Dictionary De - En
De - Es
De - Pt| Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) | by Linux fortune |
| Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art. -- Tom Stoppard | |
| The man who sets out to carry a cat by its tail learns something that will always be useful and which never will grow dim or doubtful. -- Mark Twain | |
| You see, I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones. -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "A Study in Scarlet" | |
| A little retrospection shows that although many fine, useful software systems have been designed by committees and built as part of multipart projects, those software systems that have excited passionate fans are those that are the products of one or a few designing minds, great designers. Consider Unix, APL, Pascal, Modula, the Smalltalk interface, even Fortran; and contrast them with Cobol, PL/I, Algol, MVS/370, and MS-DOS. -- Fred Brooks | |
| If the designers of X-window built cars, there would be no fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which followed the same principles -- but you'd be able to shift gears with your car stereo. Useful feature, that. -- From the programming notebooks of a heretic, 1990. | |
| THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #10: SIMPLE SIMPLE is an acronym for Sheer Idiot's Monopurpose Programming Language Environment. This language, developed at the Hanover College for Technological Misfits, was designed to make it impossible to write code with errors in it. The statements are, therefore, confined to BEGIN, END and STOP. No matter how you arrange the statements, you can't make a syntax error. Programs written in SIMPLE do nothing useful. Thus they achieve the results of programs written in other languages without the tedious, frustrating process of testing and debugging. | |
| THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #12: LITHP This otherwise unremarkable language is distinguished by the absence of an "S" in its character set; users must substitute "TH". LITHP is said to be useful in protheththing lithtth. | |
| Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (10) Sorry, but that's too useful. (9) Dammit, little-endian systems *are* more consistent! (8) I'm on the committee and I *still* don't know what the hell #pragma is for. (7) Well, it's an excellent idea, but it would make the compilers too hard to write. (6) Them bats is smart; they use radar. (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here? (4) How many times do we have to tell you, "No prior art!" (3) Ha, ha, I can't believe they're actually going to adopt this sucker. (2) Thank you for your generous donation, Mr. Wirth. (1) Gee, I wish we hadn't backed down on 'noalias'. | |
| A little retrospection shows that although many fine, useful software systems have been designed by committees and built as part of multipart projects, those software systems that have excited passionate fans are those that are the products of one or a few designing minds, great designers. Consider Unix, APL, Pascal, Modula, the Smalltalk interface, even Fortran; and contrast them with Cobol, PL/I, Algol, MVS/370, and MS-DOS. - Fred Brooks, Jr. | |
| HOW TO PROVE IT, PART 2 proof by cumbersome notation: Best done with access to at least four alphabets and special symbols. proof by exhaustion: An issue or two of a journal devoted to your proof is useful. proof by omission: 'The reader may easily supply the details' 'The other 253 cases are analogous' '...' | |
| HOW TO PROVE IT, PART 4 proof by personal communication: 'Eight-dimensional colored cycle stripping is NP-complete [Karp, personal communication].' proof by reduction to the wrong problem: 'To see that infinite-dimensional colored cycle stripping is decidable, we reduce it to the halting problem.' proof by reference to inaccessible literature: The author cites a simple corollary of a theorem to be found in a privately circulated memoir of the Slovenian Philological Society, 1883. proof by importance: A large body of useful consequences all follow from the proposition in question. | |
| HOW TO PROVE IT, PART 6 proof by picture: A more convincing form of proof by example. Combines well with proof by omission. proof by vehement assertion: It is useful to have some kind of authority relation to the audience. proof by ghost reference: Nothing even remotely resembling the cited theorem appears in the reference given. | |
| ADA: Something you need only know the name of to be an Expert in Computing. Useful in sentences like, "We had better develop an ADA awareness. -- "Datamation", January 15, 1984 | |
| Computer, n.: An electronic entity which performs sequences of useful steps in a totally understandable, rigorously logical manner. If you believe this, see me about a bridge I have for sale in Manhattan. | |
| Glib's Fourth Law of Unreliability: Investment in reliability will increase until it exceeds the probable cost of errors, or until someone insists on getting some useful work done. | |
| Laws of Computer Programming: (1) Any given program, when running, is obsolete. (2) Any given program costs more and takes longer. (3) If a program is useful, it will have to be changed. (4) If a program is useless, it will have to be documented. (5) Any given program will expand to fill all available memory. (6) The value of a program is proportional the weight of its output. (7) Program complexity grows until it exceeds the capability of the programmer who must maintain it. | |
| Van Roy's Law: An unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys. | |
| Bread and Circuits: The electronic era tendency to view party politics as corny -- no longer relevant of meaningful or useful to modern societal issues, and in many cases dangerous. -- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture" | |
| Everything takes longer, costs more, and is less useful. -- Erwin Tomash | |
| A mother mouse was taking her large brood for a stroll across the kitchen floor one day when the local cat, by a feat of stealth unusual even for its species, managed to trap them in a corner. The children cowered, terrified by this fearsome beast, plaintively crying, "Help, Mother! Save us! Save us! We're scared, Mother!" Mother Mouse, with the hopeless valor of a parent protecting its children, turned with her teeth bared to the cat, towering huge above them, and suddenly began to bark in a fashion that would have done any Doberman proud. The startled cat fled in fear for its life. As her grateful offspring flocked around her shouting "Oh, Mother, you saved us!" and "Yay! You scared the cat away!" she turned to them purposefully and declared, "You see how useful it is to know a second language?" | |
| Fortune presents: USEFUL PHRASES IN ESPERANTO, #1. ^Cu vi parolas angle? Do you speak English? Mi ne komprenas. I don't understand. Vi estas la sola esperantisto kiun mi You're the only Esperanto speaker renkontas. I've met. La ^ceko estas enpo^stigita. The check is in the mail. Oni ne povas, ^gin netrovi. You can't miss it. Mi nur rigardadas. I'm just looking around. Nu, ^sajnis bona ideo. Well, it seemed like a good idea. | |
| Fortune presents: USEFUL PHRASES IN ESPERANTO, #2. ^Cu tiu loko estas okupita? Is this seat taken? ^Cu vi ofte venas ^ci-tien? Do you come here often? ^Cu mi povas havi via telelonnumeron? May I have your phone number? Mi estas komputilisto. I work with computers. Mi legas multe da scienca fikcio. I read a lot of science fiction. ^Cu necesas ke vi eliras? Do you really have to be going? | |
| Fortune presents: USEFUL PHRASES IN ESPERANTO, #5. Mi ^cevalovipus vin se mi havus I'd horsewhip you if I had a horse. ^cevalon. Vere vi ^sercas. You must be kidding. Nu, parDOOOOOnu min! Well exCUUUUUSE me! Kiu invitis vin? Who invited you? Kion vi diris pri mia patrino? What did you say about my mother? Bu^so^stopu min per kulero. Gag me with a spoon. | |
| Celestial navigation is based on the premise that the Earth is the center of the universe. The premise is wrong, but the navigation works. An incorrect model can be a useful tool. -- Kelvin Throop III | |
| Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists. -- John Kenneth Galbraith | |
| Anything that is good and useful is made of chocolate. | |
| "You are old," said the youth, "and your programs don't run, And there isn't one language you like; Yet of useful suggestions for help you have none -- Have you thought about taking a hike?" "Since I never write programs," his father replied, "Every language looks equally bad; Yet the people keep paying to read all my books And don't realize that they've been had." | |
| Try to value useful qualities in one who loves you. | |
| ARTHUR It probably seems a terrible thing to say, but you know what I sometimes think would be useful in these situations? LINT. What? ARTHUR A gun of some sort. LINT.2 Will this help? ARTHUR What is it? LINT.2 A gun of some sort. ARTHUR Oh, that'll help. Can you make it fire? LINT. Er... F/X DEAFENING ROAR LINT. Yes. - Arthur and the Lintillas gaining the upper hand, Fit the Twelfth. | |
| "Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindboggingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. "The argument goes something like this: `I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, `for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.' "`But,' says Man, `The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.' | |
| It's trivial to make fun of Microsoft products, but it takes a real man to make them work, and a god to make them do anything useful. | |
| As many of you know, I am taking a class here at UNC on Personality. One of the tests to determine personality in our book was so incredibly useful and interesting, I just had to share it. Answer each of the following items "true" or "false" 1. I salivate at the sight of mittens. 2. If I go into the street, I'm apt to be bitten by a horse. 3. Some people never look at me. 4. Spinach makes me feel alone. 5. My sex life is A-okay. 6. When I look down from a high spot, I want to spit. 7. I like to kill mosquitoes. 8. Cousins are not to be trusted. 9. It makes me embarrassed to fall down. 10. I get nauseous from too much roller skating. 11. I think most people would cry to gain a point. 12. I cannot read or write. 13. I am bored by thoughts of death. 14. I become homicidal when people try to reason with me. 15. I would enjoy the work of a chicken flicker. 16. I am never startled by a fish. 17. My mother's uncle was a good man. 18. I don't like it when somebody is rotten. 19. People who break the law are wise guys. 20. I have never gone to pieces over the weekend. | |
| As many of you know, I am taking a class here at UNC on Personality. One of the tests to determine personality in our book was so incredibly useful and interesting, I just had to share it. Answer each of the following items "true" or "false" 1. I think beavers work too hard. 2. I use shoe polish to excess. 3. God is love. 4. I like mannish children. 5. I have always been diturbed by the sight of Lincoln's ears. 6. I always let people get ahead of me at swimming pools. 7. Most of the time I go to sleep without saying goodbye. 8. I am not afraid of picking up door knobs. 9. I believe I smell as good as most people. 10. Frantic screams make me nervous. 11. It's hard for me to say the right thing when I find myself in a room full of mice. 12. I would never tell my nickname in a crisis. 13. A wide necktie is a sign of disease. 14. As a child I was deprived of licorice. 15. I would never shake hands with a gardener. 16. My eyes are always cold. 17. Cousins are not to be trusted. 18. When I look down from a high spot, I want to spit. 19. I am never startled by a fish. 20. I have never gone to pieces over the weekend. | |
| You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency. -- W. Somerset Maugham, "The Circle" | |
| "I would suggest you to read through the following book and files: * Kernighan & Pike, "The Practice of Programming" * Documentation/CodingStyle * drivers/net/aironet4500_proc.c and consider, erm, discrepancies. On the second thought, reading K&R might also be useful. IOW, no offense, but your C is bad beyond belief." - Al Viro | |
| It should be a case of "Just plug in a new kernel, and suddenly your existing filesystem just allows you to do more! 20% more for the same price! AND we'll throw in this useful ginzu knife for just 4.95 for shipping and handling. Absolutely free!" - Linus Torvalds on linux-kernel | |
| Linus Torvalds wrote: > It should be a case of "Just plug in a new kernel, and suddenly your > existing filesystem just allows you to do more! 20% more for the same > price! AND we'll throw in this useful ginzu knife for just 4.95 for > shipping and handling. Absolutely free!" ...Linus demonstrates why American culture is a bad influence on you. - Jeff Garzik on linux-kernel | |
| > If you took my patch for it, PLEASE don't send it for inclusion; it's an > evil hack and no longer needed when Intel fixes the bug in their 440GX bios. "when" is not a word I find useful about most bios bugs. Try "if" or "less likely that being hit on the head by an asteroid" - Alan Cox on linux-kernel | |
| Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub; It is the center hole that makes it useful. Shape clay into a vessel; It is the space within that makes it useful. Cut doors and windows for a room; It is the holes which make it useful. Therefore benefit comes from what is there; Usefulness from what is not there. | |
| Know the strength of man, But keep a woman's care! Be the stream of the universe! Being the stream of the universe, Ever true and unswerving, Become as a little child once more. Know the white, But keep the black! Be an example to the world! Being an example to the world, Ever true and unwavering, Return to the infinite. Know honor, Yet keep humility. Be the valley of the universe! Being the valley of the universe, Ever true and resourceful, Return to the state of the uncarved block. When the block is carved, it becomes useful. When the sage uses it, he becomes the ruler. Thus, "A great tailor cuts little." | |
| <jim> Lemme make sure I'm not wasting time here... bcwhite will remove pkgs that havent been fixed that have outstanding bugs of severity "important". True or false? <JHM> jim: "important" or higher. True. <jim> Then we're about to lose ftp.debian.org and dpkg :) * netgod will miss dpkg -- it was occasionally useful <Joey> We still have rpm.... | |
| <Knghtbrd> Okay, you people have started talking about BSDM applications of network hardware... I think I'll run off and do something useful and Debianish and stay OUT of this one... <Knghtbrd> (for a change) | |
| <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 | |
| <doogie_> linux takes shit and turns it into something useful. <doogie_> windows takes something useful and turns it into shit | |
| All men know the utility of useful things; but they do not know the utility of futility. -- Chuang-tzu | |
| Nasrudin walked into a teahouse and declaimed, "The moon is more useful than the sun." "Why?", he was asked. "Because at night we need the light more." | |
| I just uploaded xtoolplaces-1.6. It fixes all bugs but one: It still coredumps instead of doing something useful. The upstream author's e-mail address bounces, Redhat doesn't provide it and I never used it. -- Sven Rudolph <sr1@os.inf.tu-dresden.de> | |
| <jim> Lemme make sure I'm not wasting time here... bcwhite will remove pkgs that havent been fixed that have outstanding bugs of severity "important". True or false? <JHM> jim: "important" or higher. True. <jim> Then we're about to lose ftp.debian.org and dpkg :) * netgod will miss dpkg -- it was occasionally useful <Joey> We still have rpm.... -- Seen on #Debian | |
| If you aren't rich you should always look useful. -- Louis-Ferdinand Celine | |
| To stay youthful, stay useful. | |
| If you want to see useful Perl examples, we can certainly arrange to have comp.lang.misc flooded with them, but I don't think that would help the advance of civilization. :-) -- Larry Wall in <1992Mar5.180926.19041@netlabs.com> | |
| It won't be covered in the book. The source code has to be useful for something, after all... :-) -- Larry Wall in <10160@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV> | |
| No prisoner's dilemma here. Over the long term, symbiosis is more useful than parasitism. More fun, too. Ask any mitochondria. -- Larry Wall in <199705102042.NAA00851@wall.org> | |
| I'm not sure whether that's actually useful... -- Larry Wall in <199710011704.KAA21395@wall.org> | |
| Aquavit is also considered useful for medicinal purposes, an essential ingredient in what I was once told is the Norwegian cure for the common cold. You get a bottle, a poster bed, and the brightest colored stocking cap you can find. You put the cap on the post at the foot of the bed, then get into bed and drink aquavit until you can't see the cap. I've never tried this, but it sounds as though it should work. -- Peter Nelson | |
| Your digestive system is your body's Fun House, whereby food goes on a long, dark, scary ride, taking all kinds of unexpected twists and turns, being attacked by vicious secretions along the way, and not knowing until the last minute whether it will be turned into a useful body part or ejected into the Dark Hole by Mister Sphincter. We Americans live in a nation where the medical-care system is second to none in the world, unless you count maybe 25 or 30 little scuzzball countries like Scotland that we could vaporize in seconds if we felt like it. -- Dave Barry, "Stay Fit & Healthy Until You're Dead" | |
