Some mid-week humor.

I’ve happened upon these during my voyages on the choppy waters of the Internet and they made me smile, so I thought Id bring them to you too.

First Up, from GraphJam…

For those of you who haven’t experienced GraphJam yet – its a site where people can submit graphs representing information in a humorous way, such as the above.

Secondly, I have discovered the quotes of the great ‘Gene Spafford’, A professor of computer science at Purdue University, and a leading computer security expert.  Wikipedia has a great article on him here.

Anyway, he has some excellent quotes related to the Internet (but perhaps not suitable for Iris’s Quote of the Day, so I dispense them here:-

• Axiom #1: "The Usenet is not the real world. The Usenet usually does not even resemble the real world."^[2]

  • Corollary #1: "Attempts to change the real world by altering the structure of the Usenet is an attempt to work sympathetic magic -- electronic voodoo."^[2]
  • Corollary #2: "Arguing about the significance of newsgroup names and their relation to the way people really think is equivalent to arguing whether it is better to read tea leaves or chicken entrails to divine the future."^[2]
• Axiom #2: "Ability to type on a computer terminal is no guarantee of sanity, intelligence, or common sense."^[2]
  • Corollary #3: "An infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of keyboards could produce something like Usenet."^[2]
  • Corollary #4: "They could do a better job of it."^[2]
• Axiom #3: "Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) applies to Usenet."^[2]
  • Corollary #5: "In an unmoderated newsgroup, no one can agree on what constitutes the 10%."^[2]
  • Corollary #6: "Nothing guarantees that the 10% isn't crap, too."^[2]
• "Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhoea -- massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it."^[2]
• "Don't sweat it -- it's not real life. It's only ones and zeroes."^[2]
• "The only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards - and even then I have my doubts."^[3]
• "Securing an environment of Windows platforms from abuse - external or internal - is akin to trying to install sprinklers in a fireworks factory where smoking on the job is permitted."^[4]

I know a few of these should make my colleagues smile.  I particularly like the last one.
For those of you who don’t know what Usenet and Newsgroups are, they’re an early piece of internet technology still going strong, but out of the limelight of the general populous and they’re basically message boards accessible to all to post and reply to – an early form of forums.