quotes.vemod.net

Nobody ever got fired for buying {IBM, Oracle} products.

In feature films, the director is God. In documentary films, God is the director.

Plans and estimates are like a lettuce, good for a couple of days, rather wilty after a week, and unrecognizable after a couple of months.

Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature. I prefer to see with closed eyes.

Good judgement is the result of experience and experience the result of bad judgement.

[…] As children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side. If you were to visit education, as an alien, and say “What’s it for, public education?” I think you’d have to conclude—if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything that they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners—I think you’d have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn’t it? They’re the people who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there. And I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn’t hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They’re just a form of life, another form of life. But they’re rather curious, and I say this out of affection for them. There’s something curious about professors in my experience—not all of them, but typically—they live in their heads. They live up there, and slightly to one side. They’re disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads, don’t they? It’s a way of getting their head to meetings. If you want real evidence of out-of-body experiences, by the way, get yourself along to a residential conference of senior academics, and pop into the discotheque on the final night. And there you will see it—grown men and women writhing uncontrollably, off the beat, waiting until it ends so they can go home and write a paper about it.

The aspects you are willing to ignore are more important than the aspects you are willing to accept. Robbery is not just another way of making a living, rape is not just another way of satisfying basic human needs, torture is not just another way of interrogation. And XML is not just another way of writing S-exps. There are some things in life that you do not do if you want to be a moral being and feel proud of what you have accomplished.

The most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough.

The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.

So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.

First rule of the “Thesaurus Club” is you don’t talk about, mention, speak of, discuss, debate, gossip or chat about the Thesaurus Club.

The first thing I learned about programming was how wonderful it was. The second thing I learned was how horrible it was.

Mathematicians stand on each other’s shoulders while computer scientists stand on each other’s toes.

The question of whether Machines Can Think… is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.

Well, in our society, we have things that you might use your intelligence on, like politics, but people really can’t get involved in them in a very serious way — so what they do is they put their minds into other things, such as sports. You’re trained to be obedient; you don’t have an interesting job; there’s no work around for you that’s creative; in the cultural environment you’re a passive observer of usually pretty tawdry stuff; political and social life are out of your range, they’re in the hands of the rich folks. So what’s left? Well, one thing that’s left is sports — so you put a lot of the intelligence and the thought and the self-confidence into that. And I suppose that’s also one of the basic functions it serves in the society in general: it occupies the population, and keeps them from trying to get involved with things that really matter.