Workbench Design/WB Collection.iso/workbench werkzeuge/bildschirmschoner/swazblanker/blankers/data/quotes/computers

Text File | 1996-04-07 | 19KB | 487 lines

\* QUOTES FILE
\* Computer jokes
\*
%%
ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE n.: Language of choice for Scrabble players. allows the
^smallest and fastest routines to be written in five months instead of one.
^Extra points for variable names rich in Q's and Z's.
%%
BASIC n.: Language of choice by non-programmers.
%%
BBS n.: Mechanism to allow the socially autistic to masquerade as real people
^and communicate with one another by posting clever near-random commentary on
^a remote computer.
%%
C n.: Short for "chutzpah", a quality needed before tacling even the more
^simplest program with this language. C is also the symbol for the speed of
^light, but that has absolutely nothing to do with how quickly one can learn
^or use the language.
%%
CLONE n.: An acronym standing for "Copied Low-cost Optimal Non-IBM Equipment".
^Often used as a cure for the dreaded Big Blue. Texas, land of independent
^self-styled individualists, is current "Siliclone Valley" where imagination
^is limited only by IBM.
%%
DEMO n.: A method of program testing that tends to isolate numerous
^non-reproducible program behaviors. Fixing said abnormalities is difficult
^because they only appear when the debugging software is not loaded, and
^when severeal potential buyers are watching.
%%
EISA n.: Chinese for "we copied it without duplicating it". Inscrutable
^alternative to Micro Channel Architecture, (MCA)>; backed by everybody but IBM.
%%
GANG OF NINE n.: Originally the Gang of None, this is a group of 100+
^coming-of-age companies marked by their new-found willingness to tell IBM
^jokes in public, their unwillingness to pay IBM bus royalties. Answer: EISA,
^MCA, and Greyhound. Question: name two dogs and a bus.
%%
HACKER n.: A programmer who grew up tapping out Morse Code on a ham radio, and
^has never forgiven IBM for not putting a front switch panel on the original PC.
%%
IBM n.: Standards proposing organization. IBM develops hardware architectures,
^and builds slow underpowered prototypes for other companies to improve upon.
^See Clone.
%%
LAN n.: High-tech cousin of the mainframe nominally designed
^to allow people to share information and snoop into personal letters and
^resumes queued for the laser printer.
%%
MCA n.: IBM's new bus that carries information in 32-bit packets. The first
^bus developed solely by lawyers, it is considered copy-proof (the theory
^being that no one would want anything created by lawyers). The bus is actually
^48 bits wide, but the lawyers take 1/3 of anything they work on. A
^not-so-subtle attemt to limit the market to IBM.
%%
NOVICE n.: A person who talks about learning Basic, and spend all of his/her
^time trying to get into the joke and adult message bulletin boards.
%%
Ph.D n.: A user with more sense than money. Ph.D's generally have elegant
^solutions to problems that don's exist. The (top-down, of course) solutions
^always work because they have never been programmed. (Stands for piled
^high and deep, as in B.S., M.S., Ph.D = bull s..t, more s..t, etc. ed.)
%%
You know you've been spending too much time with a computer when your
^friend misdates a check, and you suggest adding a '++' to fix it.
%BY Unknown
%%
Ken Thompson has an automobile which he helped design. Unlike most
^automobiles, it has neither speedometer, nor gas gage, nor any of the
^numerous idiot lights wich plague the modern driver. Rather, if the
^driver makes any mistake, a giant "?" lights up in the center of the
^dashboard. "The experienced driver", he says, "will usually know what's
^wrong."
%%
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. This also simplifies
^modifying the program, should the value of pi change.
%FROM FORTRAN manual for Xerox computers
%%
On a clear disk you can seek forever.
%%
"To be or not to be that is the question.": any programmer knows the answer $2b or (not $2b) is $ff.
%%
These two strings walk into a bar and sits down. The bartender says, "So what'll it be?" The first string says,
^"I think I'll have a beer quaqg fulk boorg jdk^CjfdLkjk3s d#f67howe%^U r89nvy~ ~ owmc63^Dz x.xvcu"
"Please excuse my friend," the second string says. "He isn't null-terminated."
%BY Unknown
%%
ADA n.: Something you need to know the name of to be an Expert in
^Computing. Useful in sentences like, "We had better develop an ADA
^awareness."
%%
BUG n.: An elusive creature living in a program that makes it incorrect.
^The activity of "debugging," or removing bugs from a program, ends when
^people get tired of doing it, not when the bugs are removed.
%%
CACHE n.: A very expensive part of the memory system of a computer that no one is supposed to know is there.
%%
DESIGN v.: What you regret not doing later on.
%%
DOCUMENTATION n.: Instructions translated from Swedish by Japanese for English speaking persons.
%%
HARDWARE n.: The parts of a computer system that can be kicked.
%%
MACHINE-INPEDENDENT PROGRAM n.: A program that will not run on any machine.
%%
MEETING n.: An assembly of computer experts coming together to decide what
^person or department not represented in the room must solve the problem.
%%
MINICOMPUTER n.: A computer that can be afforded on the budget of a
middle-level manager.
%%
OFFICE AUTOMATION n.: The use of computers to improve efficiency in the
^office by removing anyone you would want to talk with over coffee.
%%
ON-LINE n.: The idea that a human being should always be accessible to a computer.
%%
PASCAL n.: A programming language named after a man who would turn over in his grave if he knew about it.
%%
PERFORMANCE n.: A statement of the speed at which a computer system works.
^Or rather, might work under certain circumstances.  Or was rumored to be
^working over in Jersey about a month ago.
%%
PRIORITY n.: A statement of the importance of a user or a program.  Often
^expressed as a relative priority, indicating that the user doesn't care
^when the work is completed so long as he is treated less badly than
^someone else.
%%
QUALITY CONTROL n.: Assuring that the quality of a product does not get out
^of hand and add to the cost of its manufacture or design.
%%
SYSTEMS PROGRAMMER n.: A person in sandals who has been in the elevator
^with the senior vice president and is ultimately responsible for a phone
^call you are to receive from you boss.
%%
355/113 -- Not the famous irrational number PI, but an incredible simulation.
%BY Unknown
%%
%FROM 43rd Law of Computing:
Anything that can go wr -- Core dumped
%%
A CONS is an object which cares.
%BY Bernie Greenberg
%%
A computer makes as many mistakes in two seconds as 20 men working 20 years make.
%BY Unknown
%%
A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do.
%BY Dennis M. Ritchie
%%
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
%BY Unknown
%%
APL hackers do it in the quad.
%%
APL is a write-only language. I can write programs in APL, but I can't read any of them.
%BY Koy Keir
%%
All a hacker needs is a tight PUSHJ, a loose pair of UUOs, and a warm place to shift.
%%
All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors.
%BY Unknown
%%
An elephant is a mouse with an operating system.
%BY Unknown
%%
And on the seventh day, He exited from append mode.
%BY Unknown
%%
%BY Rich Kulawiec, paraphrasing Arthur C. Clarke
Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.
%%
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
%BY Unknown, paraphrasing Arthur C. Clarke
%%
Anything labeled "NEW" and/or "IMPROVED" isn't. The label means
^the price went up. The label "ALL NEW", "COMPLETELY NEW", or "GREAT NEW"
^means the price went way up.
%BY Unknown
%%
Around computers it is difficult to find the correct unit of time to
^measure progress. Some cathedrals took a century to complete. Can you
^imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long?
%FROM Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982
%%
As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error.
%BY Weisert
%%
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.
%BY Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949
%%
As the trials of life continue to take their toll, remember that
^there is always a future in Computer Maintenance.
%FROM National Lampoon, "Deteriorata"
%%
At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer you will find at least
two human errors, including the error of blaming it on the computer.
%BY Unknown
%%
BASIC is the Computer Science equivalent of 'Scientific Creationism'.
%%
%BY Leonard Brandwein
Beware of Programmers who carry screwdrivers.
%%
%BY Donald Knuth
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
%%
%FROM Bradley's Bromide:
If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a committee -- that will do them in.
%%
Brain fried -- Core dumped
%%
%FROM Brook's Law:
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
%%
%FROM Brooke's Law:
Whenever a system becomes completely defined, some damn fool
^discovers something which either abolishes the system or
^expands it beyond recognition.
%%
Bus error -- passengers dumped.
%%
%BY Bruce Leverett
%FROM "Register Allocation in Optimizing Compilers"
But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the
^system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed,
^analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses.
%%
%BY Unknown
Computers are not intelligent. They only think they are.
%%
%BY Gilb
Computers are unreliable, but humans are even more unreliable. Any system which depends on human reliability is unreliable.
%%
%BY Unknown
Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was written and another for which it wasn't.
%%
%BY Unknown
Every program is a part of some other program, and rarely fits.
%%
%BY Unknown
If it doesn't have recursive function calls, Real Software Engineers don't program in it.
%%
%BY Unknown
If it's not in the computer, it doesn't exist.
%%
%BY Unknown
If the input editor has been designed to reject all bad input,
^an ingenious idiot will discover a method to get bad data past it.
%%
%BY Unknown
If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
%%
%BY Unknown
If you put garbage in a computer nothing comes out but garbage. But
^this garbage, having passed through a very expensive machine,
^is somehow enobled and none dare criticize it.
%%
%BY Blair P. Houghton
In My Egotistical Opinion, most people's C programs should be indented six feet downward and covered with dirt.
%%
%BY Unknown
LISP-programmers say: "Guess how many parentheses are needed to do this!"
Prolog-programmers say: "How can I do it in reasonable time ?"
C-programmers say: "Can You guess what this->program does ?"
Forth-programmers say: "third stack in is what Guess ?"
Basic-'programmers' say: "Where did I goto hell ?"
Fortran- and Cobol-slaves cry: "How can I do this ?"
%%
%BY Unknown
Life would be so much easier if could just look at the source code.
%%
%BY Unknown
Line Printer paper is strongest at the perforations.
%%
Lisp programmers do it recursively.
%%
Lisp programmers have to be bound (to-do 'it)...
%%
Memory fault -- core...uh...um...core...Oh dammit, I forget!
%%
Memory flaw - core dumped.
%%
%FROM Micro Credo
Never trust a computer bigger than you can lift.
%%
%FROM ALGOL 68 Report
No proper program contains an indication which as an operator-applied
^occurrence identifies an operator-defining occurrence which as an
^indication-applied occurrence identifies an indication-defining
^occurrence different from the one identified by the given indication as
^an indication-applied occurrence.
%%
%BY Unknown
Old programmers never die. They just branch to a new address.
%%
%BY Unknown
One good reason why computers can do more work than people is that they never have to stop and answer the phone.
%%
%BY Robert Firth
One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to
^indicate successful termination of their C programs.
%%
Operators mount anything.
%%
Printers do it by wrinkling the sheets.
%%
%BY Unknown
The C Programming Language -- A language which combines the flexibility of assembly language
^with the readability of assembly language.
%%
Two is not 3 -- not even for large values of 2.
%%
%FROM Weinberg's First Law
Progress is made on alternate Fridays.
%%
%FROM Weinberg's Principle
An expert is a person who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy.
%%
%FROM Weinberg's Second Law
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs,
^then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
%%
Who cares if it doesn't do anything? It was made with our new Triple-Iso-Bifurcated-Krypton-Gate-MOS process.
%%
%BY Rich Kulawiec
Wombat's Laws of Computer Selection:
(1) If it doesn't run Unix, forget it.
(2) Any computer design over 10 years old is obsolete.
(3) Anything made by IBM is junk. (See number 2)
(4) The minimum acceptable CPU power for a single user is a
VAX/780 with a floating point accelerator.
(5) Any computer with a mouse is worthless.
%%
%BY Unknown
The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity - the rest is overhead for
^the operating system.
%%
COBOL programs are an exercise in Artificial Inelegance.
%%
%BY Unknown
When does a system administrator do the first backup?
The first day on the job after the system adminsitrator who never did.
%%
An engineer is someone who does list processing in Fortran.
%%
%BY Unknown
Documentation is the castor oil of programming ...
Managers know it must be good because the programmers hate it so much.
%%
%BY Unknown
A very intelligent turtle
Found programming UNIX a hurdle
The system, you see,
Ran as slow as did he,
And that's not saying much for the turtle.
%%
Remember, UNIX spelled backwards is XINU.
%%
Q: How many IBM cpu's does it take to do a logical right shift?
A: 33.1 to hold the bits and 32 to push the register.
%%
%BY Unknown
99 blocks of crud on the disk,
99 blocks of crud!
You patch a bug, and dump it again:
100 blocks of crud on the disk!
100 blocks of crud on the disk,
100 blocks of crud!
You patch a bug, and dump it again:
101 blocks of crud on the disk!...
%%
%FROM Steinbach's Guideline for Systems Programming
Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle.
%%
%FROM A Law of Computer Programming:
Make it possible for programmers to write in English and you will find the programmers cannot write in English.
%%
Our OS who art in CPU, UNIX be thy name. Thy programs run, thy syscalls done, in kernel as it is in user!
%%
USER n.: A programmer who will believe anything you tell him.
%%
This login session: $13.99, but for you $11.88
%%
If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up.
%%
Optimization hinders evolution.
%%
%BY Unknown
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
%%
%BY Unknown
Everyone can be taught to sculpt:  Michelangelo would have had to be
^taught how to do it too.  So it is with the great programmers.
%%
%BY Unknown
There are two ways to write error-free programs.  Only the third one works.
%%
%BY Unknown
The best book on programming for the layman is "Alice in Wonderland";
^but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.
%%
%BY Unknown
Bringing computers into the home won't change either one, but may revitalize the corner saloon.
%%
%BY Unknown
Beware of the Turing Tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy.
%%
%BY Unknown
It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
%%
%BY Unknown
In English, every word can be verbed.  Would that it were so in our programming languages.
%%
%BY Unknown
In a five year period we can get one superb programming language.  Only we can't control when the five
^year period will begin.
%%
%BY Unknown
When someone says "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done," give him a lollipop.
%%
Think of it!  With VLSI we can pack 100 ENIACs in 1 sq. cm.!
%%
%BY Alan Perlis
In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
%%
%BY Alan Perlis
You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing viability of Fortran.
%%
%BY Alan Perlis
A Lisp programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of
nothing.
%%
%BY Alan Perlis
The computing field is always in need of new cliches.
%%
%BY Alan Perlis
It is against the grain of modern education to teach children to program.  What fun is there in making plans,
^acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self-critical?
%%
SOFTWARE n.: formal evening attire for female computer analysts.
%%
Q: How many DEC repairman does it take to fix a flat ?
A: Five; four to hold the car up and one to swap tires.
%%
Q: How many IBM CPU's does it take to execute a job?
A: Four; three to hold it down, and one to rip its head off.
%%
%BY Unknown
A recent study has found that concentrating on difficult off-screen objects, such as the faces of loved ones,
^causes eye strain in computer scientists.  Researchers into the phenomenon cite the added concentration needed
^to "make sense" of such unnatural three dimensional objects...
%%
Q: How many Pentium designers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: 1.99904274017, but that's close enough for non-technical people.
%%
Q: What's another name for the "Intel Inside" sticker they put on Pentiums?
A: Warning label.
%%
Q: What do you get when you cross a Pentium PC with a research grant?
A: A mad scientist.
%%
Q: What do you call a series of FDIV
instructions on a Pentium?
A: Successive approximations.
%%
Q: Complete the following word analogy:
Add is to Subtract as Multiply is to
1) Divide
2) ROUND
3) RANDOM
4) On a Pentium, all of the above
A: Number 4.
%%
Q: What algorithm did Intel use in the Pentium's floating point divider?
A: "Life is like a box of chocolates."
%BY Source: F. Gump of Intel
%%
Q: Why didn't Intel call the Pentium the 586?
A: Because they added 486 and 100 on the first Pentium and got 585.999983605.
%%