Henry Spencer Quotes

Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.

Programming graphics in X is like finding the square root of PI using Roman numerals.

MS-DOS isn't dead, it just smells that way.

C++ is the best example of second-system effect since OS/360.

Politics /n/: from 'poly ticks', short for 'many small bloodsucking insects'.

A bit of tolerance is worth a megabyte of flamming.

Altruism is a fine motive, but if you want results, greed works much better.

If you lie to the compiler, it will get its revenge.

To err is human, but to really screw things up requires a design committee of bureaucrats.

Belief is no substitute for arithmetic.

Progress requires setbacks the only sure way to avoid failure is not to try.

Whether solid rockets are more or less likely to fail than liquid-fuel rockets is debatable. More serious, though, is that when they do fail, it's usually violent and spectacular.

Reusable rockets promise much easier testing because you should usually get them back, and you can debug as you go rather than having to get everything perfect the first time.

In 1960-61, a small group of female pilots went through many of the same medical tests as the Mercury astronauts and scored very well on them - in fact, better than some of the astronauts did.