Dictionary De - En
De - Es
De - Pt| Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) | by Linux fortune |
| I. Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation. Daffy Duck steps off a cliff, expecting further pastureland. He loiters in midair, soliloquizing flippantly, until he chances to look down. At this point, the familiar principle of 32 feet per second per second takes over. II. Any body in motion will tend to remain in motion until solid matter intervenes suddenly. Whether shot from a cannon or in hot pursuit on foot, cartoon characters are so absolute in their momentum that only a telephone pole or an outsize boulder retards their forward motion absolutely. Sir Isaac Newton called this sudden termination of motion the stooge's surcease. III. Any body passing through solid matter will leave a perforation conforming to its perimeter. Also called the silhouette of passage, this phenomenon is the speciality of victims of directed-pressure explosions and of reckless cowards who are so eager to escape that they exit directly through the wall of a house, leaving a cookie-cutout-perfect hole. The threat of skunks or matrimony often catalyzes this reaction. -- Esquire, "O'Donnell's Laws of Cartoon Motion", June 1980 | |
| "I don't know why, but first C programs tend to look a lot worse than first programs in any other language (maybe except for fortran, but then I suspect all fortran programs look like `firsts')" (By Olaf Kirch) | |
| Brace yourselves. We're about to try something that borders on the unique: an actually rather serious technical book which is not only (gasp) vehemently anti-Solemn, but also (shudder) takes sides. I tend to think of it as `Constructive Snottiness.' -- Mike Padlipsky, "Elements of Networking Style" | |
| Making files is easy under the UNIX operating system. Therefore, users tend to create numerous files using large amounts of file space. It has been said that the only standard thing about all UNIX systems is the message-of-the-day telling users to clean up their files. -- System V.2 administrator's guide | |
| Never try to explain computers to a layman. It's easier to explain sex to a virgin. -- Robert Heinlein (Note, however, that virgins tend to know a lot about computers.) | |
| THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #17: SARTRE Named after the late existential philosopher, SARTRE is an extremely unstructured language. Statements in SARTRE have no purpose; they just are. Thus SARTRE programs are left to define their own functions. SARTRE programmers tend to be boring and depressed, and are no fun at parties. | |
| The problem with engineers is that they tend to cheat in order to get results. The problem with mathematicians is that they tend to work on toy problems in order to get results. The problem with program verifiers is that they tend to cheat at toy problems in order to get results. | |
| Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse. | |
| One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. it is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new bamboozles rise.) -- Carl Sagan, "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection," Parade, February 1, 1987 | |
| "Summit meetings tend to be like panda matings. The expectations are always high, and the results usually disappointing." -- Robert Orben | |
| "When the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything as if it were a nail." -- Abraham Maslow | |
| When taxes are due, Americans tend to feel quite bled-white and blue. | |
| Albrecht's Law: Social innovations tend to the level of minimum tolerable well-being. | |
| Brogan's Constant: People tend to congregate in the back of the church and the front of the bus. | |
| Murphy's Law of Research: Enough research will tend to support your theory. | |
| Rudin's Law: If there is a wrong way to do something, most people will do it every time. Rudin's Second Law: In a crisis that forces a choice to be made among alternative courses of action, people tend to choose the worst possible course. | |
| Poverty Jet Set: A group of people given to chronic traveling at the expense of long-term job stability or a permanent residence. Tend to have doomed and extremely expensive phone-call relationships with people named Serge or Ilyana. Tend to discuss frequent-flyer programs at parties. -- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture" | |
| Yuppie Wannabes: An X generation subgroup that believes the myth of a yuppie life-style being both satisfying and viable. Tend to be highly in debt, involved in some form of substance abuse, and show a willingness to talk about Armageddon after three drinks. -- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture" | |
| Squires: The most common X generation subgroup and the only subgroup given to breeding. Squires exist almost exclusively in couples and are recognizable by their frantic attempts to create a semblance of Eisenhower-era plenitude in their daily lives in the face of exorbitant housing prices and two-job life-styles. Squires tend to be continually exhausted from their voraciously acquisitive pursuit of furniture and knickknacks. -- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture" | |
| Normally our rules are rigid; we tend to discretion, if for no other reason than self-protection. We never recommend any of our graduates, although we cheerfully provide information as to those who have failed their courses. -- Jack Vance, "Freitzke's Turn" | |
| Although we modern persons tend to take our electric lights, radios, mixers, etc., for granted, hundreds of years ago people did not have any of these things, which is just as well because there was no place to plug them in. Then along came the first Electrical Pioneer, Benjamin Franklin, who flew a kite in a lighting storm and received a serious electrical shock. This proved that lighting was powered by the same force as carpets, but it also damaged Franklin's brain so severely that he started speaking only in incomprehensible maxims, such as "A penny saved is a penny earned." Eventually he had to be given a job running the post office. -- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?" | |
| We who revel in nature's diversity and feel instructed by every animal tend to brand Homo sapiens as the greatest catastrophe since the Cretaceous extinction. -- S.J. Gould | |
| Never drink coke in a moving elevator. The elevator's motion coupled with the chemicals in coke produce hallucinations. People tend to change into lizards and attack without warning, and large bats usually fly in the window. Additionally, you begin to believe that elevators have windows. | |
| Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood, Stop up the access and passage to remorse That no compunctious visiting of nature Shake my fell purpose, not keep peace between The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts, And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers, Wherever in your sightless substances You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night, And pall the in the dunnest smoke of hell, That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, To cry `Hold, hold!' -- Lady MacBeth | |
| You recoil from the crude; you tend naturally toward the exquisite. | |
| Your depth of comprehension may tend to make you lax in worldly ways. | |
| If a man had a child who'd gone anti-social, killed perhaps, he'd still tend to protect that child. -- McCoy, "The Ultimate Computer", stardate 4731.3 | |
| Women professionals do tend to over-compensate. -- Dr. Elizabeth Dehaver, "Where No Man Has Gone Before", stardate 1312.9. | |
| First, a few words about tools. Basically, a tool is an object that enables you to take advantage of the laws of physics and mechanics in such a way that you can seriously injure yourself. Today, people tend to take tools for granted. If you're ever walking down the street and you notice some people who look particularly smug, the odds are that they are taking tools for granted. If I were you, I'd walk right up and smack them in the face. -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw" | |
| Anybody with money to burn will easily find someone to tend the fire. | |
| People tend to make rules for others and exceptions for themselves. | |
| Alan Cox wrote: > In theory however i2o is a standard and all i2o works alike. In practice i2o > is a pseudo standard and nobody seems to interpret the spec the same way, the > implementations all tend to have bugs and the hardware sometimes does too. That's a pretty good description of standards in general, at least when it comes to hardware :-) - Jens Axboe's interpretation of standards | |
| Interface definitions tend to be treated a little differently to "code". But as I keep trying to beat into people - if you are going to mix GPL and non GPL code see a lawyer - thats what they are there for - Alan Cox on linux-kernel | |
| If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. -- Maslow | |
| I don't know why, but first C programs tend to look a lot worse than first programs in any other language (maybe except for fortran, but then I suspect all fortran programs look like `firsts') -- Olaf Kirch | |
