
• Everyone complains about the end of Halo 2, more than the end of any other game. If they had finished more games, they'd proably complain about those endings. But that game is really well paced--everyone gets to the end. -- Todd Howard (Bethesda)
• 3DO was some of the best experience I've had in my career, because the business strategy there was based around not giving the development teams the budget, time, or ability to make good games. -- Kudo Tsunoda (EA)
• The Standard Library is extremely flexible and very fast. It's a wheel that will fit a Ferrari, although not a Saturn V. -- STL
• If I had a power like on Heroes, I'd want to be able to switch between Verdana and Consolas by just thinking about it. -- STL
• You can be a level 70 Night Elf Hunter... and still get a degree! -- Today's Education
• we were barn-roofing all week and the code went all sock-footed on me so I dumped the grody dealie into the SVN and went to sleep -- Kirill
• That’s like asking 'Which is better, chocolate or peanut butter?' The trick is to make them into a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. -- lukems (Bungie)
• In the beginning, there was PHP, and developers had to learn a little bit of SQL. This was a disaster for the most part because nobody could understand what XSS and SQL injection were. So, to make things easier for the average idiot, Ruby on Rails was invented. Developers didn't even have to think about complicated stuff like, I don't know, LEFT JOINs. -- Ted (uncov.com)
• Running any firmware other than the original one that came with the drive will get you banned from Xbox Live. So it will definitely reduce drive noise because you won’t have it turned on, and the load time becomes a non-issue. -- Lit
• Thankfully, the game [Shaq-Fu] tanked and Shaq spent the rest of the '90s concentrating on things he was good at, like acting and rapping. -- Game Informer
• P stands for Pop lock and drop it -- Kirill
• If you look at their about page, you can see that Pageflakes is revolutionizing how we use the Internet. Revolutionizing? Is that the new "synergy"? Let's review: Overthrowing an oppressive government: revolutionary. Fighting for equal rights: revolutionary. Manned space flight: revolutionary. Dragging shit around on a web page: not revolutionary. -- Ted (uncov.com)
• Programs can try to make themselves more difficult to kill (deny PROCESS_TERMINATE access, deny PROCESS_CREATE_THREAD access so people can't CreateRemoteThread(EndProcess), deny PROCESS_VM_WRITE so people can't scribble into your stack and make you doublefault, deny PROCESS_SUSPEND_RESUME so they can't suspend you), but eventually you just can't stop them from, say, elevating to Debug privilege, debugging your process, and moving EIP to 'ExitProcess'. -- Raymond Chen
• Our apps run in an environment hostile to their behavior and lifetime. When that squirrel decides to climb into the transformer down the block it’s lights out whether your app wants it to be or not. -- jonwis
• [The Mork file format] masquerades as a 'textual' file format when in fact it's just another binary-blob file, except that it represents all its magic numbers in ASCII. It's not human-readable, it's not hand-editable, so the only benefit there is to the fact that it uses short lines and doesn't use binary characters is that it makes the file bigger. Oh wait, my mistake, that isn't actually a benefit at all. -- Jamie Zawinski (jwz.org)
• Don’t spend 3 hours racing in Forza 2, then play Burnout: Revenge, then get in your real life car to drive anywhere. -- Sparky
• Runtime code generation is an extremely complicated topic. It's kind of cute when people think they can do it with CopyMemory. -- Raymond Chen
• It is worthwhile to consider ways to make incorrect code harder to write accidentally. It is useless to try to make incorrect code harder to write intentionally. -- STL
• The most depressing thing about std::string is how much better it is than the alternatives. -- STL
• It's much easier to profile a correct program and identify places where abstraction should be removed (especially when such removal is easy) than to debug an incorrect program filled with the misery of C string manipulation. -- STL
• Premature optimization is the root of something something. All evil? Don't mind if I do! -- STL
• If you never ask the programmer how long a buffer is, they never have an opportunity to give the wrong answer. -- STL
• TR1 Regex will arrive in glory, wearing the golden armor of templates, holding the silver shield of iterators, and wielding the Runeblade Of Perl (named for the blacksmith who created it, although it was stolen and possessed for a time by the wicked ECMAScript). Sunlight bouncing off of its armor and shield will vaporize lesser regexes - they will become less than memories. -- STL
• As a programmer, thanks to plummeting memory prices, and CPU speeds doubling every year, you had a choice. You could spend six months rewriting your inner loops in Assembler, or take six months off to play drums in a rock and roll band, and in either case, your program would run faster. Assembler programmers don’t have groupies. -- Joel Spolsky
• You know what they say about casts - they help something broken to limp along. -- STL
• You know what I say about casts: they conceal something broken. -- STL
• That's really the sign of a good name, in my opinion: that it might be mistaken for a PGP key. -- Tycho
• If you’re demoing an application that needs more than a half million pixels, go back home and redesign the app. -- Joel Spolsky
• Also, it is extremely confusing to indicate notes with asterisks immediately after type names (just like it's extremely confusing to indicate footnotes with superscripted numbers immediately after numbers - books do this occasionally, apparently because they like me to scream at them). -- STL
• 'varargs' and 'safe' don't belong in the same sentence, unless accompanied by 'HA HA HA NO'. -- STL
• People who run high DPI should just be told to get better glasses so the graphic designer's work can show in its full glory. -- raymondc
• Being a windbg fan, I tend to use it to butter my toast, polish my shoes, and brutally kill my services. -- jefsm
• It's hard to justify optimizing a scenario that programmers were told to avoid and which they in fact were already avoiding. You don't optimize for the case where somebody is abusing your system. It's like spending time designing a car's engine so it maintained good gas mileage when the car has no oil. -- raymondc
• It seemed heretical to think of Karl Marx. But looking at the roomful of computers running automated trading models that themselves scan custom-formatted machine-readable financial news stories to help make decisions, you didn't have to be a Marxist to appreciate his observation that industry will strive to 'produce machines by means of machines' — as well as his prediction that the 'more developed the capital,' the more it would seek the 'annihilation of space by time.' -- Tom Vanderbilt
• You'll be much better off if, when you read __if_exists, you think __explode_randomly. Reasoning about it is a waste of time. -- STL
• In general, though, I would say that leaving one's diary with a satirist requires some courage. -- Tycho
• [Montezuma's] Revenge is a drink best served unboiled. -- Cowbirds in Love
• One deficit an electronic reader has over printed media, and this is only a factor if you've been in the air as much as we have lately, is that there are portions of the flight where you can't read. Your 'book,' as it were, now belongs in the same criminal class of devices which includes laptops and missile transponders. -- Tycho
• I can't imagine eating Braid cereal. Half an hour later, it just shoots right back out of your mouth. -- Jim Sterling (destructoid)
• And if you have paid money for [Velvet Assassin], you need to go to the police, because you've been robbed. You actually have to file a report with the police. And I'll make you do it, because otherwise, you're an accessory to theft. -- Jim Sterling (Destructoid)
• My basic rule of thumb is that if Yoda is bigger than I am, the TV is too big. -- benb
• People tend to think the developer is talking out both sides of its mouth when they describe Conviction as a Stealth game, which I understand completely, because the ability they're always promoting is the ability to shoot four guys in the head at once. But there is a Stealth game here, capital S - a highly novel, extremely challenging one - which is, perhaps appropriately, hiding in plain sight. -- Tycho
• Historically in cases such as this the names have been changed to protect the innocent. In this case, the names have been retained specifically to amplify their shame. -- Tycho
• I would argue that Limbo has mediocre graphics in a similar way that Van Gough painted mediocre photographs. -- Alan O
• What's wrong with your microphone? You sound like you're simultaneously in a bathroom and a robot. -- Reverend Anthony
• Like the Geth, which are basically like zombies, and the Krogans, which are like huge toad zombies. -- Brad Nicholson (Podtoid #135)
• Lately I've been playing this new Ubisoft game for the Mac, called Imagine: Catastrophic Data Loss. -- Topher Cantler (Electric Hydra #1)
• Do you guys remember how Christian Bale sounded in The Dark Knight? If you gave that guy a cough drop, that's what Jack Slate [Dead to Rights] sounds like. -- Joseph LeRay (Electric Hydra #1)
• I've never played a game that was so clunky. Wait, no, I'll take that back; I've played many a clunky game, but it's [Army of Two: the 40th Day] a third person, cover-based shooter. You should have it by now, guys. -- Brad Nicholson (Electric Hydra #1)
• You can put a camera in my shower if it means no more pollen. -- Brad Nicholson (Electric Hydra #2)
• I will say, though... the coffee mugs break the game [Alan Wake]. I'm out here, I'm in the woods, scary shit's happening. The Lost monster's popping up in the background. It's all dark and shit. Now I'm like, "Yo! There's a coffee mug back there! I'm gonna go get that shit." -- Brad Nicholson (Electric Hydra #3)
• They're like savory grapes. If I were a theist, I would argue that olives were invented by Satan to trick us into thinking we had some delicious grapes. -- Jim Sterling (Electric Hydra #3)
• I think rather than calling it the Xbox 360 Slim, we should call it the 360 Proper, because that's what it is now: a proper one. -- Jim Sterling (Electric Hydra #8)
• I bet [E99 (from Singularity)] could cure cancer if it didn't make you a zombie. Which it does. FYI. -- Brad Nicholson (Electric Hydra #11)
• It [Shadow of the Colossus] creates effective contrast, like riding a bike down a long and peaceful country road, and every other hundred yards, the bike turns into a bear. -- Yahtzee
• Breaking David Duchovny in half would be pretty easy, because he's so wooden. -- Jim Sterling (Electric Hydra #13)
• Little Big Planet 2: You Press a Button to a Man. This is important. -- Idle Thumbs #51
• Only thing I don't like are the smug atheist people who think you are stupid for believing in something at all. -- Occams Electric Toothbrush
• Capcom make game stories the same way tumble dryers make potato salad. -- Yahtzee (Dead Rising 2 review)
• My journalism is not suspect; it's a confessed criminal. -- HandsomeBeast
• Whenever I think of Mike and Ikes, I think of Michael and Isaac, my good friends. -- Max Scoville (Podtoid 149)
• We're the only cookbook in the world with partial differential equations. We may also end up being the last cookbook in the world with partial differential equations... -- Nathan Myhrvold
• This is ballistics gelatin. We made a block of it. We have a high speed camera. Pretty soon, somebody's gonna get a gun. -- Nathan Myhrvold
• [The Playstation Move] also launched on the same day as Reach, which... I don't know. Maybe don't launch things then. -- Tycho
• To my mind, nothing could communicate the soul of Kinect better than Myst - a "tactile" world of mysterious devices and interactive art, where precision blasting is no virtue. -- Tycho
• What is the biggest innovation in the last six years of aggregated shooting? Literally, it is the ability to cower. Gears of War 3 lets players press A to snivel behind a topiary. -- Tycho
• Are we still allowed to hope that our daughters settle down with a nice human, irrespective of gender, even though it forecloses the possibility of couplings with sentient minerals or bipedal reptoids? I hope this is something a father is still allowed to do. -- Tycho
• Playing with human teammates is also mandatory because the AI in this game [Brink] went to the same primary school as Sheva Alomar from Resident Evil 5. -- Michael Carusi
• "Indie means independently financed", you say. "Indie means creative and innovative!", your friend responds." Another friend cries "Who cares!" , and in the background, your mother calls "Come and help with the dishes!" -- Alex "Demruth" Bruce
• People kinda suck, but persons are amazing. -- Occams Electric Toothbrush
• PAX was fun. No, a thrift store on a Saturday morning is fun. PAX was special. -- Occams Electric Toothbrush
• I think a lot of Sony loyalists suffer from Stockholm Syndrome. -- Corduroy Turtle
• Real life takes more patience and skill than Dark Souls. I tried to parry "overtime," but it can't be parried. -- @EpicNameBro
• I don't think Twitter does podcasts unless they're 140 seconds long. -- Beyamor (gnarcast ep 1)
• I have all the bluster of a glacier. -- Beyamor
• Like, if proper software practices was an uptight, decrepit congressman, this code would be two dudes making out in front of a burning flag. -- Beyamor
• Monsieur to a convict is a glass of water to a man dying of thirst at sea. Ignominy thirsts for respect. -- Les Miserables
• Cities produce ferocious men because they produce corrupt men; the mountains, the forest, and the sea render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human. -- Les Miserables
• He feels that he is buried at once by those two infinities, the ocean and the sky; the one is a tomb, the other a pall. -- Les Miserables
• She was a pretty blonde with fine teeth. She had gold and pearls for her dowry; but the gold was on her head and the pearls in her mouth. -- Les Miserables
• Dark Souls is that moment when you lock your keys in your car and it runs you over. -- Beyamor
• If we would take a little pains, the nettle would be useful; we neglect it and it becomes harmful. Then we kill it. How much men are like the nettle! ... there are no bad herbs and no bad men; there are only bad cultivators. -- Les Miserables
• One can no more prevent a mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to the shore. In the case of a sailor this is called the tide; in the case of the guilty it is called remorse. God upheaves the soul as well as the ocean. -- Les Miserables
• They were warmly clad, but with such maternal art, that the thickness of the stuff detracted nothing from the coquetry of the fit. Winter was provided against without effacing spring. -- Les Miserables
• These three little girls could not count 24 years among them all, and they already represented all human society; on one side envy, on the other disdain. -- Les Miserables
• The first baby takes the places of the last doll. A little girl without a doll is almost as unfortunate and quite as impossible as a woman without children. -- Les Miserables
• What a sublime and sweet thing is hope in a child who has never known anything but despair! -- Les Miserables
• Nothing stifles one like this perpetual symmetry. Symmetry is ennui, and ennui is the very essence of grief and melancholy. -- Les Miserables
• There are in this world two beings who can be deeply thrilled: the mother who finds her child, and the tiger who finds his prey. -- Les Miserables
• Jean Valjean had this peculiarity; he might be said to carry two knapsacks: in one he had the thoughts of a saint, in the other the formidable talents of a convict. He helped himself from one or the other as occasion required. -- Les Miserables
• It is, however, true: grave-diggers themselves die. By dint of digging graves for others they open their own. -- Les Miserables
• There are men who at any price desire influence and to attract the attention of others; where they cannot be oracles they make themselves laughing-stocks. -- Les Miserables
• Wonderful and terrible trial, from which the feeble come out infamous, from which the strong come out sublime. Crucible into which destiny casts man whenever she desires a scoundrel or a demigod. -- Les Miserables
• Noble and mysterious triumphs which no eye sees, which no renown rewards, which no flourish of trumpets salutes. Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are battle-fields which have their own heroes; obscure heroes, sometimes greater than the illustrious heroes. -- Les Miserables
• There are fathers who do not love their children; there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson. -- Les Miserables
• Mankind is so constituted that, in a parlor, your whole dress may be soiled except your shoes. In order to be well received but one irreproachable thing is requisite--conscience? no, boots. -- Les Miserables
• It's like, French is a great idea, but nobody is going to invent French if they're constantly being attacked by bears. Do you see? SYSTEMS HACKERS SOLVE THE BEAR MENACE. -- James Mickens (The Night Watch)
• In related, late-breaking news, the speed of light has obstinately decided to stay constant (immutable if you wish) at about 300,000,000 meters per second. -- Andrei Alexandrescu
• It's highly hypocritical for people to refuse to change their playstyle to counter someone else's, then turn around and tell the other person they need to change. Meta[game] is always changing, either you adapt with it or get left behind. -- vageta311
• The function that is least likely to cause a problem is one that doesn't exist, which is the benefit of inlining it. If a function is only called in a single place, the decision is fairly simple. -- Carmack
• If you've ever played Magic: The Gathering with a rules lawyer, you understand the basic process that a complex game system goes through to compute what happens on every event, because you've lived it! -- Casey Muratori
• It's like you told me when you developed the horse and buggy, "Why are you teaching people to study how to build axles and gearings and stuff? We have a horse drawn carriage! It's perfect!" We need airplanes, okay? We need race cars. We need trains. We need rockets! We're not anywhere near there, so don't pick up a game engine and think you're using a rocket; you're using a horse drawn carriage. -- Casey Muratori (Handmade Hero #007)