Dictionary De - En
De - Es
De - Pt| Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) | by Linux fortune |
| Pure drivel tends to drive ordinary drivel off the TV screen. | |
| Ever wondered about the origins of the term "bugs" as applied to computer technology? U.S. Navy Capt. Grace Murray Hopper has firsthand explanation. The 74-year-old captain, who is still on active duty, was a pioneer in computer technology during World War II. At the C.W. Post Center of Long Island University, Hopper told a group of Long Island public school adminis- trators that the first computer "bug" was a real bug--a moth. At Harvard one August night in 1945, Hopper and her associates were working on the "granddaddy" of modern computers, the Mark I. "Things were going badly; there was something wrong in one of the circuits of the long glass-enclosed computer," she said. "Finally, someone located the trouble spot and, using ordinary tweezers, removed the problem, a two-inch moth. From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it." Hopper said that when the veracity of her story was questioned recently, "I referred them to my 1945 log book, now in the collection of the Naval Surface Weapons Center, and they found the remains of that moth taped to the page in question." [actually, the term "bug" had even earlier usage in regard to problems with radio hardware. Ed.] | |
| Fellow programmer, greetings! You are reading a letter which will bring you luck and good fortune. Just mail (or UUCP) ten copies of this letter to ten of your friends. Before you make the copies, send a chip or other bit of hardware, and 100 lines of 'C' code to the first person on the list given at the bottom of this letter. Then delete their name and add yours to the bottom of the list. Don't break the chain! Make the copy within 48 hours. Gerald R. of San Diego failed to send out his ten copies and woke the next morning to find his job description changed to "COBOL programmer." Fred A. of New York sent out his ten copies and within a month had enough hardware and software to build a Cray dedicated to playing Zork. Martha H. of Chicago laughed at this letter and broke the chain. Shortly thereafter, a fire broke out in her terminal and she now spends her days writing documentation for IBM PC's. Don't break the chain! Send out your ten copies today! For example, if \thinmskip = 3mu, this makes \thickmskip = 6mu. But if you also want to use \skip12 for horizontal glue, whether in math mode or not, the amount of skipping will be in points (e.g., 6pt). The rule is that glue in math mode varies with the size only when it is an \mskip; when moving between an mskip and ordinary skip, the conversion factor 1mu=1pt is always used. The meaning of '\mskip\skip12' and '\baselineskip=\the\thickmskip' should be clear. -- Donald Knuth, TeX 82 -- Comparison with TeX80 | |
| If you ever want to have a lot of fun, I recommend that you go off and program an imbedded system. The salient characteristic of an imbedded system is that it cannot be allowed to get into a state from which only direct intervention will suffice to remove it. An imbedded system can't permanently trust anything it hears from the outside world. It must sniff around, adapt, consider, sniff around, and adapt again. I'm not talking about ordinary modular programming carefulness here. No. Programming an imbedded system calls for undiluted raging maniacal paranoia. For example, our ethernet front ends need to know what network number they are on so that they can address and route PUPs properly. How do you find out what your network number is? Easy, you ask a gateway. Gateways are required by definition to know their correct network numbers. Once you've got your network number, you start using it and before you can blink you've got it wired into fifteen different sockets spread all over creation. Now what happens when the panic-stricken operator realizes he was running the wrong version of the gateway which was giving out the wrong network number? Never supposed to happen. Tough. Supposing that your software discovers that the gateway is now giving out a different network number than before, what's it supposed to do about it? This is not discussed in the protocol document. Never supposed to happen. Tough. I think you get my drift. | |
| UNIX Trix For those of you in the reseller business, here is a helpful tip that will save your support staff a few hours of precious time. Before you send your next machine out to an untrained client, change the permissions on /etc/passwd to 666 and make sure there is a copy somewhere on the disk. Now when they forget the root password, you can easily login as an ordinary user and correct the damage. Having a bootable tape (for larger machines) is not a bad idea either. If you need some help, give us a call. -- CommUNIXque 1:1, ASCAR Business Systems | |
| I think that all right-thinking people in this country are sick and tired of being told that ordinary decent people are fed up in this country with being sick and tired. I'm certainly not. But I'm sick and tired of being told that I am. - Monty Python | |
| 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 | |
| Consultant, n.: An ordinary man a long way from home. | |
| Vanilla, adj.: Ordinary flavor, standard. See FLAVOR. When used of food, very often does not mean that the food is flavored with vanilla extract! For example, "vanilla-flavored won ton soup" (or simply "vanilla won ton soup") means ordinary won ton soup, as opposed to hot and sour won ton soup. | |
| Look at it this way: Your daughter just named the fresh turkey you brought home "Cuddles", so you're going out to buy a canned ham. And you're still drinking ordinary scotch? | |
| Look at it this way: Your wife's spending $280 a month on meditation lessons to forget $26,000 of college education. And you're still drinking ordinary scotch? | |
| FORTUNE'S GUIDE TO DEALING WITH REAL-LIFE SCIENCE FICTION: #2 What to do... if you get a phone call from Mars: Speak slowly and be sure to enunciate your words properly. Limit your vocabulary to simple words. Try to determine if you are speaking to someone in a leadership capacity, or an ordinary citizen. if he, she or it doesn't speak English? Hang up. There's no sense in trying to learn Martian over the phone. If your Martian really had something important to say to you, he, she or it would have taken the trouble to learn the language before calling. if you get a phone call from Jupiter? Explain to your caller, politely but firmly, that being from Jupiter, he, she or it is not "life as we know it". Try to terminate the conversation as soon as possible. It will not profit you, and the charges may have been reversed. | |
| 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 | |
| Take a look around you, tell me what you see, A girl who thinks she's ordinary lookin' she has got the key. If you can get close enough to look into her eyes There's something special right behind the bitterness she hides. And you're fair game, You never know what she'll decide, you're fair game, Just relax, enjoy the ride. Find a way to reach her, make yourself a fool, But do it with a little class, disregard the rules. 'Cause this one knows the bottom line, couldn't get a date. The ugly duckling striking back, and she'll decide her fate. (chorus) The ones you never notice are the ones you have to watch. She's pleasant and she's friendly while she's looking at your crotch. Try your hand at conversation, gossip is a lie, And sure enough she'll take you home and make you wanna die. (chorus) -- Crosby, Stills, Nash, "Fair Game" | |
| What Did Santa Claus Bring You In 1999? (#1) LINUS TORVALDS: Santa didn't bring me anything, but Tim O'Reilly just gave me a large sum of money to publish my new book, "Linus Torvalds' Official Guide To Receiving Fame, Fortune, and Hot Babes By Producing Your Own Unix-Like Operating System In Only 10 Years". ORDINARY LINUX HACKER: I kept hinting to my friends and family that I wanted to build my own Beowulf Cluster. My grandmother got mixed up and gave me a copy of "Beowulf's Chocolate Cluster Cookbook". I like chocolate, but I would've preferred silicon. LINUX LONGHAIR: My friends sent me a two-year subscription to several Ziff-Davis publications, much to my dislike. I don't want to read Jesse Berst's rants against Linux, or John Dvorak's spiels about how great Windows 2000 is. Still, I suppose this isn't so bad. Ziff-Davis glossy paper makes an excellent lining for fireplaces. | |
| /* * Hi, this is Linus Torvalds speaking, your Benevolent Dictator. I'm typing * this today to talk about EyeOpener(tm) brand caffeinated beverages, for * those really, really, _really_ long nights of kernel hacking. * * EyeOpener(tm): When ordinary colas don't keep you awake for 72 hours * straight. */ -- Comment embedded in Linux kernel 2.6.15 after Linus Torvalds decided to get-rich-quick by placing "comment-verts" in the code | |
| There are no great men, only great challenges that ordinary men are forced by circumstances to meet. -- Admiral William Halsey | |
| Fortune Documents the Great Legal Decisions: We can imagine no reason why, with ordinary care, human toes could not be left out of chewing tobacco, and if toes are found in chewing tobacco, it seems to us that someone has been very careless. -- 78 So. 365. | |
| 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 | |
| For the run-time caching, I was going to suggest "cached" (doh!), but perhaps "once" is more meaningful to ordinary people. -- Larry Wall in <199709021812.LAA12571@wall.org> | |
| To ordinary folks, conversion is not always automatic. It's something that may or may not require explicit assistance. See Billy Graham. :-) -- Larry Wall in <199710141738.KAA22289@wall.org> | |
