Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) | by Linux fortune |
Feel free to contact me (flames about my english and the useless of this driver will be redirected to /dev/null, oh no, it's full...). (Michael Beck, describing the PC-speaker sound device) | |
linux: because a PC is a terrible thing to waste (ksh@cis.ufl.edu put this on Tshirts in '93) | |
Linux: Because a PC is a terrible thing to waste. (By komarimf@craft.camp.clarkson.edu, Mark Komarinski) | |
Fellow programmer, greetings! You are reading a letter which will bring you luck and good fortune. Just mail (or UUCP) ten copies of this letter to ten of your friends. Before you make the copies, send a chip or other bit of hardware, and 100 lines of 'C' code to the first person on the list given at the bottom of this letter. Then delete their name and add yours to the bottom of the list. Don't break the chain! Make the copy within 48 hours. Gerald R. of San Diego failed to send out his ten copies and woke the next morning to find his job description changed to "COBOL programmer." Fred A. of New York sent out his ten copies and within a month had enough hardware and software to build a Cray dedicated to playing Zork. Martha H. of Chicago laughed at this letter and broke the chain. Shortly thereafter, a fire broke out in her terminal and she now spends her days writing documentation for IBM PC's. Don't break the chain! Send out your ten copies today! For example, if \thinmskip = 3mu, this makes \thickmskip = 6mu. But if you also want to use \skip12 for horizontal glue, whether in math mode or not, the amount of skipping will be in points (e.g., 6pt). The rule is that glue in math mode varies with the size only when it is an \mskip; when moving between an mskip and ordinary skip, the conversion factor 1mu=1pt is always used. The meaning of '\mskip\skip12' and '\baselineskip=\the\thickmskip' should be clear. -- Donald Knuth, TeX 82 -- Comparison with TeX80 | |
Imagine that Cray computer decides to make a personal computer. It has a 150 MHz processor, 200 megabytes of RAM, 1500 megabytes of disk storage, a screen resolution of 4096 x 4096 pixels, relies entirely on voice recognition for input, fits in your shirt pocket and costs $300. What's the first question that the computer community asks? "Is it PC compatible?" | |
Meantime, in the slums below Ronnie's Ranch, Cynthia feels as if some one has made voodoo boxen of her and her favorite backplanes. On this fine moonlit night, some horrible persona has been jabbing away at, dragging magnets over, and surging these voodoo boxen. Fortunately, they seem to have gotten a bit bored and fallen asleep, for it looks like Cynthia may get to go home. However, she has made note to quickly put together a totem of sweaty, sordid static straps, random bits of wire, flecks of once meaniful oxide, bus grant cards, gummy worms, and some bits of old pdp backplane to hang above the machine room. This totem must be blessed by the old and wise venerable god of unibus at once, before the idolatization of vme, q and pc bus drive him to bitter revenge. Alas, if this fails, and the voodoo boxen aren't destroyed, there may be more than worms in the apple. Next, the arrival of voodoo optico transmitigational magneto killer paramecium, capable of teleporting from cable to cable, screen to screen, ear to ear and hoof to mouth... | |
Writers who use a computer swear to its liberating power in tones that bear witness to the apocalyptic power of a new divinity. Their conviction results from something deeper than mere gratitude for the computer's conveniences. Every new medium of writing brings about new intensities of religious belief and new schisms among believers. In the 16th century the printed book helped make possible the split between Catholics and Protestants. In the 20th century this history of tragedy and triumph is repeating itself as a farce. Those who worship the Apple computer and those who put their faith in the IBM PC are equally convinced that the other camp is damned or deluded. Each cult holds in contempt the rituals and the laws of the other. Each thinks that it is itself the one hope for salvation. -- Edward Mendelson, "The New Republic", February 22, 1988 | |
Windows 2000 is out! -- PC Magazine, April 2013 | |
The Magic of Windows: Turns a 486 back into a PC/XT. | |
Linux: Because a PC is a terrible thing to waste. | |
Get it up, keep it up... LINUX: Viagra for the PC. -- Chris Abbey | |
Hear me out. Linux is Microsoft's main competition right now. Because of this we are forcing them to "innovate", something they would usually avoid. Now if MS Bob has taught us anything, Microsoft is not a company that should be innovating. When they do, they don't come up with things like "better security" or "stability", they come back with "talking paperclips", and "throw in every usless feature we can think of, memory footprint be dammed". Unfortunatly, they also come up with the bright idea of executing email. Now MIME attachments aren't enough, they want you to be able to run/open attachments right when you get them. This sounds like a good idea to people who believe renaming directories to folders made computing possible for the common man, but security wise it's like vigorously shaking a package from the Unibomber. So my friends, we are to blame. We pushed them into frantically trying to invent "necessary" features to stay on top, and look where it got us. Many of us are watching our beloved mail servers go down under the strain and rebuilding our company's PC because of our pointless competition with MS. I implore you to please drop Linux before Microsoft innovates again. -- From a Slashdot.org post in regards to the ILOVEYOU email virus | |
Get it up, keep it up... LINUX: Viagra for the PC. -- Chris Abbey | |
I sat laughing snidely into my notebook until they showed me a PC running Linux... And oh! It was as though the heavens opened and God handed down a client-side OS so beautiful, so graceful, and so elegant that a million Microsoft developers couldn't have invented it even if they had a hundred years and a thousand crates of Jolt cola. -- Polly Sprenger, LAN Times | |
Excerpts From The First Annual Nerd Bowl (#4) BRYANT DUMBELL: Welcome back. After Round 1, the Mad Hatters are ahead 15 to 12. Round 2, the Caffeine Craziness event, is now underway. JOHN SPLADDEN: This is my favorite part of the Nerdbowl. Each player tries to consume as many gallons of caffeinated beverages within one minute, and then points are awarded based on the redness of their eyes. DUMBELL: I like this event too... I must admit, it's much better than the "Crash It" event that was played in the Zeroth Annual Nerdbowl last year. Players were each seated in front of a PC running Windows 98... points were awarded based on how fast the player could cause a Blue Screen. SPLADDEN: Ah, yes, I remember that. Everybody complained that the event was too easy. "Where the hell is the challenge?" yelled Chris DiBona while doing a victory dance after the VA Linux Rich Penguins beat the SuSE Cats In The Hats last year 121-96. | |
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. | |
Brief History Of Linux (#17) If only Gary had been sober When Micro-soft moved to Seattle in 1979, most of its revenue came from sales of BASIC, a horrible language so dependant on GOTOs that spaghetti looked more orderly than its code did. (BASIC has ruined more promising programmers than anything else, prompting its original inventor Dartmouth University to issue a public apology in 1986.) However, by 1981 BASIC hit the backburner to what is now considered the luckiest break in the history of computing: MS-DOS. (We use the term "break" because MS-DOS was and always will be broken.) IBM was developing a 16-bit "personal computer" and desperately needed an OS to drive it. Their first choice was Gary Kildall's CP/M, but IBM never struck a deal with him. We've discovered the true reason: Kildall was drunk at the time the IBM representatives went to talk with him. A sober man would not have insulted the reps, calling their employer an "Incredibly Bad Monopoly" and referring to their new IBM-PC as an "Idealistically Backwards Microcomputer for People without Clues". Needless to say, Gary "I Lost The Deal Of The Century" Kildall was not sober. | |
Brief History Of Linux (#19) Boy meets operating system The young Linus Torvalds might have been just another CompSci student if it wasn't for his experiences in the Univ. of Helsinki's Fall 1990 Unix & C course. During one class, the professor experienced difficulty getting Minix to work properly on a Sun box. "Who the heck designed this thing?" the angry prof asked, and somebody responded, "Andrew Tanenbaum". The name of the Unix & C professor has already escaped from Linus, but the words he spoke next remain forever etched in his grey matter: "Tanenbaum... ah, yes, that Amsterdam weenie who thinks microkernels are the greatest thing since sliced bread. Well, they're not. I would just love to see somebody create their own superior Unix-like 32-bit operating system using a monolithic kernel just to show Tanenbaum up!" His professor's outburst inspired Linus to order a new IBM PC so he could hack Minix. You can probably guess what happened next. Inspired by his professor's words, Linus Torvalds hacks together his own superior Unix-like 32-but operating system using a monolithic kernel just to show Mr. Christmas Tree up. | |
Solving The Virus Problem Once And For All System administrators across the globe have tried installing anti-virus software. They've tried lecturing employees not to open unsolicited email attachments. They've tried installing firewalls and the latest security patches. But even with these precautions, email viruses continue to rank third only to Solitaire and the Blue Screen Of Death in the amount of lost productivity they cause. Meanwhile, Microsoft Exchange and LookOut! remain as the number one virus delivery products on the market today. But maybe not for much longer. A group of disgruntled administrators have teamed up to produce and sell a brand new way to fight viruses, one that attacks the root of the problem: stupid users. Salivating Dogs, Inc. of Ohio has unveiled the "Clue Delivery System" (CDS), a small device that plugs into the back of a standard PC keyboard and delivers a mild electric shock whenever the luser does something stupid. The device is triggered by a Windows program that detects when the luser attempts to open an unsolicited email attachment or perform another equally dangerous virus-friendly action. | |
With the current lunatic US congress proposals on security, crypto and building big brother into all PC's I'd say allowing non GPL security modules is positively dangerous to the well being of non US citizens - Alan Cox on linux-kernel | |
PnPBIOS is a PC specific affliction. Other platforms have more elegantly designed but even buggier solutions - Alan Cox on linux-kernel | |
I sat laughing snidely into my notebook until they showed me a PC running Linux. And oh! It was as though the heavens opened and God handed down a client-side OS so beautiful, so graceful, and so elegant that a million Microsoft developers couldn't have invented it even if they had a hundred years and a thousand crates of Jolt cola. -- LAN Times | |
I sat laughing snidely into my notebook until they showed me a PC running Linux.... And did this PC choke? Did it stutter? Did it, even once, say that this program has performed an illegal operation and must be shut down? No. And this is just on the client. -- LAN Times | |
Feel free to contact me (flames about my english and the useless of this driver will be redirected to /dev/null, oh no, it's full...). -- Michael Beck, describing the PC-speaker sound device | |
Linux: because a PC is a terrible thing to waste -- ksh@cis.ufl.edu put this on Tshirts in '93 | |
Day X+4 months: Microsoft ships NT 5.0 for Intel.with a big media event on TV. IBM begins to ship Debian 4.6 as the standard OS on all machines from mainframe to PC and announces the move on Slashdot. -- Christoph Lameter | |
> <magical +3 sigh of hyperbole deflection> The branden dodges your magical sigh. The branden attacks you with a slew of words! The branden misses! -- Henning Makholm in <yahsmr7dk9k.fsf@pc-043.diku.dk> |