Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) | by Linux fortune |
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As part of an ongoing effort to keep you, the Fortune reader, abreast of the valuable information the daily crosses the USENET, Fortune presents: News articles that answer *your* questions, #1: Newsgroups: comp.sources.d Subject: how do I run C code received from sources Keywords: C sources Distribution: na I do not know how to run the C programs that are posted in the sources newsgroup. I save the files, edit them to remove the headers, and change the mode so that they are executable, but I cannot get them to run. (I have never written a C program before.) Must they be compiled? With what compiler? How do I do this? If I compile them, is an object code file generated or must I generate it explicitly with the > character? Is there something else that must be done? | |
Dear Emily: I collected replies to an article I wrote, and now it's time to summarize. What should I do? -- Editor Dear Editor: Simply concatenate all the articles together into a big file and post that. On USENET, this is known as a summary. It lets people read all the replies without annoying newsreaders getting in the way. Do the same when summarizing a vote. -- Emily Postnews Answers Your Questions on Netiquette | |
Dear Ms. Postnews: I couldn't get mail through to somebody on another site. What should I do? -- Eager Beaver Dear Eager: No problem, just post your message to a group that a lot of people read. Say, "This is for John Smith. I couldn't get mail through so I'm posting it. All others please ignore." This way tens of thousands of people will spend a few seconds scanning over and ignoring your article, using up over 16 man-hours their collective time, but you will be saved the terrible trouble of checking through usenet maps or looking for alternate routes. Just think, if you couldn't distribute your message to 9000 other computers, you might actually have to (gasp) call directory assistance for 60 cents, or even phone the person. This can cost as much as a few DOLLARS (!) for a 5 minute call! And certainly it's better to spend 10 to 20 dollars of other people's money distributing the message than for you to have to waste $9 on an overnight letter, or even 25 cents on a stamp! Don't forget. The world will end if your message doesn't get through, so post it as many places as you can. -- Emily Postnews Answers Your Questions on Netiquette | |
"Every group has a couple of experts. And every group has at least one idiot. Thus are balance and harmony (and discord) maintained. It's sometimes hard to remember this in the bulk of the flamewars that all of the hassle and pain is generally caused by one or two highly-motivated, caustic twits." -- Chuq Von Rospach, about Usenet | |
"One basic notion underlying Usenet is that it is a cooperative." Having been on USENET for going on ten years, I disagree with this. The basic notion underlying USENET is the flame. -- Chuq Von Rospach | |
Unix is a lot more complicated (than CP/M) of course -- the typical Unix hacker can never remember what the PRINT command is called this week -- but when it gets right down to it, Unix is a glorified video game. People don't do serious work on Unix systems; they send jokes around the world on USENET or write adventure games and research papers. -- E. Post "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal", Datamation, 7/83 | |
USENET would be a better laboratory if there were more labor and less oratory. -- Elizabeth Haley | |
"The triumph of libertarian anarchy is nearly (in historical terms) at hand... *if* we can keep the Left from selling us into slavery and the Right from blowing us up for, say, the next twenty years." -- Eric Rayman, usenet guy, about nanotechnology | |
A good USENET motto would be: a. "Together, a strong community." b. "Computers R Us." c. "I'm sick of programming, I think I'll just screw around for a while on company time." -- A Sane Man | |
"What a wonder is USENET; such wholesale production of conjecture from such a trifling investment in fact." -- Carl S. Gutekunst | |
-- -- uunet!sugar!karl | "We've been following your progress with considerable -- karl@sugar.uu.net | interest, not to say contempt." -- Zaphod Beeblebrox IV -- Usenet BBS (713) 438-5018 th-th-th-th-That's all, folks! ----------- cut here, don't forget to strip junk at the end, too ------------- "Psychoanalysis?? I thought this was a nude rap session!!!" -- Zippy | |
>One basic notion underlying Usenet is that it is a cooperative. Having been on USENET for going on ten years, I disagree with this. The basic notion underlying USENET is the flame. -- Chuq Von Rospach, chuq@Apple.COM | |
"Every group has a couple of experts. And every group has at least one idiot. Thus are balance and harmony (and discord) maintained. It's sometimes hard to remember this in the bulk of the flamewars that all of the hassle and pain is generally caused by one or two highly-motivated, caustic twits." -- Chuq Von Rospach, chuq@apple.com, about Usenet | |
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) | |
"Remember, extremism in the nondefense of moderation is not a virtue." -- Peter Neumann, about usenet | |
Godwin's Law (prov. [Usenet]): As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. Godwin's Law thus guarantees the existence of an upper bound on thread length in those groups. | |
Stallman's Latest Proclamation Richard M. Stallman doesn't want you to say "Windows" anymore. He is now advocating that people call this OS by its real name: Microsoft-Xerox-Apple-Windows. This proclamation comes on the heels of his controversial stand that Linux should be called GNU/Linux. RMS explained in a Usenet posting, "Calling Microsoft's OS 'Windows' is a grave inaccuracy. Xerox and Apple both contributed significant ideas and innovations to this OS. Why should Microsoft get all the credit?" RMS also hinted that people shouldn't refer to Microsoft's web browser as IE. "It should really be called Microsoft-Spyglass-Mosaic-Internet-Explorer. Again, how much credit does Microsoft really deserve for this product? Much of the base code was licensed from Spyglass." Many industry pundits are less than thrilled about RMS' proclamation. The editor of Windows Magazine exclaimed, "What?!?! Yeah, we'll rename our magazine Microsoft-Xerox-Apple-Windows Magazine. That just rolls off the tongue!" A Ziff-Davis columnist noted, "Think of all the wasted space this would cause. If we spelled out everything like this, we'd have headlines like, 'Microsoft Releases Service Pack 5 for Microsoft-Xerox-Apple-Windows Neutered Technology 4.0' Clearly this is unacceptable." | |
Linux Drinking Game (Abridged) With a group of friends, take turns reading articles about Linux from popular media sources (Ziff-Davis AnchorDesk is recommended) or postings on Usenet (try alt.fan.bill-gates). If the author says one of the things below, take a drink. Continue until everyone involved is plastered. - Linux will never go mainstream - Any platform that can't run Microsoft Office [or some other Microsoft "solution"] sucks - Linux is hard to install - Linux tech support is lacking - No one ever got fired for choosing Microsoft - Any OS with a command line interface is primitive - Microsoft is an innovative company - Could you get fired for choosing Linux? - Linux was created by a bunch of snot-nosed 14 year old hackers with acne and no life - Security through obscurity is the way to go - Linus and Unix are 70s technology while NT is 90s technology - All Linux software must be released under the GPL - Linux is a great piece of shareware | |
The Movement Formerly Known As Open Source The battle over the Open Source trademark is heating up. Software in the Public Interest and the Open Source Initiative both hold competing claims to the trademark. In order to put an end to the infighting, a group of free software advocates have founded the Association for the Movement Formerly Known as Open Source (AMFKOS) One AMFKOS founder said, "I find it ironic that a trademark representing free software is itself proprietary. This situation must change. We propose that the free software movement adopt another name besides 'Open Source'. Hopefully then we can all Get-Back-To-Coding(tm) instead of fighting over Bruce Perens' and Eric Raymond's egos." Rumor has it that Richard Stallman plans to mount a campaign to promote the phrase "GNU/Free Software" in place of "Open Source". In addition, the terms "Ajar Source", "Unlocked Source", "Nude Source", "Unclosed Source", and "Just-Type-make Software" have all been proposed by various Usenet or Slashdot posters. | |
Attack of the Tuxissa Virus What started out as a prank posting to comp.os.linux.advocacy yesterday has turned into one of the most significant viruses in computing history. The creator of the virus, who goes by the moniker "Anonymous Longhair", modified the Melissa virus to install Linux on infected machines. "It's a work of art," one Linux advocate told Humorix after he looked through the Tuxissa virus source code. "This virus goes well beyond the feeble troublemaking of Melissa. It actually configures a UMSDOS partition on the user's hard drive and then downloads and installs a stripped-down version of Slackware Linux." The email message that the virus is attached to has the subject "Important Message About Windows Security". The text of the body says, "I want to let you know about some security problems I've uncovered in Windows 95/98/NT, Office 95/97, and Outlook. It's critically important that you protect your system against these attacks. Visit these sites for more information..." The rest of the message contains 42 links to sites about Linux and free software. Details on how the virus started are a bit sketchy. The "Anonymous Longhair" who created it only posted it to Usenet as an early April Fool's gag, demonstrating how easy it would be to mount a "Linux revolution". | |
The GPL Is Not Y2K-Compliant! BOSTON, MA -- Panic ensued earlier today at GNU Project Headquarters when it was discovered that the GNU General Public License is not ready for the year 2000. Thankfully, the panic quickly subsided when RMS posted an emergency diff file to Usenet that patches the GPL to eliminate the problem. The non-Y2K compliant material appears on lines 295 and 316 of version 2.0 of the GPL. Both lines contain the text, "Copyright (C) 19yy ", a classic example of unpreparedness for the year 2000. Microsoft was quick to respond to the news, saying in a rushed press release, "At least our license agreements don't contain any Y2K issues." The GNU Project immediately countered Microsoft's statement with a press release that said simply, "Whatever". | |
Treaty of Helsinki Signed HELSINKI, FINLAND -- A cease-fire in the flame war between Linux and FreeBSD has been reached. A group of two dozen Linux and FreeBSD zealots met in Helsinki to ratify a treaty bringing a temporary end to the hostile fighting between both camps. "Today is a good day for peace," one observer noted. "Now both sides can lay down their keyboards and quit flaming the opposing side on Usenet and Slashdot." The cease-fire is a response to the sudden increase in fighting that has occured over the past two weeks. The Slashdot server became a victim of the cross-fire this week when thousands of Anonymous Cowards and Geek Zealots posted inflammatory comments that amounted to, "My OS is better than your OS!" Many nerds, suffering withdrawl symptoms when the Slashdot site slowed to a crawl, demanded that the bickering stop. "I can't take it anymore! It takes two minutes to download the Slashdot homepage -- assuming the site is actually online. I must have my 'News for Nerds' now! The fighting must stop," one Anonymous Coward ranted. | |
Brief History Of Linux (#14) Military Intelligence: Not an oxymoron in 1969 It was the Department Of Defense that commissioned the ARPANET in 1969, a rare example of the US military breaking away from its official motto, "The Leading Edge Of Yesterday's Technology(tm)". In the years leading up to 1969, packet switching technology had evolved enough to make the ARPANET possible. Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc. received the ARPA contract in 1968 for packet switching "Interface Message Processors". US Senator Edward Kennedy, always on the ball, sent a telegram to BBN praising them for their non-denominational "Interfaith" Message Processors, an act unsurpassed by elected representatives until Al Gore invented the Internet years later. While ARPANET started with only four nodes in 1969, it evolved rapidly. Email was first used in 1971; by 1975 the first mailing list, MsgGroup, was created by Steve Walker when he sent a "First post!" messages to it. In 1979 all productive use of ARPANET ceased when USENET and the first MUD were created. In 1983, when the network surpassed 1,000 hosts, a study showed that 90.4% of all traffic was devoted to email and USENET flame wars. | |
Brief History Of Linux (#20) Linux is born Linus' superhuman programming talent produced, within a year, a full operating system that rivaled Minix. The first official announcement on comp.os.minix came October 5th, in which Linus wrote these famous words: Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers? Do you want to cut your teeth on an operating system that will achieve world domination within 15 years? Want to get rich quick by the end of the century by taking money from hordes of venture capitalists and clueless Wall Street suits? Need to get even with Bill Gates but don't know what to do except throw cream pies at him? Then this post might just be for you :-) Linux (which was known as "Lindows", "Freax", and "Billsux" for short periods in 1991) hit the bigtime on January 5, 1992 (exactly one year after Linus wasn't hit by a bus) when version 0.12 was released under the GNU GPL. Linus called his creation a "better Minix than Minix"; the famous Linus vs. Tanenbaum flamewar erupted soon thereafter on January 29th and injured several Usenet bystanders. | |
Sorry about off-topic. I thought I was posting to Usenet. - William Park on linux-kernel | |
Go not unto the Usenet for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (and quite a few things that just have nothing at all to do with the question). -- seen in a .sig somewhere |