Signature Quotes: Computers & Networking 

These are my collection of sig quotes, collected from years of crawling about the Internet. Share and Enjoy...

Don't give me any technical reason why something can't be done. If you really believed in the product you'd make it work. -- From a Marketing type
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.
I'm all for computer dating, but I wouldn't want one to marry my sister.
The New Testament offers the basis for modern computer coding theory, in the form of an affirmation of the binary number system.
But let your communication be Yea, yea; nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil. -- Matthew 5:37
Over heard from some IBM employees at a San Jose watering hole.
IBM: You can buy better, but you can't pay more.
There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence. -- Jeremy S. Anderson
"Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin." -- John von Neumann
"The Analytical Engine has no pretentions to *originate* anything. It can do *whatever we know how to order it* to perform." -- Ada Lovelace
If some unemployed punk in New Jersey, can get a cassette to make love to Elle McPherson for $19.95, this virtual reality stuff is going to make crack look like Sanka. - Dennis Miller
Net postings: Demonstrating the lack of quality psychotherapy in the world... 
Free will is an illusion. We are all slaves to heredity and our upbringing and environment. Hence the opinions expressed here are not my own. Please feel free to flame my parents and friends.
Macs are to computing what television is to journalism. 
"This is typical retrograde, low-tech, Chevy Impala-type thinking. We non-linear, postindustrial children of the Information Age, however, know that the important thing is the Big Picture." - Cecil Adams, The Straight Dope 
"Today I decided that I had been at RPI too long without some of my best C magic. I xmitted them to the VAX, typed "CC ....." and I swear upon first born son of the KISS system that they ran. Isn't it nice when theory approximates reality????" -- Eric Van Tassell
HAIRY adj. 1. Overly complicated. "DWIM is incredibly hairy." 2. Incomprehensible. "DWIM is incredibly hairy." 3. Of people, high-powered, authoritative, rare, expert, and/or incomprehensible. Hard to explain except in context: "He knows this hairy lawyer who says there's nothing to worry about." 
Base address, n.
Low-rent accomodation of the kind frequented by operators, programmers, and other no-collar workers. Even cheaper accomodation is possible - a relative address - if you have an aunt or uncle living in the area. 
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it" - Donald Knuth 
If train stations are where trains stop, what are work stations? 
Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft ... and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor. -- Wernher von Braun 
Peter Norton asked an IBM executive if he had tried to install OS/2 on his computer. The executive said: "I don't have a computer, I have a secretary." 
"C" gains much of its vaunted efficiency by employing a very powerful pre-processor, normally referred to as a "programmer." 
X-Spook-Fodder: CIA NSA FBI IRA Clinton uprise assassinate BATF DEA IRS KGB 
4. Usenet is not a right. Usenet is a right, a left, a jab, and a sharp uppercut to the jaw. The postman hits! You have new mail." - Ed Vielmetti 
What a terrible thing to have lost one's .sig. Or not to have a .sig at all. How true that is. 
Hardware, n.: The parts of a computer system that can be kicked. 
"The computer industry is journalists in their 20s standing in awe of entrepreneurs in their 30s who are hiring salesmen in their 40s and 50s and paying them in the 60s and 70s to bring their marketing into the 80s." -- public relations wizard Marty Winston 
Technology is dominated by two types of people:
Those who understand what they do not manage.
Those who manage what they do not understand. -- Putt's Law 
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? -- Alan Perlis  
    ^
   / \
  / @ \   "We don't exist."  The Reformed Bavarian
 /     \   Free Will Church of Illumination.
 -------
There is no truth to the rumor that Lotus is suing Apple for copying the look and feel of their lawsuits. 
Another Month Ends; All Targets Met ; All Systems Working;
All Customers Satisfied; All Staff Eager and Enthusiastic
All Pigs Fed and Ready to fly 
It was a typical net.exercise -- a screaming mob pounding on a greasy spot on the pavement, where used to lie the carcass of a dead horse. 
All undetectable errors will be treated as if no error occured. (IBM) 
Discord, the Goddess of the Net, was developing a taste for blood sacrifice.
*Note: No animals were killed in the construction of this sig.
"usenet: it's not an obsession. it's just something I have to do ALL THE TIME" -- Meredith "gypsy" Tanner 
Usenet is "the closest thing this planet has to a collective consciousness." - Ray Lampman (Ray.Lampman@FullFeed.Com) 
Usenet is "the last uncensored mass medium." - Steve Crocker (aq817@cleveland.Freenet.Edu) 
I refuse to perpetuate the myth that the opinions of an individual must be representative of their organization by cautioning against it. 
"If you meet the Buddha on the net, put him in your kill file" -- Robert Firth 
"Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea -- massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind- boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it." -- gene spafford, 1992 
USENET: Post to exotic, distant machines. Meet exciting, unusual people. And flame them. 
Smith&Wesson -- The Ultimate "Point & Click" User interface. 
"The biggest problem with reading [Usenet] is there is so much and it is all so interesting. It is easy to be enamored with it. Be selective about which groups you read. It could mean your job, your family, or your college career." --Ed Krol, _The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog_ 
Frobnitz, pl. Frobnitzem (frob'nitsm) n.:
An unspecified physical object, a widget. Also refers to electronic black boxes. This rare form is usually abbreviated to FROTZ, or more commonly to FROB. Also used are FROBNULE, FROBULE, and FROBNODULE. Starting perhaps in 1979, FROBBOZ (fruh-bahz'), pl. FROBBOTZIM, has also become very popular, largely due to its exposure via the Adventure spin-off called Zork (Dungeon). These can also be applied to non-physical objects, such as data structures. 
This is the snobbery of the people on the Mayflower looking down their noses at the people who came over ON THE SECOND BOAT!" - Mitch Kapor, on Usenet elitism 
"I thought that 'Intel Inside' was a warning required by the Truth in Advertising Laws" 
"Meanwhile, I don't see what Mitch's problem is with the Internet. I mean, as of this very week, you can now get the entire Bible in Pig Latin via ftp. I mean, _that's_ scholarship. That's public service. The Future Is Now." -- Patrick Nielsen Hayden 
"Speaking for myself, my niece can't get enough of Hacker Barbie's Dream Basement Apartment! The pink Sun workstation in the corner, the little containers of takeout Szechuan scattered across the floor, her "Don't Blame Me, I Voted Libertarian" t-shirt -- it's on every little girl's Xmas list! To me, the most realistic thing is how if you put in her in the chair in front of the monitor, she'll stare at it for hours without blinking or taking her hands off the keyboard."
I didn't really say all the things that I said. You probably didn't read what you thought you read. Statistics show that this whole thing is more than likely just a hideous misunderstanding. 
"Encryption...is a powerful defensive weapon for free people. It offers a technical guarantee of privacy, regardless of who is running the government... It's hard to think of a more powerful, less dangerous tool for liberty." -Esther Dyson
"Sure it's senseless, but it's that kinda senseless that grabs you by the hair and drags you around for a couple hours..." -- Mike Murray on DOOM 
In the event I am captured or killed, the secretary, the project leader, the manager and the CEO will disavow any knowledge of my opinions.
"I did this 'cause Linux gives me a woody." -Dave Taylor of id Software, on his motivations for porting DOOM to Linux. 
DISCLAIMER: Wasn't me! A monkey sat at my keyboard and typed one key per second for five years until he got this! 
To post or not to post, that is the question...Whether 'tis nobler on the 'net to suffer, the flames from outrageous loonies or to press 'F' against a sea of slander and by opposing end them? To send KILL signal; to sleep(1); No more... 
"I live on the highway - near the Puppet Motel. I log in every day - I know the neighborhood well........They're havin' virtual sex - they're eatin' virtual food. No wonder these Puppets are in a lousy mood...." -- Laurie Anderson 
Grep this Canter & Seigle: Green Card Scam Spam Don't Do It Just Say No 
"We have tamed lightning - and now use it to make sand think" 
Absolutely no trees were killed to produce this sig. Well, OK, we had to tie one up and torture it. So. However, this is not the only sig I have. My other one is even more important. It's name is P226.
Error reading from device Brain - (A)bort, (R)etry, (G)et a Beer? 
M-16 AK-47 Heroin LSD Cocaine Marijuana Grenades TNT Bomb Thermonuclear Uranium-235 RU-486 Data Encryption Security PGP Conspiracy Censorship JFK Clipper Chip Import Export Airport Spooks DIA CIA NSA FBI Secret Service FDA Brave New World Order Alien Keyword Filtering Software haha fooled you 
"The problem with evolution is that humans with undesirable traits reproduce before said traits catch up with them. That's why we still have people who ride motorcycles without helmets, Cyberpromo, Inc. and Bill Clinton." 
Microsoft Network is prohibited from redistributing this work in any form, in whole or in part. License to distribute this post is available to Microsoft for $1000. Posting without permission constitutes an agreement to these terms. 
Any attempt to delete or censor this message before normal expiration shall constitute a violation of my civil rights and is punishable by federal law. 
I delete flames before reading, and I keep an active killfile. If you don't hear from me, your system is okay, I just have you set for ignore... 
Our connection, which art on the Internet
Hallow'ed be thy address
Thy upgrades come,
Thy queue be done,
On the net as it is from the DNS.
Give us this day our daily e-mail
And forgive us our system crashes
As we forgive those links that drop against us.
Lead us not into excessive access bills
And deliver us from accounting errors
For thine is the communication
The CPU power and the response
Forever and ever, TCP/IP. 
Real Life, also known as "that big room with the ceiling that is sometimes blue and sometimes black with little lights" 
"The main product of a research laboratory is ideas". Butler Lampson...... Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) 
"Where blind and naked Ignorance Delivers brawling judgments, unashamed, On all things all day long." --Tennyson
Ha'-hmmm. Maybe this verse could be a sort of USENET motto. 
"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?" -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982 
the sand remembers
once there was beach and sunshine
but chip is warm too
-- Damon Koronakos and Brian Roberts: HI-TECH HAIKUS 
samurai fighter
keyboard and mouse are his sword
digital battles
-- Damon Koronakos and Brian Roberts: HI-TECH HAIKUS 
"There are three kinds of death in this world. There's heart death, there's brain death, and there's being off the network." -- Guy Almes 
The beauty of mechanical problems is that they are often visible to the naked and untrained eye. If white smoke is rising from a disk drive, that is probably where the problem lies (unless your disk drive has just elected the new Pope). - John Bear, Computer Wimp 
My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what's really going to be scared. --P.J. Plauger, Computer Language, Programming on Purpose, p.29, March 1983 
"I am Pentium of Borg. Arithmetic is irrelevant. Prepare to be approximated." 
"You couldn't get a clue during the clue mating season in a field full of horny clues if you smeared your body with clue musk and did the clue mating dance..." --- Edward Flaherty 
"The Business Services Leadership Team will enhance the organization in order to continue on the journey toward a Market Facing Organization (MFO) model. To that end, we are consolidating the Object Management for Business Services into a cross strata team." 
(c) Copyright *Your Name*. All rights reserved. The body of this message may not be reproduced except in direct replies via USENET or email. 
"The fear of flame creeps slowly through his belly as his fingers reach for the mouse, but its been a hell of a week, and he's too tired to worry about 
"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." - Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949 
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." - Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943 
"I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year." - The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957 
"But what ... is it good for?" - Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip. 
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." - Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977 
"Where a calculator like the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1 1/2 tons." -- Popular Mechanics, ca. 1947 
"Driving a Hudson Hornet on the disinformation triple bypass: cruising for burgers & garage sales. Hooks baited, lines entangled, roadkill cooked" 
"An' then Chicken@little.com, he come scramblin outta the terminal room screaming "The system's crashing! The system's crashing!" - Uncle RAMus, 'Tales for Cyberpsychotic Children' 
"I'll use vi when they pry emacs from my cold, dead fingers..." 
"First they came for the hackers. But I never did anything illegal with my computer, so I didn't speak up.
Then they came for the pornographers. But I thought there was too much smut on the Internet anyway, so I didn't speak up.
Then they came for the anonymous remailers. But a lot of nasty stuff gets sent from anon.penet.fi, so I didn't speak up.
Then they came for the encryption users. But I could never figure out how to work PGP anyway, so I didn't speak up.
Then they came for me. And by that time there was no one left to speak up." - Alara Rogers, Aleph Press 
Standard Disclaimer: Not only do I speak for No one else, I don't even Speak for me. All my personalities and the spirits that I channel disavow all knowledge of my activities. In fact, all my personalities and channeled spirits hate my guts. (Well, maybe with garlic & butter...) 
For law enforcment officials monitoring the net: marijuana, cocaine, cia, plutonium, ammonium nitrate, Mena, militia, dea, nsa, pgp, hacker, assassinate. 
..... REALITY.SYS Corrupted - Unable to recover Universe 
29A, the hexadecimal of the Beast. 
A)bort, R)etry or S)elf-destruct? 
A)bort, R)etry, I)gnore, V)alium? 
A)bort, R)etry, I)nfluence with large hammer. 
A)bort, R)etry, P)ee in drive door 
AAAAAA - American Association Against Acronym Abuse Anonymous 
"I file things in historical order, with a hashing algorithm of gravity" 
"That's our advantage at Microsoft; we set the standards and we can change them." -- Karen Hargrove, Microsoft (quoted in the Feb 1993 Unix Review editorial) 
I would not, could not SAVE ON PHONE,
I would not, could not BUY YOUR LOAN,
I would not, could not MAKE MONEY FAST,
I would not, could not SEND NO CA$H,
I would not, could not SEE YOUR SITE,
I would not, could not EAT VEG-I-MITE,
I do *not* *like* GREEN CARDS AND SPAM! Mad-I-Am!
(inspired: PvdL) 
Usenet is a sewer. Don't waste soap trying to clean it. - reid@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us
Mosher's Law of Software Engineering:
Don't worry if it doesn't work right. If everything did, you'd be out of a job.
A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. - A Contrived Reduction Of Nouns, Yielding Mnemonics. 
"You need the computing power of a Pentium, 16 million bytes of RAM, and a 1 billion-byte hard disk to run Windows 95. It took the computing power of approximately 3 Commodore 64s to fly to the moon. Something is wrong here..." 
It isn't that unix isn't a user friendly operating system, it's just choosy about which users it wants to be friends with, and even the best of friends occasionally fight. 
What did the devil say when the first email spammer showed up in hell?
"There goes the neighborhood!" 
"The Court declares that Cyber Promotions does not have a right under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution [...] to send unsolicited email advertisements over the Internet..." said Judge Charles R. Weiner, of the U.S. Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, in his ruling, November 4, 1996 
"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home." -- Ken Olson, President, Digital Equipment, 1977 
"What do you think will be the biggest problem in computing in the 90's?"
"There are only 17,000 three-letter acronyms." - Paul Boutin 1989 
Too err is human. To moo, bovine.
"If C gives you enough rope to hang yourself, then C++ gives you enough rope to bind and gag your neighborhood, rig the sails on a small ship, and still have enough rope to hang yourself from the yardarm." -- Anonymous
"Meatspace" - The physical world (as opposed to the virtual world), also "carbon community."
"Treeware" - Manuals and documentation.
Cannot find REALITY.SYS. Universe halted.
COFFEE.EXE Missing - Insert Cup and Press Any Key.
Buy a Pentium 586/90 so you can reboot faster.
2 + 2 = 5 for extremely large values of 2.
Computers make very fast, very accurate mistakes.
Computers are not intelligent. They only think they are.
My software never has bugs. It just develops undocumented features.
C:\WINDOWS C:\WINDOWS\GO C:\PC\CRAWL
C:\DOS C:\DOS\RUN RUN\DOS\RUN 
<-------- The information went data way --------
Best file compression around
"DEL *.*" = 100% compression
The Definition of an Upgrade: Take old bugs out, put new ones in.
BREAKFAST.COM Halted...Cereal Port Not Responding
The name is Baud......, James Baud.
BUFFERS FILES 2nd down, 4th quarter, 5 yards to go!
Access denied! Nah nah na nah nah!
C:\Bad command or file name! Go stand in the corner.
Bad command. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay!
Why doesn't DOS ever say "EXCELLENT command or filename!"
As a computer, I find your faith in technology amusing.
Southern DOS: Y'all reckon? (Yep/Nope)
Backups? We don' NEED no steenking backups.
E Pluribus Modem
... File not found. Should I fake it? (Y/N)
Ethernet (n): Something used to catch the Etherbunny
A mainframe: The biggest PC peripheral available.
An error? Impossible! My modem is error correcting.
Press any key... no, No, NO!! Not THAT one!
Press CTRL-ALT-DEL to continue ...
I can please only one person per day.
Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either.
-- motto of Dogbert's New Ruling Class
"We are all victims of this slime. They... ...fill our mailboxes with gibberish that would get them indicted if people had time to press charges"-- Hunter S. Thompson predicts junk e-mail, 1985 (from Generation of Swine)
If it's not on fire then it's a software problem.
The only truly "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned. (Bruce Ediger, bediger@teal.csn.org, in comp.os.linux.misc, on X interfaces.)
The Palm Pilot organizer isn't just a sales success. It's reaching cult status. At the Feb. 18 meeting of President Clinton's high-tech Advisory Committee in Santa Clara, Calif., 15 of the 22 members whipped out the Palm to schedule future meetings. -- Business Week, March 1998.
"There's always one more bu6"
"Bother," said Pooh as he reached for the reset button.
GNU PROGRAMMERS do it for free and they don't give a damn about look & feel
Created with the No. 1 Rated HTML editor - "emacs"
"Bother," said Pooh, as Windows swapped out again.
"The Court declares that Cyber Promotions does not have a right under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution [...] to send unsolicited email advertisements over the Internet..." said Judge Charles R. Weiner, of the U.S. Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, in his ruling, November 4, 1996
What did the devil say when the first email spammer showed up in hell?
"There goes the neighborhood!"
"The most likely way for the world to be destroyed is by accident.
That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents." -- Nathaniel Borenstein
CNE's are certified to do it.
At the cutting edge of trailing technology
"Life Sucks...then you turn to the documentation and discover that's a feature, not a bug."
Real programmers don't bring brown-bag lunches.  If the vending machine doesn't sell it, they don't eat it.
Vending machines don't sell quiche.
If I just flamed you, and you are thinking 'What a jerk', be glad I'm not as bad as my friend John. He gets his kicks by wrenching the wings off of live rabbits. Ah HA! You didn't know rabbits had wings, did you? And of course they dont, until John has hammered them into their backs with six inch nails. A rather simple-minded hobby, but it keeps him amused.
"Print isn't dead; it just seems that way because it doesn't move." - Frank Romano, Rochester Institute of Technology
vi vi vi - The editor of the beast
How many usenetters does it take to change a light bulb?
Read the FAQ!
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine." -- RFC 1925
"The trouble with computers of course, is that they're very sophisticated idiots." -- The Doctor
Going to add some signal to my noise soon....
"You are in a maze of twisty subroutines, all alike".
Token Ring, n.: a local area network architecture, perhaps a future replacement for SNA. Not to be confused with the Tolkien Ring, although the purposes are similar: "One Ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them, in a LAN with more nodes where the stations lie."
If I hire a sysadmin and he ISN'T a fascist, I've wasted my money.
"If you post it, they will flame" - Anon
"On the Information SuperHighway, I'm the guy with a hat driving 50 in the fast lane with my blinker on and my seatbelt hanging out the door making sparks." - markus@rsvl.unisys.com
"I have a spelling checker, It came with my PC;
It plainly marks four my revue Mistakes I cannot sea.
I've run this poem threw it, I'm sure your please too no,
It's letter perfect in its weigh, My checker toiled me sew."
- Mike Perkowitz map@cs.washington.edu
"You've got to know when to code 'em, know when to load 'em, know when to emulate, know when to run. You never count your money, when your sittin' at the keyboard: there'll be time enough for countin', when the software's done."
"If the standard says that [things] depend on the phase of the moon, the programmer should be prepared to look out the window as necessary." -- Chris Torek
"Clueless marketing guy carries cool technology into oblivion. Kinds of like an I.P.O." -- User Friendly
[Software is] stored on an 8MB Sony 'memory stick' about two inches long. Sure enough, the memory stick gets inserted into the dog's body in exactly the place you'd sort of hoped they would not have asked you to insert it." -- Sony "Aibo" robotic dog owner John Wharton (Interesting people mailing list 8/16/99)
"There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about." -- John von Neumann
The three principle virtues of a good programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris.
Yoda DOS: (A)bort or (F)ail, there is no (R)etry....
"This is our robot. There are many like it, but this one is ours. Our robot is our best friend. It is our life. We must master it as we must master our lives." -- Team King Louie, Winners 2000 6.270
To quote "Dear Emily Postnews"
Q: I cant spell worth a dam. I hope your going too tell me what to do?

A: Don't worry about how your articles look. Remember it's the message that counts, not the way it's presented. Ignore the fact that sloppy spelling in a purely written forum sends out the same silent messages that soiled clothing would when addressing an audience.

Hit any user to continue.
"The Reality is, however, that ClearType is warmed-over technology that failed to save handheld Windows CE devices from oblivion." -- MIT's Technology Review, July/August 2000
"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
Book: A non-volatile information storage medium.
"Net? Fie on thee! The net is no substitute for the feel of a heavy book in your hands!" -- Rod Basler
The box said "Requires Windows 95 or better."
So I installed Linux ...
"What's a FAQ? Boy, I wish someone would put a list of answers for common questions such as this..."
"APL is a write-only language. I can write programs in APL, but I can't read any of them." -- Roy Keir
"Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window." -- Steve Wozniak
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