EDGAR: Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis and Retrieval system (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission)

Bill Gates: "I wish I got a chance to write more code. I do mess around. They don't let my code go in shipping products. They haven't done that for about eight years now. And when I say I'm going to come in and write this over the weekend, they don't really believe me quite as much as they used to."

This morning I received a phone call from my son that made me feel like I had walked onto the set of the Geek Family, or something:

[ring]
 Dad: "Hello?"
 Son: "Hi, Dad, it's me. Got a minute?"
 Dad: "Of course."
 Son: "I'm confused about Active Directory. What is it, exactly?"
 Dad: [pausing a moment to compose an answer that my son will understand] "It's a flexibly organized and extensible hierarchal collection of objects and their attributes."
 Son: "What kind of objects?"
 Dad: "Whatever you want: User objects; Printer objects; Network objects; Volume objects; Computer objects; attributes can be extended for an object or new object classes can be defined if you so desire."
 Son: "And you view these with something like Windows Explorer that gives you a GUI view of the hierarchy?"
 Dad: "Yes ... you can also use DOS commands from the command line instead of the GUI."
 Son: "So you can script everything you need to manipulate the objects and their attributes?"
 Dad: "Exactly!"
 Son: "Ahhh ... I get it. Thanks, Dad! And Happy Father's Day!"
 Dad: "I'm glad I could help ... after all, that's what fathers are for! And a Happy Father's Day to you, too :)"
[click]

Melissa M. Meyer (et al.): "One challenge of designing a service on an internetwork that already provides that service is that it might seem that you are reinventing the wheel. A good design process should start with a blank slate and be led by the organization's business objectives. If you work within the limits of the existing services, you might not be able to achieve the business objectives. Keeping an existing service can also result in inheriting its existing problems. Once the ideal system is designed, then existing systems can be worked into the design or discarded."

How much downtime is allowed in order to claim "6 nines" availability?

Terry Pratchett: "The role of listeners has never been fully appreciated. However, it is well know that most people don't listen. They use the time when someone else is speaking to think of what they're going to say next. True Listeners have always been revered among oral cultures, and prized for their rarity value; bards and poets are ten a cow, but a good Listener is hard to find, or at least hard to find twice."

Dexia Scarrow: "We navigated a twisted labyrinth formed from four layers of brown boxes, piled to head height. 'Excuse the mess,' Martinez said, looking back at me over his shoulder. 'I really should find a better solution to my filing problems, but there's always something more pressing that needs doing instead.'"

Jim's Paradox: Imagine a "dartboard" defined by a circle of unit radius and a "dart" defined by a line segment of unit length. The dart is "thrown" such that it intersects the plane of the dartboard at right angles within the area defined by the unit radius and thus uniquely defines a point of intersection. What are the odds of hitting this one point out of the infinite number of points contained within the unit circle? According to mathematical probability, this would be 1:Infinity which, according to the Calculus, evaluates to exactly zero. Since the odds of the dart hitting any given point within the target area is zero, one must therefore conclude that the dart will never hit the target at all. An inconvenient truth since the dart obviously hits the dartboard time and time again. What's wrong with this picture?

Anonymous: "Give someone a jug of wine and they'll be drunk for a day. Teach them how to grow grapes and they'll be drunk for life."

Avi Greengart of Current Analysis, Inc.: "Many people hate, hate, hate their cellphones. The iPhone doesn't make you feel stupid--it makes you feel cool."

Lee Ponzu: "People are event driven, and sometimes they walk into each other 'by accident' because they don't process the events in the right order, or there is some sort of delay while they process some other event. This issue is common to all distributed systems [....]"

APL program to calculate and print all of the prime numbers from 1 to R inclusive:

Why programmers celebrate Halloween on Christmas Day: OCT 31 = DEC 25

Dr. Alfred Lanning: "There have always been ghosts in the machine. Random segments of code, that have grouped together to form unexpected protocols. Un-anticipated, these free radicals engender questions of free will, creativity, and even the nature of what we might call the soul."

Mark Edgar: "umop apisdn"

MUNG (Mung Until No Good): "To make repeated changes which individually may be reversible, yet which ultimately result in an unintentional irreversible destruction of large portions of the original item."

QOTM: "To err is human; to forgive, divine; but to royally mung things up takes a computer."

Drivel: "Any activity that consumes time, money, and/or attention while having a non-positive impact on basic survival needs."

Motto: ""
Translation: "Thanks are not necessary for what is one's duty."

Unknown: "A forest and an orchard may contain the same number of trees, but the latter is more suitable for array processing."

Arthur: "You know, it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space, that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young."
Ford: "Why, what did she tell you?"
Arthur: "I don't know, I didn't listen."

Old Arabic Apothegm:

He who knows not and knows not that he knows not is a fool, shun him. He who knows not and knows that he knows not is simple, teach him. He who knows and knows not that he knows is asleep, waken him. He who knows and knows that he knows is wise, follow him.

Donald Rumsfeld:

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know.