Erik Naggum
People search for the meaning of life, but this is the easy question: we are born into a world that presents us with many millenia of collected knowledge and information, and all our predecessors ask of us is that we not waste our brief life ignoring the past only to rediscover or reinvent its lessons badly.Collection: Past
We have no mom-and-pop oil rigs in Norway.Collection: Mom
Unformed people delight in the gaudy and in novelty. Cooked people delight in the ordinary.Collection: People
From the Latin word "imponere", base of the obsolete English "impone" and translated as "impress" in modern English, Nordic hackers have coined the terms "imponator" (a device that does nothing but impress bystanders, referred to as the "imponator effect") and "imponade" (that "goo" that fills you as you get impressed with something - from "marmelade", often referred as "full of imponade", always ironic).Collection: Latin
In Norway, we have a community of people who prefer to use a version of Norwegian that looks very much like lutefisk: Dug up remains from the garbage heap of history and dressed up to look like a tradition.Collection: People
Norway did not even have a revolution at the time the rest of Europe was busy figuring out human rights and stuff, because we were busy fighting over how to spell it.Collection: Fighting
Constructing a social system that tends to those who agree with it is a piece of cake compared to constructing one that makes those who disagree with it want to obey its principles.Collection: Cake
C being what it is lacks support for multiple return values, so the notion that it is meaningful to pass pointers to memory objects into which any random function may write random values without having a clue where they point, has not been debunked as the sheer idiocy it really is.Collection: Meaningful
Life is too long to be good at C++ – if you had spent all that time to become good at it, you would essentially have to work with it, too, to get back the costs, and that would just be some long, drawn-out torture.Collection: Long
The purpose of human existence is to learn and to understand as much as we can of what came before us, so we can further the sum total of human knowledge in our life.Collection: Purpose
Microsoft is not the answer. Microsoft is the question. NO is the answer.Collection: Technology
Suppose we blasted all politicians into space. Would the SETI project find even one of them?Collection: Space
I'm bothered by the fact that stupid people don't spontaneously combust, which they should.Collection: Stupid
You become a serious programmer by going through a stage where you are fully aware of the degree to which you know the specification, meaning both the explicit and the tacit specification of your language and of your problem. "Hey, it works most of the time" is the very antithesis of a serious programmer, and certain languages can only support code like that.Collection: Support
Like many older fans of Free Software and Open Source, I have discovered that it is really only free in the sense that the time you spend on it is worthless.Collection: Fans
I have a cat, so I know that when she digs her very sharp claws into my chest or stomach it's really a sign of affection, but I don't see any reason for programming languages to show affection with pain.Collection: Pain
Very clever implementation techniques are required to implement this insanity correctly and usefully, not to mention that code written with this feature used and abused east and west is exceptionally exciting to debug.Collection: Clever
The fundamental deficiency in HTML is that it reduces hypertext and the intertwinedness of human communication to a question of how it is rendered and what happens when you click on it. ... HTML is to the browser what PostScript is to the laser printer.Collection: Communication
The Internet will not become a money machine until the banking industry figures out how to transfer money for free so you can charge USD 0.005 (half a cent) for some simple service like, say, reading a newspaper article you have searched for. With today's payment system, the cost of the transfer of the funds completely dwarf the cost of the service paid for. ... This situation, however, is what acutely prevents the Internet from taking off as a network for paid services.Collection: Reading
I have actually programmed a fair bit in Perl, like I have C++ code published with my name on it. Other things I have tried and have no intention to do again if I can at all avoid it include smoking, getting drunk enough to puke and waste the whole next day with hang-over, breaking a leg in a violent car crash, getting mugged in New York City, or travel with Aeroflot.Collection: New York
Enlightenment is probably antithetical to impatience.Collection: Enlightenment
XML is a giant step in no direction at all.Collection: Giants
'Code sharing' is an economic surplus phenomenon. It works only when none of the people involved in it are in any form of need.Collection: People
If, however, one factor is too successful, it will continue to be the winning factor regardless of the variation in the other factors over the range of variation in the conditions, and therefore will stifle the development of other advantageous factors until the conditions change sufficiently that it no longer is the winning factor. At this point, the whole population is ill prepared for the change, and may well perish entirely if the winning factor accidentally becomes the matching factor for a disease or a predator.Collection: Successful
The only important property of evils of the past is that they not be repeated in the future, in any way, shape, or form.Collection: Past
Once we were Programmers. Maybe our last best hope is a movie.Collection: Lasts
I believe C++ instills fear in programmers, fear that the interaction of some details causes unpredictable results. Its unmanageable complexity has spawned more fear-preventing tools than any other language, but the solution should have been to create and use a language that does not overload the whole goddamn human brain with irrelevant details.Collection: Believe
Have you considered the option of getting the joke? If not, try it now and redeem your soul.Collection: Soul
The aspects you are willing to ignore are more important than the aspects you are willing to accept.Collection: Important