% My involvement included explaining to marketing why we couldn't give them a list of all non-game Windows apps. -- [name withheld] "And the cluefire burned brightly, and consumed the marketroids." -- Anthony de Boer % I don't see what C++ has to do with keeping people from shooting themselves in the foot. C++ will happily load the gun, offer you a drink to steady your nerves, and help you aim. -- Peter da Silva % How about an Australian-language version? 'Your program just attempted an illegal instruction. No worries, mate.' -- Paul Tomblin % This was, apparently, beyond her ken. So far beyond her ken that she was well into barbie territory. -- J. D. Baldwin % I picked up a Magic 8-Ball the other day and it said 'Outlook not so good.' I said 'Sure, but Microsoft still ships it.' -- Anonymous % SWMBO: Would you like to (perform household chore)? me: No. At least, I'm bloody well tempted to reply with that, although it's been proven over time to be a Relationship Reboot Sequence. -- David P. Murphy % I told $VERY_BIG_CLIENT that sure, we can do $THING_THAT_VIOLATES_CAUSALITY by Tuesday. You can do that, right? -- Lionel % It seems that we were audited recently, and the auditors found a certain 'f' word in the comments of a configuration file, and deemed that this is a 'security risk'. -- Paul Fenwick % It's not hard, it's just asking for a visit by the fuckup fairy. -- Peter da Silva % I hate mornings. I know they hate me back, too. -- Joel Gluth % The Write Many, Read Never drive. For those people that don't know their system has a /dev/null already. -- Rik Steenwinkel, singing the praises of 8mm Exabytes % I'm not sure if this is a good or a bad thing. Probably a bad thing; most things are bad things. -- Nile Evil Bastard % Revenge is an integral part of forgiving and forgetting. -- The BOFH % Almost any animal is capable of learning a stimulus/response association, given enough repetition. -- Lionel Lauer Experimental observation suggests that this isn't true if double-clicking is involved. -- Malcolm Ray % I once successfully declined a departmental retreat, saying that on that day I planned instead to advance. -- Alan J. Rosenthal % Either way, it'll remind the clued that there's only one letter difference between 'turkey' and 'turnkey'. -- Mike Andrews % Crowds want to beat, journalists deserve to be beaten. Where lies the problem? -- Lars Syrstad % The pluses in my current job include laughing in the face of Nobel laureates who have just lost the only copy of their data. (Hey, I'm still a BOFH). -- Bob Dowling % Better to teach a man to fish than to give him a fish. And if he can't be bothered to learn to fish and starves to death, that's a good enough outcome for me. -- Steve VanDevender % Compared to system administration, being cursed forever is a step up. -- Paul Tomko % We're the technical experts. We were hired so that management could ignore our recommendations and tell us how to do our jobs. -- Mike Andrews % I didn't need to sabotage anything. Not being around to say "No that won't work" or "you can't do it that way" is more than enough damage. (Ego problem? It's not a problem.) -- Graham Reed, on job endings % Stress, n. The mental confusion and physiological upset resulting from a mental/physical conflict, such as when the body wants to kick the living shit out of some luser who richly deserves it, and the brain veto-ing the proposition. -- Dan Holdsworth % They got rid of it because they judged it more trouble than it was worth. (And considering they'd gone to great lengths to minimize its worth, I suppose they were right.) -- J. D. Baldwin % Hmmm. So I must use a permanent From line to accommodate your needs to censor my free expresssion. I don't think so. -- [luser] OOOOOH! OOOOOOOH! We have our VERY OWN Freedom Knight to play with. -- Chris Rovers % If lusers got a clue, you'd be out of work. No thanks necessary. :-) -- [uninvited git] Duh. If lusers got a clue we could _concentrate_ on our work. -- Lars Balker Rasmussen % Any research done on how to efficiently use computers has been long lost in the mad rush to upgrade systems to do things that aren't needed by people who don't understand what they are really supposed to do with them. -- Graham Reed % If nothing else, I can watch my cow-orkers dodge clues in a manner vaguely reminescent of Keanu Reeves from The Matrix -- Justin Chandler The lusers I've had to work with in the past would never need to dodge; they've been armored in triple-plated apathy for so long you can almost *hear* the clues ricochet off of them with an audible "pting". -- David P. Murphy % Don't even get me started on the MCSEs I know. It's a miracle of modern technology that some of these fsckwits still draw breath, much less a paycheck. -- Marc Bowden % Surely the 98% of DNA we share with monkeys must be enough to stop people from sinking this low. -- Frossie % There are mushrooms that can survive weeks, months without air or anything to digest. They just dry out and when water comes back, they wake up again. -- Jens Benecke And then they call the helldesk to complain that their password has expired. -- Scripsit Tanuki the Raccoon-dog % Not that I'm annoyed at this particular bit of recto-plasmic sputum which has crawled up from the depths of product mis-management to haunt me. Not at all. -- Simon Burr % I have a feeling the auditors haven't looked at crontab yet, but I'm curious to see if they deem a reference to "yogurt sucking maggots" a security risk as well. -- Paul Fenwick % "A" is for Arrogance, properly done. "B" is for Bastard, the New Zealand one. "C" is for Cynic, jaded and tired; it's also for Caffeine, which keeps us all wired. -- Derick Siddoway % "D" for Delete, we'll do it to you; "E" for 31337, the skr1pt-k1ddie's due. "F" is for Format(1M), we use it on disks, "G" is the middle name of the guy who does RISKS. -- Ben (void) % "H" for the Hubris that makes lusers luse; "I"'m the Important one, the person who su(8)'s. "J" is for Jaded, see "C" above; "K" is for Kill(1), a command we all love. -- Ben (void) % "L" is for Luser, the sysadmin's bane, "M" with a "4" keeps the mail gurus sane. "N" is for No, whatever the question, "O" is for Octal, the way of permissions. -- Ben (void) % "P" is for Password, have you changed yours lately? "Q" is for Quotas, which simplify greatly. "R" is for Random, a most useful quality, "S" I can't tell you, it's against policy. -- Ben (void) % "T" is for TECO, a very old editor, "U" is for Unix, which has no competitor. "V" is the System whose Release 4 we wrestle with, "W" is for W(1), to see who(1) we nestle with. -- Ben (void) % "X" is the windowing system from Hell, "Y" do we use it? The rest suck as well! "Z" is for Zero, indicating success It terminates programs -- and alphabets, yes. -- Ben (void) % I got told by a friend's ex-girlfriend that she could tell I was a Linux geek from the way I *walked*. -- Skud % I don't have a sense of humour, merely an over-exaggerated sense of revenge. -- Stephen Harris % I think it's a beautiful day to go to the zoo and feed the ducks. To the lions. -- Brian Kantor % Frankly, your argument wouldn't float were the sea composed of mercury. -- Biff % Progress (n.): The process through which Usenet has evolved from smart people in front of dumb terminals to dumb people in front of smart terminals. -- obs@burnout.demon.co.uk % Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; give him a freshly-charged Electric Eel and chances are he won't bother you for anything ever again. -- Tanuki % When C++ is your hammer, everything looks like a thumb. -- Steven M. Haflich % IMHO WinTelnet is one of those situations in which both fish and firearm are firmly bracketed to the barrel itself, in perfect alignment, and actually walking up and pulling the trigger starts to fall into the "Why Bother?" category. -- Anthony deBoer % Anyone want to help write _Survival for Dummies_? -- pretty short: "Don't" in large, friendly letters. -- Joe Moore % I was absolutely horrified to see a book entitled 'C++ for dummies'. What is the potential market for this book? What programmer considers themself to be a dummy? Who wants to run code written by a dummy? And perhaps more importantly, someone who *considers themselves* to be a dummy? -- Matthew Wilcox % WARNING: This book is crammed with loads of deliberate misinformation designed for the sole purpose of helping lusers darwinate in spectacular ways for the amusement of those more intelligent. -- henke % The only thing I'd use on guinea-fowl is a shredder. Same with peacocks. The sound of peacocks being shredded can't possibly be any worse than the sound of peacocks not being shredded. -- Tanuki % I think I'd like to see a Simpsons episode starting up with Bart Simpson writing "I will not attempt to undermine the Usenet Cabal". -- J. D. Falk % For their next act, they'll no doubt be buying a firewall running under NT, which makes about as much sense as building a prison out of meringue. -- Tanuki % You can lead an idiot to knowledge but you cannot make him think. You can, however, rectally insert the information, printed on stone tablets, using a sharpened poker. -- Nicolai % Usenet should require licenses; licenses that can be revoked. -- Abigail % It's possible there had been armed autonomous droids at some point in the past, and one can almost imagine past issues of that galaxy's Risks Digest. -- Anthony DeBoer, on SW: TPM % A *huge* proportion of people cannot make *correct and accurate* generalisations of principles. They have to learn everything as if it's an unrelated piece of crap, BECAUSE THEY ARE STUPID! PEOPLE ARE STUPID! -- Thorfinn % Don't use this code for realtime control, for weapons systems, or for anything else that may put life or limb at hazard. It isn't man-rated, it isn't really thing-rated, and we don't claim that it's worth a good G*dDamn for anything at all, at all. -- Mike Andrews, on Java compilers % The consquences of any action will never be fully understood until after it's too late to do anything about it. -- Schwartz's Second Law % I love the way Microsoft follows standards. In much the same manner that fish follow migrating caribou. -- Paul Tomblin % Windows gives you a nice view of clouds so you can't see any potentially useful boot time messages. -- Bill Hay % People who are willing to rely on the government to keep them safe are pretty much standing on Darwin's mat, pounding on the door, screaming, 'Take me, take me!' -- Carl Jacobs % I'm an apatheist. The question is no longer interesting, and the answer no longer matters. -- petro % I never really understood how there could be things that would drive you insane just because you knew them until I ran into Windows. -- Peter da Silva % ...and the French an excuse to use their traditional battle cry. -- Firebeard "We surrender, here, have my daughter?" -- Paul Tomblin % If I had encountered Bill Gates today, I would have shaken his hand, said "hello", and stopped kicking as soon as there was nothing left but a bloody stain on the floor. -- Shag % I'm not one of those who think Bill Gates is the devil. I simply suspect that if Microsoft ever met up with the devil, it wouldn't need an interpreter. -- Nick Petreley % I find that anthropomorphism really doesn't help me deal with hardware all that much, because it lends a certain attitude of disdain to what would otherwise be a mere malfunction. -- Carl Jacobs % Failure is not an option. It comes bundled with your Microsoft product. -- Ferenc Mantfeld % If you continue to annoy us, you may find that we prefer the solution of inducing you leave to the solution of deleting your posts. We are not gentle tolerant people. We like drastically effective solutions. -- Steve VanDevender % They're only floundering and helpless when trying to get you to do stuff for them. It's an act. Actually they are scheming little fsckers, and nothing fascinates them as much as some person playing with them by giving them clues and mocking them. -- Chris Johnson describes lusers % I still think buying a book of that title from Microsoft Press would be like buying a handbook for humanitarians from Pol Pot. -- Paul Tomblin, about _Writing Solid Code_ % Is it just me, or does anyone else here find it vaguely unsettling that you get your theology from Star Trek? -- Anthony DeBoer Yeah, he should get it from B5 like us normal people. -- Paul Tomblin % The way NT mounts filesystems is something I'd expect to find in a barnyard or on a stock-breeding farm. -- Mike Andrews % I work for an investment bank. I have dealt with code written by stock exchanges. I have seen how the computer systems that store your money are run. If I ever make a fortune, I will store it in gold bullion under my bed. -- Matthew Crosby % The world is *not* a place where equality reigns, or where all people are wonderful creatures. As it happens, we happen to hold a particular worldview that there *is* a techno-elite (yes, that's a trite and overused term), and we are part of it. -- Thorfinn % In a country where it is considered a normal, sane and fun recreational activity to strap two greased sticks to your feet and throw yourself down the side of a friggin' mountain, nobody has the right to call *my* minor peccidillos "unsafe". -- Nathan Mehl % My group's mission statement - 'You want *what* ? By *WHEN* ?' -- Simon Burr % An Emacs reference mug is what I want. It would hold ten gallons of coffee. -- Steve VanDevender % I admit that X is the second worst windowing system in the world, but all the others I've used are tied for first. -- Paul Tomblin % "Includes Adobe PageMaker. Now you can create layouts that look like you paid a professional!" No, now you can create layouts that look like you used a tool that a professional might have used, had you had the sense to pay him. -- Christopher R. Maden % A little rudeness and disrespect can elevate a meaningless interaction into a battle of wills and add drama to an otherwise dull day. -- Calvin discovers Usenet % The only sensible way to estimate the stability of a Windows server is to power it down and try it out as a step ladder. -- Robert Crawford % People who love sausages, respect the law, and work with IT standards shouldn't watch any of them being made. -- Peter Gutmann % First time I've gotten a programming job that required a drug test. I was worried they were going to say 'you don't have enough LSD in your system to do Unix programming'. -- Paul Tomblin % Simulated editor war, conducted by seasoned professionals in a controlled environment. Don't try this at home. -- Christian Bauernfeind % I must admit that Micro$oft does seem to bear an awful resemblence to the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation. Considering that my attempts at using Word always resulted in something almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a document. -- Rich Kaszeta % Violence, rude language, excessive drinking, paganism. It's hard to find children's books like that these days. -- Stig Morten Valstad admires _Mr. Toad_ % It's not 'I don't do Windows', it's 'I know nothing about Windows, and it generally explodes when I get near it'. -- Matt McLeod % Graffiti has merely machine-gunned the surviving handwriting ability clinging to the upturned lifeboats of the good ship 'Cursive'. -- Saundo, on Palm Pilots % Microsoft has decided to rename 'Windows 98' to 'Windows Diana', because it is superficially attractive, impossible to live with, consumes masses of resources, then it crashes. -- related by Zombie in #aix % The little pad of semi-sticky paper is the single largest security breach in the entire computer industry, bar none. -- some guy named 'gram' in c.s.u % Life suddenly made much more sense, the day I fully grokked that people are stupid. -- Frank Sweetser % The bottom line is that under 1 percent of this world has what it really takes to make computers do the Right Thing. No matter how used the shaved apes are to buttons, dials and screens, they're still doing voodoo. -- The Cosmic Tomato % I tried staying in during a fire alarm some years ago. Unfortunately the fire warden wouldn't accept 'A real hacker goes down with his newsfeed' as an excuse. -- Peter Gutman % We don't need a fountain of youth. We need a fountain of smart. -- Bill Mattocks's .sig % My Win98 installation has been doing that for months.. German, English, and Dutch, all intermingled. What's so frightening about that? -- Jasper Janssen You mean seeing 'Reboot Macht Frei' on your screen? -- Greg Andrews % I've gone through over-stressed to physical exhaustion -- what's next? -- Simon Burr Tuesday. -- Kyle Hearn % Microsoft: bringing the world to your desktop -- and your desktop to the world. -- Peter Gutmann % Your paranoia is a powerful defense against my sarcasm. -- https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2005-05-25 % What's that word, it means you feel small and red, starts with an M? -- Peter da Silva Management. -- Simon Fraser % It seems that there are two different sorts of people: People who care about the important stuff -- like if a job gets done, and if it gets done well -- and clueless fucking morons who wouldn't know a job well done if it bit them on the ass, and so think that 'professionalism' is a better indicator of the quality of work. -- Dave Brown % The only way to convince some people that HTML is about content, not style is with a 2x4 <PLANK>. -- Geoff Lane % MSDOS has to be one of the suckiest OSes ever. -- Gary Barnes Umm... a small technical point. Messy-Dross is _not_ a true operating system. It's a program loader with a hardon and delusions of grandeur. -- Valdis Kletnieks % Historical Landmark #9678023 Windows 95: Five years ago, corporate software giant, Microsoft, spent millions of dollars, and put a team of hundreds of highly specialized programmers on an extensive and highly ambitious project to find another name for the Apple Menu. -- Avi Selk, in comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc % No, the best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating system. -- Bill Gates % As a computing professional, I believe it would be unethical for me to advise, recommend, or support the use (save possibly for personal amusement) of any product that is or depends on any Microsoft product. -- David H. Wolfskill % Can I LART an aol'r for attempting to subscribe to a majordomo list with their street address, or should I wait for a second offence? -- Allan Stojanovic % You don't change the way people think by changing what they say. You change the way people think with HEADLESS CHARRED BODIES FLYING THROUGH THE AIR. BLOOD! FLAMES! HELLFIRE AND DAMNATION! -- Alastair J. R. Young % Actually, an oxymoron is more along the lines of a moron with an OH+ radical attached. Since both morons and free radicals tend to bind strongly to the first interesting thing that comes along, this is a match made in heaven. -- The Internet Oracle % Conspiracies abound: If everyone's against you, the reason can't _possibly_ be that you're a fuckhead. -- The Usenet Guide to Power Posting % Home pages are the pet rock of the 90s. They all have them, they all think they're very cute. But in a few years they're going to look back and be pretty embarrassed. -- Kim Alm % Get with the program, jeffrey. No one is 'wrong' on Usenet. They are either 100% totally correct, or they are 'a lying, scum sucking weasel.' There is no in-between. -- Garrett Johnson % The thing that gets me is that one of the arguments that landed Robert Morris, author of "the internet worm" in jail was all the sysadmins' time his prank cost. Yet the author of sendmail is still walking around free without even a U (for Unixery) branded on his forehead. -- Nicolas Pioch % NOW I've heard it all. Problem: expensive application from large well known company keeps crashing. Vendor solution: "Oh, someone at your site must be kill -9ing it accidentally. Our recommendation is to rename the `kill` command." -- Matthew Crosby % 10 ways to stop users mistaking you for a normal person (4): When booting a workstation, shout out all console output 1/2 a second before it appears. Do this with your eyes closed and fists clenched. -- Steve Mitchell % You really know you're in trouble when your boss decides upon a suicide pact... and agrees to go first. -- Chris King % I'm a Darwinian carnivore. I only eat things that weren't fit enough to prevent their being killed. -- Mike Sphar % I have /usr/sbin/coffee mounted from /dev/mug right now, and you can't have it. Oh no, I just tried to seek past end-of-beverage. *sigh* -- Graham Reed % But yeah, a semi-automatic, a room full of our managers, and I would *not* be a scene conducive to my staying out of gaol. -- Matt McLeod % I would like to shake the hand of the man who first decided that e-mail clients should slice, dice and run arbitrary programs. Then I'd like to stir, blend and puree his hand. -- J. D. Baldwin % But also remember, if it's fixed price, it's costly. Because it always takes longer than that. And there's bits you didn't think of. And they take longer than that too. And then you realize it going to take longer again because you have to fully document and package and test and train and fix and change and test and change and fix and update again. And then it takes longer than that. -- Netizen's Adam, on quoting % If you drink Real beer, you become horizontal... so, if you drink Imaginary beer, you become vertical... -- Thorfinn % If netcat is compiled with -DGAPING_SECURITY_HOLE, the -e argument specifies a program to exec after making or receiving a successful connection. -- netcat README file % Real Programmers don't use Python. -- Skud Real Programmers don't use *whitespace*. -- Thorfinn % Alright. Talk. Don't make me reach over there and pull your still-pumping heart out from the gaping hole you used to call a chest whilst breaking your sternum and playing air guitar with your ribcage. -- Tai % I trust the cut & paste under Win2k's telnet about as far as I can comfortably spit a rat. -- John Burnham % You'll get access to my computer room right after you pry the Halon test key out of my cold, lifeless hands. -- Simon Travaglia % "Zero Tolerance" in this case meaning "We're too stupid to be able to apply conscious thought on a case-by-case basis". -- Mike Sphar % The phrase "Login to www.clue.org and issue the GET command" springs to mind. -- Tanuki % 'Vegetarian' -- it's an old Indian word meaning 'lousy hunter'. -- Red Green % You're going to try and drink an *Australian* under the table? Good fucking luck, mate. -- Paul Tomblin % When the revolution comes, we'll need a longer wall. -- Tom De Mulder % OTOH, the general theme is that lusers should not be allowed to have computers, cars, guns or genitalia. -- Anthony DeBoer % The difference is that Unix has had thirty years of technical types demanding basic functionality of it. And the Macintosh has had fifteen years of interface fascist users shaping its progress. Windows has the hairpin turns of the Microsoft marketing machine and that's all. -- Red Drag Diva % Reliability went through the floor, tunnelled its way to the centre of the Earth, and perished in the magma. -- Saundo % I assume HR did send out the ad I wanted, not "apply for a cool job if you're a clueless fuck". -- The Flying Hamster, on the receiving end of too many CVs % I haven't had any mail from my mother since her ISP ended up in the RBL. I deny that I nominated them... -- Peter Corlett % Every year laws are passed to insure that these same adults survive to raise another generation with the same characteristics of cluelessness. -- Paul Tomko And if the boom-boxes and car stereos weren't so damnably loud, you'd be able to hear the high-pitched hum: Darwin spinning at 20000 RPM on Timken roller bearings in a chamber evacuated to 1E-27 Torr. -- Mike Andrews % The language that these files use is just like BASIC, only with all of the good parts ripped out. Oh, and did I mention that it's case-sensitive? I could eat a K&R and *shit* a better language. -- Brian Gallew describes "Optio" % The PC movement is about trying not to offend people who are busily manipulating you by being creatively thinkskinned. -- Joe Zeff % If Paul's really talking about truly average people, then they'd probably die in either case, because common sense isn't. -- Derick Siddoway % Wonder what diamonds do to lusers though. -- Peter N. M. Hansteen When attached to the teeth of a blade turning at 7000rpm, a darn fine job. -- D. Joseph Creighton % Those that could learn[1] did, and those that couldn't learn[2] were sufficiently cowed to shut the fsck up and leave the rest of us alone. [1] A surprisingly large fraction of the divisional workforce [2] An appallingly large fraction of the divisional workforce -- Mike Andrews % I'm feeling much better now. Really. I'm just going to eat an orange now. I'll just take out my knife and gently, carefully, peel the skin off THE FUCKWIT BASTARD THAT WROTE THIS PIECE OF PIG SHIT- -- Randy the Random % It's distinctly sub-optimal having a 70MPH pigeon explode all over the inside of your vehicle. -- Tanuki % Their constitution is unwritten, and is mostly based on common law and practice. In other words, they do something wrong and it then becomes the norm. -- Laurie Couturier, on the British legal system % Yes, those of us here have pretty much come to the conclusion that once you know What's Really Going On and How To Cope With It, you find that you don't like it much. -- Steve VanDevender % If this is UI for anyone, say hello to Satan for me next time he pops into your office for a status report. -- Chris King % The problem with eating a high-fibre diet is that, before you know it, your lower bowel will have attracted a whole mass of backhoes. -- Tanuki % You mean [Exchange] was deliberately written? I thought someone had transcribed the writing on a football-stadium restroom wall, found that it compiled, so shipped it. -- Tanuki % I'm just waiting for the day that someone decides that "ignorant moron" is an ethnic group, and thus cannot be discriminated against. -- Christian Wagner % In an experiment to determine the precise amount of beer required to enjoy this film, I passed out. -- Dave O'Brien, on "Highlander II" % The only complaint I have against WinDoze is that it doesn't always fail at install time. -- Mike Andrews % I should never have learnt C. There's a limit to how dangerous you can get with Perl. -- Simon Cozens But it's quite a *high* limit. -- Adrian Hilton As we know to our cost. -- SPARK Ada development team % I can see the headlines now: Cargo Plane/Truck Carrying Entire Usenet Archive Crashes in Freak Storm/Freak Traffic Accident -- Bruce Tomlin Near the crash site, a discarded rocket launcher was found, with a note attached: "X-No-Archive: YES, FUCKING YES YES YES". -- Juergen Nieveler % Knuth has written a book called "The errors of TeX". I doubt Microsoft has the money to buy the paper required to print a book called "The errors of Word". -- Abigail % It typically takes 25-30 gallons of petrol/diesel to fully-consume an average-sized body under ideal conditions. That I am conversant with this level of detail should serve as an indication of why the wise man does not ask me questions about MS-Windows. -- Tanuki % As you accelerate your food, it takes exponentially more and more energy to increase its velocity, until you hit a limit at C. This energy has to come from somewhere; in this case, from the food's nutritional value. Thus, the faster the food is, the worse it gets. -- Mark Hughes, comprehending the taste of fast food % Deciding to precipitate the disaster, I have donned my copper armour, filled a fire bucket, and wired myself to all the important swervers. -- Iain Rae % I DON'T WANT A WEB BROWSER IN MY DESKTOP. I DON'T CARE IF IT DOESN'T COST EXTRA. I DON'T WANT IT. -- Peter da Silva does not like how Windows shipped % I liken system administration to remotely piloting an airplane - while barely balancing oneself on a rollercoaster running at full speed - blindfolded - by means of a hacked up half-broken TV remote. -- and people really want a job as a BOFH? % It occurred to me today to wonder why so many Manglers seem to think that the proper way to get you to respect their authority is to do things to you that cause you to lose all respect for them as a person? [and if that ever happens to me, kill me right there and then - AJH] % That bone-crunching thud you just heard was my opinion of humanity plummeting from its comfortable resting-place in the basement, breaking through the floor, and ending up wedged somewhere in the vicinity of the Mohorovicic discontinuity. % The FAA found out that one gigantic replacement of everything would lead to world's worst case of "Second System Effect". -- Paul Tomblin % I'm worried that air traffic control is in danger of switching to Windows 2000. I think I'll walk. -- Paul Tomblin % C has features?? I thought the whole point of that language was to offer nothing but bare metal. -- David P. Murphy % The magic BOFH-phrase you need to summon at this point is: "_Your_ lack of planning is not about to become _my_ emergency." -- Tanuki % Actually, HTML is very useful. As a flag to say "you don't need to read this email." -- Paul Tomblin % Ahhh, the permie offer. The "Please sign up with us clueless fsckwits so you can spend all your time digging us out at a pittance" offer. -- Dan Holdsworth % I wouldn't be surprised if I'd have to put garlic in the CD drawer to really get rid of it. -- Arthur van der Harg on 'Gator' % Yeah, because you never know when the value of 2^15 will change and you have to go through all your code fixing it. -- Paul Tomblin % You're nicer than I. I was thinking "Mark, would you recognize a clue if one were gnawing on the end of your dick?" -- random % I did volunteer EMS as recovery from sysadmining, then I did sysadmining to recover from volunteer EMS. -- random % Why is there only one Monopolies and Mergers Commission? -- JNP % "Look, PHB, if you go for *NIX, you'll have to hire a *NIX admin, and they charge a bomb and dress like refugees. But with NT you just need someone with an MCSE." -- Omri Schwarz understands why the world is screwed % Of course the staff can tell their heads from their arses. Their heads are the bits that are stuck up their arses. Ergo their arses must be the bits that have heads stuck up them. -- Matthew Malthouse % Could you stop changing your email address willy-nilly, so my killfile can spare me from your erudition and wit? -- Alan Shutko % Make backups before you try something new or interesting or experimental or radical or if the day has a "y" in it. -- Chris Hacking % Today Has Been Two Of Those Days. -- Mike Andrews % What a beautiful image - Gartner wonks piled high on a burning bush, screaming that "maybe IIS isn't so good after all" and "our statistics show a sudden increase in temperature." -- Chris Rovers % "My brother-in-law, the bar owner." -- Beautiful Phrases #1 % Alt.sysadmin.recovery: You will not soon find a more wretched hive of ranting and pedantry. We aim to please, so duck. -- ADB % When I hear the history of some of the more ugly European cities, with "... destroyed in 14xx, burnt in 16xx ..." I get the urge to ask why they keep rebuilding it and if they can't get the hint. -- Lieven Marchand % The thing I've noticed, particularly about Usenet, that while as a welcome break from work it is refreshing and interesting, when you've got bugger all else to do it kinda loses its appeal. -- C Speed % Welsh sheep aren't intellectuals. Welsh woodlice look down on them as utter lusers. Welsh sheep even make students look smart, they're that daft. -- Dan Holdsworth % > (One of the things I can't quite get used to in 'merryka > is that they have bathrooms or restrooms, but no toilets.) The thing is, North Americans are dirty and tired, but don't give a shit. -- flaps % Like the man said: "Nothing good ever goes in /opt." -- Tim Foreman % Lusers annoy you; Backups are crap; Morons employ you; And samba won't map; Printers need cable; Installs restart; Servers aren't stable; You might as well LART. -- David P. Murphy, parodying Dorothy Parker's _Resume_ % Violence is the last resort of the incompetent. The competent, of course, make it their *first* resort. % If you are "fighting" vi (ie telling it stupid things) it should not try and give helpful hints, it should munge your cursor, screw up your terminal, rot13 your mailbox and call your girlfriend for a date. -- Pi % I decided my disk was getting too full and nobody seemed to be referencing this huge file called /vmunix... -- Paul Tomblin % I forsee one of those "open your wallet and repeat after me, _help yourself_" moments in your local friendly workshop. -- Tanuki % What philology luser tried to hang "fear of sameness" on bigotry? Every time i see the word i want to kick his shins. -- Pat Wade, on homophobia % I just overheard someone referring to Solaris 2.6 as a "virgin operating system". With a straight face, no less. In one sense, I can see it. The one whereby it knows what it wants to do, it's just not entirely sure how... -- Carl Jacobs % You can drag any rat out of the sewer and teach it to get some work done in Perl, but you cannot teach it serious programming. -- Erik Naggum % C is *supposed* to be dangerous, damnit! -- Anonymous, on "Safer C" % It could have been raining flaming bulldozers, and those idiots would have been standing out there smoking, going 'hey, look at that John Deere burn!' -- Texan AMD security guard % Why don't companies make second-person shooter games? I mean, we have first-person, and third-person. Why not second-person? -- Joe Moore % Some of you may have had occasion to run into mathematicians and to wonder, therefore, how they got that way. -- Tom Lehrer, "Tom Lehrer In Concert" % Of course, the old servers was 50 Megs short of filling up its disk, and $exchange-Admins know what that means... -- Jurgen Nieveler That they shouldn't have been running Exchange in the first place? -- David P. Murphy % My family's values included "Always state your assumptions and your evidence", "first find out what the problem is, then fix it", and "feed your horse before yourself". But you don't see people legislating those... -- Zebee Johnstone % How many of us have had people look at our music collection, and shake their heads in confusion? -- Eric the Read s/shake their heads in confusion/blanch and back away slowly/ -- Joe B % I think I have a new personal rule: Never watch anything which includes the author's name in the title, particularly if the author is dead. -- Andrew Dalgleish % Unix is great. The Unix culture is magnificent. Life in a Unix without the GNU utilities is the kind of hell I'd not wish on my worst enemy. -- Robert Uhl % Is it so difficult to master your bloody pride and admit that yes, a bunch of hackers turned out a better suite of utilities than your teams of engineers ever could? -- Robert Uhl % The Code Red virus hasn't caused the widespread chaos earlier predicted. Mainly due to the use of a security product known as 'Patch'. -- Radio report, 28/11/01 % Don't you just hate them? Don't you just wanna break their ribs, cut their backs open and pull their lungs out from behind? -- Ina Faye-Lund, on script kiddies % Oh, NT is reliable. You can count on it to keel over under just any circumstance. -- Rik Steenwinkel % "I'm sorry, your missile just caused a General Protection error. Your General is no longer protected." -- Nicholas Avenell, on Windows for Weapons % Please say this was followed by a very serious discussion on Right and Wrong involving a blow torch, 220V, a cobra and three East Germans named Georg... -- Robert Uhl % In fact, it's surprising that any sort of hardware works. When it works, it is just biding its time waiting for a more inconvenient time for it to fail. -- Joe Moore % In college, I wrote a TECO-like progamming language as a joke - one-letter statements, totally unreadable. Then I discovered sendmail, and stopped, because the joke had been done so much better than I ever could. -- Mark Hughes % I treat shops as military objectives to be penetrated and stripped of needed resources in as little time as possible. She has adventures in them. -- Joe Thompson % ...I've discovered the one thing worse than people who open attachments from people they don't know. People who delete files when instructed by people they don't know. -- Michael % [Once in a lifetime opportunity] is simply a veiled reference to the staff contract termination procedure, which involves a sunny wall, a single cigarette and some middling to average marksmen... -- Dan Holdsworth % As for taste buds, bear in mind that the country which gave the world Irn Bru also developed the Deep Fried Mars Bar. Marmite is the height of sophistication in comparison. -- Malcolm Ray % With M$, as far as I'm aware, the stupidity comes bundled with the software. -- Meg Thornton % ...the default behaviour should be *not* to fuck up. -- adb % Microsoft's _intention_ is to have the OS drop its pants, bend over, and ask the whole bloody net to remotely install any bits at all . . . and then they're surprised it turns out to be a serious security flaw? -- David P. Murphy, on Windows XP % I'd sooner volunteer to admin every Windows box at $ORKPLACE (and it's a biiiig place) than think for one second that I could understand the thought process of a teenage female. -- David P. Murphy % It is necessary to get JPEGs of one's offspring, if only so that you can call them up on your screen at work and remember what they look like during late-night sysadminning when you should be home with them. -- adb % Sept 25th: Discovered lots of things about Dynamic HTML. Notably that almost every site attempting to use it is crap. -- Alan Cox's diary % Indeed, if we (as a society) took a bit more of a 'tough love' approach to things, really allowed people to suffer from their own bad choices, and made it damn clear that one can't just assume something is safe because "they couldn't sell it if it wasn't!", we might start seeing 'thinking' coming back into vogue. -- lizard % Do you have a point, or are you saving it for a special occasion? -- David P. Murphy % Here in the US, we are so schizoid and deeply opposed to government censorship that we insist on having unaccountable private parties to do it instead. -- Bill Cole % Nazis are part of *every* government, everywhere, in all of human history. They're just not always called that. -- J. D. Baldwin % If you don't pay for criminally bad software through the nose, you will never realize how much you are being ripped off! -- Pim van Riezen % Imagine a world where millions of companies were given the choice between actually paying for the odd ten thousand dollars' worth of bug-infested agonizing doofusware or going for a quality free software solution that isn't being pushed on them like bad cocaine! -- Pim van Riezen % The First Amendment protects all speech, no matter how offensive some people may find it. The site http://www.bonsaikitten.com/ is clearly a humorous endeavor. The fact that a number of people seem to have very little sense of humor isn't relevant. -- Jered Floyd % I think Java is the best language going today, which is to say, it's the marginally acceptable one among the set of complete bagbiting loser languages that we have to work with out here in the real world. -- Jamie Zawinski % Whenever someone says something exceedingly stupid, I feel it my duty to educate them. Plus, everyone else leaves and the meeting becomes de facto over. -- Rob Russell understands meetings % ...would you work for a company that couldn't tell the difference in quality of its employees' normal work product and the work product of someone on drugs without performing a test? -- socks % I think I've finally worked out why the Irish drink Guinness. It's to lubricate their throat so they can speak their own language. -- David P. % Life is like a puzzle: amid these oddly shaped pieces there are two that fit each other. They don't fit because they're perfect, they just fit because they're perfect for each other. Apart, they are two pieces without definition; together they complement each other and take on meaning. -- T. D. Jakes % Contracting is a good, even honourable, way to earn a living, as long as one hides the secret that it's possible to pave one's patio with gold bars. -- Dave, ex-BA % Welcome to Global Warming, everyone. It appears to be globally warmer, and if that isn't Global Warming, then What The Fsck Is? -- Mike Andrews % Some days violence is just a nice quick solution to a problem that would need thought, planning and actual work to do justice to. -- Wayne Pascoe % As a survival strategy, you've got to admit that being-liked-by-man ain't too shabby. Works for dogs, cats, oxen, apples etc. Never worked too well for wolves, bears, woolly mammoths etc. Results are not yet in regarding kudzu and head-lice. -- Robert Uhl % So I got to play distributed systems Jenga: take an undocumented pile of interdependent machines, and remove as many machines as possible without making the whole thing come crashing down. -- Logan % Stubborness will get you where self-esteem won't let you go. -- Queen of Swords % Hi, I'm Marc Andreesen, and after a hard day working on our piss-poor browser, I need to relax with a piss-poor beer! -- Malcolm Ray, on Marc's Miller Lite beer ads % I've never understood why women douse themselves with things that are alleged to smell of roses/tulips/freesias. What exactly are they trying to attract? Bees? -- Tanuki % I'm not going to be a place that allows viruses to go unpunished. Anything virus-ridden gets cleaned, anything that can't gets deleted. Period. Fuck anyone who doesn't take heed. This is my network. -- ben@lspace.org % I saw part of a telecast of some Wagner opera or other on TV one time. It took two characters the best part of an hour to say "Oh! Hello!" to each other. At that point I turned it off, even though I was in grave danger of missing the first five or six minutes of "How're you doing?" -- Dave Brown % I blame the teachers, and I blame the politicians for picking the teachers, and I blame the parents for voting them in, and top of the list I put the bastard who invented the caps-lock key. -- Chris Hacking % Yes, Java is so bulletproofed that to a C programmer it feels like being in a straitjacket, but it's a really comfy and warm straitjacket, and the world would be a safer place if everyone was straitjacketed most of the time. -- Mark Hughes % After 30 years, it should be pretty bloody obvious to everyone (but apparently the memo has missed a few people) that all but the very best C programmers are nothing but a danger to themselves and others. -- Mark Hughes % People advocating C as the generic language of choice make the same big mistake that I think people may be making when advocating unrestricted gun ownership, legalized harddrugs, an end to speedlimits in traffic and a computer on every desktop... -- Pim van Riezen % I read [.doc files] with "rm". All you lose is the microsoft-specific font selections, the macro viruses and the luser babblings. -- Gary "Wolf" Barnes % Usenet is a co-operative venture, backed by nasty people - follow the standards. -- Chris Rovers % The people here have other bones to pick -- possibly including yours. -- Mike Andrews % So I was reading Twelfth Night ... and would you believe that the I LOVE YOU hoax is the exact same trick Shakespeare uses to point out what an arrogant, self-absorbed fool Malvolio is? -- Julia McKinnell % "Integration by parts -- a very powerful technique." Teaching by intimidation -- also a very powerful technique. -- Logan Shaw, quoting Chuck Odle, his Calculus teacher % > Which ISPs provide write-only Usenet access? From the state of Usenet in general? All of them. -- J. D. Baldwin and Derick Siddoway % And it should be the law: If you use the word 'paradigm' without knowing what the dictionary says it means, you go to jail. No exceptions. -- David Jones % The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. -- Dick the Butcher, Henry VI, Part 2, act IV, scene 2 % "MERCY!? You stuck me right through my throbbin' /eye/!" "The grace of God knows no bounds, but _my_ mercy has some practical limitations." -- https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2004-12-05 % No wonder women and cats get along so well. They understand each other, being so similar in requirements. -- Jay Maynard Now I'm no expert in women, but I'd not convinced that all you need to please a woman is to feed her stinky meat and clean out the dirt tray as appropriate. -- Peter Corlett % DON'T MAKE THAT FACE WHEN I TELL YOU TO READ THE FUCKING MANUAL! IT'S GOOD FOR YOU I SAY! READ THE FUCKING MANUAL! How do you think I found out how the machine works? DID I SIT AROUND ASKING SOMEBODY FOR A FEW MONTHS?? -- Beable van Polasm % The only problem is that if we found the Holy Grail, we'd have to support it and explain to the lusers which way to tip it so that they don't get the elixer of life down the front of their tasteless shirts. -- Wayne Pascoe % After all, why in the world would any employer want happier, better educated employees who are more in touch with current technical developments in their field of work? That would interfere with too many existing arrangements. -- Curt % Died. Woke up in Hell. Punched in PIN, logged on. Just another day. -- David Gerard % Bill Gates is a true genius. He's made installing and maintaining windows apps so ridiculously difficult and expensive that businesses and consumers will actually buy into the idea of having their applications on someone else's server. -- Ukab the Great % My kettle just sits there steaming, and won't tell me anything. Much like my first wife. -- Paul Tomblin % Exploit is announced. Server runs an old version. A root compromise. -- Alan J Rosenthal % It's a house of cards, supported not on the backs of turtles but on bullshit. Making the bullshit gooier makes the house of cards less likely to collapse, but is not necessarily an improvement. -- Alan J Rosenthal % Sign on door of computing lecturer: "If your project is 90% right, I will give you a distinction, your employer will fire you." -- Zebee Johnstone % "Think?" I asked. "I don't think. I'm a witness. Someone asks me a question, and I answer it as honestly as I can. How could I be on anyone's *side*?" -- David P. Murphy, on his participation in a lawsuit % I've long believed that a large amount of our current technology was invented by SF writers, and remained fiction until some geek read it and thought "I know how to build that". -- Andrew Dalgleish % Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that's not why we're doing it. -- Richard Feynman % If you refer to a woman as any form of waterborne African mammal then a quick death is absolutely the *best* thing that could happen to you next. -- Adi % AFAICT, most national capitals have already reached bogon criticality, passed it, seen it in the rear view mirror and now look back on the moment as a fond, if distant, memory. -- Robert Uhl % As convenient as it is for information to come to us, libraries do have a valuable side effect: they force all of the smart people to come together in one place where they can interact with one another. -- Neal Stephenson % Medication did wonders for me, Dave. Perhaps it could for you, if a crowbar and half a pound of axle grease count as medication. -- Red Drag Diva % Boss: There wasn't anything there, so I removed it. Me: Wasn't any _what_ _where_, and if there wasn't anything, what did you remove? -- JDW % One could teach a child to Google but one _still_ should make them think. -- Maarten Wiltink % [Hunt for Red October] also passed the "Is this believable" test. Such as, software that classes unknown sounds as sea animals mating ... -- rwp % My standard response to statements like "We _must_ implement multi-processor object-oriented Java-based client-server technologies immediately!" was "You know, FORTRAN and slide rules put men on the moon and got them back safely multiple times." -- Matt Roberds % May all their sendmail.cf files be edited in notepad and returned, only to be read at the next reboot. -- Tom O'Neil % Mentally update my CV, paying special attention to the bits about how to say "Was Fired For Being A Prat" in a positive light. -- Eric the Read's bad day % The average banker could benefit tremendously from a good kick to the head at precisely-timed intervals. -- Dan Holdsworth % You cannot run Windows innocently. Guilt of aiding & abetting, at the very least, is automatic. Loading up on anti-virus and firewall software, even decent ones, are merely well-meaning actions to be taken into consideration by judge and jury when deciding your sentence. -- David P. Murphy % As it should be - snipe at *.mil and expect to drop any plans for the rest of that day. -- Alex % > Best job interview question I've heard: "So, do you have > 15 years of experience with Java?" "No, it just seems like 15 years...." -- Geoff Lane % Documentation: Cryptic, lacking, erroneous. Pick any three. -- Arvid % Three of your friends throw up after eating chicken salad. Do you think "I should find more robust friends" or "we should check that refrigerator"? -- Donald Becker, on vortex-bug, suspecting a network-wide problem % Well, that's why VAXC and VAXCRTL were worse: they *ran*, which fooled the stupid people (such as myself) into thinking there was something beneficial about to happen, if you would just put enough time and blood into it. With Whitesmiths you could confidently toss it out the window almost immediately. -- David P. Murphy % Can't get out of 'vi'? Common problem. Don't worry, I'm here to help. Just log in as root and type "init 0". It works for pretty much any problem you might have with Linux. No, no, no. Thank /you/. -- Mikey Raeder % "Harry very carefully read the manual - four times - because Snape would cut off his breathing privs if he asked him a question that the manual could answer..." -- Jim quotes Harry Potter and the Book Of The BOFH % Here at WeSellCellPhones, I was pleased to hear that they believe in "work-life balance." What it turned out this actually means is that your work is your life, and is by definition balanced... -- JDF % I realized recently that my personal happiness and sanity are worth far more than anything an employer can pay me, and that nothing is worth that twisting feeling you get in your gut every morning as you drag yourself out of bed and to a job you can't stand. -- MC Langston % If I have to deal with another salesweasel, I shall scream, if only to cover the sound caused by me ripping his head from his body to use the carcass as a footstool. -- MC Langston % Today is a good day. Not because anything wonderful is happening, so much, but because my definition of a 'bad day' has been revised. -- Chris Klein % It took people a long time to figure out which machine was doing it, and even longer to figure out how. But for some reason it didn't take them any time at all to figure that I'd done it. -- Paul Tomblin % Doctrine, n. A third-rate substitute for thinking, much beloved of politicians and other such morons, since thinking comes so hard to these. -- Dan Holdsworth % The implication of the camel on the front of the Perl book is, I think, quite clear: Perl programmers permanently have the hump and are predisposed towards spitting. -- Jonathan Page % Knuth is definitely the bastard something from hell. I just admire him from a distance, it's safer. -- Peter da Silva % If killing them all to a man is not an option then you are better off to simply leave them to slowly self destruct under their own incompetance. -- Dag % "Colin decided then and there that the female mind was a strange and incomprehensible organ -- one which no man should even attempt to understand. There wasn't a woman alive who could go from point A to B without stopping at C, D, X and 12 along the way." -- Julia Quinn % a) log a message at user.emerg of the form "DANGER! MORON ON /dev/pts/1" b) print to stderr "NO! WRONG! TOTALLY WRONG! WHERE'D YOU LEARN THIS? STOP DOING IT!" -- Jeremiah Weiner % O Canada, we stand ready to sit down and discuss our problems in a civilized fashion for thee. -- wednesday % Remember, you're dealing with developers. If they knew what they were doing, they wouldn't be doing it. -- Mike A % As a married man, 'sex' is defined as sexual activity with SWMBO, period. Anything that does not fit within those bounds is filed under either stupidity or suicide and possibly both... -- K. Josey % It's the _target_ that supposed to go "F00F", not the processor. -- Mike Andrews, on Pentiums in missiles % There is alleged to be an airport whose designator is ARP but I've never got any response to my attempts to locate it. -- Tanuki % Legacy (adj): an uncomplimentary computer-industry epithet that means 'it works'. -- Anthony DeBoer % Kyoto dealt with Global Warming. Disposing of lawyers cuts down the production of Hot Air, and thus is encouraged by the Kyoto Accords. -- Keith Glass % The biggest problem with democracy is that it is, in effect, the rule by the whim of the moment. -- Keith Glass % There are many types of bigotry, some of them completely OK and acceptable. This is the acceptable type called "postjudice". -- Mike Andrews % You know the saying, every time you develop an idiot proof system they develop a better type of idiot... and now you know who "they" are. -- Matthew Malthouse % Sometimes, when a luser makes an unreasonable demand, the best thing to do is let them have exactly what they ask for. -- Joe Zeff % If Alan Turing was alive today, the homosexuality would be OK but he'd be in trouble for codebreaking. -- Martin Bacon % Ayn Rand's writings never make perfect sense. She never realized that people will choose short-term profits which require long-term payments. -- David P. Murphy % I mean, if I went 'round saying I was a perl hacker, just because some moistened bint lobbed a "Perl for Dummies" at me, they'd put me away! -- Randy the Random % It isn't the volts that kill, it's the missing brain waves. -- seen by Matt Roberds on a circuit board % If anyone tells me to work smarter, not harder, I will kick him or her, hard, in a random body part. I will then kick him or her a second time, "smarter, not harder," which is to say that on the second strike, I'll use the same force, but target more carefully. -- Catherine % "The surreality of the universe tends towards a maximum" -- Skud's Law "Never formulate a law or axiom that you're not prepared to live with the consequences of." -- Skud's Meta-Law % Fortunately, he was promoted far enough up the management ladder that he no longer has any real responsibility and is kept far away from sharp or dangerous objects - such as cc, gcc, vi and emacs. -- Curt Fennell % If you had the chance of making the amount of pain your lusers had to suffer dependent on the number of windows on their screens, you would seize the opportunity, wouldn't you? -- Abigail % I use shell scripts at ork. Some cow-orkers refuse to touch them, their excuse is usually "I don't understand perl". Their fear of perl is such that all things unknown are also perl. -- Andrew Dalgleish % Camels and llamas and hashes and scalars Cute little modules talking to mailers Regexes munging my humungous strings These are a few of my favourite things. -- Malcolm Ray, making Perl sing % You can be jailed for lying about being good in bed. -- Lionel, paraphrasing the Criminal Code of Canada, 159(3)(b)(i) % Information moves, or we move to it. Moving to it has rarely been popular and is growing unfashionable; nowadays we demand that the information come to us. -- Neal Stephenson % 404 is hexadecimal for "fuck off". -- Alan Rosenthal % The strength of the antispammer movement is that there is no organization. Nobody can make deals, nobody has the authority to surrender. All people with pretensions of "leadership" do is make it look like a small bunch of people with no life. It's a *big* bunch of people with no life. -- Paul Vader % I have a longstanding agreement with tequila: I won't drink it, and it won't make me sick. -- Brian Kantor % > When Lusers are concerned, when is there EVER sufficient support ? Easy: a few tons of concrete, poured right up to the nose off the luser should give any luser enough support. -- Alex % And the Prime Directive would be a valid excuse to do absolutely nothing all day. "I can't fix $LUSER's problem, because to do so would interfere with their development/evolution. Sorry." -- James Turinsky % I know it's a buzzword [...], but fsckit, 'Enterprise' editions of things *should* come with the phasers and photon torpedos and all. Of course, the first vendor freebie you'd get would be a red shirt... -- Anthony de Boer % Software planning seems to be based on denying plausibility. -- Graham Reed % I got accused of being humorless last night. I'm considering quoting Lieutenant Commander Data: "Perhaps the joke was not funny." -- Alan Rosenthal % They thought that faxing one's butt was bad - just wait till they hear about blurry, pixilated, mpeg artifacted live porn by phone! -- Geoff Lane contemplates the 3G future % I call these twits pseudo-literate. That is, they can read but won't. -- Joe Zeff % It's Mickeysoft for pity's sake. *OF COURSE* it's going take all the ram in range. I'm surprised the fsking box doesn't grow tentacles and start stealing DIMMs from the machines next to it. -- JoeB % Heaven has all the lusers, a generous supply of larts - and no PHBs anywhere in sight. -- The BOFH Heaven, according to Suresh % With so many "textbook cases" of single points of failure, you'd think that we'd stop building systems to demonstrate the concept. -- Matt Curtin % There is, of course, no "we" - merely an anarchistic co-operative movement of professional dysfunctionals led by a shadowy gang of stealth agitprop-agents who send their orders steganographically encoded into RFC documents or subliminally transmitted in the hum of 10^6 CPU cooling-fans. -- Tanuki % ...if you squeeze a MS product into a small enough memory footprint there may not be sufficient space for it to fall over, thus giving the impression it's reliable. -- Geoff Lane % Remember, "close" counts in horse-shoes, hand-grenades and nuclear warfare; but in spamming, it's considered unnecessary precision. -- Alun Jones % Kids today. Why, you tell 'em about ten users in 128 kilobytes, ten meg hard drives the size of a Maytag, they believe you. Tell them about booting a single-user operating system in 16 megabytes, they think you're pulling their leg. -- Peter da Silva % (http://xxxx.org/~stevo/BankWest_Personal_Fees_Rack.pdf) I started to read this, then realized it was anti-recovery and quit. "Great hockey game last night! Did you watch any of it, Murphy?" "No, I was studying a brochure of personal fees for an Australian bank." -- David P. Murphy % This, my simpering little friend, is the fabled 'Broadsword of Duodenic Clue Insertion.' Forged by the System Administrators of Hell, and quenched in the blood of a thousand AOLers. But you, my precious luser, can call it "Momma." -- Ciro the Spider-Man % Last I checked, it wasn't the power cord for the Clue Generator that was sticking up your ass. -- John Novak % One distinguishing characteristic of BOFHen is attention deficit disorder. Put me in front of something boring and I can find a near-infinite number of really creative ways to bugger off. -- ADB % If I have pinged farther than others, it is because I routed upon the T3s of giants. -- Greg Andrews % But seriously, I've got root, so it's his problem. -- Nick Manka % 25 grams of wafers and 20 ml of wine undergo transubstantiation and become the flesh and blood of our Lord. How many Joules of heat are released by the transformation? -- Theological Physics exam, 1997 % Of course I still retain claim to "I can't believe it's not Jesus!" low-fat communion wafers, and "Christ-lite" alcohol-free communion wine. -- Tanuki the Raccoon-dog % I'm having a great deal of trouble compressing that down to four lines. I tried removing all the unnecessary parts, but nothing happened, so I'll try creating a number of meaningful four-line .sigs --- wish me luck. -- David P. Murphy, on a "bits are cheaper than time" rant % "I know what you are thinking, punk! You're wondering if I hired six lawyers... or only five. Now, seeing as this is a U.S. Circuit Appellate Court --- the world's most powerful deterrent to justice --- the question you have to ask yourself is... 'Do I feel litigious?' Well do you, punk? Do you feel litigious?" -- Kevin Goebel channels Clint Eastwood % Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. -- Flannery O'Connor % Now there's a thought: government of the people, by the politicians, for the rich. Oh, wait; we already have that, don't we? -- Joe Zeff % 32yo PFY in Annandale, likes broken shit and problems no one else will touch, hates end-users, time-clocks, and dress codes, seeks BOFH for clues and at least $45K. Send picture of broken shit pile. -- Gary S. Callison % > I didn't see any stipulation that your pager actually had to be turned on. PHB. I can page admins from their resty sleep. Bas. Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do page for them? -- J. D. Baldwin updates THE FIRST PART OF KING HENRY THE FOURTH, Act III, Scene 1 % There's this special biologist word we use for "stable". It's "dead". -- Jack Cohen % > As a rough estimate, it approaches that of M$-BOB. I am pretty sure "BOB" is a suckage-singularity . . . it's not really possible to "approach" it. -- J. D. Baldwin % Like most computer techie people, I'll happily spend 6 hours trying to figure out how to do a 3 hour job in 10 minutes. -- Rev. James Cort, ASR % I swear to god, if people treated their cars the way they treat their computers, half the cars on the road would be covered in bumper stickers advertising porno, and their trunks would be filled with rotting garbage. -- Christian Wagner % You want secure hosting? www.thebunker.net. They won't let *you* anywhere near the hardware you're renting from them. They won't even show you *pictures* of it. It could be supercharged hamsters all the way down, and you'd never know. -- Robert Sneddon % [the average computer user] has been served so poorly that he expects his system to crash all the time, and we witness a massive worldwide distribution of bug-ridden software for which we should be deeply ashamed. -- Edsger Dijkstra % We had 12.9 gigabytes of PowerPoint slides on our network. And I thought, what a huge waste of corporate productivity. So we banned it. And we've had three unbelievable record-breaking fiscal quarters since we banned PowerPoint. Now, I would argue that every company in the world, if it would just ban PowerPoint, would see their earnings skyrocket. Employees would stand around going, "What do I do? Guess I've got to go to work." -- Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems [SJM, 03Aug97. Keith Bostic bostic@bostic.com, QOTD] % Or, to put it another way, if you see a long line of rats streaming off of a ship, the correct assumption is *not* "gosh, I bet that's a real nice boat now that those rats are gone". -- Mike Sphar % [how to overload an annoying server] *** self-destruct mode *** Post it on Fark.com as an accident at a nude volleyball beach link and use the "Boobies - Not Safe For Work" icon. *** /self-destruct mode *** -- kevingoebel % In my own thesis, I quoted (was forced to quote, in fact) a man who, at the time I submitted had just been kicked out of the US dept of Agriculture for scientific fraud, and was counter-suing them, and a lady who had a test for a sex pheromone for which a false positive could be generated by poisoning the test animals. -- Dan Holdsworth % Just keep taking point, pit-boy. -- Brian to Dave, KODT % Someone might raise the objection that it is "circular" to appeal to the Bible for its own authentication and vindication, meaning that to appeal to Scripture in support of Scripture is to argue in a circle. Any court will recognize that a man has a right to testify in his own behalf. Now we know that it is possible for every man to lie, or to deceive, or to be prejudiced. But because the Bible is the Word of God, and God, because of Who He is, cannot lie (Titus 1:2), most certainly the Bible's witness to its inspiration ought, therefore, to be accepted as trustworthy. -- Lehman Strauss, Litt.D., F.R.G.S., utterly unable to recognize "circular logic", at http://www.bible.org/docs/theology/biblio/trust.htm % Of course, I also got weird looks when I said that, as a kid, I watched the toast brown in a toaster to see whether it browned at a linear or exponential rate. -- Jeff Davis % They should be firewalled off from the rest of society. With real fire. -- Paul Tomblin describes how to treat virus creators % If it had been a choice, I would want some 60% of my pension going into managed funds mostly dealing in alcohol/tobacco/firearms/porn stock. I am a firm believer in the baser instincts of humans as my guide to future prosperity. Alas, finding a managed fund with that as its primary leaning is rather noneasy in these days of "Ethical investment" and "Ethical funds". Where are my *non*-ethical funds??? -- Ingvar the Grey % IMAP is just not a very rich protocol. -- Steve Conn, Exchange Server product manager for Microsoft % Will debug C homework for lap dances. -- Mike Looney % D: is just a data disk. That's why it's called "D", for "DATA". C: is the Windows OS disk, so it's called "C", for "CRAP". -- David P. Murphy % A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet? -- Daniel Jensen % Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering wanker; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I killfile thee; for hate's sake I spit my last post at thee! All your base are belong to us! -- Paul Tomblin saw it somewhere % The root cause of the continuing problem was the excessive retry rate, which was caused by this particular idiosyncratic mailer not taking "fuck off for a bit, will you" as an answer. -- Ian Jenkins does not like the MTAWNMNBS % You are mistaken, Harry. I am not hostile, for I am *certified nice*. See this certificate? It says that by having completed the course, I am officially one hell of a courteous guy. -- Warren Wright, http://www.absurdnotions.org/page103.html % My problems start when the smarter bears and the dumber visitors intersect. -- Steve Thompson, wildlife biologist at Yosemite National Park % I was on a Boston to New York shuttle flight that gets stuck on the runway for 3 hours with no explanation. Worse, I'm sitting in front of three idiot consultants from Razorfish who spend the whole time talking loudly and incessantly. Remarkably, not one word of it resembled any productive activity in the slightest. "So, I conducted a series of group discussion sessions to quantify how they establish their procedures." "But, Bianca, how did you formulate the framework for evaluating their paradigms?" I was thinking back to the Slashdot article where a client sued Razorfish for delivering a shoddy site and wondered whether these clowns had worked that project. My favorite line - Bianca is irate because a client asked her for some concrete bit of information: "Can you believe that? Hello? I'm an Information Architect, not a Knowledge Engineer!" -- update() on slashdot % A week or two ago we all sat around and tried to think up a name for the client; we can't call it Mosaic, because that's the name of the company. The marketroids had all kinds of silly suggestions like Cyber this and Power that and blah-blah Ware. Then someone said something about crushing NCSA Mosaic, and I blurted out "Mozilla!" Everyone seemed to like that, so I think that might end up being the official name of the browser. -- Jamie Zawinski (5 August 1994) % Yes, we ARE rather dull people. We appreciate being dull people. Exciting is only good when it happens to someone else ... as in "an exciting wreck", "an exciting plane crash", "an exciting install of Windows XP", et al. -- Ralph Wade Phillips % When I do it, it's development. When you do it, it's coding. When he does it, it's mindless hacking. -- Paul Tomblin % . . |------------------------- a long way ------------------------| -- Christophe Rhodes, ucam.chat % ASR is one of the easiest places in the world to make a bad impression, first or otherwise, because everyone else here is likely as stressed as you are, though much more competent and cynical. -- Chris Johnson % Because of the Blaster and SOBIG worms, Corporate IS won't allow any OS on the corporate net that isn't certified, and the only OSes they will certify are Windows 2000 and Windows XP, the two biggest culprits in those self same worms. -- Paul Tomblin % Networks are like sewers: my job is to make sure your data goes away when you flush, and to stop the rats climbing into your toilet through the pipes. -- Tanuki describes network administration % The pet rock, of course, is the ridiculous thing that _someone else_ owns; on YOUR system, it's an essential part of the listening experience. -- David Parsons explains audiophiles % Every fleeting thought you've ever had in your life, no matter how bizarre, is someone's lifelong obsession. And he has a website. -- Skif's Internet Theorem % I notice that "talent" is a favorite word of people who don't create anything themselves. -- Kevin Pease % I read the fscking manual, because I choose to use tools like C, or like Stihl chainsaws, that are powerful enough that you'd better RTFM if you don't want Bad Things to happen. I don't want weak tools. And I likewise don't want programmers who think they can just screw around and slap stuff together in toddler-safe environments without having certain knowledge of what they're doing. People who refuse to RTFM really torque me off. -- Anthony de Boer on why he avoids PHP % A subset of C++ and embedded environments should be fine -- Philip Armstrong Yah, we call that subset "C". -- Peter da Silva % "Buckaroo Banzai" is actually not so bad, particularly Lithgow's prescient portrayal of Steve Ballmer. -- Patrick R. Wade % I'm fairly sure if they took porn off the Internet, there'd only be one website left, and it would be called "bring-back-the-porn dot com". -- Perry Cox, _Scrubs_ % Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. -- Brian W. Kernighan % If you can't just tell this person to go get fscked, then just give him /wrong/ information. I'm sure that he'll eventually stop after you've had him send enough stuff to /dev/null. -- Mike Raeder Counter proof: MSCEs are still drawing paychecks. -- Paul Tomblin % "Cynical" is a term invented by optimists to describe realists. -- Gregory Benford % If you decide to chase down the prerequisites by installing their RPMs, the first three or four levels will seem reasonable, but once you're down about ten levels, the new version of 'echo' you're installing will end up requiring upgrades of minor things like the C library, the kernel, or the color of the solder-mask on the circuit board of the network device at the other end of your connection. -- Matt Roberds % Today while watching people complain about the latest Windows worm outbreak, I likened Windows users to people stuck in abusive relationships: they get beat up over and over again, but they won't leave. -- Steve VanDevender % Remember that commercials are designed to do one thing only: promote a product in such a way that you, the listener, will part with your money to get the product. Never trust a commercial for ANY product. Talk to people who have actually spent money on the product, or be an idiot and believe everything you hear on the radio. -- Listener Tip on www.krud.com % Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My suggested compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration. -- Stan Kelly-Bootle % Decaf for *you*, miladdo. -- Jim Andrew I don't need that poison any more. I'm pissed off, wired and jittery on _life_. -- Douglas Henke % The Web brings people together because no matter what kind of a twisted sexual mutant you happen to be, you've got millions of pals out there. Type in "Find people that have sex with goats that are on fire" and the computer will say, "Specify type of goat". -- Rich Jeni % We really aren't that far removed from bloodletting and leeches, no. -- rone I still think of DeForest Kelley when that sentiment is raised. -- Derick Siddoway I think of Steve Martin. -- David P. Murphy % Tune in next time for the "insurance company" rant, followed by the exciting "taking it back to get it fixed correctly" rant! -- Matt Roberds predicts his future with considerable surety % If computer science was a science, computer "scientists" would study what computer systems do and draw well-reasoned conclusions from it, instead of being rabid clueless wankers who've never even seen a real world system before, let alone used one. These are the kind of people that brought us Pascal, folks. -- Charles J. Radder Computer science has about as much to do with computers as astronomy does with telescopes. -- Edsger Dijkstra % A friend of mine just bought [a virtual memory package for a Macintosh]. What is he going to do with it? "I'm going to install a *really big* RAMdisk. Clever, huh?" -- entropy@pawl.rpi.edu (The Throne of Jasper) August 1989 % "I cannot read the fiery letters," said the PFY in a quavering voice. "No," said BOFH, "but I can. The letters are Elvish, of an ancient mode, but the language is that of Armonk, which I will not utter here. But this in the Common Tongue is what is said, close enough: By this or any other name, You are well and truly fscked." -- Bram % Remember that game in kindergarten, where you whisper in someone's ear, and the message works its way around the class and comes back to you as something totally different? That game exists to educate you on how graveyard maintenance crews pass on computer related instructions. -- AJS % By now, all the monks here are probably laughing at me, but that's okay. I've laughed at a lot of you, too. What would the monastery be without the camaraderie of mutual schadenfreude? -- Zed C. Pobre % If someone else can run arbitrary code on your computer without your permission, it's not *your* computer any more. -- Rich Kulawiec % The best case scenario is "secure, usable, Microsoft: pick any two" . . . the worst case is "pick any one". -- James Riden % When you're putting on and taking off the Magic Decoder Ring enough times to look like you're committing solo TTTSNBN and trying to get your readers to do the same, it's time to just rot the whole paragraph. -- Anthony de Boer % Well vers'd was he in ye skylles of LARTe; 'twas said thirteen dozenne spammers he'd cleaved apart! His bootes were black, and about his wayste A cellephone, and a Leathermanne fair well were playc'd. -- Tanuki channels Chaucer % Don't worry, Rob. No one could possibly mistake you for someone who gives a fuck. -- one of Rob Blake's well-trained users % Somewhere, classes are being offered on "how to sound like you're drowning in peanut-butter whilst having marbles shoved up your nose whenever making a phone-call". They also apparantly offer an extension course on "how... to... talk... slowly... when... describing... what... you... were... doing... when... the... problem... started... andthentalkinglikeanamphetaminecrazed ferretwhilerattlingofftheerrormessageandyourusernameandpasswordandanythinge lsethatmightbemarginallyhelpfultotheadmin". An alarming number of my previous batch of lusers had taken this, and apparantly all of them graduated magna cum laude. -- Adam the Tired % "professional" == "I get paid to do this". Nothing more, nothing less. -- David P. Murphy % Six years ago, I was told I've a life expectancy of less than my cats. Hearing other religious types tell me that they are sure their deity has some wonderful reason for doing this to me, feels exactly like a luser explaining why their box doesn't work anymore. -- Andrew Nicholson % Hogshead now has a stated policy of _Not Doing Business With Fuckwits_, which has saved me enormous amounts of heartache over the last few months. I recommend it. -- James Wallis, Hogshead Publishing % But I haven't set you on fire yet! -- The Gord, http://www.actsofgord.com/Annoy/chapter07.php % Remember when we used to be mad at jwz for the blink tag? Remember when that was the worst thing that a web browser could do to annoy you? Sigh. -- Paul Tomblin % Standing barefoot in a river of clues, most people would not get their toes wet. -- Brian Kantor % I have identified this service to be a scam using the "superfluous female person standing next to logo" method. -- BillX on /. % I think we passed the "Do not feed the trolls" sign several cages back, and are now well within the trollarium proper. -- Mark C. Langston % Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats. -- Howard Aiken % I found that my old 486 desktop wouldn't work properly until I'd had a go at it with a ball-peen hammer, much to the irritation of the sysadmin I was sharing the house with who thought I shouldn't treat a computer like that. -- Peter Corlett Now that's just crazy talk. *ALL* hardware is begging to be treated like that. -- David P. Murphy % "Eppur si muove!" (And yet it does move!) -- Galileo Galilei % My pessimism extends to the point of even suspecting the sincerity of the pessimists. -- Jean Rostand, 1931 % I just love regedit's error message. Singular, yes. -- Maarten Wiltink % That's how I transferred over 30 hours worth of credit from 3 'A' Levels, and ended up with about 45 hours of credit from the various things I did before I came to .us. Reading the catalog was the first thing I did. Finding all the loopholes was fun! -- Tai Thus proving that there *are* real-life advantages to being a min-maxing character-creating RPG player. -- David P. Murphy % The copyright file is for everyone. That we make it available in plain-text, uncompressed form rather than in spinning, throbbing OpenGL-rendered 3D text over a thumping dance music soundtrack is a feature, not a bug. -- Branden Robinson % I've seen things you people can't imagine. Chimneysweeps on fire over the roofs of London. I've watched kite-strings glitter in the sun at Hyde Park Gate. All these things will be lost in time, like chalk-paintings in the rain. Time for my nap. -- Julie Andrews, _Bladestroller_ (by Peter da Silva) % My grandfather on why he has no computer in his house: "it's just a passing fad." I'm feeling less and less of an urge to beg to differ with him. -- Omri Schwarz % Our goverment "invests" in roads, but "subsidises" public transport. -- Peter Corlett % I still want a phone with caller-IQ. -- Tanuki % It always comes as a shock, doesn't it. I've always wondered why, though. Unless manglement is really on some strong drugs which paint the world pink, make the sun giggle, and replace their employees with teletubbies staring in wonder at their manager wearing his genitals on his head. Then the BOFH comes, boots their arse around the desk, pumps them full of stationery and staples his resignation to their forehead. -- Bogdan Iamandei % She said "no", by the way. -- Tim, _The Office_ % I don't run antivirus software on my computer; I prefer to run it in my brain. -- Dave Buckles % Imagine, if you will, something with the grace, elegance and steerability of a shopping cart, having a completely inappropriate engine bodged onto it, and with the risk of it falling apart at any moment. These kids would probably have gone on to become great British car designers, if only they could have perfected a means of getting it to leak oil. -- Peter Corlett % Dr. Doom prays for death. Doom knows fully well that he will one day control the universe and possess power even beyond his incomparable imagination. Even so, Doom feels the only way to purge such intolerable filth as this pie adventure from his fantastic mind is *death*. Sweet embracing death where no such Aquaman advertisements can be found. Kill . . . Doom . . . -- SeanBaby analyzes an old Hostess Fruit Pie advertisement % I often reflect that if "privileges" had been called "responsibilities" or "duties", I would have saved thousands of hours explaining to people why they were only gonna get them over my dead body. -- Lee K. Gleason, VMS sysadmin % (for a secure system) Microsoft, electricity, network: pick any two. -- Iain D Broadfoot % Apple's original usability studies contradicted the Xerox ones. The difference? Xerox studied people who were used to the idea of computers and user interfaces. Apple studied random lusers. -- Peter da Silva % You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe. -- Marcus to Franklin in B5: A Late Delivery from Avalon % Hopefully, the power switch in *that* case is labelled "off" and "more off". -- Peter Corlett % My other computer is your Windows machine. -- sig % The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth. -- George Orwell % I think that most people in my city believe the rule for four-way stops is "me first". If they saw a copy of the Highway Traffic Act of Ontario, they'd be surprised that they're not listed there by name. -- Alan J Rosenthal % Have the rest of you noticed there are a lot of people who can't tell the difference between "right to use" and "annual maintenance"? -- Graham Reed, on beancounters who mindlessly pay for support % Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge where there is no river. -- Nikita Krushchev % What really convinced me of the worthlessness of MCx was that after two years as the company-wide mail guru, I still failed the MCP Exchange sample exam by a huge margin, largely because I couldn't tell you every menu option selection required to migrate from $OTHER_MAIL_SERVER to Exchange. -- Andy Cunningham % I was thinking that the zeroth law would work out to be something like "sometimes a robot may break the first law in an immediate sense if the end result will be improved entertainment industry profits". -- Matt McLeod % We think our software [Windows] is far more secure than open-source software. It is more secure because we stand behind it, we fixed it, because we built it. Nobody ever knows who built open-source software. -- Steve Ballmer % My hate/hate relationship with XML is, predictably, on 'hate' at the moment. -- Matt S Trout % Grr... don't get me started on Wagner. The man couldn't resolve a dominant seventh to a tonic with two musical dictionaries open to the word "resolution", and a copy of anything by Muddy Waters. -- Eric the Read % Why don't you go with Thief or something so that I can forget that you exist and let the unending tide of rage that I call "being awake" simmer down to a mere powder keg of fury? -- Black Mage rids himself of Fighter, _8-bit Theatre_ % Shut up. I've been hanging out with Fighter all day. I could literally *feel* him sucking away at my . . . brain-thinky score thing. -- Red Mage explains why it is necessary to do so http://www.nuklearpower.com/2001/09/07/episode-076-fighter-and-red-mage-are-back/ % When I worked for American Express, I worked for the Stored Value Cards department, which was a brand new thing for AmEx. I remember standing in a group around a monitor when we brought new functionality online, holding our collective breath, because no matter how much we tested it in development, the real test was real life. I remember thinking that every other card authorization system in the world probably had its own set of geeks standing around holding their breath. Every time I used a piece of plastic to pay for things that year, I was always surprised when it worked. -- Derick Siddoway % "I see you've a large number of telnet connections to dialup lines in the Netherlands." "That'll be my chat people. They need telnet to chat properly." "Of course they do." -- the PFY locates the cause of the network traffic surge % I'm not a Windows user, consequently I'm not afraid of receiving email from total strangers. -- Geoff Lane % Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send. -- rewording of _Postel's Law_ in RFC 2468 Be pedantic in what you accept, and arbitrarily brutal in what you send. -- Malcolm Ray % "This is an outrage! I will not stand idly by for this!" "Good point. Pronto, would you mind gift-wrapping our friend here in a nice, festive shade of sit-down-and-shut-up?" -- https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2003-04-18 % In a lot of ways it was really rather nice, although that may just be because my experience with it was before my POS lobe got full. -- Steve VanDevender % Perl is strange, wonderful, awe-inspiring, mentally stimulating, intellectually inspiring, and whole bunch of other great things that are great in a use-it-where-I-won't-get-paged-about-it-at-0300 sense. -- Anthony de Boer % I've spent a lot of years in the service industry, both as tech and a service manager, and have found that intermittant faults are the single biggest cause of wasted time & resources. Now, from a service POV, you don't give a shit whether a given part is good or bad, all you care about is that it's consistently in one of those states, so you can replace it or eliminate it from your investigations. If careful application of a size 9 critical alignment tool will help reduce the local level quantum uncertainty, then it's a procedure of which I'm entirely in favour. -- Lionel % Thomas Covenant is just _bad_. You seem to be making the mistake of assuming that just because he's an anti-hero, anyone who doesn't like the books just isn't mature enough to get it. That kind of thinking leads to Modern Art. -- Shalon Wood % AD 'YOURBASE.**' G UACC(NONE) OWNER(US) -- Chris Suslowicz $ SET SECURITY /OWNER='f$user()' /CLASS=BASE USER$DISK:['yourname'...]*.*;* -- David P. Murphy # find / -user your -name base -print0 | xargs -0 chown us:us -- Paul Martin % I have decided that I don't hate marketing, I hate _bad_ marketing. The problem, of course, is that "bad marketing" is to "marketing" kind of as "nitrogen" is to "air", except more common. -- Jeremiah DeWitt Weiner % My S.O. asked me why there wasn't a Microsoft-brand antivirus, then immediately said, "Oh, of course. If they can't fix the OS, you'd be crazy to buy their antivirus as an add-on." -- Kevin Martin % I detest the new capitalism. "people are our greatest asset" hah! Although I suppose if that means "so we depreciate them over 5 years then replace", I guess they aren't lying. -- Zebee Johnstone % There is another circle of hell called 'The SAP helpdesk' that gets to deal with that; 100% of SAP problems that get to me result in a reload of the SOE. -- Rob Adams % A few years ago when "filesharing" was first becoming a big thing, Linus did make a point that people were WRONG to be tossing other peoples' copyrighted content at each other, and that Linux was free because Linus was giving it away, not because people had any right to be taking it regardless, and didn't mean that everything else in the universe was automatically also free if you were an opensourcer. Larry did not anticipate the Freeness Nazi Inquisition. -- Anthony de Boer % Our Diplomas are from Prestigious non-accredited universities, and will look great in your office, den or resume. -- winner of the 2002 Oxymoron of the Year contest % I remember wondering at the time, why someone would use something like [XTree Gold] when you could obviously do it 5 times quicker at the command line. The universe heard me and now I am a sysadmin for my sins. -- stevo % Me, I'm having trouble conceiving just *how* such an abomination can even be capable of happening, even with a finger macro. Gnus doesn't exactly have a "slurp last twenty articles into this article and fire away" command key --- not for lack of trying, mind. -- Dave Brown I'm sure Lars would accept a patch. -- James Riden % In one hundred years from now, the OED will be recording the major change in the English language that led to shifts in meaning for words like "advanced", "innovative" and "open". -- Rodger Donaldson % There are not words enough to describe how fucked up imake is. -- Peter da Silva % Examples of valid code in PL/1: if if = then then then = else; else else = if; do do = by by to to while while(until) until(end); -- not Tim Connors % It is easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of computers by the sense of accomplishment you get from getting them to run at all. -- Douglas Adams % His skull is impervious to your sarcasm. -- https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2003-06-15 % Please stop rolling your Jargon Dice and explain the problem you are having to me in plain English, using small words. -- John Hardin % a.s.r is where you come to have those last vestiges of hope and optimism burned away. -- Steve VanDevender % I need a new cell phone. It must have: - Quad band GSM (7 countries on 3 continents in the next 5 months?) - Bluetooth. - Either a removable/upgradable RAM card or 256MB+ of default RAM These features would be nice: - Camera - Ability to run terminal/ssh - POP/IMAP/SMTP -- Dan Birchall That's not a telephone. That's an Internet caf�. -- Maarten Wiltink % That's right. SQL in the querystring of the URL. -- Mike O, in http://www.thedailywtf.com/forums/38722/ShowPost.aspx adaptability += 1; extensibility += 1; security -= Universe.Atoms.Count; -- Ross Day % If it is vapourware then a vapour driver would be a snap for you to write. Just remember to pipe RND into the error handling, the way the real drivers do, so it's believable. -- Chris Hacking % Dragons: color-coded for YOUR convenience! -- Elan in http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0207.html % I've adopted the motto of a fellow on the aussie-isp list: "Service with a capital Bugger Off" Seems to have gone down fairly well, too. -- Matt McLeod % You ask MikeA an inane question. MikeA hits you with a cluebat. MikeA hits you with 3000 volts across the forehead. MikeA hits you with a brick. MikeA hits you with a canoe paddle. MikeA hits you with a howitzer. MikeA hits you with a tile from raised floor. MikeA hits you with a 2x4. MikeA hits you with an Imperial Assload of hungry ferrets. MikeA hits you with startling news. MikeA hits you with an Orbital Anvil Delivery System. You die. Dump file (y/n)? -- Geoff Kinnel % If the designers of X Windows built cars, there would be no fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which followed the same principles . . . but you'd be able to shift gears with your stereo. Useful feature, that. -- Marcus J. Ranum, Digital Equipment Corp. % Perhaps you'd like to read this informative brochure, "So now you're a sysadmin stuck supporting systems that don't work from vendors who don't care for people with no clue". -- Damian James % Time passes, the Inquisition extract a luserid and jobname, and I find that the accursed thing is still running (36 hours or so) on the Dev system. One anvil later, it isn't. -- Chris Suslowicz % Wait, this is ASR . . . fuck off, of course I'm right. -- Graham Reed % I think it's obvious that Word documents make the best data storage format, don't you? -- Whackjack, on https://thedailywtf.com/articles/comments/Integration_Nation Idiot. Word is not a _storage_ format, it's a _transportation_ format. *XML* is a storage format. -- Stan Rogers % If it's too urgent to send Second Class, then it's too urgent to send First. -- Gary Barnes % I *know* that lying is one of the basic skills for today's successful Estate Agent. I *know* that estate agents will describe as "picturesque" a hovel that will come down on your head as soon as you sand away the load bearing paint. These things are now accepted and honourable. -- Menno Willemse % Fifteen years later some people _still_ won't talk to me. That's fine: what I have for them can't be spoken; it can only be fired. -- Mike Andrews % What happens when a user goes to "http://idioticapplication.com/securityhole.php?doaction=system&forclient=rm%20-rf%20/"? -- anonymous A security hole gets closed. -- Thuktun % If being dropped out of an aircraft into what is, for all anyone knows, a minefield is "moderately rough handling", what would constitute "rough handling" or "very rough handling"? -- David Richerby Being shipped UPS. -- Dave Brown % People ask me what I do for a living, and I tell 'em "I type". It's accurate and easier to explain than "I administrate a cluster of IVR computer telephony and occasionally pull shifts in the Mail Ops NOC". What do I do, really? I just sit here at my desk, and I type. I am a good typer. -- Huey % Out: 220 XX.XXXXX.XXX ESMTP Postfix In: <PRE>HELO 127.0.0.1</PRE> Dear god. -- Peter da Silva % The question, "Will a key with more bits give me better security?" is a lot like the question, "Will more cylinders in my car engine make me go faster?" -- Jon Callas % That'll teach them. Well, it'll teach the *others*. -- Menno Willemse % It always freaks me out that those people make that choice. "I want a career with no surprises. I know: I'll go into a fast-moving industry and work with machines which are almost infinitely flexible! That's ideal!" -- Malcolm Ray % bofh.lusty-servers BIND, CNAME chains, domainatrixes, and fscking. -- Anthony de Boer % It's not actually a _rule_ that all English-language obscenities dot com have to be click-throughs for pornographic web sites. It's just a convention. -- Alan J. Rosenthal % HTML was such a nice system when it was first designed. No explicit font specifications as such (tough shit if the luser can't configure their browser); it was clean, somehow. And now that the webmonkeys have pissed all over it, we require dunny-cleaning features in browsers. -- Dan Holdsworth % The money isn't worth it. In California, it's not as if you get to keep any of it. -- Mixerman % You're one of those weird Unix people who thinks that the proper response to a problem is to diagnose it [using] the available evidence. Whereas every sensible Windows user knows that the *correct* thing to do is to either ignore it or frob things at random until the problem goes away. -- Malcom Ray % Surely you're not writing scripts in csh. That's like building a fire escape out of balsa-wood and painting it with thermite. -- Peter da Silva % Bill, we have created these "football monsters", and no matter what you do, you will never be able to satisfy that creature. Understand that at the outset: forget about pacifying the boosters, and you can survive. You better win most every game, but even if you do, the Monster will keep chomping. If you get caught up in trying to feed that thing, it will eat you up, too. -- Barry Switzer's advice to Bill Curry % You make a persuasive argument. And by that, I mean there are more of you and you are using that to coerce me into obeying your moral code. -- Belkar, _Order of the Stick_ #125 http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0125.html % i know 0 about coding but i know when you do a prog you write small hints in the code to help others out -- Tatsujin % We're standing there pounding a dead parrot on the counter, and the management response is to frantically swap in new counters to see if that fixes the problem. -- Peter Gutmann % What's bad about tea? The only problem I see with tea around here is that people will put a half-cup of sugar in a cup of tea. It seems it's not tea unless you can shake it and it looks like a Christmas paperweight. -- Gene Cash % The difference is that while C lets you shoot yourself in the foot, Perl shoots itself in the foot *first* to make sure the gun works. -- Peter da Silva % This doubles the effective focal length to a 35mm equivalent of 17280mm . . . yes, there are five digits in that number, which of course is utterly insane. -- http://www.dvinfo.net/canon/images/images17.php % Yeah, yeah, I'm old. Fuck off. -- stevo (and, no doubt, many other monks) % The instructor, bless him, told us it stood for "Microsoft Certified Shutdown Engineer", because every time you do anything, you have to reboot! -- Ben Aveling % And it's the web page for... ...a stock broker. The site starts out, "a new breed of stockbroker is the born" (sic), and it just goes downhill from there. Made by suits, for suits. No human thought went into the creation of this web site. -- Dave Brown % A security update for the .WMF-exploit will be released today at 2pm ET, instead of Tuesday January 10, 2006, as originally planned, as part of our regular monthly release of security bulletins, once testing for quality and application compatibility was complete. However, testing has been completed earlier than anticipated and the update is ready for release. In addition, we are releasing the update early in response to strong customer sentiment that the release should be made available as soon as possible. -- Microsoft It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grammes a week. -- George Orwell, "1984" % If our hearts are pure, we can stamp out initrd in our lifetime. -- Nix % I've changed my mind, this isn't a WTF at all. It's just a standard implementation using the well known SQL Injection design pattern. -- [anonymous] on http://www.thedailywtf.com/forums/58317/ShowPost.aspx % On a totally unrelated note, I have plenty of bandwidth & several lazy servers. If there's anyone out there who'd like to help me load-test my boxen by supplying me with randomly-selected large files to serve, they're very welcome to contact me at this email address to discuss suitable arrangements. I also have the facilities for AV format translation, should anyone run into a need for such services. -- Lionel's idea of being "subtle" % That was possibly the only time in my entire career that somebody actually noticed and cared to say that they were impressed by something I'd achieved. These days, I could turn lead into gold, and I'd be whinged at because they wanted platinum. -- Peter Corlett % Objective-C++: Trying to find out exactly how many wrongs _do_ make a right. -- David Richerby % So why does volunteering work? Because only successful people tend to volunteer. Unsuccessful people don't volunteer -- they complain instead. -- Steve Pavlina % Helping you to shoot yourself in the foot is not in my mission statement. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz % A communications team? Oh, you mean when I stand planted at the sysbofhs door saying to everybody approaching "Yes, we know. No, I don't know. We'll let you know." Wow, there's a name for everything in this language. -- Frossie % It is amazing how the bloody Ultrix box, which we all secretly hoped would breathe its last during one of the many outages, serenely Ultrixed on while the newer bigger more used s