To hear the voice of god:
cat /vmlinuz &> /dev/audio 
-- slashdot

Q: How did you hear about our products? 
A: 
 [] Recomended by a friend
 [] Saw ad in magazine
 [] Screaming butterflies spoke of them 
-- Slashdot


"Half-assed programming was a time-filler that, like knitting, must
date to the beginning of the human experience."
Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep



I've always felt that a computer system is a significant statement
about our relationship to the world -- how we organize our
understanding of it, how we want to interact with what we know, how we
wish to project the whole notion of intelligence.
-- Ellen Ullman

 
We build our computers the way we build our cities -- over time,
without a plan, on top of ruins.
-- Ellen Ullman


It is here that the stereotype of the programmer, sitting in a dim
room, growling from behind Coke cans, has its origins. The disorder of
the desk, the floor; the yellow post-it notes everywhere; the white
boards covered with scrawl: all this is the outward manifestation of
the messiness of human thought. The messiness cannot go into the
program; it piles up around the programmer.
-- Ellen Ullman


On average, professional coders make 100 to 150 errors in every
thousand lines of code they write, according to a multiyear study of
13,000 programs by Humphrey of Carnegie Mellon.



The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple.
-- billnapier



This is one of the most beautiful bugs I've ever seen - Microsoft is
clearly an innovator in bringing ever-more-advanced,
aesthetically-pleasing bugs to customers.
-- jdbo


I used to program my IBM PC to make hideous noises to wake me up. I
also made the conscious decision to hard-code the alarm time into the
program, so as to make it more difficult for me to reset it. After I
realised that I was routinely getting up, editing the source file,
recompiling the program and rerunning it for 15 minutes extra sleep,
before going back to bed, I gave up and made the alarm time a
command-line option.
               -B.M. Buck

That's *int* main() to you, citizen
               -Dan Martinez

"The Red Book will you read, hmmm? You data on the stack, followed by
your operators will you put, hmmm?" "I'm not afraid." "You will
be. *You will be.*"
               -Dan Martinez

Next week on unhinged: geeks, their anxieties, and the pre-processors
that love them!
               -Aleecia McDonald


You are talking about the Count Dracula of the computing world. The
tree large enough that a stake capable of killing COBOL could be
fashioned from its trunk has not yet grown anywhere upon the face of
this verdant planet.
               -Dan Martinez

"The web knows. It knows everything. The web is god."
--Spike


"Online communication is a fragile thing. It's also phenomenological.
There is no existence beyond what we read. If you present the persona of
a humorless twit, then you are one, as far as the net is concerned."
--Bruce Baugh


     When I have understanding of computers I shall be the Supreme Being!
Evil, Time Bandits


 the television is for swithcing off, 
the computer for swithcing on.
Steve Jobs

...the deeper one drives the spade the harder the digging gets; maybe it has become too hard for us
unless we are given some outside help, be it even by such devilish devices as high speed computing
machines. 
                                     -H. Weyl


"Any medium powerful enough to extend man's reach is powerful enough
to topple his world. To get the medium's magic to work for one's aims
rather than against them is to attain literacy. " -- Alan Kay,
"Computer Software", Scientific American ---


You can resist the invasion of armies,but you cannot resist
the invasion of ideas.
Robert Söderberg


I'm at ground zero in an information explosion.


The more society becomes information instead of material objects, this
question of whether a person can copy things will make the difference 
between a world of universal prosperity and a world of universal rat-race.
Richard Stallman

     I do not fear computers. I fear lack of them. -Isaac Asimov 

The computer is the Proteus of machines.  - Seymour Papert

Information is more basic than matter and energy.
                           Atoms, electrons, quarks consist of bits --
                                   Binary units of information
                           Like those processed in computer software
                                       And in the brain.
                      The behavior of these bits, and thus of the universe,
                           Is governed by a single programming rule.
                                         Edward Fredkin 




Människans förmåga att växa och utvecklas är hennes styrka. Rätt
utnyttjad ger IT vingar åt denna förmåga. Det är vingar att lyfta och
att överbrygga avstånd med. Det är vingar att förverkliga annars
ouppnåeliga ambitioner med, vingar som kan revolutionera både vardag
och arbetsliv.

Genom IT:s genombrott förändras människors och länders villkor i
grunden. Avstånden minskar.  Samarbetet får nya verktyg. Gränser
länderna emellan bryts ner till förmån för ett fritt flöde av
vetande. Ekonomins internationalisering understryks ytterligare.

IT skapar nya möjligheter såväl för individen som för samhället. Den
ökar möjligheterna att kommunicera och att samarbeta, att ta till vara
och utnyttja information och kunskap, att lösa problem och att
utveckla ny kunskap. Den öppnar nya sätt att vara, arbeta, mötas och
umgås.

INFORMATIONSTEKNOLOGIN -
Vingar åt människans förmåga
Betänkande av IT-kommissionen Stockholm 1994


In the information age, sharing can increase world wealth enormously,
because giving information does not decrease your information.
John de Rivaz  


 "Information vill vara fri." Tänk om man kunde säga detsamma om mä
niskan...
Horatius Ladislau


     Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It wafts across the 
electrified borders. Breezes of electronic beams blow through the Iron Curtain
as if it were lace. 
-- Ronald Reagan (speaking before the Institut de France on June 15, 1989), 
Source: Reuters, Via: VitaminB@bionomics.org on 12-Sep-96 


In the agrarian age and before, nature (matter) was being
transformed by physical labor and mechanical devices (i.e.
matter). Hence matter was being transformed by matter. 

During the Industrial Revolution, we inserted a new factor in the
production process, i .e. energy (in the form of processed
fuels). Hence matter was being transformed by matter, and by
energy, and this lead to a quantum leap in productivity. 

We are now in the process of adding yet another factor in this
equation: i.e. information. Today, the natural world is being
transformed not only by using matter and energy, but by the
introduction of information, which leads to a new explosion of
productivity. 

We can say that virtualisation is the increasing substitution of
matter by information. 
Michel Bauwens


I don't know that it's either conscious or intelligent, but I'd count
it as being alive. I'm not sure whether it's more like a parasite or
more like a symbiote in re the human race. I am sure that we're much
too fond of the Net to get rid of it.....it's rather like a very large
electronic housecat.
Nancy Lebovitz  (nancyL@universe.digex.net) 


In the Global Village, every war is a civil war.

"Why ship atoms when you ship bits?" - Negroponte


cryptocosmology- sufficiently advanced communication is indistinguishable from noise - god is in the least significant bits
- fnerd@smds.com (FutureNerd Steve Witham) 

brain slow like last leaf 
tentative fall 
of seventeen bits 
-- Steve 
ss6r@fermi.clas.virginia.edu 


Within my computer-self
generating alienselves and
silken moons
- Michael R. Collings 
mcolling@pepperdine.edu