Dictionary De - En
De - Es
De - Pt| Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) | by Linux fortune |
| IV. The time required for an object to fall twenty stories is greater than or equal to the time it takes for whoever knocked it off the ledge to spiral down twenty flights to attempt to capture it unbroken. Such an object is inevitably priceless, the attempt to capture it inevitably unsuccessful. V. All principles of gravity are negated by fear. Psychic forces are sufficient in most bodies for a shock to propel them directly away from the earth's surface. A spooky noise or an adversary's signature sound will induce motion upward, usually to the cradle of a chandelier, a treetop, or the crest of a flagpole. The feet of a character who is running or the wheels of a speeding auto need never touch the ground, especially when in flight. VI. As speed increases, objects can be in several places at once. This is particularly true of tooth-and-claw fights, in which a character's head may be glimpsed emerging from the cloud of altercation at several places simultaneously. This effect is common as well among bodies that are spinning or being throttled. A "wacky" character has the option of self-replication only at manic high speeds and may ricochet off walls to achieve the velocity required. -- Esquire, "O'Donnell's Laws of Cartoon Motion", June 1980 | |
| Potahto' Pictures Productions Presents: THE TATERNATOR: Cyborg spud returns from the future to present-day McDonald's restaurant to kill the potatoess (girl 'tater) who will give birth to the world's largest french fry (The Dark Powers of Burger King are clearly behind this). Most quotable line: "Ah'll be baked..." A FISTFUL OF FRIES: Western in which our hero, The Spud with No Name, rides into a town that's deprived of carbohydrates thanks to the evil takeover of the low-cal Scallopinni Brothers. Plenty of smokeouts, fry-em-ups, and general butter-melting by all. FOR A FEW FRIES MORE: Takes up where AFOF left off! Cameo by Walter Cronkite, as every man's common 'tater! | |
| === ALL USERS PLEASE NOTE ======================== A new system, the CIRCULATORY system, has been added. The long-experimental CIRCULATORY system has been released to users. The Lisp Machine uses Type B fluid, the L machine uses Type A fluid. When the switch to Common Lisp occurs both machines will, of course, be Type O. Please check fluid level by using the DIP stick which is located in the back of VMI monitors. Unchecked low fluid levels can cause poor paging performance. | |
| The misnaming of fields of study is so common as to lead to what might be general systems laws. For example, Frank Harary once suggested the law that any field that had the word "science" in its name was guaranteed thereby not to be a science. He would cite as examples Military Science, Library Science, Political Science, Homemaking Science, Social Science, and Computer Science. Discuss the generality of this law, and possible reasons for its predictive power. -- Gerald Weinberg, "An Introduction to General Systems Thinking" | |
| We the Users, in order to form a more perfect system, establish priorities, ensure connective tranquility, provide for common repairs, promote preventive maintenance, and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our processes, do ordain and establish this Software of The Unixed States of America. | |
| It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt | |
| Knowledge without common sense is folly. | |
| ...difference of opinion is advantageious in religion. The several sects perform the office of a common censor morum over each other. Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. - Thomas Jefferson, "Notes on Virginia" | |
| The best that we can do is to be kindly and helpful toward our friends and fellow passengers who are clinging to the same speck of dirt while we are drifting side by side to our common doom. - Clarence Darrow | |
| Already the spirit of our schooling is permeated with the feeling that every subject, every topic, every fact, every professed truth must be submitted to a certain publicity and impartiality. All proffered samples of learning must go to the same assay-room and be subjected to common tests. It is the essence of all dogmatic faiths to hold that any such "show-down" is sacrilegious and perverse. The characteristic of religion, from their point of view, is that it is intellectually secret, not public; peculiarly revealed, not generall known; authoritatively declared, not communicated and tested in ordinary ways...It is pertinent to point out that, as long as religion is conceived as it is now by the great majority of professed religionists, there is something self-contradictory in speaking of education in religion in the same sense in which we speak of education in topics where the method of free inquiry has made its way. The "religious" would be the last to be willing that either the history of the content of religion should be taught in this spirit; while those to whom the scientific standpoint is not merely a technical device, but is the embodiment of the integrity of mind, must protest against its being taught in any other spirit. - John Dewey (1859-1953), American philosopher, from "Democracy in the Schools", 1908 | |
| A university faculty is 500 egotists with a common parking problem. | |
| Mr. DePree believes participative capitalism is the wave of the future. The U.S. work force, he believes, "more and more demands to be included in the capitalist system and if we don't find ways to get the capitalist system to be an inclusive system rather than the exclusive system it has been, we're all in deep trouble. If we don't find ways to begin to understand that capitalism's highest potential lies in the common good, not in the individual good, then we're risking the system itself." -- Max DePree, chairman and CEO of Herman Miller Inc., "Herman Miller's Secrets of Corporate Creativity", The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 1988 | |
| "The stars are made of the same atoms as the earth." I usually pick one small topic like this to give a lecture on. Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars -- mere gobs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere." I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination -- stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern -- of which I am a part -- perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the *why?* It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent? -- Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988) | |
| 8) Use common sense in routing cable. Avoid wrapping coax around sources of strong electric or magnetic fields. Do not wrap the cable around flourescent light ballasts or cyclotrons, for example. -- Ethernet Headstart Product, Information and Installation Guide, Bell Technologies, pg. 11 | |
| Professional wrestling: ballet for the common man. | |
| I think for the most part that the readership here uses the c-word in a similar fashion. I don't think anybody really believes in a new, revolution- ary literature --- I think they use `cyberpunk' as a term of convenience to discuss the common stylistic elements in a small subset of recent sf books. -- Jeff G. Bone | |
| I would like the government to do all it can to mitigate, then, in understanding, in mutuality of interest, in concern for the common good, our tasks will be solved. -- Warren G. Harding | |
| The problem with most conspiracy theories is that they seem to believe that for a group of people to behave in a way detrimental to the common good requires intent. | |
| The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. Instead of altering their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views ... which can be very uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering. -- Doctor Who, "Face of Evil" | |
| Engram, n.: 1. The physical manifestation of human memory -- "the engram." 2. A particular memory in physical form. [Usage note: this term is no longer in common use. Prior to Wilson and Magruder's historic discovery, the nature of the engram was a topic of intense speculation among neuroscientists, psychologists, and even computer scientists. In 1994 Professors M. R. Wilson and W. V. Magruder, both of Mount St. Coax University in Palo Alto, proved conclusively that the mammalian brain is hardwired to interpret a set of thirty seven genetically transmitted cooperating TECO macros. Human memory was shown to reside in 1 million Q-registers as Huffman coded uppercase-only ASCII strings. Interest in the engram has declined substantially since that time.] -- New Century Unabridged English Dictionary, 3rd edition, 2007 A.D. | |
| hacker, n.: Originally, any person with a knack for coercing stubborn inanimate things; hence, a person with a happy knack, later contracted by the mythical philosopher Frisbee Frobenius to the common usage, 'hack'. In olden times, upon completion of some particularly atrocious body of coding that happened to work well, culpable programmers would gather in a small circle around a first edition of Knuth's Best Volume I by candlelight, and proceed to get very drunk while sporadically rending the following ditty: Hacker's Fight Song He's a Hack! He's a Hack! He's a guy with the happy knack! Never bungles, never shirks, Always gets his stuff to work! All take a drink (important!) | |
| QOTD: "A university faculty is 500 egotists with a common parking problem." | |
| Squires: The most common X generation subgroup and the only subgroup given to breeding. Squires exist almost exclusively in couples and are recognizable by their frantic attempts to create a semblance of Eisenhower-era plenitude in their daily lives in the face of exorbitant housing prices and two-job life-styles. Squires tend to be continually exhausted from their voraciously acquisitive pursuit of furniture and knickknacks. -- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture" | |
| [I plan] to see, hear, touch, and destroy everything in my path, including beets, rutabagas, and most random vegetables, but excluding yams, as I am absolutely terrified of yams... Actually, I think my fear of yams began in my early youth, when many of my young comrades pelted me with same for singing songs of far-off lands and deep blue seas in a language closely resembling that of the common sow. My psychosis was further impressed into my soul as I reached adolescence, when, while skipping through a field of yams, light-heartedly tossing flowers into the stratosphere, a great yam-picking machine tore through the fields, pursuing me to the edge of the great plantation, where I escaped by diving into a great ditch filled with a mixture of water and pig manure, which may explain my tendency to scream, "Here come the Martians! Hide the eggs!" every time I have pork. But I digress. The fact remains that I cannot rationally deal with yams, and pigs are terrible conversationalists. | |
| Q: What do Winnie the Pooh and John the Baptist have in common? A: The same middle name. | |
| Dear Freshman, You don't know who I am and frankly shouldn't care, but unknown to you we have something in common. We are both rather prone to mistakes. I was elected Student Government President by mistake, and you came to school here by mistake. | |
| It has long been an article of our folklore that too much knowledge or skill, or especially consummate expertise, is a bad thing. It dehumanizes those who achieve it, and makes difficult their commerce with just plain folks, in whom good old common sense has not been obliterated by mere book learning or fancy notions. This popular delusion flourishes now more than ever, for we are all infected with it in the schools, where educationists have elevated it from folklore to Article of Belief. It enhances their self-esteem and lightens their labors by providing theoretical justification for deciding that appreciation, or even simple awareness, is more to be prized than knowledge, and relating (to self and others), more than skill, in which minimum competence will be quite enough. -- The Underground Grammarian | |
| The most common given name in the world is Mohammad; the most common family name in the world is Chang. Can you imagine the enormous number of people in the world named Mohammad Chang? -- Derek Wills | |
| Once, when the secrets of science were the jealously guarded property of a small priesthood, the common man had no hope of mastering their arcane complexities. Years of study in musty classrooms were prerequisite to obtaining even a dim, incoherent knowledge of science. Today all that has changed: a dim, incoherent knowledge of science is available to anyone. -- Tom Weller, "Science Made Stupid" | |
| The two most common things in the Universe are hydrogen and stupidity. -- Harlan Ellison | |
| For knighthood is not in the feats of war, As for to fight in quarrel right or wrong, But in a cause which truth cannot defer: He ought himself for to make sure and strong, Just to keep mixt with mercy among: And no quarrel a knight ought to take But for a truth, or for the common's sake. -- Stephen Hawes | |
| "I thought that you said you were 20 years old!" "As a programmer, yes," she replied, "And you claimed to be very near two meters tall!" "You said you were blonde, but you lied!" Oh, she was a hacker and he was one, too, They had so much in common, you'd say. They exchanged jokes and poems, and clever new hacks, And prompts that were cute or risque'. He sent her a picture of his brother Sam, She sent one from some past high school day, And it might have gone on for the rest of their lives, If they hadn't met in L.A. "Your beard is an armpit," she said in disgust. He answered, "Your armpit's a beard!" And they chorused: "I think I could stand all the rest If you were not so totally weird!" If she had not said what he wanted to hear, And he had not done just the same, They'd have been far more honest, and never have met, And would not have had fun with the game. -- Judith Schrier, "Face to Face After Six Months of Electronic Mail" | |
| The common cormorant, or shag, Lays eggs inside a paper bag; The reason, you will see, no doubt, Is to keep the lightning out. But what these unobservant birds Have failed to notice is that herds Of bears may come with buns And steal the bags to hold the crumbs. | |
| Wake up all you citizens, hear your country's call, Not to arms and violence, But peace for one and all. Crush out hate and prejudice, fear and greed and sin, Help bring back her dignity, restore her faith again. Work hard for a common cause, don't let our country fall. Make her proud and strong again, democracy for all. Yes, make our country strong again, keep our flag unfurled. Make our country well again, respected by the world. Make her whole and beautiful, work from sun to sun. Stand tall and labor side by side, because there's so much to be done. Yes, make her whole and beautiful, united strong and free, Wake up, all you citizens, It's up to you and me. -- Pansy Myers Schroeder | |
| When the leaders speak of peace The common folk know That war is coming When the leaders curse war The mobilization order is already written out. Every day, to earn my daily bread I go to the market where lies are bought Hopefully I take my place among the sellers. -- Bertolt Brecht, "Hollywood" | |
| "The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79. .... When it's fall in New York, the air smells as if someone's been frying goats in it, and if you are keen to breathe the best plan is to open a window and stick your head in a building." - Nuff said?? | |
| Q: What do Bill Gates and Bill Clinton have in common? A: Their ratings climb whenever they do something unethical. | |
| Q: What do Windows NT and frozen pizza have in common? A: They're both half baked. | |
| Hear me out. Linux is Microsoft's main competition right now. Because of this we are forcing them to "innovate", something they would usually avoid. Now if MS Bob has taught us anything, Microsoft is not a company that should be innovating. When they do, they don't come up with things like "better security" or "stability", they come back with "talking paperclips", and "throw in every usless feature we can think of, memory footprint be dammed". Unfortunatly, they also come up with the bright idea of executing email. Now MIME attachments aren't enough, they want you to be able to run/open attachments right when you get them. This sounds like a good idea to people who believe renaming directories to folders made computing possible for the common man, but security wise it's like vigorously shaking a package from the Unibomber. So my friends, we are to blame. We pushed them into frantically trying to invent "necessary" features to stay on top, and look where it got us. Many of us are watching our beloved mail servers go down under the strain and rebuilding our company's PC because of our pointless competition with MS. I implore you to please drop Linux before Microsoft innovates again. -- From a Slashdot.org post in regards to the ILOVEYOU email virus | |
| Jargon Coiner (#5) An irregular feature that aims to give you advance warning of new jargon that we've just made up. * DUKE OF URL: A person who publishes their Netscape bookmark file on their homepage. * WWWLIZE (pronounced wuh-wuh-wuh-lize): Habit of unconsciously appending www. in front of URLs, even when it's not necessary. * DUBYA-DUBYA-DUBYA: Common pronounciation of "double-u double-u double-u" when orally specifying a wwwlized address. * ADVOIDANCE: iding a particularly annoying advertising banner by dragging another window over it, or by placing your hand on the monitor to cover it up. Example: "Bob advoided any Microsoft banners he came across." | |
| Excerpts From The First Annual Nerd Bowl (#3) BRYANT DUMBELL: It's time for Round One: The Flying CompactDiscus. JOHN SPLADDEN: That's right, Bryant. Each team member will hurl one CD-ROM and receive points for both the distance thrown and whether the disc is still readable afterwards. DUMBELL: First up is Mad Hatter's Alan Cox. He struts, he winds up, and there it goes! Look at the trajectory on that baby... Now it's time for the Portalback's Anonymous Coward #521 to throw. This guy was voted as the best CompactDiscus thrower in the league by popular vote on Slashdot. SPLADDEN: Indeed, AnonCow has got some powerful muscles. No brain though. Did you know that he dropped out of college to join the Andover.Net team? DUMBELL: Yeah, what a tough decision to make. It's now becoming quite common for nerd superstars to ditch college and move to Silicon Valley and receive Big League stock options. Still, AnonCow was out for several games this season due to a Carpal Tunnel flareup. I hope he isn't squandering his millions... he might be forced to retire early. | |
| It BASICally Sucks Older versions of MS-DOS came with bundled programming languages including GW-BASIC and QBasic. Windows XP continues the Microsoft tradition of ruining budding programmers with horrible programming tools by including XPBasic, an interpreted language in which all of the customary BASIC keywords have been replaced with advertising slogans. Nike has paid a handsome amount to Microsoft for "keyword rights". Instead of saying PRINT "HELLO WORLD", XPBasic programmers must now type JUST DO IT "HELLO WORLD". Other common XPBasic statements include WHERE DO YOU WANT TO GOTO 20 TODAY? and DIM ARRAY(1 TO 20) AS INTEGER BROUGHT TO YOU BY VERIZON WIRELESS. -- from Humorix's review of Windows XP (eXceptionally Pathetic) | |
| Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing. -- Clive James | |
| Common sense is instinct, and enough of it is genius. -- Josh Billings | |
| Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen. -- Albert Einstein | |
| Common sense is the most evenly distributed quantity in the world. Everyone thinks he has enough. -- Descartes, 1637 | |
| God must love the common man; He made so many of them. | |
| Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson | |
| The best that we can do is to be kindly and helpful toward our friends and fellow passengers who are clinging to the same speck of dirt while we are drifting side by side to our common doom. -- Clarence Darrow | |
| The difference between common-sense and paranoia is that common-sense is thinking everyone is out to get you. That's normal -- they are. Paranoia is thinking that they're conspiring. -- J. Kegler | |
| The Lord prefers common-looking people. That is the reason that He makes so many of them. -- Abraham Lincoln | |
| > valerie kernel: mtrr: your CPUs had inconsistent variable MTRR settings > valerie kernel: mtrr: probably your BIOS does not setup all CPUs It indicates your bios authors can't read standards. Thats a quite normal state of affairs, so common that the kernel cleans up after them - Alan Cox on linux-kernel | |
| Eric Biederman wrote: > That added to the fact that last time someone ran the numbers linux > was considerably faster than the BSD for mm type operations when not > swapping. And this is the common case. "Linux VM works wonderfully when nobody is using it" - Alan Cox on linux-kernel | |
| We the people of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution, in order to form a more perfect operating system, establish quality, insure marketplace diversity, provide for the common needs of computer users, promote security and privacy, overthrow monopolistic forces in the computer software industry, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the Debian GNU/Linux System. | |
| We should realize that a city is better off with bad laws, so long as they remain fixed, then with good laws that are constantly being altered, that the lack of learning combined with sound common sense is more helpful than the kind of cleverness that gets out of hand, and that as a general rule, states are better governed by the man in the street than by intellectuals. These are the sort of people who want to appear wiser than the laws, who want to get their own way in every general discussion, because they feel that they cannot show off their intelligence in matters of greater importance, and who, as a result, very often bring ruin on their country. -- Cleon, Thucydides, III, 37 translation by Rex Warner | |
| Well, he thought, since neither Aristotelian Logic nor the disciplines of Science seemed to offer much hope, it's time to go beyond them... Drawing a few deep even breaths, he entered a mental state practiced only by Masters of the Universal Way of Zen. In it his mind floated freely, able to rummage at will among the bits and pieces of data he had absorbed, undistracted by any outside disturbances. Logical structures no longer inhibited him. Pre-conceptions, prejudices, ordinary human standards vanished. All things, those previously trivial as well as those once thought important, became absolutely equal by acquiring an absolute value, revealing relationships not evident to ordinary vision. Like beads strung on a string of their own meaning, each thing pointed to its own common ground of existence, shared by all. Finally, each began to melt into each, staying itself while becoming all others. And Mind no longer contemplated Problem, but became Problem, destroying Subject-Object by becoming them. Time passed, unheeded. Eventually, there was a tentative stirring, then a decisive one, and Nakamura arose, a smile on his face and the light of laughter in his eyes. -- Wayfarer | |
| > What does ELF stand for (in respect to Linux?) ELF is the first rock group that Ronnie James Dio performed with back in the early 1970's. In constrast, a.out is a misspelling of the French word for the month of August. What the two have in common is beyond me, but Linux users seem to use the two words together. -- seen on c.o.l.misc | |
| There is a good deal of solemn cant about the common interests of capital and labour. As matters stand, their only common interest is that of cutting each other's throat. -- Brooks Atkinson, "Once Around the Sun" | |
| ... I think I'd better go back to my DESK and toy with a few common MISAPPREHENSIONS ... | |
| Aquavit is also considered useful for medicinal purposes, an essential ingredient in what I was once told is the Norwegian cure for the common cold. You get a bottle, a poster bed, and the brightest colored stocking cap you can find. You put the cap on the post at the foot of the bed, then get into bed and drink aquavit until you can't see the cap. I've never tried this, but it sounds as though it should work. -- Peter Nelson | |
