Neil : Dictionary / Wörterbuch (BEOLINGUS, TU Chemnitz)

Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English)	by Linux fortune

Although it is still a truism in industry that "no one was ever fired for buying IBM," Bill O'Neil, the chief technology officer at Drexel Burnham Lambert, says he knows for a fact that someone has been fired for just that reason. He knows it because he fired the guy. "He made a bad decision, and what it came down to was, 'Well, I bought it because I figured it was safe to buy IBM,'" Mr. O'Neil says. "I said, 'No. Wrong. Game over. Next contestant, please.'" -- The Wall Street Journal, December 6, 1989
"Our journey toward the stars has progressed swiftly. In 1926 Robert H. Goddard launched the first liquid-propelled rocket, achieving an altitude of 41 feet. In 1962 John Glenn orbited the earth. In 1969, only 66 years after Orville Wright flew two feet off the ground for 12 seconds, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and I rocketed to the moon in Apollo 11." -- Michael Collins Former astronaut and past Director of the National Air and Space Museum
What does it take for Americans to do great things; to go to the moon, to win wars, to dig canals linking oceans, to build railroads across a continent? In independent thought about this question, Neil Armstrong and I concluded that it takes a coincidence of four conditions, or in Neil's view, the simultaneous peaking of four of the many cycles of American life. First, a base of technology must exist from which to do the thing to be done. Second, a period of national uneasiness about America's place in the scheme of human activities must exist. Third, some catalytic event must occur that focuses the national attention upon the direction to proceed. Finally, an articulate and wise leader must sense these first three conditions and put forth with words and action the great thing to be accomplished. The motivation of young Americans to do what needs to be done flows from such a coincidence of conditions. ... The Thomas Jeffersons, The Teddy Roosevelts, The John Kennedys appear. We must begin to create the tools of leadership which they, and their young frontiersmen, will require to lead us onward and upward. -- Dr. Harrison H. Schmidt
Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed. -- Neil Armstrong
I put up my thumb... and it blotted out the planet Earth. -- Neil Armstrong
Neil Armstrong tripped.
That's one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind. -- Neil Armstrong
...and report cards I was always afraid to show Mama'd come to school and as I'd sit there softly cryin' Teacher'd say he's just not tryin' Got a good head if he'd apply it but you know yourself it's always somewhere else I'd build me a castle with dragons and kings and I'd ride off with them As I stood by my window and looked out on those Brooklyn roads -- Neil Diamond, "Brooklyn Roads"
My My, hey hey Rock and roll is here to stay The king is gone but he's not forgotten It's better to burn out This is the story of a Johnny Rotten Than to fade away It's better to burn out than it is to rust My my, hey hey The king is gone but he's not forgotten It's out of the blue and into the black Hey hey, my my They give you this, but you pay for that Rock and roll can never die And once you're gone you can never come back There's more to the picture When you're out of the blue Than meets the eye And into the black -- Neil Young "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue), Rust Never Sleeps"
Open Source Irrational Constant BREEZEWOOD, PA -- In a revelation that could rock the foundations of science, a researcher in Pennsylvania has discovered that the digits of the irrational constant PI encode a version of the Linux kernel. "I can't believe it," the researcher, Neil Hoffman, exclaimed. "And yet, here I am staring at what appears to be the source code for Linux kernel 5.0.0. Needless to say, my whole world-view has changed..." Hoffman explained, "My algorithm, which applies several dozen conversions and manipulations to each digit of PI, spits out plain vanilla ASCII characters that happen to form the source code for the Linux kernel." Many members of the scientific community are skeptical. One One mathematician who has memorized the digits of PI to 10,000 places said, "This is the kind of nonsense one would expect to find in a tabloid such as the National Mathematics Enquirer. Or a Linux fortune(6) file. Hoffman's 'discovery' is obviously a hoax designed to secure government research grants." In a related matter, we have received an unconfirmed report that a region of the Mandelbrot fractal contains what appear to be the words "LINUS TORVALDS WAS HERE". In addition, the words "TRANSMETA: THIS SECRET MESSAGE IS NOT HERE YET" supposedly appear within the depths of the Julia Set.
If you hype something and it succeeds, you're a genius -- it wasn't a hype. If you hype it and it fails, then it was just a hype. -- Neil Bogart
One promising concept that I came up with right away was that you could manufacture personal air bags, then get a law passed requiring that they be installed on congressmen to keep them from taking trips. Let's say your congressman was trying to travel to Paris to do a fact-finding study on how the French government handles diseases transmitted by sherbet. Just when he got to the plane, his mandatory air bag, strapped around his waist, would inflate -- FWWAAAAAAPPPP -- thus rendering him too large to fit through the plane door. It could also be rigged to inflate whenever the congressman proposed a law. ("Mr. Speaker, people ask me, why should October be designated as Cuticle Inspection Month? And I answer that FWWAAAAAAPPPP.") This would save millions of dollars, so I have no doubt that the public would violently support a law requiring airbags on congressmen. The problem is that your potential market is very small: there are only around 500 members of Congress, and some of them, such as House Speaker "Tip" O'Neil, are already too large to fit on normal aircraft. -- Dave Barry, "'Mister Mediocre' Restaurants"