Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) | by Linux fortune |
When confronted by a difficult problem, you can solve it more easily by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?" | |
Stale file handle (next time use Tupperware(tm)!) | |
From the Pro 350 Pocket Service Guide, p. 49, Step 5 of the instructions on removing an I/O board from the card cage, comes a new experience in sound: 5. Turn the handle to the right 90 degrees. The pin-spreading sound is normal for this type of connector. | |
`Lasu' Releases SAG 0.3 -- Freeware Book Takes Paves For New World Order by staff writers ... The central Superhighway site called ``sunsite.unc.edu'' collapsed in the morning before the release. News about the release had been leaked by a German hacker group, Harmonious Hardware Hackers, who had cracked into the author's computer earlier in the week. They had got the release date wrong by one day, and caused dozens of eager fans to connect to the sunsite computer at the wrong time. ``No computer can handle that kind of stress,'' explained the mourning sunsite manager, Erik Troan. ``The spinning disks made the whole computer jump, and finally it crashed through the floor to the basement.'' Luckily, repairs were swift and the computer was working again the same evening. ``Thank God we were able to buy enough needles and thread and patch it together without major problems.'' The site has also installed a new throttle on the network pipe, allowing at most four clients at the same time, thus making a new crash less likely. ``The book is now in our Incoming folder'', says Troan, ``and you're all welcome to come and get it.'' -- Lars Wirzenius <wirzeniu@cs.helsinki.fi> [comp.os.linux.announce] | |
Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle. -- Steinbach | |
As seen on slashdot about what you can do with your cable modems: (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=32387&cid=3495418): Summary: It's not about how you handle your equipment, it's where you have permission to stick it. The post is by "redgekko" | |
When the ax entered the forest, the trees said, "The handle is one of us!" -- Turkish proverb | |
Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era -- the kind of peak that never comes again. San Fransisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning... And that, I think, was the handle -- that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting -- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost ___see the high-water mark -- that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back. -- Hunter S. Thompson | |
Violence is a sword that has no handle -- you have to hold the blade. | |
Famous last words: (1) "Don't worry, I can handle it." (2) "You and what army?" (3) "If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't be a cop." | |
Steinbach's Guideline for Systems Programming: Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle. | |
Symptom: Floor swaying. Fault: Excessive air turbulence, perhaps due to air-hockey game in progress. Action Required: Insert broom handle down back of jacket. Symptom: Everything has gone dim, strange taste of peanuts and pretzels or cigarette butts in mouth. Fault: You have fallen forward. Action Required: See above. Symptom: Opposite wall covered with acoustic tile and several flourescent light strips. Fault: You have fallen over backward. Action Required: If your glass is full and no one is standing on your drinking arm, stay put. If not, get someone to help you get up, lash yourself to bar. -- Bar Troubleshooting | |
I sent a letter to the fish, I said it very loud and clear, I told them, "This is what I wish." I went and shouted in his ear. The little fishes of the sea, But he was very stiff and proud, They sent an answer back to me. He said "You needn't shout so loud." The little fishes' answer was And he was very proud and stiff, "We cannot do it, sir, because..." He said "I'll go and wake them if..." I sent a letter back to say I took a kettle from the shelf, It would be better to obey. I went to wake them up myself. But someone came to me and said But when I found the door was locked "The little fishes are in bed." I pulled and pushed and kicked and knocked, I said to him, and I said it plain And when I found the door was shut, "Then you must wake them up again." I tried to turn the handle, But... "Is that all?" asked Alice. "That is all." said Humpty Dumpty. "Goodbye." | |
Q: How many Micro$oft programmers does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: 472. One to write WinGetLightBulbHandle. One to write WinQueryStatusLightBulb. One to write WinGetLightSwitch-Handle... | |
"CmdrBurrito" Launches Slashdot.org Parody An anonymous hacker with the handle "CmdrBurrito" has launched a parody of the Slashdot "News for Nerds" site entitled Dotslash. Dotslash has the motto "Snooze for Slackers. Stuff that Scatters." It has fake news articles and ficticious reader comments. Some of the recent articles include "Bill Gates Wins Powerball Jackpot," "Linux 2.1.666 Released," and "Supercomputer Created from 8088 and Z80 Computers." Rumor has it that "CmdrBurrito" plans to create parodies of other sites, including Linux Weekly News ("Linsux Weakly Snooze"), Freshmeat ("Deadmeat"), and Linux.org ("Linsux.org"). When asked about Dotslash, Slashdot webmaster Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda said, "No problem. I simply posted an article about it on Slashdot, and watched it die from the 'Slashdot Effect.' Six hours later, and it's still offline. I suspect Dotslash is running Windows NT. The mystery 'CmdrBurrito' character is probably a bored Microsoft employee." | |
OPPRESSED GEEK: Everybody keeps blaming me for the Y2K problem, the Melissa Virus, Windows crashes... you name it. When somebody finds out you're a bona fide geek, they start bugging you about computer problems. I frequently hear things like, "Why can't you geeks make Windows work right?", "What kind of idiot writes a program that can't handle the year 2000?", "Geeks are evil, all they do is write viruses", and "The Internet is the spawn of Satan". I'm afraid to admit I have extensive computing experience. When somebody asks what kind of job I have, I always lie. From my experience, admitting that you're a geek is an invitation to disaster. LARRY WALL: I know, I know. I sometimes say that I'm the founder of a pearl harvesting company instead of admitting that I'm the founder of the Perl programming language. ERIC S. RAYMOND: This is tragic. We can't live in a world like this. We need your donations to fight social oppression and ignorance against geekdom... -- Excerpt from the Geek Grok '99 telethon | |
Brief History Of Linux (#12) A note from Bill Gates' second grade teacher: Billy has been having some trouble behaving in class lately... Last Monday he horded all of the crayons and refused to share, saying that he needed all 160 colors to maximize his 'innovation'. He then proceeded to sell little pieces of paper ("End-User License Agreement for Crayons" he called them) granting his classmates the 'non-transferable right' to use the crayons on a limited time basis in exchange for their lunch money... When I tried to stop Billy, he kept harping about his right to innovate and how my interference violated basic notions of free-market capitalism. "Holding a monopoly is not illegal," he rebutted. I chastised him for talking back, and then I took away the box of crayons so others could share them... angrily, he then pointed to a drawing of his hanging on the wall and yelled, "That's my picture! You don't have the right to present my copyrighted material in a public exhibition without my permission! You're pirating my intellectual property. Pirate! Pirate! Pirate!" I developed a headache that day that even the maximum dosage of Aspirin wasn't able to handle. And then on Tuesday, he conned several students out of their milk money by convincing them to play three-card Monty... | |
"Brown Orifice" Is Only The Beginning Last week security holes were found in Netscape's Java implementation that allowed it to act as a web server. Earlier today, a hacker announced that he had found vulnerabilities in Mozilla M17 that allow it to operate as a web browser. And that's just the beginning. Said "3l337h4x0r", the discoverer of the M17 exploit, "This is quite a hack! By manipulating some internal functions, I was able to use M17 to actually surf the web. Slashdot and Humorix rendered beautifully." Mozilla engineers were stunned. "This shouldn't be possible. M17 contains a newsreader, a mail client, an instant messenger client, and a whole bunch of XUL acronymn-enriched stuff, but it shouldn't be able to handle HTTP or HTML. We haven't been planning on adding web-surfing functionality to Mozilla until M30... maybe M25 at the earliest. I suspect this whole thing is a hoax." | |
Microsoft Fights Linux -- By Contributing Kernel Patches If you can't beat 'em, join 'em... and then destory 'em. That seems to be the new Microsoft strategy for dealing with Linux. Instead of fighting a FUD or patent war, Microsoft operatives are doing something totally out of character: they are contributing patches for the Linux kernel and other programs. Don't worry, Microsoft is still evil. It's all part of a massive denial of service attack against Linus Torvalds designed to bring kernel development to a standstill. By sending over 10,000 patches per minute by email to Linus and other top kernel hackers, Microsoft has exposed Linux's Achilles heel. "I can't believe this is happening!" one stressed-out kernel hacker said at a press conference on IRC. "If this goes on, we may have to conduct kernel development over some other network protocol, like avian carriers... Aw crap, there's smoke coming from my email server! Ahh... it can't handle the load!" At this point the developer cut off and we haven't heard from him since. At first Linus was unsure where the deluge of patches was coming from. But when he saw one patch to replace kernel panics with bluescreens, the source was pretty obvious. "Oh, and the fact that all of the patches are covered by Microsoft's GPL [Grossly Private License] was a dead giveaway, too," | |
Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all. | |
If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it around. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't say embrace trouble; that's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and you had better be on speaking terms with it. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. | |
Reality is just a crutch for people who can't handle science fiction. | |
... a thing called Ethics, whose nature was confusing but if you had it you were a High-Class Realtor and if you hadn't you were a shyster, a piker and a fly-by-night. These virtues awakened Confidence and enabled you to handle Bigger Propositions. But they didn't imply that you were to be impractical and refuse to take twice the value for a house if a buyer was such an idiot that he didn't force you down on the asking price. -- Sinclair Lewis, "Babbitt" | |
Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve. | |
Every young man should have a hobby: learning how to handle money is the best one. -- Jack Hurley | |
Now, you might ask, "How do I get one of those complete home tool sets for under $4?" An excellent question. Go to one of those really cheap discount stores where they sell plastic furniture in colors visible from the planet Neptune and where they have a food section specializing in cardboard cartons full of Raisinets and malted milk balls manufactured during the Nixon administration. In either the hardware or housewares department, you'll find an item imported from an obscure Oriental country and described as "Nine Tools in One", consisting of a little handle with interchangeable ends representing inscrutable Oriental notions of tools that Americans might use around the home. Buy it. This is the kind of tool set professionals use. Not only is it inexpensive, but it also has a great safety feature not found in the so-called quality tools sets: The handle will actually break right off if you accidentally hit yourself or anything else, or expose it to direct sunlight. -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw" | |
The annual meeting of the "You Have To Listen To Experience" Club is now in session. Our Achievement Awards this year are in the fields of publishing, advertising and industry. For best consistent contribution in the field of publishing our award goes to editor, R.L.K., [...] for his unrivalled alle- giance without variation to the statement: "Personally I'd love to do it, we'd ALL love to do it. But we're not going to do it. It's not the kind of book our house knows how to handle." Our superior performance award in the field of advertising goes to media executive, E.L.M., [...] for the continu- ally creative use of the old favorite: "I think what you've got here could be very exciting. Why not give it one more try based on the approach I've out- lined and see if you can come up with something fresh." Our final award for courageous holding action in the field of industry goes to supervisor, R.S., [...] for her unyielding grip on "I don't care if they fire me, I've been arguing for a new approach for YEARS but are we SURE that this is the right time--" I would like to conclude this meeting with a verse written specially for our prospectus by our founding president fifty years ago -- and now, as then, fully expressive of the emotion most close to all our hearts -- Treat freshness as a youthful quirk, And dare not stray to ideas new, For if t'were tried they might e'en work And for a living what woulds't we do? | |
How do Crays and Alphas handle the POSIX problem? -- Larry Wall in <199709050042.RAA29379@wall.org> | |
"I'll tell you what I know, then," he decided. "The pin I'm wearing means I'm a member of the IA. That's Inamorati Anonymous. An inamorato is somebody in love. That's the worst addiction of all." "Somebody is about to fall in love," Oedipa said, "you go sit with them, or something?" "Right. The whole idea is to get where you don't need it. I was lucky. I kicked it young. But there are sixty-year-old men, believe it or not, and women even older, who might wake up in the night screaming." "You hold meetings, then, like the AA?" "No, of course not. You get a phone number, an answering service you can call. Nobody knows anybody else's name; just the number in case it gets so bad you can't handle it alone. We're isolates, Arnold. Meetings would destroy the whole point of it." -- Thomas Pynchon, "The Crying of Lot 49" |