Emoticons
The smiley is an attack on writers and readers alike. If it is funny, it doesn’t need a smiley. If is not funny, a smiley won’t help it. The smiley teaches writers that anything they write will pass as humor as long as it is punctuated properly. It teaches readers that they must ignore their better judgment, and look only at punctuation to determine intent.
[Jim Showalter, of Harper's Magazine]
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Geeks
You know you’re a geek when you try to shoo a fly away from the monitor with your cursor. That just happened to me. It was scary.”
[Juuso Heimonen, noted poker player]
And you know that the fly’s a geek when it flies away because you moved the cursor.
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Floating Point Arithmetic
2 + 2 = 5, for extremely large values of 2.
[Anon, via the usenet]
This makes perfect sense and is probably correct.
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User Friendly
Software suppliers are trying to make their software packages more user-friendly… Their best approach, so far, has been to take all the old brochures, and stamp the words, ‘user-friendly’ on the cover.
[Bill Gates, Founder of Microsoft]
And I’d thought that was a Microsoft innovation. Live and learn.
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The Limits of Computing
It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years.
[John von Neumann, father of the computer (1903-1957)]
And unutterably stupid in 50 years.
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See also:
10 IT Quotes From The Wise
10 More IT Quotes from the Wise
Yet Another 10 IT Quotes From The Wise
10 IT Quotes – The Delicious Irony of Bill Gates
The full list of IT Quotes postings
~ Salvador Dali
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