Instance : Dictionary / Wörterbuch (BEOLINGUS, TU Chemnitz)

Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English)	by Linux fortune

There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless. Observe the ass, for instance: his character is about perfect, he is the choicest spirit among all the humbler animals, yet see what ridicule has brought him to. Instead of feeling complimented when we are called an ass, we are left in doubt. -- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
Any great truth can -- and eventually will -- be expressed as a cliche -- a cliche is a sure and certain way to dilute an idea. For instance, my grandmother used to say, "The black cat is always the last one off the fence." I have no idea what she meant, but at one time, it was undoubtedly true. -- Solomon Short
THE "FUN WITH USENET" MANIFESTO Very little happens on Usenet without some sort of response from some other reader. Fun With Usenet postings are no exception. Since there are some who might question the rationale of some of the excerpts included therein, I have written up a list of guidelines that sum up the philosophy behind these postings. One. I never cut out words in the middle of a quote without a VERY good reason, and I never cut them out without including ellipses. For instance, "I am not a goob" might become "I am ... a goob", but that's too mundane to bother with. "I'm flame proof" might (and has) become "I'm ...a... p...oof" but that's REALLY stretching it. Two. If I cut words off the beginning or end of a quote, I don't put ellipses, but neither do I capitalize something that wasn't capitalized before the cut. "I don't think that the Church of Ubizmo is a wonderful place" would turn into "the Church of Ubizmo is a wonderful place". Imagine the posting as a tape-recording of the poster's thoughts. If I can set up the quote via fast-forwarding and stopping the tape, and without splicing, I don't put ellipses in. And by the way, I love using this mechanism for turning things around. If you think something stinks, say so - don't say you don't think it's wonderful. ... -- D. J. McCarthy (dmccart@cadape.UUCP)
"The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. "For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question 'How can we eat?' the second by the question 'Why do we eat?' and the third by the question 'Where shall we have lunch?'" -- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
They use different words for things in America. For instance they say elevator and we say lift. They say drapes and we say curtains. They say president and we say brain damaged git. -- Alexie Sayle
Keep in mind always the four constant Laws of Frisbee: (1) The most powerful force in the world is that of a disc straining to land under a car, just out of reach (this force is technically termed "car suck"). (2) Never precede any maneuver by a comment more predictive than "Watch this!" (3) The probability of a Frisbee hitting something is directly proportional to the cost of hitting it. For instance, a Frisbee will always head directly towards a policeman or a little old lady rather than the beat up Chevy. (4) Your best throw happens when no one is watching; when the cute girl you've been trying to impress is watching, the Frisbee will invariably bounce out of your hand or hit you in the head and knock you silly.
Nusbaum's Rule: The more pretentious the corporate name, the smaller the organization. (For instance, the Murphy Center for the Codification of Human and Organizational Law, contrasted to IBM, GM, and AT&T.)
Reporters like Bill Greider from the Washington Post and Him Naughton of the New York Times, for instance, had to file long, detailed, and relatively complex stories every day -- while my own deadline fell every two weeks -- but neither of them ever seemed in a hurry about getting their work done, and from time to time they would try to console me about the terrible pressure I always seemed to be laboring under. Any $100-an-hour psychiatrist could probably explain this problem to me, in thirteen or fourteen sessions, but I don't have time for that. No doubt it has something to do with a deep-seated personality defect, or maybe a kink in whatever blood vessel leads into the pineal gland... On the other hand, it might be something as simple & basically perverse as whatever instinct it is that causes a jackrabbit to wait until the last possible second to dart across the road in front of a speeding car. -- Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail"
I do hate sums. There is no greater mistake than to call arithmetic an exact science. There are permutations and aberrations discernible to minds entirely noble like mine; subtle variations which ordinary accountants fail to discover; hidden laws of number which it requires a mind like mine to perceive. For instance, if you add a sum from the bottom up, and then again from the top down, the result is always different. -- Mrs. La Touche
Once upon a time, when I was training to be a mathematician, a group of us bright young students taking number theory discovered the names of the smaller prime numbers. 2: The Odd Prime -- It's the only even prime, therefore is odd. QED. 3: The True Prime -- Lewis Carroll: "If I tell you 3 times, it's true." 31: The Arbitrary Prime -- Determined by unanimous unvote. We needed an arbitrary prime in case the prof asked for one, and so had an election. 91 received the most votes (well, it looks prime) and 3+4i the next most. However, 31 was the only candidate to receive none at all. 41: The Female Prime -- The polynomial X2 - X + 41 is prime for integer values from 1 to 40. 43: The Male Prime - they form a prime pair. Since the composite numbers are formed from primes, their qualities are derived from those primes. So, for instance**, the number 6 is "odd but true", while the powers of 2 are all extremely odd numbers.
The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry, and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question "How can we eat?" the second by "Why do we eat?" and the third by "Where shall we have lunch?". -- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
COONDOG MEMORY (heard in Rutledge, Missouri, about eighteen years ago) Now, this dog is for sale, and she can not only follow a trail twice as old as the average dog can, but she's got a pretty good memory to boot. For instance, last week this old boy who lives down the road from me, and is forever stinkmouthing my hounds, brought some city fellow around to try out ol' Sis here. So I turned her out south of the house and she made two or three big swings back and forth across the edge of the woods, set back her head, bayed a couple of times, cut straight through the woods, come to a little clearing, jumped about three foot straight up in the air, run to the other side, and commenced to letting out a racket like she had something treed. We went over there with our flashlights and shone them up in the tree but couldn't catch no shine offa coon's eyes, and my neighbor sorta indicated that ol' Sis might be a little crazy, `cause she stood right to the tree and kept singing up into it. So I pulled off my coat and climbed up into the branches, and sure enough, there was a coon skeleton wedged in between a couple of branches about twenty foot up. Now as I was saying, she can follow a pretty old trail, but this fellow was still calling her crazy or touched `cause she had hopped up in the air while she was crossing the clearing, until I reminded him that the Hawkins' had a fence across there about five years back. Now, this dog is for sale. -- News that stayed News: Ten Years of Coevolution Quarterly
Keep in mind always the four constant Laws of Frisbee: (1) The most powerful force in the world is that of a disc straining to land under a car, just out of reach (this force is technically termed "car suck"). (2) Never precede any maneuver by a comment more predictive than "Watch this!" (3) The probability of a Frisbee hitting something is directly proportional to the cost of hitting it. For instance, a Frisbee will always head directly towards a policeman or a little old lady rather than the beat up Chevy. (4) Your best throw happens when no one is watching; when the cute girl you've been trying to impress is watching, the Frisbee will invariably bounce out of your hand or hit you in the head and knock you silly.
It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons. Curiously enough, the dolphins had long known of the impending destruction of the of the planet Earth and had made many attempts to alert mankind to the danger; but most of their communications were misinterpreted ... -- Douglas Admas "The Hitchhikers' Guide To The Galaxy"
Invasion of the Dancing Penguin Those annoying, dancing cartoon characters embedded in software applications are no longer confined to Microsoft programs. They have entered the realm of Linux. A new Linux distribution under development, called LinTux, promises to provide a more "user-friendly" environment through its "Dancing Penguin" assistant. Dancing Tux will "guide" users through the installation process and will be a permanent fixture of the X root window. The LinTux staff demonstrated a prototype version of the Dancing Tux program to this Humorix reporter. It was certainly impressive, but, like the Dancing Paper Clip in Microsoft Office, it becomes annoying very fast. The one redeeming feature of LinTux is that, when the system is idle, Dancing Tux becomes a make-shift screen saver. The animations included in the prototype were quite amusing. For instance, in one scene, Tux chases Bill Gates through an Antarctic backdrop. In another animation, Tux can be seen drinking beers with his penguin pals and telling Microsoft jokes.
The new "I Love You" virus is not the work of some snot-nosed acne-laced teenager working from a basement in the Phillipines. It's actually part of a conspiracy concocted by the unholy alliance of Microsoft and several well-known and well-despised spammers. You'll notice that the ILOVEYOU, Melissa, and Tuxissa strains all extract email addresses from the victim's system. This is a gold mine for spammers, who are able to use these viruses to harvest active email addresses for them. Everytime ILOVEYOU, for instance, propogates, it keeps track of all the email addresses it has been sent to, so that when it finally boomerangs back to a spammer, they have a nice convenient list of addresses to send "laser printer toner" and "get rich quick!" advertisements to. -- Bob Smith (not his real code-name), in a speech given at the First Annual Connecticut Conspiracy Convention (ConConCon), "the largest ever gathering of conspiracy theorists east of the Mississippi."
Brief History Of Linux (#4) Walls & Windows Most people don't realize that many of the technological innovations taken for granted in the 20th Century date back centuries ago. The concept of a network "firewall", for instance, is a product of the Great Wall of China, a crude attempt to keep raging forest fires out of Chinese territory. It was soon discovered that the Wall also kept Asian intruders ("steppe kiddies") out, just as modern-day firewalls keep network intruders ("script kiddies") out. Meanwhile, modern terminology for graphical user interfaces originated from Pre-Columbian peoples in Central and South America. These natives would drag-and-drop icons (sculptures of the gods) into vast pits of certain gooey substances during a ritual in which "mice" (musical instruments that made a strange clicking sound) were played to an eerie beat.
Brief History Of Linux (#8) Let's all holler for Hollerith In 1890 the US Congress wanted to extend the census to collect exhaustive demographic information on each citizen that could be resold to marketing companies to help pay for the newly installed gold-plated toilets on Capitol Hill. Experts estimated that the 1890 Census wouldn't be completed until 1900. It was hoped that an electronic tabulating machine using punchcards designed by Herman Hollerith would speed up the process. It didn't quite work out that way. An infestation of termites ate their way through the wooden base of Hollerith's machines, and then a wave of insects devoured several stacks of punchcards. Also, some Hollerith models had the propensity to crash at the drop of a hat... literally. In one instance, the operator dropped his hat and when he reached down to pick it up, he bumped the machine, causing it to flip over and crash. These flaws meant that the census was delayed for several years. However, the system was, in the words of one newspaper reporter, "good enough for government work", a guiding principle that lives on to this very day and explains the government's insistence on using Windows-based PCs.
Brief History Of Linux (#28) Free, Open, Libre, Whatever Software Eric S. Raymond's now famous paper, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", set the stage for the lucrative business of giving software away. In CatB, ESR likened the software industry to an anarchistic bazaar, with each vendor looking out for himself, trying to hoodwink customers and fellow vendors. The produce vendor (i.e. Apple), for instance, felt no need to cooperate with the crystal-ball seller (Oracle) or the con artist hocking miracle drugs (Microsoft). Each kept their property and trade secrets to themselves, hoping to gain an edge and make money fast. "With enough eyeballs, all bug-ridden software programs are marketable," ESR observed. ESR contrasted the "caveat emptor" Bazaar to an idealistic Cathedral model used by free software developers. European cathedrals of medieval days were built block-by-block with extensive volunteer manpower from the surrounding community. Such projects were "open" in the sense that everybody could see their progress, and interested people could wander inside and offer comments or praise about construction methods. "Those medieval cathedrals are still standing," ESR mused. "But bazaars built in the 14th Century are long gone, a victim of their inferior nature."
Many mental processes admit of being roughly measured. For instance, the degree to which people are bored, by counting the number of their fidgets. I not infrequently tried this method at the meetings of the Royal Geographical Society, for even there dull memoirs are occasionally read. [...] The use of a watch attracts attention, so I reckon time by the number of my breathings, of which there are 15 in a minute. They are not counted mentally, but are punctuated by pressing with 15 fingers successively. The counting is reserved for the fidgets. These observations should be confined to persons of middle age. Children are rarely still, while elderly philosophers will sometimes remain rigid for minutes altogether. -- Francis Galton, 1909
You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance. -- Franklin P. Jones
* knghtbrd is each day more convinced that most C++ coders don't know what the hell they're doing, which is why C++ has such a bad rap <Culus> kb: Most C coders don't know what they are doing, it just makes it easier to hide :P <Culus> see for instance, proftpd :P
Column 1 Column 2 Column 3 0. integrated 0. management 0. options 1. total 1. organizational 1. flexibility 2. systematized 2. monitored 2. capability 3. parallel 3. reciprocal 3. mobility 4. functional 4. digital 4. programming 5. responsive 5. logistical 5. concept 6. optional 6. transitional 6. time-phase 7. synchronized 7. incremental 7. projection 8. compatible 8. third-generation 8. hardware 9. balanced 9. policy 9. contingency The procedure is simple. Think of any three-digit number, then select the corresponding buzzword from each column. For instance, number 257 produces "systematized logistical projection," a phrase that can be dropped into virtually any report with that ring of decisive, knowledgeable authority. "No one will have the remotest idea of what you're talking about," says Broughton, "but the important thing is that they're not about to admit it." -- Philip Broughton, "How to Win at Wordsmanship"
The more pretentious a corporate name, the smaller the organization. (For instance, The Murphy Center for Codification of Human and Organizational Law, contrasted to IBM, GM, AT&T ...)