This page is devoted to notable quoteables.
If you like this page of quotes, visit the 1995 UofT math quotes page. Also, visit the Friends quote page. Yeeha!
``Only work hard enough to get a 90.'' -- David Neto
``My 1024-bit IP address is my public key. If you can send a packet to me, it's valid.'' -- David Neto, in a discussion (with Jamie Mason and Alvin Shih) on the expansion of the IP address space. 1995/12/13
``There is more than one way to slice a banana.'' -- David Neto 1997/7/3. This is a toned-down version of ``There is more than one way to skin a cat.'' (ouch!) that I first heard from Dennis Pascoe, my high school physics teacher.
Quotes about me
"Your Web page is so dry, I wouldn't want to put a match near it." -- George
Neto and Deepti Sanwalka, upon visiting my graphics-less pages.
"You know what your problem is? You like programming too much!" -- David
Mitchell, early 1997.
Others
On computers
Microsoft
"Information in this document is subject to change without notice and does not
represent a commitment on the part of Microsoft Corporation." Inside cover
of "Microsoft OS/2 Programmer's Reference, volume 4", ISBN 1-55615-220-5
Copyright 1989.
"Intel and its vendors are careful to mention that the Pentium Pro is designed to be used in 32-bit operating systems with 32-bit applications. In other words, it isn't particularly efficient at running 16-bit applications or operating systems. This includes Windows 95, which Microsoft has revealed contains more 16-bit code than the company first let on." fifth paragraph, "Pentium Pro: The New Leader of the Pack", by Graeme Bennett, January 1996 The Computer Paper.
From dandycon@acy.digex.net Tue Jul 23 12:06:21 EDT 1996
Message-ID: <4si5h4$3tr@news3.digex.net>
For years, people have been turning 486's into 386's by running Windows.
Then they turned their 586-class computers into 386's with Win95. Now
people can turn their 686-class machines into 386's with NT, it's their choice.
--
Stephen Amadei
Director of MIS
Dandy Connections, Inc.
Atlantic City, NJ
Miscellaneous
"Some day we are going to figure out who is paying for it!" --
D.E.Knuth on
the Internet.
"These fonts are never going to change again." D.E.Knuth http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/cm.html
"The case n=4 seems to be an odd case." -- M. Grötschel, M.W. Padberg Ch 8 Sec 5.3, The Traveling Salesman Problem, ed. Lawler et. al.
"For properly chosen N and P the computational complexity of PNN is expected to be O(N^2/P)." p28, a PhD thesis.
"There is no need to pay lots of money up front to get applications that work with the new operating system [Windows95]. That will evolve later." John Gilby, Oakville, in a letter to the editor of Fast Forward, Toronto Star, 1995/9/21.
"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 (quote from filakow@cs.wisc.edu Shaun Filakowski)
"Like most modern computer scientists you begin working on the problem by reading the news on the Net." Greenlaw, Hoover, Ruzzo, _Limits to parallel computation: P-completeness theory_, p.4
On anything else
``Books are good.'' Ringo, about 1 hour into the movie
A Hard Day's Night
``The new thing is to care passionately and be right-wing.'' Advertising executive, in the movie A Hard Day's Night
``Security is such a relative term, wouldn't you agree?'' -- Garak, Deep Space Nine, aired sometime in spring 1997.
"Use the King James: English the way Jesus spoke it." -- David Lloyd-Jones, 1996/8/19.
"Feminism is a logical extension of democracy" -- Naomi Wolf, 1995/9/27, Toronto.
"Dare to be average! --- Ways to overcome perfectionism" Chapter 14 title in David Burns' _Feeling Good: the New Mood Therapy_
"`Watching you smoke is like watching a man commit suicide,' Polina said. `No one has to attack this country, just drop cigarettes.'" p.30 paperback edition of _Red Square_, by Martin Cruz Smith.
"The opinions expressed in this paper are not those of Princeton University, nor even those of the author" -- Andrew Appel, SIGPLAN Notices, V31#2, Feb 1996
"Politics isn't a dirty game; what we do have are dirty players." -- Dennis Hui, 1997/4/2.
"Being on time is like being on fire." -- Ed Doolittle, mail .sig "Math Scholar, and Graduate", UofT
"A component of my outings turns out to be a good aerobic workout. Granted I get a solid dose of second-hand smoke, but this is Manhattan; people jog around central park and finish the job that the catalytic converters on the taxis didn't." -- Alvin Shih, writing about going to dance clubs in New York City, November 1997
"Once humans are capable of photosynthesis, a lot of things may have to change." -- Alvin Shih, writing about meat, vegans, potted plants, and whether to give cut flowers. November 1997
"That's the biggest problem I find here - air polution from traffic." -- Sandra Stoyanovich, writing about Bermuda. November 1997
"[He] had made approving noises regarding my moves, and even shook my hand a few times. At one point, he took me aside and suggested that I not move around the dance floor so much. I explained that I go where there's space. Perhaps I should have asked him to elaborate on his philosophy about fixed points and dance floor chaos, but loud music is not conducive to such discussions." -- Alvin Shih, writing about his dance club experiences. December 1997.
"... Like the linux community - where your worth is measured not by how much you accumulate, but by how much you give away.", dwight@pentasoft.com (Dwight VandenBerghe), comp.compilers, December 18, 1997.
"I am a good programmer", Linus Torvalds, MetroActive magazine, 05.08.97 (whatever that date means)
"You have to be a little crazy to be the best in the world at something.", Linus Torvalds, MetroActive magazine, 05.08.97 (whatever that date means). Quite apropos for PhD students...
"Every well-educated person must know what an equivalence relation is." Steve Cook, October 4, 1990.
"In theory, theory and practice are the same.
In practice, theory and practice are different.
- I heard this from Janathan Smedley in 1989, but he didn't know the source
of the quote.
"Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it sure has earned a lot of people graduate degrees." -- Robyn Irving, PhD, 1998/2/19.
"Programmers are from Mercury, Sales People are from Uranus" -- Don Marti, in Linuxmanship
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it and then misapplying the wrong remedies." -- Groucho Marx, according to a .sig I've seen.
"At our present rate of population growth, the human species will equal the mass of the observable universe in 10,000 years or so." --- Marc Moorcroft, 1998/3/11.
"When I was in high school I seriously considered studying Computer Science, Engineering, Business, and Law. I entertained business and law because I wanted to go into a non nerdy profession. Luckily, I went into computer science, embraced my inner geek, and surrounded myself by people who were just as freaky as I was. Oh well." -- Andy Brownbill, May 12, 1998.
"This is a room where people were clearly stoked about what is happening, and what they were doing. And each of these people are just nice folks. They just happen to have obsessive compulsive hobbies that are changing the world." -- Rob Malda, moderator of slashdot.org, musing about the scene at LinuxExpo 1998.
"I'm a hacker and proud -- and no, that does not mean computer criminal, and if you think it does -- go do your homework." -- Eric S. Raymond, in an interview, spring 1998
"Never attribute to malice that which can be sufficiently explained by Murphy's law." -- paraphrased by Steven (steven at panopticon dot csustan dot edu) in comments to an article about rumours that Beowulf ethernet drivers would be considered munitions.
"When I was in high school planning on writing the great science fiction novel, I had what seemed to me an amazing idea; a story about someone who goes through weird and different states of mind, instead of weird and different planets, changes in technology, catastrophe, etc. Eventually I realized that I was planning to invent the mainstream novel, and turned to other pursuits, like learning assembly language, which was clearly the way programming was going." -- Marc Moorcroft, 1998/10/1
"Basically, I believe that we have entered a brave new representative age where people who choose to be vocal can finally contact people who are doing `bad things', and get their message to the right place. Remember this in the future -- most corporations who you may want to complain to do not have server capacity to handle the complaints from a mob of angry people." -- Theo de Raadt, March 1999, owner of the theos.com domain after amicably resolving a domain name dispute with THEOS Software Corporation. After Theo's story was puslished on slashdot.org, hundreds of emails and thousands of visitors to THEOS Software's web site brought the corporation's "largely NT-based" mail and web servers to their knees. Theo de Raadt develops OpenBSD.