Dictionary De - En
De - Es
De - Pt| Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) | by Linux fortune |
| 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. | |
| X windows: Something you can be ashamed of. 30% more entropy than the leading window system. The first fully modular software disaster. Rome was destroyed in a day. Warn your friends about it. Climbing to new depths. Sinking to new heights. An accident that couldn't wait to happen. Don't wait for the movie. Never use it after a big meal. Need we say less? Plumbing the depths of human incompetence. It'll make your day. Don't get frustrated without it. Power tools for power losers. A software disaster of Biblical proportions. Never had it. Never will. The software with no visible means of support. More than just a generation behind. Hindenburg. Titanic. Edsel. X windows. | |
| "If you want the best things to happen in corporate life you have to find ways to be hospitable to the unusual person. You don't get innovation as a democratic process. You almost get it as an anti-democratic process. Certainly you get it as an anthitetical process, so you have to have an environment where the body of people are really amenable to change and can deal with the conflicts that arise out of change an innovation." -- Max DePree, chairman and CEO of Herman Miller Inc., "Herman Miller's Secrets of Corporate Creativity", The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 1988 | |
| Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn't happen. -- Winston Churchill | |
| Historic Underdosing: To live in a period of time when nothing seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts. -- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture" | |
| Historic Overdosing: To live in a period of time when too much seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts. -- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture" | |
| "Die? I should say not, dear fellow. No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him." -- John Barrymore's dying words | |
| "When you wake up in the morning, Pooh," said Piglet at last, "what's the first thing you say to yourself?" "What's for breakfast?" said Pooh. "What do you say, Piglet?" "I say, I wonder what's going to happen exciting today?" said Piglet. Pooh nodded thoughtfully. "It's the same thing," he said. | |
| "For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen. " | |
| Dave Finton gazes into his crystal ball... July 2000: Government Issues Update on Y2K Crisis to American Public In a statement to all U.S. citizens, the President assured that the repairs to the nation's infrastructure, damaged severely when the Y2K crisis hit on January 1, is proceeding on track with the Government's guidelines. The message was mailed to every citizen by mail carriers via horseback. The statement itself was written on parchment with hand-made ink written from fountain pens. "Our technological progress since the Y2K disaster has been staggering," said the statement. "We have been able to fix our non-Y2K compliant horse carriages so that commerce can once again continue. We believe that we will be able to reinvent steam-powered engines within the next decade. Internal combustion engines should become operational once again sometime before the dawn of the next century." No one knows when the technological luxuries we once enjoyed as little as 6 months ago will return. Things such as e-mail, the Internet, and all computers were lost when the crisis showed itself for what it really was: a disaster waiting to happen. Scholars predict the mainframe computer will be invented again during the 24th century... | |
| You can't start worrying about what's going to happen. You get spastic enough worrying about what's happening now. -- Lauren Bacall | |
| When you are young, you enjoy a sustained illusion that sooner or later something marvelous is going to happen, that you are going to transcend your parents' limitations... At the same time, you feel sure that in all the wilderness of possibility; in all the forests of opinion, there is a vital something that can be known -- known and grasped. That we will eventually know it, and convert the whole mystery into a coherent narrative. So that then one's true life -- the point of everything -- will emerge from the mist into a pure light, into total comprehension. But it isn't like that at all. But if it isn't, where did the idea come from, to torture and unsettle us? -- Brian Aldiss, "Helliconia Summer" | |
| Is something VIOLENT going to happen to a GARBAGE CAN? | |
