October : Dictionary / Wörterbuch (BEOLINGUS, TU Chemnitz)

Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English)	by Linux fortune

October 12, the Discovery. It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it. -- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February. -- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
"Probably the best operating system in the world is the [operating system] made for the PDP-11 by Bell Laboratories." - Ted Nelson, October 1977
"Emergency!" Sgiggs screamed, ejecting himself from the tub like it was a burning car. "Dial 'one'! Get room service! Code red!" Stiggs was on the phone immediately, ordering more rose blossoms, because, according to him, the ones floating in the tub had suddenly lost their smell. "I demand smell," he shrilled. "I expecting total uninterrupted smell from these fcking roses." Unfortunately, the service captain didn't realize that the Stiggs situation involved fifty roses. "What am I going to do with this?" Stiggs sneered at the weaseling hotel goon when he appeared at our door holding a single flower floating in a brandy glass. Stiggs's tirade was great. "Do you see this bathtub? Do you notice any difference between the size of the tub and the size of that spindly wad of petals in your hand? I need total bath coverage. I need a completely solid layer of roses all around me like puffing factories of smell, attacking me with their smell and power-ramming big stinking concentrations of rose odor up my nostrils until I'm wasted with pleasure." It wasn't long before we got so dissatisfied with this incompetence that we bolted. -- The Utterly Monstrous, Mind-Roasting Summer of O.C. and Stiggs, National Lampoon, October* 1982
We decided it was night again, so we camped for twenty minutes and drank another six beers at a Young Life campsite. O.C. got into the supervisory adult's sleeping bag and ran around in it. "This is the judgment day and I'm a terrifying apparition," he screamed. Then the heat made O.C. ralph in the bag. -- The Utterly Monstrous, Mind-Roasting Summer of O.C. and Stiggs, National Lampoon, October 1982
"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
In California, Bill Honig, the Superintendent of Public Instruction, said he thought the general public should have a voice in defining what an excellent teacher should know. "I would not leave the definition of math," Dr. Honig said, "up to the mathematicians." -- The New York Times, October 22, 1985
If you do your best the rest of the way, that takes care of everything. When we get to October 2, we'll add up the wins, and then we'll either all go into the playoffs, or we'll all go home and play golf. Both those things sound pretty good to me. -- Sparky Anderson
Brief History Of Linux (#11) Birth of Gates and the Anti-Gates October 28, 1955 saw the birth of William H. Gates, who would rise above his humble beginnings as the son of Seattle's most powerful millionaire lawyer and become the World's Richest Man(tm). A classic American rags-to-riches story (with "rags" referring to the dollar bills that the Gates family used for toilet paper), Bill Gates is now regarded as the world's most respected businessman by millions of clueless people that have obviously never touched a Windows machine. Nature is all about balance. The birth of Gates in 1955 tipped the cosmic scales toward evil, but the birth of Linus Torvalds in 1969 finally balanced them out. Linus' destiny as the savior of Unix and the slayer of money-breathing Redmond dragons was sealed when, just mere hours after his birth, the Unix epoch began January 1st, 1970. While the baseline for Unix timekeeping might be arbitrary, we here at Humorix like to thank the its proximity of Linus' birth is no coincidence.
Brief History Of Linux (#20) Linux is born Linus' superhuman programming talent produced, within a year, a full operating system that rivaled Minix. The first official announcement on comp.os.minix came October 5th, in which Linus wrote these famous words: Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers? Do you want to cut your teeth on an operating system that will achieve world domination within 15 years? Want to get rich quick by the end of the century by taking money from hordes of venture capitalists and clueless Wall Street suits? Need to get even with Bill Gates but don't know what to do except throw cream pies at him? Then this post might just be for you :-) Linux (which was known as "Lindows", "Freax", and "Billsux" for short periods in 1991) hit the bigtime on January 5, 1992 (exactly one year after Linus wasn't hit by a bus) when version 0.12 was released under the GNU GPL. Linus called his creation a "better Minix than Minix"; the famous Linus vs. Tanenbaum flamewar erupted soon thereafter on January 29th and injured several Usenet bystanders.
Brief History Of Linux (#24) Linus Torvalds quotes from his interview in "LinuxNews" (October 1992): "I doubt Linux will be here to stay, and maybe Hurd is the wave of the future (and maybe not)..." "I'm most certainly going to continue to support it, until it either dies out or merges with something else. That doesn't necessarily mean I'll make weekly patches for the rest of my life, but hopefully they won't be needed as much when things stabilize." [If only he knew what he was getting into.] "World domination? No, I'm not interested in that. Galactic domination, on the other hand..." "Several people have already wondered if Linux should adopt a logo or mascot. Somebody even suggested a penguin for some strange reason, which I don't particularly like: how is a flightless bird supposed to represent an operating system? Well, it might work okay for Microsoft or even Minix..." "I would give Andy Tanenbaum a big fat 'F'."
<calc> yea it sounds useful for RE'ing USB <calc> i have a useless 3com usb camera here :( <knghtbrd> calc: 3Com could have you arrested for violating laws which don't exist 'till October ;> <calc> knghtbrd: i will hide :) <knghtbrd> ...resisting arrest too eh? <calc> knghtbrd: no i will hide before i get served
One promising concept that I came up with right away was that you could manufacture personal air bags, then get a law passed requiring that they be installed on congressmen to keep them from taking trips. Let's say your congressman was trying to travel to Paris to do a fact-finding study on how the French government handles diseases transmitted by sherbet. Just when he got to the plane, his mandatory air bag, strapped around his waist, would inflate -- FWWAAAAAAPPPP -- thus rendering him too large to fit through the plane door. It could also be rigged to inflate whenever the congressman proposed a law. ("Mr. Speaker, people ask me, why should October be designated as Cuticle Inspection Month? And I answer that FWWAAAAAAPPPP.") This would save millions of dollars, so I have no doubt that the public would violently support a law requiring airbags on congressmen. The problem is that your potential market is very small: there are only around 500 members of Congress, and some of them, such as House Speaker "Tip" O'Neil, are already too large to fit on normal aircraft. -- Dave Barry, "'Mister Mediocre' Restaurants"
There has been a little distress selling on the stock exchange. -- Thomas W. Lamont, October 29, 1929 (Black Tuesday)