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Most infamous "Last words":

by davido (Cardinal)
on Aug 25, 2006 at 01:46 UTC ( [id://569500]=poll: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??

Vote on this poll

Hey everyone, watch this!
[bar] 89/22%
Now hit enter.
[bar] 67/17%
Clip the blue wire first.
[bar] 29/7%
You can do that with string eval.
[bar] 35/9%
I'll just reformat it and reinstall everything.
[bar] 71/18%
Woops!
[bar] 44/11%
Nice camel...
[bar] 20/5%
while(1){....}
[bar] 32/8%
'create' (node)
[bar] 4/1%
no strict qw/vars/;
[bar] 14/3%
405 total votes
Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Most infamous "Last words":
by davido (Cardinal) on Aug 25, 2006 at 03:02 UTC

    In light of recent events at Dell and Apple (thanks to Sony batteries), I probably should have included an option, "Do you smell smoke?"


    Dave

      Memory tingling, something in the 60s US war (1860s, that is). A fast Google:

      "They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist...", General John Sedgwick

Re: Most infamous "Last words":
by rinceWind (Monsignor) on Aug 25, 2006 at 08:42 UTC

    This poll reminds me of "Don't try this at home".

    I can think of a few others:

    • Just run this SQL on the live database
    • Shut down and restart - everything will be fine
    • apt-get upgrade
    • we can always restore from the backup

    Or from history:

    • Charge! (Charge of the Light Brigade)
    • Captain, the swimming pool seems to be leaking. (Titanic)
    • That was a test run? (Chernobyl)

    --

    Oh Lord, won’t you burn me a Knoppix CD ?
    My friends all rate Windows, I must disagree.
    Your powers of persuasion will set them all free,
    So oh Lord, won’t you burn me a Knoppix CD ?
    (Missquoting Janis Joplin)

      We can always restore from the backup. Is usually followed by does anybody know where the backup is?? Right after somebody started the initialization
      -- Grey Fox
      Perl - Hours to learn lifetime to master.

      You want more, do you?

      Vaguely program related:

      and not

      • I can cross the tracks before that train,
      • I wanted to see if it [the lawn mower's blade] was turning.
      • What do you mean I can't smoke on home oxygen?
      • I thought it wasn't loaded.

      emc

      Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

      Albert Einstein
Re: Most infamous "Last words":
by McDarren (Abbot) on Aug 25, 2006 at 03:34 UTC

      Vaguely related are:

      Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.
      — Lord Kelvin, President, Royal Society, 1895.

      Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible.
      — Simon Newcomb, 1902.

      ..and this rather disdainful one:

      The Americans cannot build aeroplanes. They are very good at refrigerators and razor blades.
      — Hermann Goering, German Air Force Minister to Hitler, 1940.

      emc

      Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

      Albert Einstein

        Makes you wonder what current assumptions will be proved wrong by our children

        You can't go faster than the speed of light" -- Silly Grandpa


        ___________
        Eric Hodges
Re: Most infamous "Last words":
by atcroft (Abbot) on Aug 25, 2006 at 02:12 UTC
Re: Most infamous "Last words":
by lima1 (Curate) on Aug 25, 2006 at 07:28 UTC
    "FUCK. Wrong terminal." way too often. At least I have learned why it is a good idea to use subversion for everything important :)

      Best answer EVAR.

      I recall once saying something very like that after crashing Wikipedia. Seriously.

      Ssshhh, don't tell anyone.

      print substr("Just another Perl hacker", 0, -2);
      - apotheon
      CopyWrite Chad Perrin

Re: Most infamous "Last words":
by marto (Cardinal) on Aug 25, 2006 at 08:15 UTC
    "Go away. I'm all right"
    H. G. Wells, died. 1946

    Many more classics here
Re: Most infamous "Last words":
by merlyn (Sage) on Aug 27, 2006 at 16:48 UTC
Re: Most infamous "Last words":
by tilly (Archbishop) on Aug 29, 2006 at 02:16 UTC
    In highschool I read a book of "World Worsts".

    Their worst final words was a general who, after being warned that they were under fire, said, They couldn't hit an elephant at this dis-

    It was a fun book. For instance their worst weapon ever was a Russian one in WW II where they trained dogs with bombs on their back to associate the bottom of tanks with food. Unfortunately they only had Russian tanks to train them with, and the dogs were capable of telling the difference between Russian tanks and German ones.

    Their second worst weapon was a USBritish anti-tank grenade. The problem grenades had is that they'd hit a tank, bounce, then blow up a few feet away. So they designed one that was sticky so that it could stick to the tank and deliver the maximum explosion. Unfortunately it also stuck to the hand of the person throwing the grenade...

    As I said, a fun book.

    Update: Thanks to the anonymous monk for the correction. My memory must be faulty.

Re: Most infamous "Last words":
by Knom (Beadle) on Aug 25, 2006 at 05:37 UTC
    "What did I just do..."
      What STOP sign ?

Re: Most infamous "Last words":
by blue_cowdawg (Monsignor) on Aug 28, 2006 at 02:31 UTC

    "You'll never need more than 64K of memory" -- Allegedly, Bill Gates circa 1985 in an interview.

    I say allegedly because after searching Google I couldn't actually find the quote cited. I didn't try all that hard admittedly, but according to folklore "The Bill" said that and later ammended that to say "You'll never need more than 640K".

    Here I sit with a laptop with 1Gb of memory and quite frequently when I've started Apache, Tomcat, Postgres and a couple of my development tools I notice my disk spinning like crazy, check vmstat and sure enough I'm in swap hell.

    The more things change... the more they stay the same.


    UPDATE:

    It vexed me terribly that I couldn't find the quote. So I checked a few more places and discovered what I'd suspected for a while. Apparently the quote is a misattributed quote. On wikiquote I find a page about Bill Gates and under the section called appropriately enough "Misattributions" I find the following quote: "I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time... I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again."

    Still... I remember the day when we thought upgrading from 8K of RAM to 16K of RAM was something really really super.

    There it is... you learn something every day...


    Peter L. Berghold -- Unix Professional
    Peter -at- Berghold -dot- Net; AOL IM redcowdawg Yahoo IM: blue_cowdawg
      I remember reading that in pc magazine, compute or some such 81-83 area he just flipped off to an interviewer who was harassing him on dos'es memory limits. I doubt he meant it and sounded annoyed by the response he gave. I doubt you will ever find a direct source, one the archives back then were nonexistent and 2 heck he could buy the reference to make it go away. Also I remember it as "no one will ever need more then 640k" when at the time 386-512 was the norm and 640 was a huge increase.
Re: Most infamous "Last words":
by chargrill (Parson) on Aug 25, 2006 at 04:56 UTC

    I voted for "reformat and reinstall".

    I was having trouble after trouble with my perl installation on cygwin at my new job. CPAN was broken - refused to run make. I'd use it to get get modules, then cd ~/.cpan/build/module-dir; make && make test.... Had to work out the dependencies myself. Then cygwin/X stopped working. "Screw this, I'll just blow away C:\cygwin and start from scratch".

    Half a day later, and I think I have most of the modules I had worked so hard to get installed the first time re-installed. CPAN is still a little funky (serves me right for keeping a "hand-me-down" computer instead of insisting on a freshly imaged box) but let me tell you that reformating and reinstalling is not always the best option :)



    --chargrill
    $,=42;for(34,0,-3,9,-11,11,-17,7,-5){$*.=pack'c'=>$,+=$_}for(reverse s +plit//=>$* ){$%++?$ %%2?push@C,$_,$":push@c,$_,$":(push@C,$_,$")&&push@c,$"}$C[$# +C]=$/;($#C >$#c)?($ c=\@C)&&($ C=\@c):($ c=\@c)&&($C=\@C);$%=$|;for(@$c){print$_^ +$$C[$%++]}
Re: Most infamous "Last words":
by swampyankee (Parson) on Aug 25, 2006 at 16:31 UTC

    Those famous programming last words: "It's just a trivial change; I don't need to test anything." are missing.

    In my old age, I've learned to test after making changes in comment text.

    emc

    Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

    Albert Einstein
Re: Most infamous "Last words": (what happened?)
by tye (Sage) on Aug 27, 2006 at 06:31 UTC

      Wow! That looks just as confusing as hardburn's old signature:

      : () { :|:& };:
      I've never realized what that signature was supposed to be until someone mentioned it on IRC and told me what language it was in.

      (It's a bash command.)

Re: Most infamous "Last words":
by b10m (Vicar) on Aug 25, 2006 at 07:51 UTC

    Instead of "last words", there are of course also "last actions" ... a Yahoo/Google/{insert fav. search engine} query like "unrm for ext3"/"howto undelete ext3" for instance ;-)

    --
    b10m

    All code is usually tested, but rarely trusted.
Re: Most infamous "Last words":
by jcoxen (Deacon) on Aug 25, 2006 at 10:50 UTC
    Strictly speaking, that first option should read

    <Southern accent>"Hey, Ya'll. Watch this!!!"</Southern accent>

    Jack

      As a native of a small town in the southern U.S., I take umbrage at this post. Or at least I will when I stop laughing at it.

      --DrWhy

      "If God had meant for us to think for ourselves he would have given us brains. Oh, wait..."

        Hey, we got rednecks (or at least redneck wannabes) up North.

        The originals are better. At least they've got (a) senses of humor and (b) know where to get good sausage & biscuits

        emc

        Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

        Albert Einstein
        Since I grew up in East Tennessee and Southern West Virginia, I'm allowed to make Southern jokes. 'Course, now I live in a small town in North-central Pennsylvania - way North of the Manson-Nixon line - and there's more Rednecks around here than I every saw down south.

        Jack

      "Hey, Ya'll. Watch this!!!"

      Or, "hold my beer and watch this". Actually, I heard that one on vacation, just as the man in question stood on top of a little red wagon and had somebody else push him down the hill towards a ramp...

      IIRC, it was comedian Todd Yohn who did that, on some Bob and Tom album, claiming it was the most common last words by stupid rednecks. He then followed it up with "Them's my people!"

      Of course, the second most common last words of stupid rednecks would be "Hell, I can do that."

      --
      tbone1, YAPS (Yet Another Perl Schlub)
      And remember, if he succeeds, so what.
      - Chick McGee

Re: Most infamous "Last words":
by blue_cowdawg (Monsignor) on Aug 25, 2006 at 20:33 UTC
        Clip the blue wire first....

    Seen on a T shirt: "I am a explosive ordinance disposal technician. If I begin to run, try to keep up. "


    Peter L. Berghold -- Unix Professional
    Peter -at- Berghold -dot- Net; AOL IM redcowdawg Yahoo IM: blue_cowdawg

      Don't know why (well the run part), but that reminded me of this t-shirt I first saw in Spike Lee's Katrina documentary.

      -derby
Re: Most infamous "Last words":
by ww (Archbishop) on Aug 25, 2006 at 11:37 UTC
    I was torn between no strict qw/vars/; and the eval option...
    but I'm truly surprised that none of the replies to an un-asked variant of this selection have not thus far included:
    • "There may eventually be a world-wide market for as many as ten (computers)." Attributed to an IBM exec, circa 1948
    • ""There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home." " Attributed to the Ken Olsen of DEC in the late 1970's (and snopes.com says that is a valid urban legend)
Re: Most infamous "Last words":
by herveus (Prior) on Aug 26, 2006 at 02:05 UTC
    Howdy!

    "Hold my beer! I saw this on TV."

    yours,
    Michael
Re: Most infamous "Last words":
by stonecolddevin (Parson) on Aug 25, 2006 at 07:57 UTC
    Good Lord I know this all too well :-)
    meh.
Re: Most infamous "Last words":
by snafu (Chaplain) on Aug 29, 2006 at 22:02 UTC
    what about:

    What does this button do?

    _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
    - Jim
    Insert clever comment here...

      DEE DEE!
Re: Most infamous "Last words":
by spiritway (Vicar) on Aug 31, 2006 at 01:03 UTC

    What's that big red switch for?

    It's OK, it's not loaded.

    Yeah, you think you're so tough...

    I'm sure the power's off.

    This fuse is plenty long.

    (By an airplain pilot): "What's a mountain goat doing up here in a cloud bank?" (thanks to cartoonist Gary Larson)

    (By Socrates): "I just drank *what*?"

Re: Most infamous "Last words":
by EvanK (Chaplain) on Aug 29, 2006 at 14:36 UTC
    Curiously missing is "I built it, I know how it works."

    __________
    Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
    - Terry Pratchett

Re: Most infamous "Last words":
by ambrus (Abbot) on Aug 26, 2006 at 20:36 UTC

    I voted for string eval. I hate string eval, in any language, because it's misused too often. There are just very few good uses for eval. And a double e flag counts as string eval. I wouldn't mind if string eval had some less obvious syntax. For the very rare valid uses it has, it wouldn't hurt having to go circles to evaluate code.

    (I admit, I have used string eval in obfus, like Re: Re: exactly 390 bytes (perl) or One-liner japh (bash).)

      If you ever use require, you are using eval.


      Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.
      Lingua non convalesco, consenesco et abolesco. -- Rule 1 has a caveat! -- Who broke the cabal?
      "Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".
      In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

        That's of course true, but it's more conciled (then, say, with do file). I'm also quite sure I'm sometimes using modules that use string eval somewhere.

        Also, what I hate most is when eval is used more frequently then it should be, like evaluating the same code over and over again when it would be enough to call it just once to compile a subroutine, and require typically avoids this. (Not all uses of eval I hate fall into this category, I also dislike when eval is called just once per run unneccesarily, partly because it makes eval more known and people will use it in worse situations.)

Re: Most infamous "Last words":
by margulies (Friar) on Aug 25, 2006 at 23:44 UTC
    "Don't worry, I can do it"
Re: Most infamous "Last words":
by pileofrogs (Priest) on Aug 26, 2006 at 01:24 UTC

    "Honey, you have our passports, right?"

Re: Most infamous "Last words":
by sub_chick (Hermit) on Aug 30, 2006 at 22:52 UTC
    I'll just reformat it and reinstall everything.++

    I reformatted my HDD, modified the partition table, go to reinstall XP...b00m, for some crazy reason, my cd-drive wouldn't read the XP install disc...that did it for me. I didn't have a spare disc and ended up on Linux.


    Es gibt mehr im Leben als Bücher, weißt du. Aber nicht viel mehr. - (Die Smiths)"
Re: Most infamous "Last words":
by greenFox (Vicar) on Sep 01, 2006 at 00:02 UTC

    From the headstone of comedian Spike Milligan:

    "Duirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite"

    "I told you I was ill"

    --
    Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought. -Basho

Re: Most infamous "Last words":
by rdm (Hermit) on Aug 31, 2006 at 08:07 UTC

    "Trust me, I know what I'm doing!" (s.t.r. for 5 points. 10 points for the last words scene that goes with it.)

    Oh, and "Do not worry, I am cognizant of my actions." (same ref, 5 pts for scene.)

    -Reality might not get out of Beta today. (O.Timas, "Bot")
Re: Most infamous "Last words":
by Anonymous Monk on Aug 25, 2006 at 15:18 UTC
    "What's this button do?"
Re: Most infamous "Last words":
by Anonymous Monk on Aug 25, 2006 at 14:16 UTC
    I see Weapons of Mass Destruction
Re: Most infamous "Last words":
by Anonymous Monk on Aug 25, 2006 at 15:19 UTC
    "Hey, what could it hurt if.."
Re: Most infamous "Last words":
by ambrus (Abbot) on Sep 25, 2008 at 20:29 UTC

    The words in xkcd://292:

    I could restructure the program's flow,
    or use one little goto instead.
    Eh, screw good practice. How bad can it be?

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