Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) | by Linux fortune |
Now she speaks rapidly. "Do you know *why* you want to program?" He shakes his head. He hasn't the faintest idea. "For the sheer *joy* of programming!" she cries triumphantly. "The joy of the parent, the artist, the craftsman. "You take a program, born weak and impotent as a dimly-realized solution. You nurture the program and guide it down the right path, building, watching it grow ever stronger. Sometimes you paint with tiny strokes, a keystroke added here, a keystroke changed there." She sweeps her arm in a wide arc. "And other times you savage whole *blocks* of code, ripping out the program's very *essence*, then beginning anew. But always building, creating, filling the program with your own personal stamp, your own quirks and nuances. Watching the program grow stronger, patching it when it crashes, until finally it can stand alone -- proud, powerful, and perfect. This is the programmer's finest hour!" Softly at first, then louder, he hears the strains of a Sousa march. "This ... this is your canvas! your clay! Go forth and create a masterwork!" | |
The net is like a vast sea of lutefisk with tiny dinosaur brains embedded in it here and there. Any given spoonful will likely have an IQ of 1, but occasional spoonfuls may have an IQ more than six times that! -- James 'Kibo' Parry | |
When the Apple IIc was introduced, the informative copy led off with a couple of asterisked sentences: It weighs less than 8 pounds.* And costs less than $1,300.** In tiny type were these "fuller explanations": * Don't asterisks make you suspicious as all get out? Well, all this means is that the IIc alone weights 7.5 pounds. The power pack, monitor, an extra disk drive, a printer and several bricks will make the IIc weigh more. Our lawyers were concerned that you might not be able to figure this out for yourself. ** The FTC is concerned about price fixing. You can pay more if you really want to. Or less. -- Forbes | |
The General disliked trying to explain the highly technical inner workings of the U.S. Air Force. "$7,662 for a ten cup coffee maker, General?" the Senator asked. In his head he ran through his standard explanations. "It's not so," he thought. "It's a deterrent." Soon he came up with, "It's computerized, Senator. Tiny computer chips make coffee that's smooth and full-bodied. Try a cup." The Senator did. "Pfffttt! Tastes like jet fuel!" "It's not so," the General thought. "It's a deterrent." Then he remembered something. "We bought a lot of untested computer chips," the General answered. "They got into everything. Just a little mix-up. Nothing serious." Then he remembered something else. It was at the site of the mysterious B-1 crash. A strange smell in the fuel lines. It smelled like coffee. Smooth and full bodied... -- Another Episode of General's Hospital | |
Bizoos, n.: The millions of tiny individual bumps that make up a basketball. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" | |
Q: What's tiny and yellow and very, very, dangerous? A: A canary with the super-user password. | |
Traveling through New England, a motorist stopped for gas in a tiny village. "What's this place called?" he asked the station attendant. "All depends," the native drawled. "Do you mean by them that has to live in this dad-blamed, moth-eaten, dust-covered, one-hoss dump, or by them that's merely enjoying its quaint and picturesque rustic charms for a short spell?" | |
Electricity is actually made up of extremely tiny particles, called electrons, that you cannot see with the naked eye unless you have been drinking. Electrons travel at the speed of light, which in most American homes is 110 volts per hour. This is very fast. In the time it has taken you to read this sentence so far, an electron could have traveled all the way from San Francisco to Hackensack, New Jersey, although God alone knows why it would want to. The five main kinds of electricity are alternating current, direct current, lightning, static, and European. Most American homes have alternating current, which means that the electricity goes in one direction for a while, then goes in the other direction. This prevents harmful electron buildup in the wires. -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw" | |
The earth is like a tiny grain of sand, only much, much heavier. | |
'Twas midnight on the ocean, Her children all were orphans, Not a streetcar was in sight, Except one a tiny tot, So I stepped into a cigar store Who had a home across the way To ask them for a light. Above a vacant lot. The man behind the counter As I gazed through the oaken door Was a woman, old and gray, A whale went drifting by, Who used to peddle doughnuts Its six legs hanging in the air, On the road to Mandalay. So I kissed her goodbye. She said "Good morning, stranger", This story has a morale Her eyes were dry with tears, As you can plainly see, As she put her head between her feet Don't mix your gin with whiskey And stood that way for years. On the deep and dark blue sea. -- Midnight On The Ocean | |
High Priest: Armaments Chapter One, verses nine through twenty-seven: Bro. Maynard: And Saint Attila raised the Holy Hand Grenade up on high saying, "Oh Lord, Bless us this Holy Hand Grenade, and with it smash our enemies to tiny bits." And the Lord did grin, and the people did feast upon the lambs, and stoats, and orangutans, and breakfast cereals, and lima bean- High Priest: Skip a bit, brother. Bro. Maynard: And then the Lord spake, saying: "First, shalt thou take out the holy pin. Then shalt thou count to three. No more, no less. *Three* shall be the number of the counting, and the number of the counting shall be three. *Four* shalt thou not count, and neither count thou two, excepting that thou then goest on to three. Five is RIGHT OUT. Once the number three, being the third number be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade towards thy foe, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it. Amen. All: Amen. -- Monty Python, "The Holy Hand Grenade" | |
Brief History Of Linux (#10) The AnyQuack Computer One electronic machine, Colossus, was used by the British in World War II to decode Nazi transmissions. The code-breakers were quite successful in their mission, except for the tiny detail that nobody knew how to read German. They had decoded unreadable messages into... unreadable messages. Two years later in 1945, a group of professors and students at the Univ. of Pennsylvania were discussing computing theory. An argument ensued, in which one professor yelled, "Any quack can build an electronic computer! The real challenge is building one that doesn't crash every five minutes." One graduate student, J. Presper Eckert, Jr., responded, "I'm any quack! I'll take you up on that challenge. I'll build a device that can calculate 1,000 digits of pi in one hour... without crashing!" Several professors laughed; "Such high-speed calculations are beyond our level of technology." Eckert and his friends did build such a device. As a joke, he called the machine "AnyQuack", which eventually became ENIAC -- ENIAC's Not Intended As Crashware, the first known example of a self-referential acronym. | |
Men's skin is different from women's skin. It is usually bigger, and it has more snakes tattooed on it. Also, if you examine a woman's skin very closely, inch by inch, starting at her shapely ankles, then gently tracing the slender curve of her calves, then moving up to her ... [EDITOR'S NOTE: To make room for news articles about important world events such as agriculture, we're going to delete the next few square feet of the woman's skin. Thank you.] ... until finally the two of you are lying there, spent, smoking your cigarettes, and suddenly it hits you: Human skin is actually made up of billions of tiny units of protoplasm, called "cells"! And what is even more interesting, the ones on the outside are all dying! This is a fact. Your skin is like an aggressive modern corporation, where the older veteran cells, who have finally worked their way to the top and obtained offices with nice views, are constantly being shoved out the window head first, without so much as a pension plan, by younger hotshot cells moving up from below. -- Dave Barry, "Saving Face" | |
I have a TINY BOWL in my HEAD | |
Once, there was NO fun ... This was before MENU planning, FASHION statements or NAUTILUS equipment ... Then, in 1985 ... FUN was completely encoded in this tiny MICROCHIP ... It contain 14,768 vaguely amusing SIT-COM pilots!! We had to wait FOUR BILLION years but we finally got JERRY LEWIS, MTV and a large selection of creme-filled snack cakes! | |
Fortune's Exercising Truths: 1: Richard Simmons gets paid to exercise like a lunatic. You don't. 2. Aerobic exercises stimulate and speed up the heart. So do heart attacks. 3. Exercising around small children can scar them emotionally for life. 4. Sweating like a pig and gasping for breath is not refreshing. 5. No matter what anyone tells you, isometric exercises cannot be done quietly at your desk at work. People will suspect manic tendencies as you twitter around in your chair. 6. Next to burying bones, the thing a dog enjoys mosts is tripping joggers. 7. Locking four people in a tiny, cement-walled room so they can run around for an hour smashing a little rubber ball -- and each other -- with a hard racket should immediately be recognized for what it is: a form of insanity. 8. Fifty push-ups, followed by thirty sit-ups, followed by ten chin-ups, followed by one throw-up. 9. Any activity that can't be done while smoking should be avoided. |