-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- How good is good enough: documentation Looking at Sun man pages versus Linux man pages is like looking at a Van Gogh or Monet after studying the work of the high school football player taking art as an "easy" elective. Amy Graf, BitMover -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- BitKeeper humor One of the Soma Networks guys, walking by Georg's desk after putting a beer in the fridge: ``Successful push into the BeerKeeper repository.'' Courtney Gibson -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On hiring people Don't confuse the desire to perform with the ability to perform. Larry McVoy -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Theory vs. Practice Obviously incorrect. The problem with most elementary OS books is that they dwell on the conceptual solutions to non-problems and so equip students to solve the other examples of non-problems in the back of the chapter. Victor Yodaiken arguing with a theoretician about clusters. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On contracts ``The big print giveth, and the fine print taketh away.'' Cardinal Cook -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cynical professors ``This talk is like an Infinity commercial. You see lots of pretty pictures -- waves splashing up on rocks, sunsets, sandy beaches -- but you never see the car.'' Prof. Marv Solomon After listening to a less-than-perfect talk. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- How to read a paper ``Reading a scientific article isn't the same as reading a detective story. We want to know from the start that the butler did it.'' O.D. Ratnoff -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On programming skill ``Average programmers should be rounded up and placed in internment camps to keep them away from keyboards.'' Well known Linux personage Who said he'd kill me if I mentioned his name. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Politeness ``Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untraveled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as `empty,' `meaningless,' or `dishonest,' and scorn to use them. No matter how `pure' their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.'' --Lazarus Long -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Best FreeBSD vs Linux comments ``Any advice on what makes FreeBSD more attractive than Linux or whatever would be appreciated.'' Dean Lewis in comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc. ``Jordan Hubbard and Linus Torvalds in Speedos. There just is no comparison.'' Ron Echeverri replying to Dean Lewis in comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc. ``He's got millions of seats and you've got millions of arguments.'' Me, speaking to Jordan Hubbard about Linus. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On doing ``Do or do not. There is no try." Yoda -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Computer Geeks ``Computer types? Well, there's your hippies, and your nerds, and your suits. The hippies and the nerds are all right but ya gotta watch out for the suits.'' Video store clerk -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ``Think of it this way: threads are like salt, not like pasta. You like salt, I like salt, we all like salt. But we eat more pasta.'' Me explaining why a 1000 threads in a window system is not wise. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Threads A computer is a state machine. Threads are for people who can't program state machines. Alan Cox in a discussion about the threads and the Linux scheduler -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Growing older The difference between children and adults is that adults have a lot more to lose when they screw up. Steve Alexander -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On Competing in the 90's ``I don't think anyone realized the magnitude of change required to compete. You tend to look for changes of 10 percent when what you need is a ten- or twelvefold change.'' David Kearns, Xerox CEO Speaking about restructuring large companies. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On Accountability ``It's called accountability, and more and more shareholders are demanding it.'' Richard Koppes, CalPERS Speaking about waste in large companies. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On Types of People ``There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.'' Mark Twain -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On Being Nice ``It's nice to be important, but it's important to be nice.'' Anon. but sent to me when I got too cocky (it helped a little). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On The Real World ``In college, they started all physics problems with `assume a frictionless surface.' The difference between college and industry is that in college you spend all your time on the formulas and in industry you spend all your time on friction.'' Larry McVoy -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On Networking Architecture ``Do you want protocols that look nice or protocols that work nice?'' Mike Padlipsky, internet architect -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On Architecture Architect: Someone who knows the difference between that which could be done and that which should be done. Larry McVoy -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On Design ``Numbers talk, bullshit walks.'' Anonymous -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On Denial ``Evil comes from denying reality. Period. You have to distort reality to rationalize evil acts.'' Mary Gaitskill, novelist -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On Staying Fresh ``You look at people who are five years out of college that got A's in calculus. Now they can't do calculus. So they shouldn't have jobs doing calculus, and they certainly shouldn't be telling other people how to do calculus.'' Jeff Bonwick, frustrated Sun engineer -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On Goals ``Some people lose sight of the fact that a computer is basically a fancy filing cabinet. Those people are doomed to failure in the computer industry.'' Larry McVoy -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On Losing Touch ``Should we build the system that our customers want or should we build the system that PSARC wants?'' Jeff Bonwick, frustrated Sun engineer -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On Reality ``The truth is the truth. An opinion is an opinion. Don't confuse the two.'' Larry McVoy -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On Bureaucracy ``I can't understand this proliferation of paperwork. It's useless to fight the forms. You've got to kill the people producing them.'' Vladimir Kabaidze In a speech to the Communist Party. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On Business ``Don't confuse selling with installing.'' Hal Stern -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On I/O Channels ``Putting a Tsunami in the middle of the data path is like putting a child in the middle of a 4 lane highway.'' Dave Banks, Sun Storage array engineer -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On Truth ``The truth stands apart from mere mortals.'' William Shakespeare -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On Memory Systems Design ``Parity is for farmers.'' Seymour Cray ``Coherence is for Yogis.'' Renu Ram -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On Unix and Unix Hackers ``The problem here is that there is parent and child but no adult.'' Lynne Jolitz -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On The Real World ``In theory, practice and theory are the same, but in practice they are different.'' Larry McVoy -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linux on MIPS ``Yeah, that kernel is so great it finds hardware you don't even have.'' Steve Alexander, Silicon Graphics Commenting on Dave Miller's Linux port to MIPS - it found an EISA bus that wasn't there. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On The Scale of Things ``Anyone who is worried about a 2-3x improvement is ignoring the 10-1000x improvement sitting in their building.'' Random Cluster People -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On People ``Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity.'' Anon. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On Talent ``The value of a technical conversation is inversely proportional to how well the participants are dressed.'' Larry McVoy -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On Tact ``We're operating from a knowledge base that is not very dense.'' Jim Skeen Explaining how to say that we don't know what we are doing. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On Performance ``If the performance ain't crankin', you're just yankin'.'' Steve Alexander, Silicon Graphics -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On typing ``After 40 Terabytes, your fingers start to hurt.'' David Miller, Linux kernel hacker -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ``More pondering on this is needed...'' David Miller, Linux kernel hacker -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Architects He was a very great artist at the business of designing aeroplanes, and like all great designers in the aircraft industry he was a perfect swine to deal with. There is, of course, a good deal of explanation in the psychology for this universal characteristic of the greatest aeroplane designers. A beautiful aircraft is the expression of the genius of a great engineer who is also a great artist. It is impossible for that man to carry out the whole of the design himself; he works through a design office staffed by a hundred draugthsman or more. A hundred minds, each with their own less competent ideas, are striving to modify the chief designer's original conception. If the design is to appear in the end as a great artistic unity, the chief designer must be a man of immensely powerful will, capable of imposing his idea and way of doing things on each of his hundred draughtsman, so that each one is too terrified to insert any of his own ideas. If the chief designer has not got this personality and strength of will, his original conception will be distorted in the design office and will appear as just another, not-so-good aeroplane. He will not then be ranked as a good chief designer. All really first class designers, for this reason, are both artists, engineers, and men of a powerful and intolerant temper, quick to resist the least modification of the plans, energetic in fighting the least infringement upon what they regard as their own sphere of action. If they were not so, they could not produce good aeroplanes. Nevil Shute