Creating computer software is always a demanding and painstaking
process -- an exercise in logic, clear expression, and almost fanatical
attention to detail.  It requires intelligence, dedication, and an
enormous amount of hard work.  But, a certain amount of unpredictable
and often unrepeatable inspiration is what usually makes the difference
between adequacy and excellence.
                -- unknown

If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward,
then we are a sorry lot indeed.
                -- Albert Einstein

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves
up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
                -- Winston Churchill

"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], 'Pray, Mr.
Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers
come out?'  I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas
that could provoke such a question."
-- Charles Babbage

We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely
intellectual fields.  But which are the best ones to start with?  Many people
think that a very abstract activity, like the playing of chess, would be
best.  It can also be maintained that it is best to provide the machine with
the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand
and speak English.
		-- Alan M. Turing

If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing
of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur
of this life.
		-- Albert Camus

"> I am using the Intel PCI backplane with default etchlink/jumper
 > configuration and the EBSA285 configured as host bridge.

 I'd suggest that you check, double check, triple check, take a photo of
 the links and put it up on the web and get someone else to check all
 the link settings on the EBSA285 card."

 	- Russell King on linux-arm-kernel

I'd like to meet the guy who invented beer and see what he's working on now.
                -- Unknown

Utility is when you have one telephone, luxury is when you have two,
opulence is when you have three -- and paradise is when you have none.
		-- Doug Larson

He who despairs over an event is a coward, but he who holds hopes for
the human condition is a fool.
		-- Albert Camus

	As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even to the
highest parts of the earth's atmospheric envelope, Professor Goddard's rocket
is a practicable and therefore promising device. It is when one considers the
multiple-charge rocket as a traveler to the moon that one begins to doubt...
for after the rocket quits our air and really starts on its journey, its
flight would be neither accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the
charges it then might have left.  Professor Goddard, with his "chair" in
Clark College and countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not
know the relation of action to re-action, and of the need to have something
better than a vacuum against which to react... Of course he only seems to
lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.
		-- New York Times Editorial, 1920

They will only cause the lower classes to move about needlessly.
		-- The Duke of Wellington, on early steam railroads.

It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students
that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are
mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
		-- Edsger W. Dijkstra, SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 17, Number 5

   "I'd rather die before using Micro$oft Word"
     -- Donald E. Knuth
      (asked whether he'd reinvent TeX in the light of M$ Word)

When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute.
But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute -- and it's longer than any
hour.  That's relativity.
		-- Albert Einstein

... in three to eight years we will have a machine with the general
intelligence of an average human being ... The machine will begin
to educate itself with fantastic speed.  In a few months it will be
at genius level and a few months after that its powers will be
incalculable ...
		-- Marvin Minsky, LIFE Magazine, November 20, 1970

One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast
to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists,
a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also
just stupid.
                -- J.D. Watson, "The Double Helix"

"This knowledge I pursure is the finest pleasure I have ever known.  I could
no sooner give it up that I could the very air that I breath."
-- Paolo Uccello, Renaissance artist, discoverer of the laws of perspective

No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain.  All I'm after is
just a mediocre brain, something like the president of American Telephone
and Telegraph Company.
                -- Alan Turing on the possibilities of a thinking
                   machine, 1943.

Linux is obsolete
(Andrew Tanenbaum)

At the heart of science is an essential tension between two seemingly
contradictory attitudes -- an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre
or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny
of all ideas, old and new.  This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep
nonsense.  Of course, scientists make mistakes in trying to understand the
world, but there is a built-in error-correcting mechanism:  The collective
enterprise of creative thinking and skeptical thinking together keeps the
field on track.
		-- Carl Sagan, "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection"


Every paper published in a respectable journal should have a preface by
the author stating why he is publishing the article, and what value he
sees in it.  I have no hope that this practice will ever be adopted.
		-- Morris Kline

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform 
(or pause and reflect).
- Mark Twain

Growing old isn't bad when you consider the alternatives.
                -- Maurice Chevalier

Anyone can become angry -- that is easy; but to be angry with the right
person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose
and in the right way -- that is not easy.
                -- Aristotle

Love is a grave mental disease.
                -- Plato

Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.
                -- Victor Hugo

On the subject of C program indentation:
        "In My Egotistical Opinion, most people's C programs should be
        indented six feet downward and covered with dirt."
                -- Blair P. Houghton

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

I have sacrificed time, health, and fortune, in the desire to complete these
Calculating Engines.  I have also declined several offers of great personal
advantage to myself.  But, notwithstanding the sacrifice of these advantages
for the purpose of maturing an engine of almost intellectual power, and
after expending from my own private fortune a larger sum than the government
of England has spent on that machine, the execution of which it only
commenced, I have received neither an acknowledgement of my labors, not even
the offer of those honors or rewards which are allowed to fall within the
reach of men who devote themselves to purely scientific investigations...
        If the work upon which I have bestowed so much time and thought were
a mere triumph over mechanical difficulties, or simply curious, or if the
execution of such engines were of doubtful practicability or utility, some
justification might be found for the course which has been taken; but I
venture to assert that no mathematician who has a reputation to lose will
ever publicly express an opinion that such a machine would be useless if
made, and that no man distinguished as a civil engineer will venture to
declare the construction of such machinery impracticable...
        And at a period when the progress of physical science is obstructed
by that exhausting intellectual and manual labor, indispensable for its
advancement, which it is the object of the Analytical Engine to relieve, I
think the application of machinery in aid of the most complicated and abtruse
calculations can no longer be deemed unworthy of the attention of the country.
In fact, there is no reason why mental as well as bodily labor should not
be economized by the aid of machinery.
                -- Charles Babbage, "The Life of a Philosopher"


Windows NT Beer: Comes in 32-oz. cans, but you can only buy it by the 
truckload. This causes most people to have to go out and buy bigger 
refrigerators. The can looks just like Windows 3.1 Beer's, but the 
company promises to change the can to look just like Windows 95 Beer's --
after Windows 95 beer starts shipping. Touted as an "industrial strength" 
beer, and suggested only for use in bars.

	A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a
strings of pearls.  The spirit and intent of the program should be retained
throughout.  There should be neither too little nor too much, neither needless
loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming
rigidity.
	A program should follow the 'Law of Least Astonishment'.  What is this
law?  It is simply that the program should always respond to the user in the
way that astonishes him least.
	A program, no matter how complex, should act as a single unit.  The
program should be directed by the logic within rather than by outward
appearances.
	If the program fails in these requirements, it will be in a state of
disorder and confusion.  The only way to correct this is to rewrite the
program.
		-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"