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A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ? !

Everything is proceeding to plan. Lee and Dave are in the mini-sub preparing to take out the Thames Flood Barrier at full tide. I am in Mountain View, hurrying around MAE-WEST with a fast-depleting knapsack of Semtex hanging jauntily from my shoulder. Across the world, Y2K consultants are beginning to feel the effects of the powerful time-release hallucinogen we secreted onto the pages of "COBOL for Dummies" back in 1997. These last few days have left little time for love, laughter or editorial conferences, so we hope you'll make do with this seasonal quiz based on the last years' events. We hope it will take your mind off the the sounds of the angry peasant mobs milling outside your offices. Answers next week: first correct entry after midnight gets two week's supply of Evian and six vials of the emergency vaccine. In Year Zero, suckers!
-Danny O'Brien, Need To Know News
But while these squabbles go on and on, by the end of tonight, it'll be clear who won the real Browser War. It's Jamie Zawinski, who - although it was a close race - managed to ship his nightclub before Mozilla 1.0.
-Danny O'Brien, Need To Know News
In these terrible times, it's good to watch the tech community put its problems aside, and supply what we were all so desperately short of: plenty of wild unsolicited opinions. After those first few hours of awful shocked silence - what a relief to be interrupted by the CEO of CoffeeCup Software, producers of an innocuous Windows HTML editor, e-mailing his 1.2 million customer base to "call for [the responsible] country's complete destruction and annihilation". And at the end of that fateful day, noted hacker Eric S. Raymond rained his thoughts like fresh water, revealing that those who "disarmed all the non-terrorists on those airplanes ... bear some moral responsibility". Thanks too to BYTE's Jerry Pournelle, who slowly toughened his demands from an early request that /usr/bin/laden be handed over "bound and chained", to Thursday's demand that Nablus, Gaza, Baghdad *and* Damascus be razed to the ground; to the Evening Standard infowar expert who warned that "inflamed young men" could escalate the conflict by releasing "cyber viruses, crashing our computers ... from council houses in Bradford"; and kindly John Keegan in the Telegraph, who wrote that ISPs should ban encryption among their users, and those who refused must be "destroyed with cruise missiles". And on through the lonely nights, as net.folk on chat traded credulous rumours and confused geopolitics, and Nostradamus buffs mulled seriously over a quatrain that, sadly, was probably invented by a skeptic to show how *any* random phrase could end up a doomladen prophecy. But be assured that the crisis is not yet over. Please help: opinions are still desperately needed - and bloggers, columnists and sleep-deprived newsreaders are running short of ideas. So: do you have some minority you'd like to haphazardly blame? Some half-arsed genocidal theory you'd like to insist become global policy? Some simplistic demonisation of a country's recent history that needs to be waved in the faces of everyone you know? Mail it to our hotline on devnull@spesh.com, and we'll pass it on to those who must fill the useless silence which would otherwise be wasted on slow, methodical grief.
-Danny O'Brien, Need To Know News
NSI - AN APOLOGY. In last week's NTK, we apologised for an article which have suggested that NSI's modification to the whois registry (to show registrars, not actual, useful, contact addresses) might break existing whois utilities. NSI protested that it wasn't their fault, and they were maintaining an old-style system at whois.networksolutions.com, which any sensible sysadmin could easily switch to. On the day of the switchover, NSI's own Web registration system broke. They were pointing to the wrong server. NTK would like to apologise for the apology. Sorry.
-Danny O'Brien, Need To Know News
Perfectly timed, the Microsoft Free Friday campaign was announced last week (as so many major projects are these days, by Dave Winer randomly talking in his sleep).
-Danny O'Brien, Need To Know News
So the new look, new stupid, Deja decided to killfile five years of Usenet archiving to concentrate on its comparison-shopping core incompentency.
-Danny O'Brien, Need To Know News
Still, at least Denise "Starship Troopers" Richards dresses up as Lara Croft for no readily apparent reason...
-Danny O'Brien on The World is Not Enough
Thanks to everyone who didn't e-mail us over the last year to falco BOO.COM. Everyone else: no shit, Sherlocks. And we know that we should be revelling in those rumours of corporate excess, the Flash-driven horrors spooned out of Organic's arse into gaping mouths of usability experts the globe over, the vision of Miss Boo being dragged in chains through the streets of London. But sod it, kids: there but for the grace of God go all of us in six months. And maybe it's time you looked your boardroom pals that talk so confidently of their plans at your startup, and wonder whether they'd take as much care of you when the whole thing takes off like a concrete rowing-boat. As it will. Oh yes. For the bell, it tolls for boo. I mean you.
-Danny O'Brien, Need To Know News
When the the London Stock Exchange trading computers crashed *just* at the point that the US stock market bubble wobbled, it's tempting to see more than the usual invisible hand manipulating the market. Was it truly incompetence on an unparallelled scale, or could this "accident" have been a deliberate denial of service prevent further instability? Well, given Andersen Consulting's involvement, we're assuming the former.
-Danny O'Brien, Need To Know News
A system admin's life is a sorry one. The only advantage he has over Emergency Room doctors is that malpractice suits are rare. On the other hand, ER doctors never have to deal with patients installing new versions of their own innards!
-Michael O'Brien
We live in a dangerous Age. To say how you feel is to lay your own grave
-Sinead O'Connor
The purpose of this newsgroup is to get people to learn how to use kill files.
-Chris O'Donovan in alt.religion.computers
True followers of the unix way, which is the one true way, all have gigabytes of free disk space and trn merely helps them fill this void in their life.
-Chris O'Donovan
I know you lived in France but that doesn't mean you know everything.
-Frank O'Hara
Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
-P.J. O'Rourke
Making fun of born-again christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope.
-P.J. O'Rourke
Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.
-P.J. O'Rourke
The Middle Eastern states aren't nations; they're quarrels with borders.
-P.J. O'Rourke
Writing on a computer makes saving what's been written too easy. Pretentious lead sentences are kept, not tossed. Instead of sitting surrounded by crumpled paper, the computerized writer has his mistakes neatly stored in digital memory.
-P. J. O'Rourke
we help those who arrive when our blood alcohol level exceeds our caffeine concentrations. now is not that time.
-obvious, #perl
I should like to comment this code of mine, but I can't seem to grok the finer nuances of what I did...
-Erik Ogan
slack off... my life is so much better now that I don't have something as silly as classes getting in my way
-Erik Ogan
They are seldom found out, because they gravitate to the kind of clients who, bamboozled by their rhetoric, do not hold them responsible for sales results. Their campaigns find favor at cocktail parties in New York, San Francisco and London but are taken less seriously in Chicago. In the days when I specialized in posh campaigns for The New Yorker, I was the hero of this coterie, but when I graduated to advertising in mass media and wrote a book which extolled the value of research, I became its devil. I comfort myself with the reflection that I have sold more merchandise than all of them put together.
-David Ogilvy
When I write an advertisement, I don't want you to tell me that you find it 'creative'. I want you to find it so interestin that you *buy the product*. When Aeschines spoke, they said, 'How well he speaks.' But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, 'Let us march against Philip.'
-David Ogilvy
Also, C++ is intended to be all "type safe" and crap like that, trying to be all pristine and nice and well-defined and all set up to protect everyone from themselves, and what language do they choose as a stable foundation for this language? C! The biggest free-for-all "I'll just pass a pointer to your mother around and fake everybody out" language on the planet. It's like giving an AK-47 to a monk, shooting him full of crack and letting him loose in a mall and expecting him to balance your checking account "when he has the time."
-Drew Olbrich
Also, to answer the question "When will the new spreadsheet be ready for use?" The answer is about five or six weeks, although it may appear to you to be as long as three months, since, like all programmers, I am travelling at relativistic speeds.
-Drew Olbrich
Another industry secret is that "Schindler's List" was created entirely on a sound stage in Burbank by one camera man, three actors, and a dozen guys using a custom version of Photoshop.
-Drew Olbrich
At the suggestion of my reproductive system, I suggest that we create a new CMU bboard called "I left my penis logged in."
-Drew Olbrich
C++ is like jamming a helicopter inside a Miata and expecting some sort of improvement.
-Drew Olbrich
I hope this doesn't disrupt the trendy "The World Sucks, Everybody Sucks; Well, Maybe Not As Much As I Do; I'd Like To Suck More Than You Do, Really I Would; Hey, Sucking Any More Would Be An Improvement"... attitude.
-Drew Olbrich
I love stress because it's a whole lot better than depression.
-Drew Olbrich
It's all about getting off the planet.
-Drew Olbrich
My inner child is toting an Uzi.
-Drew Olbrich
OK everybody, I am NOW the FUCKING BUTT-ASS !G!O!D! of numerical methods!! Bring on your fourth-order Runge Kutta adaptive stepsize monotonically decreasing maximum allowed error fwap and I'LL MAKE the fucking computer boy BOW BEFORE ME DAMMIT and scrape him off the ROAD, the little TWIRP-ASS JELLO-HEADED yaddia-ya!!!!
-Drew Olbrich
Sometimes, I'm not so much fishing for compliments as snorkeling for criticism.
-Drew Olbrich
There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.
-Ken Olsen, President, Digital Equipment, 1977
We really need it because Microsoft keeps releasing sloppier and sloppier software that needs a faster and faster machine. The speed is crazy.
-Ken Olsen
By the way, if you do mention Pez and my wife, also mention that she's a management consultant and has a master's degree in molecular genetics, OK?
-Pierre Omidyar, who founded eBay to help his wife collect Pez dispensers
"My final piece of expert advice," Peavy added, "is that all of you people should just go fuck yourselves."
-The Onion
We're selling more than a cracker here, We're selling the salty, unctuous illusion of happiness.
-The Onion
If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One... I am become Death, the Shatterer of Worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoting "The Bhagavad Gita", 1945
The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds and the pessimist knows it.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer
We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer
Leaving behind the OS X user interface is like leaving London - you don't realise what a constant, nagging annoyance it is - like having a 24 hour toothache - until you've left town.
-Andrew Orlowski
Most people would like to be delivered from temptation but would like it to keep in touch.
-Robert Orben
I just can't stand the visual rape of walking down St. Marks Pl. and having all these unknown people offend me with facial piercings, which are there purely to shock and give a pretense of alienation. If they want to upset their mother and father figures, they should go and shit on their floor. And as for their supposed 'tribalism,' just throw and $100 bill into the middle of the room and see how unified they are.
-Genesis P-Orridge
Unfortunately, mathematics is about theory. Your question actually has practical appliations. I can't really answer it.
-Alejandro Ortega
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on the human face -- forever... And remember that it is forever.
-George Orwell
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
-George Orwell
Something else I'd like to do eventually is add the ability to supply the URL for an image you'd like to beat up on when you tire of killing Barney (not that that is likely to happen), then the server would fetch the image and allow you to use the same set of weapons on it. This would let people ''cross-examine'' their thesis advisors, etc.
-Gerald Oskoboiny
I could take a Ventrue but that TOAST OTTO ritual just really sucks.
-Otto on MasqueradeMUSH
My CPU can beat up your CPU with *both* its FPU's tied behind its MMU!!
-Lamar Owen
Any member introducing a dog into the Society's premises shall be liable to a fine of one pound. Any animal leading a blind person shall be deemed to be a cat.
-from Oxford Union Society rules