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Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) by Linux fortune

        A manager went to his programmers and told them: "As regards to your
work hours: you are going to have to come in at nine in the morning and leave
at five in the afternoon."  At this, all of them became angry and several
resigned on the spot.
        So the manager said: "All right, in that case you may set your own
working hours, as long as you finish your projects on schedule."  The
programmers, now satisfied, began to come in a noon and work to the wee
hours of the morning.
                -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
It is a very humbling experience to make a multimillion-dollar mistake, but
it is also very memorable.  I vividly recall the night we decided how to
organize the actual writing of external specifications for OS/360.  The
manager of architecture, the manager of control program implementation, and
I were threshing out the plan, schedule, and division of responsibilities.
        The architecture manager had 10 good men.  He asserted that they
could write the specifications and do it right.  It would take ten months,
three more than the schedule allowed.
        The control program manager had 150 men.  He asserted that they
could prepare the specifications, with the architecture team coordinating;
it would be well-done and practical, and he could do it on schedule.
Furthermore, if the architecture team did it, his 150 men would sit twiddling
their thumbs for ten months.
        To this the architecture manager responded that if I gave the control
program team the responsibility, the result would not in fact be on time,
but would also be three months late, and of much lower quality.  I did, and
it was.  He was right on both counts.  Moreover, the lack of conceptual
integrity made the system far more costly to build and change, and I would
estimate that it added a year to debugging time.
                -- Frederick Brooks Jr., "The Mythical Man Month"
We are preparing to think about contemplating preliminary work on plans to
develop a schedule for producing the 10th Edition of the Unix Programmers
Manual.
                -- Andrew Hume
It is a very humbling experience to make a multimillion-dollar mistake, but it
is also very memorable.  I vividly recall the night we decided how to organize
the actual writing of external specifications for OS/360.  The manager of
architecture, the manager of control program implementation, and I were
threshing out the plan, schedule, and division of responsibilities.

The architecture manager had 10 good men.  He asserted that they could write
the specifications and do it right.  It would take ten months, three more
than the schedule allowed.

The control program manager had 150 men.  He asserted that they could prepare
the specifications, with the architecture team coordinating; it would be
well-done and practical, and he could do it on schedule.  Futhermore, if
the architecture team did it, his 150 men would sit twiddling their thumbs
for ten months.

To this the architecture manager responded that if I gave the control program
team the responsibility, the result would not in fact be on time, but would
also be three months late, and of much lower quality.  I did, and it was.  He
was right on both counts.  Moreover, the lack of conceptual integrity made
the system far more costly to build and change, and I would estimate that it
added a year to debugging time.
- Frederick Brooks Jr., "The Mythical Man Month"
"We can't schedule an orgy, it might be construed as fighting"
--Stanley Sutton
Mike's Law:
For a lumber company employing two men and a cut-off saw, the
marginal product of labor for any number of additional workers
equals zero until the acquisition of another cut-off saw.
Let's not even consider a chainsaw.
- Mike Dennison
[You could always schedule the saw, though - ed.]
"Maintain an awareness for contribution -- to your schedule, your project,
our company."  
-- A Group of Employees
With the news that Nancy Reagan has referred to an astrologer when planning
her husband's schedule, and reports of Californians evacuating Los Angeles
on the strength of a prediction from a sixteenth-century physician and
astrologer Michel de Notredame, the image of the U.S. as a scientific and
technological nation has taking a bit of a battering lately.  Sadly, such
happenings cannot be dismissed as passing fancies.  They are manifestations
of a well-established "anti-science" tendency in the U.S. which, ultimately,
could threaten the country's position as a technological power. . . .  The
manifest widespread desire to reject rationality and substitute a series
of quasirandom beliefs in order to understand the universe does not augur
well for a nation deeply concerned about its ability to compete with its
industrial equals.  To the degree that it reflects the thinking of a
significant section of the public, this point of view encourages ignorance
of and, indeed, contempt for science and for rational methods of approaching
truth. . . . It is becoming clear that if the U.S. does not pick itself up
soon and devote some effort to educating the young effectively, its hope of
maintaining a semblance of leadership in the world may rest, paradoxically,
with a new wave of technically interested and trained immigrants who do not
suffer from the anti-science disease rampant in an apparently decaying society.
-- Physicist Tony Feinberg, in "New Scientist," May 19, 1988
There cannot be a crisis next week.  My schedule is already full.
                -- Henry Kissinger
Cheops' Law:
        Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.
Dallas Cowboys Official Schedule

        Sept 14                Pasadena Junior High
        Sept 21                Boy Scout Troop 049
        Sept 28                Blind Academy
        Sept 30                World War I Veterans
        Oct 5                Brownie Scout Troop 041
        Oct 12                Sugarcreek High Cheerleaders
        Oct 26                St. Thomas Boys Choir
        Nov 2                Texas City Vet Clinic
        Nov 9                Korean War Amputees
        Nov 15                VA Hospital Polio Patients
        My friends, I am here to tell you of the wonderous continent known as
Africa.  Well we left New York drunk and early on the morning of February 31.
We were 15 days on the water, and 3 on the boat when we finally arrived in
Africa.  Upon our arrival we immediately set up a rigorous schedule:  Up at
6:00, breakfast, and back in bed by 7:00.  Pretty soon we were back in bed by
6:30.  Now Africa is full of big game.  The first day I shot two bucks.  That
was the biggest game we had.  Africa is primerally inhabited by Elks, Moose
and Knights of Pithiests.
        The elks live up in the mountains and come down once a year for their
annual conventions.  And you should see them gathered around the water hole,
which they leave immediately when they discover it's full of water.  They
weren't looking for a water hole.  They were looking for an alck hole.
        One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas, how he got in my
pajamas, I don't know.  Then we tried to remove the tusks.  That's a tough
word to say, tusks.  As I said we tried to remove the tusks, but they were
imbedded so firmly we couldn't get them out.  But in Alabama the Tuscaloosa,
but that is totally irrelephant to what I was saying.
        We took some pictures of the native girls, but they weren't developed.
So we're going back in a few years...
                -- Julius H. Marx [Groucho]
Brief History Of Linux (#18)
There are lies, damned lies, and Microsoft brochures

Even from the very first day, the Microsoft Marketing Department was at
full throttle. Vaporware has always been their weapon of choice. Back when
MS-DOS 1.25 was released to OEMs, Microsoft handed out brochures touting
some of the features to be included in future versions, including:
Xenix-compatible pipes, process forks, multitasking, graphics and cursor
positioning, and multi-user support.

The brochure also stated, "MS-DOS has no practical limit on disk size.
MS-DOS uses 4-byte Xenix compatible pointers for file and disk capacity up
to 4 gigabytes." We would like to emphasize in true Dave Barry fashion
that we are not making this up.

Big vaporous plans were also in store for Microsoft's "Apple Killer"
graphical interface. In 1983 Microsoft innovated a new marketing ploy --
the rigged "smoke-and-mirrors" demo -- to showcase the "overlapping
windows" and "multitasking" features of Interface Manager, the predecessor
to Windows. These features never made it into Windows 1.0 -- which,
incidentally, was released 1.5 years behind schedule.
"I suppose this is the Linus Torvalds version of Fermats Last Theorem :-)
(Leaving people wondering "why" for hundreds of years...)"

        - Timmy Thorn on kernel/sched.c:schedule()
Innovation is hard to schedule.
                -- Dan Fylstra
What they say:                                What they mean:

A major technological breakthrough...        Back to the drawing board.
Developed after years of research        Discovered by pure accident.
Project behind original schedule due        We're working on something else.
        to unforseen difficulties
Designs are within allowable limits        We made it, stretching a point or two.
Customer satisfaction is believed        So far behind schedule that they'll be
        assured                                        grateful for anything at all.
Close project coordination                We're gonna spread the blame, campers!
Test results were extremely gratifying        It works, and boy, were we surprised!
The design will be finalized...                We haven't started yet, but we've got
                                                to say something.
The entire concept has been rejected        The guy who designed it quit.
We're moving forward with a fresh        We hired three new guys, and they're
        approach                                kicking it around.
A number of different approaches...        We don't know where we're going, but
                                                we're moving.
Preliminary operational tests are        Blew up when we turned it on.
        inconclusive
Modifications are underway                We're starting over.
XXI:
        It's easy to get a loan unless you need it.
XXII:
        If stock market experts were so expert, they would be buying stock,
        not selling advice.
XXIII:
        Any task can be completed in only one-third more time than is
        currently estimated.
XXIV:
        The only thing more costly than stretching the schedule of an
        established project is accelerating it, which is itself the most
        costly action known to man.
XXV:
        A revised schedule is to business what a new season is to an athlete
        or a new canvas to an artist.
                -- Norman Augustine
No guarantee of accuracy or completeness!
©TU Chemnitz, 2006-2024
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