Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) | by Linux fortune |
Minnie Mouse is a slow maze learner. | |
Write-only-memory subsystem too slow for this machine. Contact your local dealer. | |
appears to be a Slow/Narrow SCSI-0 Interface problem | |
It appears that after his death, Albert Einstein found himself working as the doorkeeper at the Pearly Gates. One slow day, he found that he had time to chat with the new entrants. To the first one he asked, "What's your IQ?" The new arrival replied, "190". They discussed Einstein's theory of relativity for hours. When the second new arrival came, Einstein once again inquired as to the newcomer's IQ. The answer this time came "120". To which Einstein replied, "Tell me, how did the Cubs do this year?" and they proceeded to talk for half an hour or so. To the final arrival, Einstein once again posed the question, "What's your IQ?". Upon receiving the answer "70", Einstein smiled and replied, "Got a minute to tell me about VMS 4.0?" | |
Price Wang's programmer was coding software. His fingers danced upon the keyboard. The program compiled without an error message, and the program ran like a gentle wind. Excellent!" the Price exclaimed, "Your technique is faultless!" "Technique?" said the programmer, turning from his terminal, "What I follow is the Tao -- beyond all technique. When I first began to program I would see before me the whole program in one mass. After three years I no longer saw this mass. Instead, I used subroutines. But now I see nothing. My whole being exists in a formless void. My senses are idle. My spirit, free to work without a plan, follows its own instinct. In short, my program writes itself. True, sometimes there are difficult problems. I see them coming, I slow down, I watch silently. Then I change a single line of code and the difficulties vanish like puffs of idle smoke. I then compile the program. I sit still and let the joy of the work fill my being. I close my eyes for a moment and then log off." Price Wang said, "Would that all of my programmers were as wise!" -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming" | |
Such efforts are almost always slow, laborious, political, petty, boring, ponderous, thankless, and of the utmost criticality. -- Leonard Kleinrock, on standards efforts | |
The algorithm for finding the longest path in a graph is NP-complete. For you systems people, that means it's *real slow*. -- Bart Miller | |
X windows: It's not how slow you make it. It's how you make it slow. The windowing system preferred by masochists 3 to 1. Built to take on the world... and lose! Don't try it 'til you've knocked it. Power tools for Power Fools. Putting new limits on productivity. The closer you look, the cruftier we look. Design by counterexample. A new level of software disintegration. No hardware is safe. Do your time. Rationalization, not realization. Old-world software cruftsmanship at its finest. Gratuitous incompatibility. Your mother. THE user interference management system. You can't argue with failure. You haven't died 'til you've used it. The environment of today... tomorrow! X windows. | |
On Krat's main screen appeared the holo image of a man, and several dolphins. From the man's shape, Krat could tell it was a female, probably their leader. "...stupid creatures unworthy of the name `sophonts.' Foolish, pre-sentient upspring of errant masters. We slip away from all your armed might, laughing at your clumsiness! We slip away as we always will, you pathetic creatures. And now that we have a real head start, you'll never catch us! What better proof that the Progenitors favor not you, but us! What better proof..." The taunt went on. Krat listened, enraged, yet at the same time savoring the artistry of it. These men are better than I'd thought. Their insults are wordy and overblown, but they have talent. They deserve honorable, slow deaths. - David Brin, Startide Rising | |
"Are those cocktail-waitress fingernail marks?" I asked Colletti as he showed us these scratches on his chest. "No, those are on my back," Colletti answered. "This is where a case of cocktail shrimp fell on me. I told her to slow down a little, but you know cocktail waitresses, they seem to have a mind of their own." -- The Incredibly Monstrous, Mind-Roasting Summer of O.C. and Stiggs National Lampoon, October 1982 | |
My own life has been spent chronicling the rise and fall of human systems, and I am convinced that we are terribly vulnerable. ... We should be reluctant to turn back upon the frontier of this epoch. Space is indifferent to what we do; it has no feeling, no design, no interest in whether or not we grapple with it. But we cannot be indifferent to space, because the grand, slow march of intelligence has brought us, in our generation, to a point from which we can explore and understand and utilize it. To turn back now would be to deny our history, our capabilities. -- James A. Michener | |
Rev. Jim: What does an amber light mean? Bobby: Slow down. Rev. Jim: What... does... an... amber... light... mean? Bobby: Slow down. Rev. Jim: What.... does.... an.... amber.... light.... | |
Emacs, n.: A slow-moving parody of a text editor. | |
IBM: It may be slow, but it's hard to use. | |
Don't worry -- the brontosaurus is slow, stupid, and placid. | |
Some changes are so slow, you don't notice them. Others are so fast, they don't notice you. | |
A Mexican newspaper reports that bored Royal Air Force pilots stationed on the Falkland Islands have devised what they consider a marvelous new game. Noting that the local penguins are fascinated by airplanes, the pilots search out a beach where the birds are gathered and fly slowly along it at the water's edge. Perhaps ten thousand penguins turn their heads in unison watching the planes go by, and when the pilots turn around and fly back, the birds turn their heads in the opposite direction, like spectators at a slow-motion tennis match. Then, the paper reports "The pilots fly out to sea and directly to the penguin colony and overfly it. Heads go up, up, up, and ten thousand penguins fall over gently onto their backs. -- Audobon Society Magazine | |
(1) A sheet of paper is an ink-lined plane. (2) An inclined plane is a slope up. (3) A slow pup is a lazy dog. QED: A sheet of paper is a lazy dog. -- Willard Espy, "An Almanac of Words at Play" | |
Review Questions (1) If Nerd on the planet Nutley starts out in his spaceship at 20 KPH, and his speed doubles every 3.2 seconds, how long will it be before he exceeds the speed of light? How long will it be before the Galactic Patrol picks up the pieces of his spaceship? (2) If Roger Rowdy wrecks his car every week, and each week he breaks twice as many bones as before, how long will it be before he breaks every bone in his body? How long will it be before they cut off his insurance? Where does he get a new car every week? (3) If Johnson drinks one beer the first hour (slow start), four beers the next hour, nine beers the next, etc., and stacks the cans in a pyramid, how soon will Johnson's pyramid be larger than King Tut's? When will it fall on him? Will he notice? | |
The Commandments of the EE: (5) Take care that thou useth the proper method when thou takest the measures of high-voltage circuits too, that thou dost not incinerate both thee and thy test meter, for verily, though thou has no company property number and can be easily surveyed, the test meter has one and, as a consequence, bringeth much woe unto a purchasing agent. (6) Take care that thou tamperest not with interlocks and safety devices, for this incurreth the wrath of the chief electrician and bring the fury of the engineers on his head. (7) Work thou not on energized equipment for if thou doest so, thy friends will surely be buying beers for thy widow and consoling her in certain ways not generally acceptable to thee. (8) Verily, verily I say unto thee, never service equipment alone, for electrical cooking is a slow process and thou might sizzle in thy own fat upon a hot circuit for hours on end before thy maker sees fit to end thy misery and drag thee into his fold. | |
Why do they call a fast a fast, when it goes so slow? | |
And now your toner's toney, Disk blocks aplenty And your paper near pure white, Await your laser drawn lines, The smudges on your soul are gone Your intricate fonts, And your output's clean as light.. Your pictures and signs. We've labored with your father, Your amputative absence The venerable XGP, Has made the Ten dumb, But his slow artistic hand, Without you, Dover, Lacks your clean velocity. We're system untounged- Theses and papers DRAW Plots and TEXage And code in a queue Have been biding their time, Dover, oh Dover, With LISP code and programs, We've been waiting for you. And this crufty rhyme. Dover, oh Dover, Dover, oh Dover, arisen from dead. We welcome you back, Dover, oh Dover, awoken from bed. Though still you may jam, Dover, oh Dover, welcome back to the Lab. You're on the right track. Dover, oh Dover, we've missed your clean hand... | |
I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me, And what can be the use of him is more than I can see. He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head; And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed. The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow-- Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow; For he sometimes shoots up taller, like an india-rubber ball, And he sometimes gets so little that there's none of him at all. -- R.L. Stevenson | |
Speaking of Godzilla and other things that convey horror: With a purposeful grimace and a Mongo-like flair He throws the spinning disk drives in the air! And he picks up a Vax and he throws it back down As he wades through the lab making terrible sounds! Helpless users with projects due Scream "My God!" as he stomps on the tape drives, too! Oh, no! He says Unix runs too slow! Go, go, DECzilla! Oh, yes! He's gonna bring up VMS! Go, go, DECzilla!" * VMS is a trademark of Digital Equipment Corporation. * DECzilla is a trademark of Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of Death, Inc. -- Curtis Jackson | |
Slow day. Practice crawling. | |
You'd like to do it instantaneously, but that's too slow. | |
You go slow, be gentle. It's no one-way street -- you know how you feel and that's all. It's how the girl feels too. Don't press. If the girl feels anything for you at all, you'll know. -- Kirk, "Charlie X", stardate 1535.8 | |
I cannot overemphasize the importance of good grammar. What a crock. I could easily overemphasize the importance of good grammar. For example, I could say: "Bad grammar is the leading cause of slow, painful death in North America," or "Without good grammar, the United States would have lost World War II." -- Dave Barry, "An Utterly Absurd Look at Grammar" | |
"But the most reliable indication of the future of Open Source is its past: in just a few years, we have gone from nothing to a robust body of software that solves many different problems and is reaching the million-user count. There's no reason for us to slow down now." -- Bruce Perens, on the future of Open Source software. (Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly and Associates) | |
Affordable Virtual Beowulf Cluster Every nerd drools over Beowulf clusters, but very few have even seen one, much less own one. Until now, that is. Eric Gylgen, the open source hacker famous for EviL (the dancing ASCII paperclip add-on to vi), is working on a program that will emulate Beowulf clusters on a standard desktop PC. "Of course," he added candidly, "the performance of my virtual cluster will be many orders of magnitude less than a real cluster, but that's not really the point. I just want to be able to brag that I run a 256 node cluster. Nobody has to know I only spent $500 on the hardware it uses." Eric has prior experience in this field. Last month he successfully built a real 32 node Beowulf cluster out of Palm Pilots, old TI-8x graphing calculators, various digital cameras, and even some TRS-80s. He demonstrated a pre-alpha version of his VirtualEpicPoem software to us yesterday. His Athlon machine emulated a 256 node Beowulf cluster in which each node, running Linux, was emulating its own 16 node cluster in which each node, running Bochs, was emulating VMWare to emulate Linux running old Amiga software. The system was extremely slow, but it worked. | |
Anatomy Of A Ziff-Davis Pundit Collected Jesse Berst ramblings from the past few years: "I've always said Linux could be a serious challenger." "Could you get fired for choosing Linux?" "Linux won't beat Microsoft." "But in some situations, Linux makes sense." "Linux will never go mainstream." "We've been writing about the alternative OS for a long time now. Watching its slow, steady ascent." | |
Brisk talkers are usually slow thinkers. There is, indeed, no wild beast more to be dreaded than a communicative man having nothing to communicate. If you are civil to the voluble, they will abuse your patience; if brusque, your character. -- Jonathan Swift | |
Her days were spent in a kind of slow bustle; always busy without getting on, always behind hand and lamenting it, without altering her ways; wishing to be an economist, without contrivance or regularity; dissatisfied with her servants, without skill to make them better, and whether helping, or reprimanding, or indulging them, without any power of engaging their respect. -- J. Austen | |
Death is nature's way of telling you to slow down. | |
The only happiness lies in reason; all the rest of the world is dismal. The highest reason, however, I see in the work of the artist, and he may experience it as such. Happiness lies in the swiftness of feeling and thinking: all the rest of the world is slow, gradual and stupid. Whoever could feel the course of a light ray would be very happy, for it is very swift. Thinking of oneself gives little happiness. If, however, one feels much happiness in this, it is because at bottom one is not thinking of oneself but of one's ideal. This is far, and only the swift shall reach it and are delighted. -- Nietzsche | |
Jim> http://www.novare.net/~eam/kaffe/ Joey> ^ Joey> And now we all learn how to write Ean's name and the URL is complete. Jim> Hah! I noticed that the instead I sent it, and I tried to hit ^g, but I was too slow. :-) --- debian-devel | |
How come everyone's going so slow if it's called rush hour? | |
What they say: What they mean: New Different colors from previous version. All New Not compatible with previous version. Exclusive Nobody else has documentation. Unmatched Almost as good as the competition. Design Simplicity The company wouldn't give us any money. Fool-proof Operation All parameters are hard-coded. Advanced Design Nobody really understands it. Here At Last Didn't get it done on time. Field Tested We don't have any simulators. Years of Development Finally got one to work. Unprecedented Performance Nothing ever ran this slow before. Revolutionary Disk drives go 'round and 'round. Futuristic Only runs on a next generation supercomputer. No Maintenance Impossible to fix. Performance Proven Worked through Beta test. Meets Tough Quality Standards It compiles without errors. Satisfaction Guaranteed We'll send you another pack if it fails. Stock Item We shipped it before and can do it again. | |
#else /* !STDSTDIO */ /* The big, slow, and stupid way */ -- Larry Wall in str.c from the perl source code | |
But then it's a bit odd to think that declaring something int could actually slow down the program, if it ended up forcing more conversions back to string. -- Larry Wall in <199708040319.UAA16213@wall.org> |