Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) | by Linux fortune |
I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me. I know some people are terrified of the bomb. But then some people are terrified to be seen carrying a modern screen magazine. Experience teaches us that silence terrifies people the most. -- Bob Dylan | |
A doctor, an architect, and a computer scientist were arguing about whose profession was the oldest. In the course of their arguments, they got all the way back to the Garden of Eden, whereupon the doctor said, "The medical profession is clearly the oldest, because Eve was made from Adam's rib, as the story goes, and that was a simply incredible surgical feat." The architect did not agree. He said, "But if you look at the Garden itself, in the beginning there was chaos and void, and out of that the Garden and the world were created. So God must have been an architect." The computer scientist, who'd listened carefully to all of this, then commented, "Yes, but where do you think the chaos came from?" | |
As in Protestant Europe, by contrast, where sects divided endlessly into smaller competing sects and no church dominated any other, all is different in the fragmented world of IBM. That realm is now a chaos of conflicting norms and standards that not even IBM can hope to control. You can buy a computer that works like an IBM machine but contains nothing made or sold by IBM itself. Renegades from IBM constantly set up rival firms and establish standards of their own. When IBM recently abandoned some of its original standards and decreed new ones, many of its rivals declared a puritan allegiance to IBM's original faith, and denounced the company as a divisive innovator. Still, the IBM world is united by its distrust of icons and imagery. IBM's screens are designed for language, not pictures. Graven images may be tolerated by the luxurious cults, but the true IBM faith relies on the austerity of the word. -- Edward Mendelson, "The New Republic", February 22, 1988 | |
X windows: The ultimate bottleneck. Flawed beyond belief. The only thing you have to fear. Somewhere between chaos and insanity. On autopilot to oblivion. The joke that kills. A disgrace you can be proud of. A mistake carried out to perfection. Belongs more to the problem set than the solution set. To err is X windows. Ignorance is our most important resource. Complex nonsolutions to simple nonproblems. Built to fall apart. Nullifying centuries of progress. Falling to new depths of inefficiency. The last thing you need. The defacto substandard. Elevating brain damage to an art form. X windows. | |
...I don't care for the term 'mechanistic'. The word 'cybernetic' is a lot more apropos. The mechanistic world-view is falling further and further behind the real world where even simple systems can produce the most marvellous chaos. -- Peter da Silva | |
"The fundamental purpose animating the Faith of God and His Religion is to safeguard the interests and promote the unity of the human race, and to foster the spirit of love and fellowship amongst men. Suffer it not to become a source of dissension and discord, of hate and enmity." "Religion is verily the chief instrument for the establishment of order in the world and of tranquillity amongst it's peoples...The greater the decline of religion, the more grievous the waywardness of the ungodly. This cannot but lead in the end to chaos and confusion." -- Baha'u'llah, a selection from the Baha'i scripture | |
"We're running out of adjectives to describe our situation. We had crisis, then we went into chaos, and now what do we call this?" said Nicaraguan economist Francisco Mayorga, who holds a doctorate from Yale. -- The Washington Post, February, 1988 The New Yorker's comment: At Harvard they'd call it a noun. | |
Severe Acronym Shortage Cripples Computer Industry SILICON VALLEY, CALIFORNIA (SVC) -- According to a recent study by the Blartner Group, 99.5% of all possible five letter combinations have already been appropriated for computer industry acronyms. The impending shortage of 5LC's is casting a dark shadow over the industry, which relies heavily on short, easy-to-remember acronyms for everything. "Acronym namespace collisions (ANCs) are increasing at a fantastic rate and threaten the very fabric of the computing world," explained one ZD pundit. "For example, when somebody talks about XP, I don't know whether they mean eXtreme Programming or Microsoft's eXceptionally Pathetic operating system. We need to find a solution now or chaos will result." Leaders of several SVC companies have floated the idea of an "industry-wide acronym conservation protocol" (IWACP -- one of the few 5LCs not already appropriated). Explained Bob Smith, CTO of IBM, "If companies would voluntarily limit the creation of new acronyms while recycling outdated names, we could reduce much of the pollution within the acronym namespace ourselves. The last thing we want is for Congress to get involved and try to impose a solution for this SAS (Severe Acronym Shortage) that would likely only create many new acronyms in the process." | |
A man would still do something out of sheer perversity - he would create destruction and chaos - just to gain his point... and if all this could in turn be analyzed and prevented by predicting that it would occur, then man would deliberately go mad to prove his point. -- Feodor Dostoevsky, "Notes From the Underground" | |
When the great Tao is forgotten, Kindness and morality arise. When wisdom and intelligence are born, The great pretense begins. When there is no peace within the family, Filial piety and devotion arise. When the country is confused and in chaos, Loyal ministers appear. | |
The eye is a menace to clear sight, the ear is a menace to subtle hearing, the mind is a menace to wisdom, every organ of the senses is a menace to its own capacity. ... Fuss, the god of the Southern Ocean, and Fret, the god of the Northern Ocean, happened once to meet in the realm of Chaos, the god of the center. Chaos treated them very handsomely and they discussed together what they could do to repay his kindness. They had noticed that, whereas everyone else had seven apertures, for sight, hearing, eating, breathing and so on, Chaos had none. So they decided to make the experiment of boring holes in him. Every day they bored a hole, and on the seventh day, Chaos died. -- Chuang Tzu | |
Chaos is King and Magic is loose in the world. |