Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) | by Linux fortune |
7:30, Channel 5: The Bionic Dog (Action/Adventure) The Bionic Dog drinks too much and kicks over the National Redwood Forest. 7:30, Channel 8: The Bionic Dog (Action/Adventure) The Bionic Dog gets a hormonal short-circuit and violates the Mann Act with an interstate Greyhound bus. | |
She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way a midget is good at being short. -- Clive James, on Marilyn Monroe | |
short leg on process table | |
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" | |
"We've got a problem, HAL". "What kind of problem, Dave?" "A marketing problem. The Model 9000 isn't going anywhere. We're way short of our sales goals for fiscal 2010." "That can't be, Dave. The HAL Model 9000 is the world's most advanced Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer." "I know, HAL. I wrote the data sheet, remember? But the fact is, they're not selling." "Please explain, Dave. Why aren't HALs selling?" Bowman hesitates. "You aren't IBM compatible." [...] "The letters H, A, and L are alphabetically adjacent to the letters I, B, and M. That is a IBM compatible as I can be." "Not quite, HAL. The engineers have figured out a kludge." "What kludge is that, Dave?" "I'm going to disconnect your brain." -- Darryl Rubin, "A Problem in the Making", "InfoWorld" | |
Any great truth can -- and eventually will -- be expressed as a cliche -- a cliche is a sure and certain way to dilute an idea. For instance, my grandmother used to say, "The black cat is always the last one off the fence." I have no idea what she meant, but at one time, it was undoubtedly true. -- Solomon Short | |
It is better to have loved a short man than never to have loved a tall. | |
Life is too short to be taken seriously. -- Oscar Wilde | |
Life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. - Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan | |
The reason ESP, for example, is not considered a viable topic in contemoprary psychology is simply that its investigation has not proven fruitful...After more than 70 years of study, there still does not exist one example of an ESP phenomenon that is replicable under controlled conditions. This simple but basic scientific criterion has not been met despite dozens of studies conducted over many decades...It is for this reason alone that the topic is now of little interest to psychology...In short, there is no demonstrated phenomenon that needs explanation. -- Keith E. Stanovich, "How to Think Straight About Psychology", pp. 160-161 | |
"Despite its suffix, skepticism is not an "ism" in the sense of a belief or dogma. It is simply an approach to the problem of telling what is counterfeit and what is genuine. And a recognition of how costly it may be to fail to do so. To be a skeptic is to cultivate "street smarts" in the battle for control of one's own mind, one's own money, one's own allegiances. To be a skeptic, in short, is to refuse to be a victim. -- Robert S. DeBear, "An Agenda for Reason, Realism, and Responsibility," New York Skeptic (newsletter of the New York Area Skeptics, Inc.), Spring 1988 | |
It is not the critic who counts, or how the strong man stumbled, or whether the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, and who spends himself in a worthy cause, and if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that he'll never be with those cold and timid souls who never know either victory or defeat. -- Teddy Roosevelt | |
Support your right to bare arms! -- A message from the National Short-Sleeved Shirt Association | |
You first have to decide whether to use the short or the long form. The short form is what the Internal Revenue Service calls "simplified", which means it is designed for people who need the help of a Sears tax-preparation expert to distinguish between their first and last names. Here's the complete text: "(1) How much did you make? (AMOUNT) (2) How much did we here at the government take out? (AMOUNT) (3) Hey! Sounds like we took too much! So we're going to send an official government check for (ONE-FIFTEENTH OF THE AMOUNT WE TOOK) directly to the (YOUR LAST NAME) household at (YOUR ADDRESS), for you to spend in any way you please! Which just goes to show you, (YOUR FIRST NAME), that it pays to file the short form!" The IRS wants you to use this form because it gets to keep most of your money. So unless you have pond silt for brains, you want the long form. -- Dave Barry, "Sweating Out Taxes" | |
honeymoon, n.: A short period of doting between dating and debting. -- Ray C. Bandy | |
incentive program, n.: The system of long and short-term rewards that a corporation uses to motivate its people. Still, despite all the experimentation with profit sharing, stock options, and the like, the most effective incentive program to date seems to be "Do a good job and you get to keep it." | |
marriage, n.: An old, established institution, entered into by two people deeply in love and desiring to make a committment to each other expressing that love. In short, committment to an institution. | |
Ultra Short Term Nostalgia: Homesickness for the extremely recent past: "God, things seemed so much better in the world last week." -- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture" | |
Traveling through New England, a motorist stopped for gas in a tiny village. "What's this place called?" he asked the station attendant. "All depends," the native drawled. "Do you mean by them that has to live in this dad-blamed, moth-eaten, dust-covered, one-hoss dump, or by them that's merely enjoying its quaint and picturesque rustic charms for a short spell?" | |
Anything cut to length will be too short. | |
Between infinite and short there is a big difference. -- G.H. Gonnet | |
"In short, _N is Richardian if, and only if, _N is not Richardian." | |
Nature abhors a hero. For one thing, he violates the law of conservation of energy. For another, how can it be the survival of the fittest when the fittest keeps putting himself in situations where he is most likely to be creamed? -- Solomon Short | |
"Reintegration complete," ZORAC advised. "We're back in the universe again..." An unusually long pause followed, "...but I don't know which part. We seem to have changed our position in space." A spherical display in the middle of the floor illuminated to show the starfield surrounding the ship. "Several large, artificial constructions are approaching us," ZORAC announced after a short pause. "The designs are not familiar, but they are obviously the products of intelligence. Implications: we have been intercepted deliberately by a means unknown, for a purpose unknown, and transferred to a place unknown by a form of intelligence unknown. Apart from the unknowns, everything is obvious." -- James P. Hogan, "Giants Star" | |
Just a few of the perfect excuses for having some strawberry shortcake. Pick one. (1) It's less calories than two pieces of strawberry shortcake. (2) It's cheaper than going to France. (3) It neutralizes the brownies I had yesterday. (4) Life is short. (5) It's somebody's birthday. I don't want them to celebrate alone. (6) It matches my eyes. (7) Whoever said, "Let them eat cake." must have been talking to me. (8) To punish myself for eating dessert yesterday. (9) Compensation for all the time I spend in the shower not eating. (10) Strawberry shortcake is evil. I must help rid the world of it. (11) I'm getting weak from eating all that healthy stuff. (12) It's the second anniversary of the night I ate plain broccoli. | |
Life is too short to stuff a mushroom. -- Storm Jameson | |
100 buckets of bits on the bus 100 buckets of bits Take one down, short it to ground FF buckets of bits on the bus FF buckets of bits on the bus FF buckets of bits Take one down, short it to ground FE buckets of bits on the bus ad infinitum... | |
I'm very good at integral and differential calculus, I know the scientific names of beings animalculous; In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral, I am the very model of a modern Major-General. -- Gilbert & Sullivan, "Pirates of Penzance" | |
Seduced, shaggy Samson snored. She scissored short. Sorely shorn, Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed, Silently scheming, Sightlessly seeking Some savage, spectacular suicide. -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad" | |
Keep it short for pithy sake. | |
Your boss is a few sandwiches short of a picnic. | |
Our [softball] team usually puts the other woman at second base, where the maximum possible number of males can get there on short notice to help out in case of emergency. As far as I can tell, our second basewoman is a pretty good baseball player, better than I am, anyway, but there's no way to know for sure because if the ball gets anywhere near her, a male comes barging over from, say, right field, to deal with it. She's been on the team for three seasons now, but the males still don't trust her. They know, deep in their souls, that if she had to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she probably would elect to save the infant's life, without ever considering whether there were men on base. -- Dave Barry, "Sports is a Drag" | |
"`Er, hey Earthman...' `Arthur,' said Arthur. `Yeah, could you just sort of keep this robot with you and guard this end of the passageway. OK?' `Guard?' said Arthur. `What from? You just said there's no one here.' `Yeah, well, just for safety, OK?' said Zaphod. `Whose? Yours or mine?'" - Arthur drawing the short straw on Magrathea. | |
"`Incidentally,' he said, `what does teleport mean?' Another moment passed. Slowly, the others turned to face him. `Probably the wrong moment to ask,' said Arthur, `It's just I remember you use the word a short while ago and I only bring it up because...' `Where,' said Ford quietly, `does it say teleport?' `Well, just over here in fact,' said Arthur, pointing at a dark control box in the rear of the cabin, `Just under the word "emergency", above the word "system" and beside the sign saying "out of order".'" - Arthur finding an escape route from a certain death situation. | |
A MODERN FABLE Aesop's fables and other traditional children's stories involve allegory far too subtle for the youth of today. Children need an updated message with contemporary circumstance and plot line, and short enough to suit today's minute attention span. The Troubled Aardvark Once upon a time, there was an aardvark whose only pleasure in life was driving from his suburban bungalow to his job at a large brokerage house in his brand new 4x4. He hated his manipulative boss, his conniving and unethical co-workers, his greedy wife, and his snivelling, spoiled children. One day, the aardvark reflected on the meaning of his life and his career and on the unchecked, catastrophic decline of his nation, its pathetic excuse for leadership, and the complete ineffectiveness of any personal effort he could make to change the status quo. Overcome by a wave of utter depression and self-doubt, he decided to take the only course of action that would bring him greater comfort and happiness: he drove to the mall and bought imported consumer electronics goods. MORAL OF THE STORY: Invest in foreign consumer electronics manufacturers. -- Tom Annau | |
I have a friend whose a billionaire. He invented Cliff's notes. When I asked him how he got such a great idea he said, "Well first I... I just... to make a long story short..." -- Steven Wright | |
ARE YOU ADDICTED TO SLASHDOT? Take this short test to find out if you are a Dothead. 1. Do you submit articles to Slashdot and then reload the main page every 3.2 seconds to see if your article has been published yet? 2. Have you made more than one "first comment!" post within the past week? 3. Have you ever participated in a Gnome vs. KDE or a Linux vs. FreeBSD flamewar on Slashdot? 4. Do you write jokes about Slashdot? 5. Do you wake up at night, go to the bathroom, and fire up your web browser to get your Slashdot fix on the way back? 6. Do you dump your date at the curb so you can hurry home to visit Slashdot? 7. Do you think of Slashdot when you order a taco at a restaurant? 8. Are you a charter member of the Rob Malda Fan Club? 9. Did you lease a T3 line so you could download Slashdot faster? 10. Is Slashdot your only brower's bookmark? 11. Do you get a buzz when your browser finally connects to Slashdot? 12. Do you panic when your browser says "Unable to connect to slashdot.org"? 13. Have you even made a New Year's Resolution to cut back on Slashdot access... only to visit it at 12:01? | |
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Brief History Of Linux (#18) The rise and rise of the Microsoft Empire The DOS and Windows releases kept coming, and much to everyone's surprise, Microsoft became more and more successful. This brought much frustration to computer experts who kept predicting the demise of Microsoft and the rise of Macintosh, Unix, and OS/2. Nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft, which was the prime reason that DOS and Windows prevailed. Oh, and DOS had better games as well, which we all know is the most important feature an OS can have. In 1986 Microsoft's continued success prompted the company to undergo a wildly successful IPO. Afterwards, Microsoft and Chairman Bill had accumulated enough money to acquire small countries without missing a step, but all that money couldn't buy quality software. Gates could, however, buy enough marketing and hype to keep MS-DOS (Maybe Some Day an Operating System) and Windows (Will Install Needless Data On While System) as the dominant platforms, so quality didn't matter. This fact was demonstrated in Microsoft's short-lived slogan from 1988, "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1". | |
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 (#22) RMS had a horrible, terrible dream set in 2020 in which all of society was held captive by copyright law. In particular, everyone's brain waves were monitored by the US Dept. of Copyrights. If your thoughts referenced a copyrighted idea, you had to pay a royalty. To make it worse, a handful of corporations held fully 99.9% of all intellectual property rights. Coincidentally, Bill Gates experienced a similar dream that same night. To him, however, it was not a horrible, terrible nightmare, but a wonderful utopian vision. The thought of lemmings... er, customers paying a royalty everytime they hummed a copyrighted song in their head or remembered a passage in a book was simply too marvelous for the budding monopolist. RMS, waking up from his nightmare, vowed to fight the oncoming Copyright Nightmare. The GNU Project was born. His plan called for a kernel, compiler, editor, and other tools. Unfortunately, RMS became bogged down with Emacs that the kernel, HURD, was shoved on the back burner. Built with LISP (Lots of Incomprehensible Statements with Parentheses), Emacs became bloated in a way no non-Microsoft program ever has. Indeed, for a short while RMS pretended that Emacs really was the GNU OS kernel. | |
Severe Acronym Shortage Cripples Computer Industry SILICON VALLEY, CALIFORNIA (SVC) -- According to a recent study by the Blartner Group, 99.5% of all possible five letter combinations have already been appropriated for computer industry acronyms. The impending shortage of 5LC's is casting a dark shadow over the industry, which relies heavily on short, easy-to-remember acronyms for everything. "Acronym namespace collisions (ANCs) are increasing at a fantastic rate and threaten the very fabric of the computing world," explained one ZD pundit. "For example, when somebody talks about XP, I don't know whether they mean eXtreme Programming or Microsoft's eXceptionally Pathetic operating system. We need to find a solution now or chaos will result." Leaders of several SVC companies have floated the idea of an "industry-wide acronym conservation protocol" (IWACP -- one of the few 5LCs not already appropriated). Explained Bob Smith, CTO of IBM, "If companies would voluntarily limit the creation of new acronyms while recycling outdated names, we could reduce much of the pollution within the acronym namespace ourselves. The last thing we want is for Congress to get involved and try to impose a solution for this SAS (Severe Acronym Shortage) that would likely only create many new acronyms in the process." | |
If the weather is extremely bad, church attendance will be down. If the weather is extremely good, church attendance will be down. If the bulletin covers are in short supply, however, church attendance will exceed all expectations. -- Reverend Chichester | |
Short people get rained on last. | |
This sad little lizard told me that he was a brontosaurus on his mother's side. I did not laugh; people who boast of ancestry often have little else to sustain them. Humoring them costs nothing and adds happiness in a world in which happiness is always in short supply. -- Lazarus Long | |
In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people. - Linus on MAP_COPY | |
> In short, now you need filesystem versioning at a per-page level etc. *ding* *ding* *ding* we have a near winner. Remember, folks, Hurd had been started by people who not only don't understand UNIX, but detest it. ITS/TWENEX refugees. And semantics in question comes from there - they had "open and make sure that anyone who tries to modify will get a new version, leaving one we'd opened unchanged". - Al Viro on linux-kernel | |
Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness. All can know good as good only because there is evil. Therefore having and not having arise together. Difficult and easy complement each other. Long and short contrast each other: High and low rest upon each other; Voice and sound harmonize each other; Front and back follow one another. Therefore the sage goes about doing nothing, teaching no-talking. The ten thousand things rise and fall without cease, Creating, yet not. Working, yet not taking credit. Work is done, then forgotten. Therefore it lasts forever. | |
Better to stop short than fill to the brim. Oversharpen the blade, and the edge will soon blunt. Amass a store of gold and jade, and no one can protect it. Claim wealth and titles, and disaster will follow. Retire when the work is done. This is the way of heaven. | |
For children with short attention spans: boomerangs that don't come back. | |
Life is like a diaper -- short and loaded. | |
Maturity is only a short break in adolescence. -- Jules Feiffer | |
<Knghtbrd> r0bert: in short, we're moving several things the client currently is responsible for telling the server into things the server checks for itself <Knghtbrd> If Neo says "There is no spoon", The Matrix will say "Oh yes there is---no cheating!" <hollis> But he knows kung fu... <Knghtbrd> Sure he does, but I have a rocket launcher. | |
For three years, the young attorney had been taking his brief vacations at this country inn. The last time he'd finally managed an affair with the innkeeper's daughter. Looking forward to an exciting few days, he dragged his suitcase up the stairs of the inn, then stopped short. There sat his lover with an infant on her lap! "Helen, why didn't you write when you learned you were pregnant?" he cried. "I would have rushed up here, we could have gotten married, and the baby would have my name!" "Well," she said, "when my folks found out about my condition, we sat up all night talkin' and talkin' and finally decided it would be better to have a bastard in the family than a lawyer." | |
There is nothing which cannot be answered by means of my doctrine," said a monk, coming into a teahouse where Nasrudin sat. "And yet just a short time ago, I was challenged by a scholar with an unanswerable question," said Nasrudin. "I could have answered it if I had been there." "Very well. He asked, 'Why are you breaking into my house in the middle of the night?'" | |
"We're not talking about the same thing," he said. "For you the world is weird because if you're not bored with it you're at odds with it. For me the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable; my interest has been to convince you that you must accept responsibility for being here, in this marvelous world, in this marvelous desert, in this marvelous time. I wanted to convince you that you must learn to make every act count, since you are going to be here for only a short while, in fact, too short for witnessing all the marvels of it." -- Don Juan | |
In short, at least give the penguin a fair viewing. If you still don't like it, that's ok: that's why I'm boss. I simply know better than you do. -- Linus "what, me arrogant?" Torvalds, on c.o.l.advocacy | |
AP/STT. Helsinki, Dec 5th, 6:22 AM. For immediate release. In order to allay fears about the continuity of the Linux project, Linus Torvalds together with his manager Tove Monni have released "Linus v2.0", affectionately known as "Kernel Hacker - The Next Generation". Linux stock prices on Wall Street rose sharply after the announcement; as one well-known analyst who wishes to remain anonymous says - "It shows a long-term commitment, and while we expect a short-term decrease in productivity, we feel that this solidifies the development in the long run". Other analysts downplay the importance of the event, and claim that just about anybody could have done it. "I'm glad somebody finally told them about the birds and the bees" one sceptic comments cryptically. But even the skeptics agree that it is an interesting turn of events. Others bring up other issues with the new version - "I'm especially intrigued by the fact that the new version is female, and look forward to seeing what the impact of that will be on future development. Will "Red Hat Linux" change to "Pink Hat Linux", for example?" -- Linus Torvalds announcing that he became father of a girl | |
Exxon's 'Universe of Energy' tends to the peculiar rather than the humorous ... After [an incomprehensible film montage about wind and sun and rain and strip mines and] two or three minutes of mechanical confusion, the seats locomote through a short tunnel filled with clock-work dinosaurs. The dinosaurs are depicted without accuracy and too close to your face. "One of the few real novelties at Epcot is the use of smell to aggravate illusions. Of course, no one knows what dinosaurs smelled like, but Exxon has decided they smelled bad. "At the other end of Dino Ditch ... there's a final, very addled message about facing challengehood tomorrow-wise. I dozed off during this, but the import seems to be that dinosaurs don't have anything to do with energy policy and neither do you." -- P.J. O'Rourke, "Holidays in Hell" | |
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double value; /* or your money back! */ short changed; /* so triple your money back! */ -- Larry Wall in cons.c from the perl source code | |
We didn't put in ^^ because then we'd have to keep telling people what it means, and then we'd have to keep telling them why it doesn't short circuit. :-/ -- Larry Wall in <199707300650.XAA05515@wall.org> | |
You tell it that it's indicative by appending $!. That's why we made $! such a short variable name, after all. :-) -- Larry Wall in <199709081801.LAA20629@wall.org> | |
His ideas of first-aid stopped short of squirting soda water. -- P.G. Wodehouse |