"XML combines the efficiency of text files with the readability of binary files" - ??? "One of the greatest tragedies of life is the murder of a beautiful theory by a gang of brutal facts." - Le Rochefoucauld "Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true." - Niels Bohr "Seek simplicity, and distrust it." - Alfred North Whitehead "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others." - Groucho Marx "The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope." - Karl Marx "The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced." - Frank Zappa "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is." - Yogi Berra "Unfortunately, the current generation of mail programs do not have checkers to see if the sender knows what he is talking about." - Andrew S. Tanenbaum "The problem with object-oriented languages is they've got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle." - Joe Armstrong "If you give someone a program, you will frustrate them for a day; if you teach them how to program, you will frustrate them for a lifetime" - David Leinweber (NOWS) "I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone." - Bjarne Stroustrup "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye." - Miss Piggy "If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough." - Alan Kay "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw "Two people dying with the same amount of money need not have had equally happy lives." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero." - "Fight Club" movie "If you want to pray for potatoes, pray with a shovel." - Russian proverb ""It's only a mistake if you don't learn from it" - Megan's Dad "Floating point is sort of like quantum physics: the closer you look, the messier it gets." - Grant Edwards "XML is like violence - if it doesn't solve your problems, you are not using enough of it." - Unknown (http://tinyurl.com/ovdf9k) "50 percent of our success is good timing, 50 percent is good fortune, and the rest is brains." - Unknown (http://tinyurl.com/pjmbel) "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." - Derek Bok, the 25th President of Harvard It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default. - J.K Rowling (http://tinyurl.com/5wtgfa) "I don't mind working hard, but I mind very much working harder than I have to, especially if I know a better way." - Ron Garret (http://tinyurl.com/d6284g) "From everything I heard, Babe Ruth had only one home run; he just kept hitting it over and over again." - Steve Jobs I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. - Mark Twain I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it. - George Bernard Shaw "Ignorance killed the cat; curiosity was framed!" - C.J. Cherryh "Nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect." - Richard R. Powell (on "Wabi sabi") "If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?" -- Albert Einstein Fundamentals is a word invented by sellers to find buyers. - Marc Cuban (http://www.blogmaverick.com/2008/09/08/talking-stocks-and-money/) Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe. - Abraham Lincoln Klipstein's Fifth Prototyping and Production Law: A transistor protected by a fast-acting fuse will protect the fuse by blowing first. (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?FailFast) This has been written about extensively by various bloggers, but nobody cares about what bloggers think. It logically follows that I don't care about what I think. I couldn't indifferently agree more. - Jake Voytko (http://www.jakevoytko.com/blog/2008/08/04/norvig-atwood-and-comments) We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris. - Larry Wall and Randal L Schwartz Simplicity is the essence of happiness. - Cedric Bledsoe If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking. - George S. Patton I don't measure a man's success by how high he climbs but how high he bounces when he hits bottom. - George S. Patton Don't tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results. - George S. Patton A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week. - George S. Patton When C++ is your hammer, everything starts to look like your thumb. - Amazon interview candidate The part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good. - Samuel Johnson Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. - Leonardo da Vinci The difference between genius and insanity is measured only by success. - Eliot Carver Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. - Winston Churchill "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery (from http://workhappy.net) Failure is not an option. It's built into the software. - ??? "I'm somewhere where I don't know where I am" - Homer Simpson "I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying." - Oscar Wilde And don't EVER make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That's giving your intelligence _much_ too much credit. - Linus (http://tinyurl.com/2kkl77) Act without doing, work without effort. Think of the small as large and the few as many. Confront the difficult while it is still easy; accomplish the great task by a series of small steps. - Lao-Tze "Agile is like Churchhill's democracy, the worst possible solution until compared to the alternatives" - David Starr "It is far easier to ask for forgiveness than to beg for permission" - Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others. - ??? When a programmer catches fire it's because he or she groks the system, its underlying truth has been revealed." - Dave Winer "Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don't have the first, the other two will kill you. You think about it; it's true. If you hire somebody without the first, you really want them to be dumb and lazy." - Warren Buffett. "Get there first with the most men." - Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest summing up his military theory Documentation should answer questions of what, where and why. The code already answers "how" so don't waste time on that. - Jeff Staddon If you have a really good idea, you don't have to worry that someone will steal it because it is more likely that you'll have to shove it down their throat. - ??? The difference between playing the stock market and the horses is that one of the horses must win. - Joey Adams It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. - Theodore Roosevelt In god we trust; all others must bring data. - W. Edwards Deming "... I never saw a wreck and never have been wrecked, nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort. You see, I am not very good material for a story" - Captain Smith, Commander of Titanic * Whoever comes is the right people * Whatever happens is the only thing that could have * Whenever it starts is the right time * When it's over it's over - Open Space Principles I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been. - Wayne Gretzky You miss 100% of the shots you don't take. - Wayne Gretzky Plan early, plan twice - US Marines *Hofstadtera's Law* A task always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account - Hofstadtera's Law. When everybody thinks alike, Everyone is likely to be wrong. - ??? It it won't be simple it simply won't be. - IDF common phrase The major difference between bonds and bond traders is that the bonds will eventually mature. - ??? Plans are nothing; planning is everything. - Dwight D. Eisenhower We build toys. Some of those toys change the world. - Nassim Taleb (Black Swan) If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking. - George S. Patton "There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time." - Lord Chesterfield (1740) All models are wrong, but some are useful - George Box .. comment: vim: spell