Dictionary De - En
De - Es
De - Pt| Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) | by Linux fortune |
| Lamonte Cranston once hired a new Chinese manservant. While describing his duties to the new man, Lamonte pointed to a bowl of candy on the coffee table and warned him that he was not to take any. Some days later, the new manservant was cleaning up, with no one at home, and decided to sample some of the candy. Just than, Cranston walked in, spied the manservant at the candy, and said: "Pardon me Choy, is that the Shadow's nugate you chew?" | |
| 'Scuse me, while I kiss the sky! -- Robert James Marshall (Jimi) Hendrix | |
| Snow White has become a camera buff. She spends hours and hours shooting pictures of the seven dwarfs and their antics. Then she mails the exposed film to a cut rate photo service. It takes weeks for the developed film to arrive in the mail, but that is all right with Snow White. She clears the table, washes the dishes and sweeps the floor, all the while singing "Someday my prints will come." | |
| The Worst Musical Trio There are few bad musicians who have a chance to give a recital at a famous concert hall while still learning the rudiments of their instrument. This happened about thirty years ago to the son of a Rumanian gentleman who was owed a personal favour by Georges Enesco, the celebrated violinist. Enesco agreed to give lessons to the son who was quite unhampered by great musical talent. Three years later the boy's father insisted that he give a public concert. "His aunt said that nobody plays the violin better than he does. A cousin heard him the other day and screamed with enthusiasm." Although Enesco feared the consequences, he arranged a recital at the Salle Gaveau in Paris. However, nobody bought a ticket since the soloist was unknown. "Then you must accompany him on the piano," said the boy's father, "and it will be a sell out." Reluctantly, Enesco agreed and it was. On the night an excited audience gathered. Before the concert began Enesco became nervous and asked for someone to turn his pages. In the audience was Alfred Cortot, the brilliant pianist, who volunteered and made his way to the stage. The soloist was of uniformly low standard and next morning the music critic of Le Figaro wrote: "There was a strange concert at the Salle Gaveau last night. The man whom we adore when he plays the violin played the piano. Another whom we adore when he plays the piano turned the pages. But the man who should have turned the pages played the violin." -- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures" | |
| While he was in New York on location for _Bronco Billy_ (1980), Clint Eastwood agreed to a television interview. His host, somewhat hostile, began by defining a Clint Eastwood picture as a violent, ruthless, lawless, and bloody piece of mayhem, and then asked Eastwood himself to define a Clint Eastwood picture. "To me," said Eastwood calmly, "what a Clint Eastwood picture is, is one that I'm in." -- Boller and Davis, "Hollywood Anecdotes" | |
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| Personally, I think my choice in the mostest-superlative-computer wars has to be the HP-48 series of calculators. They'll run almost anything. And if they can't, while I'll just plug a Linux box into the serial port and load up the HP-48 VT-100 emulator. (By jdege@winternet.com, Jeff Dege) | |
| > The day people think linux would be better served by somebody else (FSF > being the natural alternative), I'll "abdicate". I don't think that > it's something people have to worry about right now - I don't see it > happening in the near future. I enjoy doing linux, even though it does > mean some work, and I haven't gotten any complaints (some almost timid > reminders about a patch I have forgotten or ignored, but nothing > negative so far). > > Don't take the above to mean that I'll stop the day somebody complains: > I'm thick-skinned (Lasu, who is reading this over my shoulder commented > that "thick-HEADED is closer to the truth") enough to take some abuse. > If I weren't, I'd have stopped developing linux the day ast ridiculed me > on c.o.minix. What I mean is just that while linux has been my baby so > far, I don't want to stand in the way if people want to make something > better of it (*). > > Linus > > (*) Hey, maybe I could apply for a saint-hood from the Pope. Does > somebody know what his email-address is? I'm so nice it makes you puke. (Taken from Linus's reply to someone worried about the future of Linux) | |
| Your Pentium has a heating problem - try cooling it with ice cold water.(Do not turn of your computer, you do not want to cool down the Pentium Chip while he isn't working, do you?) | |
| "I wonder", he said to himself, "what's in a book while it's closed. Oh, I know it's full of letters printed on paper, but all the same, something must be happening, because as soon as I open it, there's a whole story with people I don't know yet and all kinds of adventures and battles." -- Bastian B. Bux | |
| "Speak, thou vast and venerable head," muttered Ahab, "which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou has dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams has moved amid the world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; has slept by many a sailer's side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw'st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed -- while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou has seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!" -- H. Melville, "Moby Dick" | |
| A famous Lisp Hacker noticed an Undergraduate sitting in front of a Xerox 1108, trying to edit a complex Klone network via a browser. Wanting to help, the Hacker clicked one of the nodes in the network with the mouse, and asked "what do you see?" Very earnestly, the Undergraduate replied "I see a cursor." The Hacker then quickly pressed the boot toggle at the back of the keyboard, while simultaneously hitting the Undergraduate over the head with a thick Interlisp Manual. The Undergraduate was then Enlightened. | |
| Couldn't we jury-rig the cat to act as an audio switch, and have it yell at people to save their core images before logging them out? I'm sure the cattle prod would be effective in this regard. In any case, a traverse mounted iguana, while more perverted, gives better traction, not to mention being easier to stake. | |
| Hacker's Guide To Cooking: 2 pkg. cream cheese (the mushy white stuff in silver wrappings that doesn't really come from Philadelphia after all; anyway, about 16 oz.) 1 tsp. vanilla extract (which is more alcohol than vanilla and pretty strong so this part you *GOTTA* measure) 1/4 cup sugar (but honey works fine too) 8 oz. Cool Whip (the fluffy stuff devoid of nutritional value that you can squirt all over your friends and lick off...) "Blend all together until creamy with no lumps." This is where you get to join(1) all the raw data in a big buffer and then filter it through merge(1m) with the -thick option, I mean, it starts out ultra lumpy and icky looking and you have to work hard to mix it. Try an electric beater if you have a cat(1) that can climb wall(1s) to lick it off the ceiling(3m). "Pour into a graham cracker crust..." Aha, the BUGS section at last. You just happened to have a GCC sitting around under /etc/food, right? If not, don't panic(8), merely crumble a rand(3m) handful of innocent GCs into a suitable tempfile and mix in some melted butter. "...and refrigerate for an hour." Leave the recipe's stdout in a fridge for 3.6E6 milliseconds while you work on cleaning up stderr, and by time out your cheesecake will be ready for stdin. | |
| If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants. -- Isaac Newton In the sciences, we are now uniquely priviledged to sit side by side with the giants on whose shoulders we stand. -- Gerald Holton If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders. -- Hal Abelson Mathematicians stand on each other's shoulders. -- Gauss Mathemeticians stand on each other's shoulders while computer scientists stand on each other's toes. -- Richard Hamming It has been said that physicists stand on one another's shoulders. If this is the case, then programmers stand on one another's toes, and software engineers dig each other's graves. -- Unknown | |
| In a surprise raid last night, federal agents ransacked a house in search of a rebel computer hacker. However, they were unable to complete the arrest because the warrant was made out in the name of Don Provan, while the only person in the house was named don provan. Proving, once again, that Unix is superior to Tops10. | |
| `Lasu' Releases SAG 0.3 -- Freeware Book Takes Paves For New World Order by staff writers ... The SAG is one of the major products developed via the Information Superhighway, the brain child of Al Gore, US Vice President. The ISHW is being developed with massive govenment funding, since studies show that it already has more than four hundred users, three years before the first prototypes are ready. Asked whether he was worried about the foreign influence in an expensive American Dream, the vice president said, ``Finland? Oh, we've already bought them, but we haven't told anyone yet. They're great at building model airplanes as well. And _I can spell potato.'' House representatives are not mollified, however, wanting to see the terms of the deal first, fearing another Alaska. Rumors about the SAG release have imbalanced the American stock market for weeks. Several major publishing houses reached an all time low in the New York Stock Exchange, while publicly competing for the publishing agreement with Mr. Wirzenius. The negotiations did not work out, tough. ``Not enough dough,'' says the author, although spokesmen at both Prentice-Hall and Playboy, Inc., claim the author was incapable of expressing his wishes in a coherent form during face to face talks, preferring to communicate via e-mail. ``He kept muttering something about jiffies and pegs,'' they say. ... -- Lars Wirzenius <wirzeniu@cs.helsinki.fi> [comp.os.linux.announce] | |
| Norbert Weiner was the subject of many dotty professor stories. Weiner was, in fact, very absent minded. The following story is told about him: when they moved from Cambridge to Newton his wife, knowing that he would be absolutely useless on the move, packed him off to MIT while she directed the move. Since she was certain that he would forget that they had moved and where they had moved to, she wrote down the new address on a piece of paper, and gave it to him. Naturally, in the course of the day, an insight occurred to him. He reached in his pocket, found a piece of paper on which he furiously scribbled some notes, thought it over, decided there was a fallacy in his idea, and threw the piece of paper away. At the end of the day he went home (to the old address in Cambridge, of course). When he got there he realized that they had moved, that he had no idea where they had moved to, and that the piece of paper with the address was long gone. Fortunately inspiration struck. There was a young girl on the street and he conceived the idea of asking her where he had moved to, saying, "Excuse me, perhaps you know me. I'm Norbert Weiner and we've just moved. Would you know where we've moved to?" To which the young girl replied, "Yes, Daddy, Mommy thought you would forget." The capper to the story is that I asked his daughter (the girl in the story) about the truth of the story, many years later. She said that it wasn't quite true -- that he never forgot who his children were! The rest of it, however, was pretty close to what actually happened... -- Richard Harter | |
| Okay, Okay -- I admit it. You didn't change that program that worked just a little while ago; I inserted some random characters into the executable. Please forgive me. You can recover the file by typing in the code over again, since I also removed the source. | |
| "Our attitude with TCP/IP is, `Hey, we'll do it, but don't make a big system, because we can't fix it if it breaks -- nobody can.'" "TCP/IP is OK if you've got a little informal club, and it doesn't make any difference if it takes a while to fix it." -- Ken Olson, in Digital News, 1988 | |
| The fountain code has been tightened slightly so you can no longer dip objects into a fountain or drink from one while you are floating in mid-air due to levitation. Teleporting to hell via a teleportation trap will no longer occur if the character does not have fire resistance. -- README file from the NetHack game | |
| THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #13: SLOBOL SLOBOL is best known for the speed, or lack of it, of its compiler. Although many compilers allow you to take a coffee break while they compile, SLOBOL compilers allow you to travel to Bolivia to pick the coffee. Forty-three programmers are known to have died of boredom sitting at their terminals while waiting for a SLOBOL program to compile. Weary SLOBOL programmers often turn to a related (but infinitely faster) language, COCAINE. | |
| THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #18: FIFTH FIFTH is a precision mathematical language in which the data types refer to quantity. The data types range from CC, OUNCE, SHOT, and JIGGER to FIFTH (hence the name of the language), LITER, MAGNUM and BLOTTO. Commands refer to ingredients such as CHABLIS, CHARDONNAY, CABERNET, GIN, VERMOUTH, VODKA, SCOTCH, and WHATEVERSAROUND. The many versions of the FIFTH language reflect the sophistication and financial status of its users. Commands in the ELITE dialect include VSOP and LAFITE, while commands in the GUTTER dialect include HOOTCH and RIPPLE. The latter is a favorite of frustrated FORTH programmers who end up using this language. | |
| THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #8: LAIDBACK This language was developed at the Marin County Center for T'ai Chi, Mellowness and Computer Programming (now defunct), as an alternative to the more intense atmosphere in nearby Silicon Valley. The center was ideal for programmers who liked to soak in hot tubs while they worked. Unfortunately few programmers could survive there because the center outlawed Pizza and Coca-Cola in favor of Tofu and Perrier. Many mourn the demise of LAIDBACK because of its reputation as a gentle and non-threatening language since all error messages are in lower case. For example, LAIDBACK responded to syntax errors with the message: "i hate to bother you, but i just can't relate to that. can you find the time to try it again?" | |
| The Magician of the Ivory Tower brought his latest invention for the master programmer to examine. The magician wheeled a large black box into the master's office while the master waited in silence. "This is an integrated, distributed, general-purpose workstation," began the magician, "ergonomically designed with a proprietary operating system, sixth generation languages, and multiple state of the art user interfaces. It took my assistants several hundred man years to construct. Is it not amazing?" The master raised his eyebrows slightly. "It is indeed amazing," he said. "Corporate Headquarters has commanded," continued the magician, "that everyone use this workstation as a platform for new programs. Do you agree to this?" "Certainly," replied the master, "I will have it transported to the data center immediately!" And the magician returned to his tower, well pleased. Several days later, a novice wandered into the office of the master programmer and said, "I cannot find the listing for my new program. Do you know where it might be?" "Yes," replied the master, "the listings are stacked on the platform in the data center." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming" | |
| The salesman and the system analyst took off to spend a weekend in the forest, hunting bear. They'd rented a cabin, and, when they got there, took their backpacks off and put them inside. At which point the salesman turned to his friend, and said, "You unpack while I go and find us a bear." Puzzled, the analyst finished unpacking and then went and sat down on the porch. Soon he could hear rustling noises in the forest. The noises got nearer -- and louder -- and suddenly there was the salesman, running like hell across the clearing toward the cabin, pursued by one of the largest and most ferocious grizzly bears the analyst had ever seen. "Open the door!", screamed the salesman. The analyst whipped open the door, and the salesman ran to the door, suddenly stopped, and stepped aside. The bear, unable to stop, continued through the door and into the cabin. The salesman slammed the door closed and grinned at his friend. "Got him!", he exclaimed, "now, you skin this one and I'll go rustle us up another!" | |
| The so-called "desktop metaphor" of today's workstations is instead an "airplane-seat" metaphor. Anyone who has shuffled a lap full of papers while seated between two portly passengers will recognize the difference -- one can see only a very few things at once. -- Fred Brooks | |
| There has also been some work to allow the interesting use of macro names. For example, if you wanted all of your "creat()" calls to include read permissions for everyone, you could say #define creat(file, mode) creat(file, mode | 0444) I would recommend against this kind of thing in general, since it hides the changed semantics of "creat()" in a macro, potentially far away from its uses. To allow this use of macros, the preprocessor uses a process that is worth describing, if for no other reason than that we get to use one of the more amusing terms introduced into the C lexicon. While a macro is being expanded, it is temporarily undefined, and any recurrence of the macro name is "painted blue" -- I kid you not, this is the official terminology -- so that in future scans of the text the macro will not be expanded recursively. (I do not know why the color blue was chosen; I'm sure it was the result of a long debate, spread over several meetings.) -- From Ken Arnold's "C Advisor" column in Unix Review | |
| "We invented a new protocol and called it Kermit, after Kermit the Frog, star of "The Muppet Show." [3] [3] Why? Mostly because there was a Muppets calendar on the wall when we were trying to think of a name, and Kermit is a pleasant, unassuming sort of character. But since we weren't sure whether it was OK to name our protocol after this popular television and movie star, we pretended that KERMIT was an acronym; unfortunately, we could never find a good set of words to go with the letters, as readers of some of our early source code can attest. Later, while looking through a name book for his forthcoming baby, Bill Catchings noticed that "Kermit" was a Celtic word for "free", which is what all Kermit programs should be, and words to this effect replaced the strained acronyms in our source code (Bill's baby turned out to be a girl, so he had to name her Becky instead). When BYTE Magazine was preparing our 1984 Kermit article for publication, they suggested we contact Henson Associates Inc. for permission to say that we did indeed name the protocol after Kermit the Frog. Permission was kindly granted, and now the real story can be told. I resisted the temptation, however, to call the present work "Kermit the Book." -- Frank da Cruz, "Kermit - A File Transfer Protocol" | |
| While there's life, there's hope. -- Publius Terentius Afer (Terence) | |
| The so-called "desktop metaphor" of today's workstations is instead an "airplane-seat" metaphor. Anyone who has shuffled a lap full of papers while seated between two portly passengers will recognize the difference -- one can see only a very few things at once. - Fred Brooks, Jr. | |
| Remember thee Ay, thou poor ghost while memory holds a seat In this distracted globe. Remember thee! Yea, from the table of my memory I'll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, That youth and observation copied there. Hamlet, I : v : 95 William Shakespeare | |
| It is not best to swap horses while crossing the river. -- Abraham Lincoln | |
| The vigor of civilized societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth-while. Vigorous societies harbor a certain extravagance of objectives, so that men wander beyond the safe provision of personal gratifications. All strong interests easily become impersonal, the love of a good job well done. There is a sense of harmony about such an accomplishment, the Peace brought by something worth-while. - Alfred North Whitehead, 1963, in "The History of Manned Space Flight" | |
| The best that we can do is to be kindly and helpful toward our friends and fellow passengers who are clinging to the same speck of dirt while we are drifting side by side to our common doom. - Clarence Darrow | |
| The fountain code has been tightened slightly so you can no longer dip objects into a fountain or drink from one while you are floating in mid-air due to levitation. Teleporting to hell via a teleportation trap will no longer occur if the character does not have fire resistance. - README file from the NetHack game | |
| Already the spirit of our schooling is permeated with the feeling that every subject, every topic, every fact, every professed truth must be submitted to a certain publicity and impartiality. All proffered samples of learning must go to the same assay-room and be subjected to common tests. It is the essence of all dogmatic faiths to hold that any such "show-down" is sacrilegious and perverse. The characteristic of religion, from their point of view, is that it is intellectually secret, not public; peculiarly revealed, not generall known; authoritatively declared, not communicated and tested in ordinary ways...It is pertinent to point out that, as long as religion is conceived as it is now by the great majority of professed religionists, there is something self-contradictory in speaking of education in religion in the same sense in which we speak of education in topics where the method of free inquiry has made its way. The "religious" would be the last to be willing that either the history of the content of religion should be taught in this spirit; while those to whom the scientific standpoint is not merely a technical device, but is the embodiment of the integrity of mind, must protest against its being taught in any other spirit. - John Dewey (1859-1953), American philosopher, from "Democracy in the Schools", 1908 | |
| While it cannot be proved retrospectively that any experience of possession, conversion, revelation, or divine ecstasy was merely an epileptic discharge, we must ask how one differentiates "real transcendence" from neuropathies that produce the same extreme realness, profundity, ineffability, and sense of cosmic unity. When accounts of sudden religious conversions in TLEs [temporal-lobe epileptics] are laid alongside the epiphanous revelations of the religious tradition, the parallels are striking. The same is true of the recent spate of alleged UFO abductees. Parsimony alone argues against invoking spirits, demons, or extraterrestrials when natural causes will suffice. -- Barry L. Beyerstein, "Neuropathology and the Legacy of Spiritual Possession", The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII, No. 3, pg. 255 | |
| "The mark of an immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one." -- William Stekel | |
| A good USENET motto would be: a. "Together, a strong community." b. "Computers R Us." c. "I'm sick of programming, I think I'll just screw around for a while on company time." -- A Sane Man | |
| Meekness: Uncommon patience in planning a revenge that is worth while. -- Ambrose Bierce | |
| "...I could accept this openness, glasnost, perestroika, or whatever you want to call it if they did these things: abolish the one party system; open the Soviet frontier and allow Soviet people to travel freely; allow the Soviet people to have real free enterprise; allow Western businessmen to do business there, and permit freedom of speech and of the press. But so far, the whole country is like a concentration camp. The barbed wire on the fence around the Soviet Union is to keep people inside, in the dark. This openness that you are seeing, all these changes, are cosmetic and they have been designed to impress shortsighted, naive, sometimes stupid Western leaders. These leaders gush over Gorbachev, hoping to do business with the Soviet Union or appease it. He will say: "Yes, we can do business!" This while his military machine in Afghanistan has killed over a million people out of a population of 17 million. Can you imagine that? -- Victor Belenko, MiG-25 fighter pilot who defected in 1976 "Defense Electronics", Vol 20, No. 6, pg. 110 | |
| "Laugh while you can, monkey-boy." -- Dr. Emilio Lizardo | |
| Be it our wealth, our jobs, or even our homes; nothing is safe while the legislature is in session. | |
| 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 | |
| It took a while to surface, but it appears that a long-distance credit card may have saved a U.S. Army unit from heavy casualties during the Grenada military rescue/invasion. Major General David Nichols, Air Force ... said the Army unit was in a house surrounded by Cuban forces. One soldier found a telephone and, using his credit card, called Ft. Bragg, N.C., telling Army officiers there of the perilous situation. The officers in turn called the Air Force, which sent in gunships to scatter the Cubans and relieve the unit. -- Aviation Week and Space Technology | |
| The Least Successful Executions History has furnished us with two executioners worthy of attention. The first performed in Sydney in Australia. In 1803 three attempts were made to hang a Mr. Joseph Samuels. On the first two of these the rope snapped, while on the third Mr. Samuels just hung there peacefully until he and everyone else got bored. Since he had proved unsusceptible to capital punishment, he was reprieved. The most important British executioner was Mr. James Berry who tried three times in 1885 to hang Mr. John Lee at Exeter Jail, but on each occasion failed to get the trap door open. In recognition of this achievement, the Home Secretary commuted Lee's sentence to "life" imprisonment. He was released in 1917, emigrated to America and lived until 1933. -- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures" | |
| The Least Successful Police Dogs America has a very strong candidate in "La Dur", a fearsome looking schnauzer hound, who was retired from the Orlando police force in Florida in 1978. He consistently refused to do anything which might ruffle or offend the criminal classes. His handling officer, Rick Grim, had to admit: "He just won't go up and bite them. I got sick and tired of doing that dog's work for him." The British contenders in this category, however, took things a stage further. "Laddie" and "Boy" were trained as detector dogs for drug raids. Their employment was terminated following a raid in the Midlands in 1967. While the investigating officer questioned two suspects, they patted and stroked the dogs who eventually fell asleep in front of the fire. When the officer moved to arrest the suspects, one dog growled at him while the other leapt up and bit his thigh. -- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures" | |
| The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one. -- Wilhelm Stekel | |
| Treaties are like roses and young girls -- they last while they last. -- Charles DeGaulle | |
| 18th Rule of Friendship: A friend will let you hold the ladder while he goes up on the roof to install your new aerial, which is the biggest son-of-a-bitch you ever saw. -- Esquire, May 1977 | |
| Ambition, n: An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead. -- Ambrose Bierce | |
| Clovis' Consideration of an Atmospheric Anomaly: The perversity of nature is nowhere better demonstrated than by the fact that, when exposed to the same atmosphere, bread becomes hard while crackers become soft. | |
| flowchart, n. & v.: [From flow "to ripple down in rich profusion, as hair" + chart "a cryptic hidden-treasure map designed to mislead the uninitiated."] 1. n. The solution, if any, to a class of Mascheroni construction problems in which given algorithms require geometrical representation using only the 35 basic ideograms of the ANSI template. 2. n. Neronic doodling while the system burns. 3. n. A low-cost substitute for wallpaper. 4. n. The innumerate misleading the illiterate. "A thousand pictures is worth ten lines of code." -- The Programmer's Little Red Vade Mecum, Mao Tse T'umps. 5. v.intrans. To produce flowcharts with no particular object in mind. 6. v.trans. To obfuscate (a problem) with esoteric cartoons. -- Stan Kelly-Bootle, "The Devil's DP Dictionary" | |
| hacker, n.: Originally, any person with a knack for coercing stubborn inanimate things; hence, a person with a happy knack, later contracted by the mythical philosopher Frisbee Frobenius to the common usage, 'hack'. In olden times, upon completion of some particularly atrocious body of coding that happened to work well, culpable programmers would gather in a small circle around a first edition of Knuth's Best Volume I by candlelight, and proceed to get very drunk while sporadically rending the following ditty: Hacker's Fight Song He's a Hack! He's a Hack! He's a guy with the happy knack! Never bungles, never shirks, Always gets his stuff to work! All take a drink (important!) | |
| Heaven, n.: A place where the wicked cease from troubling you with talk of their personal affairs, and the good listen with attention while you expound your own. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" | |
| Hitchcock's Staple Principle: The stapler runs out of staples only while you are trying to staple something. | |
| Jacquin's Postulate on Democratic Government: No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session. | |
| life, n.: A whim of several billion cells to be you for a while. | |
| Programming Department: Mistakes made while you wait. | |
| Reception area, n.: The purgatory where office visitors are condemned to spend innumerable hours reading dog-eared back issues of trade magazines like Modern Plastics, Chain Saw Age, and Chicken World, while the receptionist blithely reads her own trade magazine -- Cosmopolitan. | |
| Rules for driving in New York: (1) Anything done while honking your horn is legal. (2) You may park anywhere if you turn your four-way flashers on. (3) A red light means the next six cars may go through the intersection. | |
| The rules: (1) Thou shalt not worship other computer systems. (2) Thou shalt not impersonate Liberace or eat watermelon while sitting at the console keyboard. (3) Thou shalt not slap users on the face, nor staple their silly little card decks together. (4) Thou shalt not get physically involved with the computer system, especially if you're already married. (5) Thou shalt not use magnetic tapes as frisbees, nor use a disk pack as a stool to reach another disk pack. (6) Thou shalt not stare at the blinking lights for more than one eight hour shift. (7) Thou shalt not tell users that you accidentally destroyed their files/backup just to see the look on their little faces. (8) Thou shalt not enjoy cancelling a job. (9) Thou shalt not display firearms in the computer room. (10) Thou shalt not push buttons "just to see what happens". | |
| Weinberg's Principle: An expert is a person who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy. | |
| write-protect tab, n.: A small sticker created to cover the unsightly notch carelessly left by disk manufacturers. The use of the tab creates an error message once in a while, but its aesthetic value far outweighs the momentary inconvenience. -- Robb Russon | |
| All the really good ideas I ever had came to me while I was milking a cow. -- Grant Wood | |
| [I plan] to see, hear, touch, and destroy everything in my path, including beets, rutabagas, and most random vegetables, but excluding yams, as I am absolutely terrified of yams... Actually, I think my fear of yams began in my early youth, when many of my young comrades pelted me with same for singing songs of far-off lands and deep blue seas in a language closely resembling that of the common sow. My psychosis was further impressed into my soul as I reached adolescence, when, while skipping through a field of yams, light-heartedly tossing flowers into the stratosphere, a great yam-picking machine tore through the fields, pursuing me to the edge of the great plantation, where I escaped by diving into a great ditch filled with a mixture of water and pig manure, which may explain my tendency to scream, "Here come the Martians! Hide the eggs!" every time I have pork. But I digress. The fact remains that I cannot rationally deal with yams, and pigs are terrible conversationalists. | |
| Pardon me while I laugh. | |
| Sailors in ships, sail on! Even while we died, others rode out the storm. | |
| It's useless to try to hold some people to anything they say while they're madly in love, drunk, or running for office. | |
| One dusty July afternoon, somewhere around the turn of the century, Patrick Malone was in Mulcahey's Bar, bending an elbow with the other street car conductors from the Brooklyn Traction Company. While they were discussing the merits of a local ring hero, the bar goes silent. Malone turns around to see his wife, with a face grim as death, stalking to the bar. Slapping a four-bit piece down on the bar, she draws herself up to her full five feet five inches and says to Mulcahey, "Give me what himself has been havin' all these years." Mulcahey looks at Malone, who shrugs, and then back at Margaret Mary Malone. He sets out a glass and pours her a triple shot of Rye. The bar is totally silent as they watch the woman pick up the glass and knock back the drink. She slams the glass down on the bar, gasps, shudders slightly, and passes out; falling straight back, stiff as a board, saved from sudden contact with the barroom floor by the ample belly of Seamus Fogerty. Sometime later, she comes to on the pool table, a jacket under her head. Her bloodshot eyes fell upon her husband, who says, "And all these years you've been thinkin' I've been enjoying meself." | |
| Symptom: Feet cold and wet, glass empty. Fault: Glass being held at incorrect angle. Action Required: Turn glass other way up so that open end points toward ceiling. Symptom: Feet warm and wet. Fault: Improper bladder control. Action Required: Go stand next to nearest dog. After a while complain to the owner about its lack of house training and demand a beer as compensation. -- Bar Troubleshooting | |
| While riding in a train between London and Birmingham, a woman inquired of Oscar Wilde, "You don't mind if I smoke, do you?" Wilde gave her a sidelong glance and replied, "I don't mind if you burn, madam." | |
| Q: How many bureaucrats does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Two. One to assure everyone that everything possible is being done while the other screws the bulb into the water faucet. | |
| Q: Why don't Scotsmen ever have coffee the way they like it? A: Well, they like it with two lumps of sugar. If they drink it at home, they only take one, and if they drink it while visiting, they always take three. | |
| Q: Why is Poland just like the United States? A: In the United States you can't buy anything for zlotys and in Poland you can't either, while in the U.S. you can get whatever you want for dollars, just as you can in Poland. -- being told in Poland, 1987 | |
| If while you are in school, there is a shortage of qualified personnel in a particular field, then by the time you graduate with the necessary qualifications, that field's employment market is glutted. -- Marguerite Emmons | |
| In a forest a fox bumps into a little rabbit, and says, "Hi, Junior, what are you up to?" "I'm writing a dissertation on how rabbits eat foxes," said the rabbit. "Come now, friend rabbit, you know that's impossible! No one will publish such rubbish!" "Well, follow me and I'll show you." They both go into the rabbit's dwelling and after a while the rabbit emerges with a satisfied expression on his face. Comes along a wolf. "Hello, little buddy, what are we doing these days?" "I'm writing the 2'nd chapter of my thesis, on how rabbits devour wolves." "Are you crazy? Where's your academic honesty?" "Come with me and I'll show you." As before, the rabbit comes out with a satisfied look on his face and a diploma in his paw. Finally, the camera pans into the rabbit's cave and, as everybody should have guessed by now, we see a mean-looking, huge lion, sitting, picking his teeth and belching, next to some furry, bloody remnants of the wolf and the fox. The moral: It's not the contents of your thesis that are important -- it's your PhD advisor that really counts. | |
| Rules for Good Grammar #4. (1) Don't use no double negatives. (2) Make each pronoun agree with their antecedents. (3) Join clauses good, like a conjunction should. (4) About them sentence fragments. (5) When dangling, watch your participles. (6) Verbs has got to agree with their subjects. (7) Just between you and i, case is important. (8) Don't write run-on sentences when they are hard to read. (9) Don't use commas, which aren't necessary. (10) Try to not ever split infinitives. (11) It is important to use your apostrophe's correctly. (12) Proofread your writing to see if you any words out. (13) Correct speling is essential. (14) A preposition is something you never end a sentence with. (15) While a transcendant vocabulary is laudable, one must be eternally careful so that the calculated objective of communication does not become ensconsed in obscurity. In other words, eschew obfuscation. | |
| A prominent broadcaster, on a big-game safari in Africa, was taken to a watering hole where the life of the jungle could be observed. As he looked down from his tree platform and described the scene into his tape recorder, he saw two gnus grazing peacefully. So preoccupied were they that they failed to observe the approach of a pride of lions led by two magnificent specimens, obviously the leaders. The lions charged, killed the gnus, and dragged them into the bushes where their feasting could not be seen. A little while later the two kings of the jungle emerged and the radioman recorded on his tape: "Well, that's the end of the gnus and here, once again, are the head lions." | |
| Journalism will kill you, but it will keep you alive while you're at it. | |
| Reporters like Bill Greider from the Washington Post and Him Naughton of the New York Times, for instance, had to file long, detailed, and relatively complex stories every day -- while my own deadline fell every two weeks -- but neither of them ever seemed in a hurry about getting their work done, and from time to time they would try to console me about the terrible pressure I always seemed to be laboring under. Any $100-an-hour psychiatrist could probably explain this problem to me, in thirteen or fourteen sessions, but I don't have time for that. No doubt it has something to do with a deep-seated personality defect, or maybe a kink in whatever blood vessel leads into the pineal gland... On the other hand, it might be something as simple & basically perverse as whatever instinct it is that causes a jackrabbit to wait until the last possible second to dart across the road in front of a speeding car. -- Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail" | |
| A mathematician, a doctor, and an engineer are walking on the beach and observe a team of lifeguards pumping the stomach of a drowned woman. As they watch, water, sand, snails and such come out of the pump. The doctor watches for a while and says: "Keep pumping, men, you may yet save her!!" The mathematician does some calculations and says: "According to my understanding of the size of that pump, you have already pumped more water from her body than could be contained in a cylinder 4 feet in diameter and 6 feet high." The engineer says: "I think she's sitting in a puddle." | |
| And the French medical anatomist Etienne Serres really did argue that black males are primitive because the distance between their navel and penis remains small (relative to body height) throughout life, while white children begin with a small separation but increase it during growth -- the rising belly button as a mark of progress. -- S.J. Gould, "Racism and Recapitulation" | |
| Back in the early 60's, touch tone phones only had 10 buttons. Some military versions had 16, while the 12 button jobs were used only by people who had "diva" (digital inquiry, voice answerback) systems -- mainly banks. Since in those days, only Western Electric made "data sets" (modems) the problems of terminology were all Bell System. We used to struggle with written descriptions of dial pads that were unfamiliar to most people (most phones were rotary then.) Partly in jest, some AT&T engineering types (there was no marketing in the good old days, which is why they were the good old days) made up the term "octalthorpe" (note spelling) to denote the "pound sign." Presumably because it has 8 points sticking out. It never really caught on. | |
| Electricity is actually made up of extremely tiny particles, called electrons, that you cannot see with the naked eye unless you have been drinking. Electrons travel at the speed of light, which in most American homes is 110 volts per hour. This is very fast. In the time it has taken you to read this sentence so far, an electron could have traveled all the way from San Francisco to Hackensack, New Jersey, although God alone knows why it would want to. The five main kinds of electricity are alternating current, direct current, lightning, static, and European. Most American homes have alternating current, which means that the electricity goes in one direction for a while, then goes in the other direction. This prevents harmful electron buildup in the wires. -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw" | |
| Everyone knows that dragons don't exist. But while this simplistic formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific mind. The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact wholly unconcerned with what ____does exist. Indeed, the banality of existence has been so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to discuss it any further here. The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical. They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each nonexisted in an entirely different way ... -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad" | |
| For God's sake, stop researching for a while and begin to think! | |
| FORTUNE'S FUN FACTS TO KNOW AND TELL: #1 A guinea pig is not from Guinea but a rodent from South America. A firefly is not a fly, but a beetle. A giant panda bear is really a member of the racoon family. A black panther is really a leopard that has a solid black coat rather then a spotted one. Peanuts are not really nuts. The majority of nuts grow on trees while peauts grow underground. They are classified as a legume -- part of the pea family. A cucumber is not a vegetable but a fruit. | |
| (German philosopher) Georg Wilhelm Hegel, on his deathbed, complained, "Only one man ever understood me." He fell silent for a while and then added, "And he didn't understand me." | |
| Life is a biochemical reaction to the stimulus of the surrounding environment in a stable ecosphere, while a bowl of cherries is a round container filled with little red fruits on sticks. | |
| Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while. | |
| Of course you can't flap your arms and fly to the moon. After a while you'd run out of air to push against. | |
| Once upon a time, when I was training to be a mathematician, a group of us bright young students taking number theory discovered the names of the smaller prime numbers. 2: The Odd Prime -- It's the only even prime, therefore is odd. QED. 3: The True Prime -- Lewis Carroll: "If I tell you 3 times, it's true." 31: The Arbitrary Prime -- Determined by unanimous unvote. We needed an arbitrary prime in case the prof asked for one, and so had an election. 91 received the most votes (well, it *looks* prime) and 3+4i the next most. However, 31 was the only candidate to receive none at all. 41: The Female Prime -- The polynomial X**2 - X + 41 is prime for integer values from 1 to 40. 43: The Male Prime - they form a prime pair. Since the composite numbers are formed from primes, their qualities are derived from those primes. So, for instance, the number 6 is "odd but true", while the powers of 2 are all extremely odd numbers. | |
| So as your consumer electronics adviser, I am advising you to donate your current VCR to a grate resident, who will laugh sardonically and hurl it into a dumpster. Then I want you to go out and purchase a vast array of 8-millimeter video equipment. ... OK! Got everything? Well, *too bad, sucker*, because while you were gone the electronics industry came up with an even newer format that makes your 8-millimeter VCR look as technologically advanced as toenail dirt. This format is called "3.5 hectare" and it will not be made available until it is outmoded, sometime early next week, by a format called "Elroy", so *order yours now*. -- Dave Barry, "No Surrender in the Electronics Revolution" | |
| The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship. -- Robert Heinlein | |
| The perversity of nature is nowhere better demonstrated by the fact that, when exposed to the same atmosphere, bread becomes hard while crackers become soft. | |
| "There are three principal ways to lose money: wine, women, and engineers. While the first two are more pleasant, the third is by far the more certain." -- Baron Rothschild, ca. 1800 | |
| While the engineer developed his thesis, the director leaned over to his assistant and whispered, "Did you ever hear of why the sea is salt?" "Why the sea is salt?" whispered back the assistant. "What do you mean?" The director continued: "When I was a little kid, I heard the story of `Why the sea is salt' many times, but I never thought it important until just a moment ago. It's something like this: Formerly the sea was fresh water and salt was rare and expensive. A miller received from a wizard a wonderful machine that just ground salt out of itself all day long. At first the miller thought himself the most fortunate man in the world, but soon all the villages had salt to last them for centuries and still the machine kept on grinding more salt. The miller had to move out of his house, he had to move off his acres. At last he determined that he would sink the machine in the sea and be rid of it. But the mill ground so fast that boat and miller and machine were sunk together, and down below, the mill still went on grinding and that's why the sea is salt." "I don't get you," said the assistant. -- Guy Endore, "Men of Iron" | |
| Now that you've read Fortune's diet truths, you'll be prepared the next time some housewife or boutique-owner-turned-diet-expert appears on TV to plug her latest book. And, if you still feel a twinge of guilt for eating coffee cake while listening to her exhortations, ask yourself the following questions: (1) Do I dare trust a person who actually considers alfalfa sprouts a food? (2) Was the author's sole motive in writing this book to get rich exploiting the forlorn hopes of chubby people like me? (3) Would a longer life be worthwhile if it had to be lived as prescribed ... without French-fried onion rings, pizza with double cheese, or the occasional Mai-Tai? (Remember, living right doesn't really make you live longer, it just *seems* like longer.) That, and another piece of coffee cake, should do the trick. | |
| Remember, DESSERT is spelled with two `s's while DESERT is spelled with one, because EVERYONE wants two desserts, but NO ONE wants two deserts. -- Miss Oglethorp, Gr. 5, PS. 59 | |
| The men sat sipping their tea in silence. After a while the klutz said, "Life is like a bowl of sour cream." "Like a bowl of sour cream?" asked the other. "Why?" "How should I know? What am I, a philosopher?" | |
| While it may be true that a watched pot never boils, the one you don't keep an eye on can make an awful mess of your stove. -- Edward Stevenson | |
| A is for awk, which runs like a snail, and B is for biff, which reads all your mail. C is for cc, as hackers recall, while D is for dd, the command that does all. E is for emacs, which rebinds your keys, and F is for fsck, which rebuilds your trees. G is for grep, a clever detective, while H is for halt, which may seem defective. I is for indent, which rarely amuses, and J is for join, which nobody uses. K is for kill, which makes you the boss, while L is for lex, which is missing from DOS. M is for more, from which less was begot, and N is for nice, which it really is not. O is for od, which prints out things nice, while P is for passwd, which reads in strings twice. Q is for quota, a Berkeley-type fable, and R is for ranlib, for sorting ar table. S is for spell, which attempts to belittle, while T is for true, which does very little. U is for uniq, which is used after sort, and V is for vi, which is hard to abort. W is for whoami, which tells you your name, while X is, well, X, of dubious fame. Y is for yes, which makes an impression, and Z is for zcat, which handles compression. -- THE ABC'S OF UNIX | |
| After a while you learn the subtle difference Between holding a hand and chaining a soul, And you learn that love doesn't mean security, And you begin to learn that kisses aren't contracts And presents aren't promises And you begin to accept your defeats With your head up and your eyes open, With the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child, And you learn to build all your roads On today because tomorrow's ground Is too uncertain. And futures have A way of falling down in midflight, After a while you learn that even sunshine burns if you get too much. So you plant your own garden and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting For someone to bring you flowers. And you learn that you really can endure... That you really are strong, And you really do have worth And you learn and learn With every goodbye you learn. -- Veronic Shoffstall, "Comes the Dawn" | |
| Beneath this stone lies Murphy, They buried him today, He lived the life of Riley, While Riley was away. | |
| Blackout, heatwave, .44 caliber homicide, The bums drop dead and the dogs go mad in packs on the West Side, A young girl standing on a ledge, looks like another suicide, She wants to hit those bricks, 'cause the news at six got to stick to a deadline, While the millionaires hide in Beekman place, The bag ladies throw their bones in my face, I get attacked by a kid with stereo sound, I don't want to hear it but he won't turn it down... -- Billy Joel, "Glass Houses" | |
| But has any little atom, While a-sittin' and a-splittin', Ever stopped to think or CARE That E = m c**2 ? | |
| Down to the Banana Republics, Down to the tropical sun. Go the expatriated Americans, Hoping to find some fun. Some of them go for the sailing, Caught by the lure of the sea. Trying to find what is ailing, Living in the land of the free. Some of them are running from lovers, Leaving no forward address. Some of them are running tons of ganja, Some are running from the IRS. Late at night you will find them, In the cheap hotels and bars. Hustling the senoritas, While they dance beneath the stars. -- Jimmy Buffet, "Banana Republics" | |
| Flying saucers on occasion Show themselves to human eyes. Aliens fume, put off invasion While they brand these tales as lies. | |
| Hit them biscuits with another touch of gravy, Burn that sausage just a match or two more done. Pour my black old coffee longer, While that smell is gettin' stronger A semi-meal ain't nuthin' much to want. Loan me ten, I got a feelin' it'll save me, With an ornery soul who don't shoot pool for fun, If that coat'll fit you're wearin', The Lord'll bless your sharin' A semi-friend ain't nuthin' much to want. And let me halfway fall in love, For part of a lonely night, With a semi-pretty woman in my arms. Yes, I could halfway fall in deep-- Into a snugglin', lovin' heap, With a semi-pretty woman in my arms. -- Elroy Blunt | |
| How doth the VAX's C-compiler Improve its object code. And even as we speak does it Increase the system load. How patiently it seems to run And spit out error flags, While users, with frustration, all Tear their clothes to rags. | |
| I had an errand there: gathering water-lilies, green leaves and lilies white to please my pretty lady, the last ere the year's end to keep them from the winter, to flower by her pretty feet till the snows are melted. Each year at summer's end I go to find them for her, in a wide pool, deep and clear, far down Withywindle; there they open first in spring and there they linger latest. By that pool long ago I found the River-daughter, fair young Goldberry sitting in the rushes. Sweet was her singing then, and her heart was beating! And that proved well for you--for now I shall no longer go down deep again along the forest-water, no while the year is old. Nor shall I be passing Old Man Willow's house this side of spring-time, not till the merry spring, when the River-daughter dances down the withy-path to bathe in the water. -- J. R. R. Tolkien | |
| In high school in Brooklyn I was the baseball manager, proud as I could be I chased baseballs, gathered thrown bats handed out the towels Eventually, I bought my own It was very important work but it was dark blue while for a small spastic kid, the official ones were green but I was a team member Nobody ever said anything When the team got to me about my blue jacket; their warm-up jackets the guys were my friends I didn't get one Yet it hurt me all year Only the regular team to wear that blue jacket got these jackets, and among all those green ones surely not a manager Even now, forty years after, I still recall that jacket and the memory goes on hurting. -- Bart Lanier Safford III, "An Obscured Radiance" | |
| John the Baptist after poisoning a thief, Looks up at his hero, the Commander-in-Chief, Saying tell me great leader, but please make it brief Is there a hole for me to get sick in? The Commander-in-Chief answers him while chasing a fly, Saying death to all those who would whimper and cry. And dropping a barbell he points to the sky, Saying the sun is not yellow, it's chicken. -- Bob Dylan, "Tombstone Blues" | |
| Let us go then you and I while the night is laid out against the sky like a smear of mustard on an old pork pie. "Nice poem Tom. I have ideas for changes though, why not come over?" -- Ezra | |
| Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. -- John Lennon, "Beautiful Boy" | |
| Lighten up, while you still can, Don't even try to understand, Just find a place to make your stand, And take it easy. -- The Eagles, "Take It Easy" | |
| Nature to all things fixed the limits fit, And wisely curbed proud man's pretending wit. As on the land while here the ocean gains, In other parts it leaves wide sandy plains; Thus in the soul while memory prevails, The solid power of understanding fails; Where beams of warm imagination play, The memory's soft figures melt away. -- Alexander Pope (on runtime bounds checking?) | |
| No plain fanfold paper could hold that fractal Puff -- He grew so fast no plotting pack could shrink him far enough. Compiles and simulations grew so quickly tame And swapped out all their data space when Puff pushed his stack frame. (refrain) Puff, he grew so quickly, while others moved like snails And mini-Puffs would perch themselves on his gigantic tail. All the student hackers loved that fractal Puff But DCS did not like Puff, and finally said, "Enough!" (refrain) Puff used more resources than DCS could spare. The operator killed Puff's job -- he didn't seem to care. A gloom fell on the hackers; it seemed to be the end, But Puff trapped the exception, and grew from naught again! (refrain) Refrain: Puff the fractal dragon was written in C, And frolicked while processes switched in mainframe memory. Puff the fractal dragon was written in C, And frolicked while processes switched in mainframe memory. | |
| Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth, And danced the skies on laughter silvered wings; Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth Of sun-split clouds and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of -- Wheeled and soared and swung High in the sunlit silence. Hovering there I've chased the shouting wind along and flung My eager craft through footless halls of air. Up, up along delirious, burning blue I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace, Where never lark, or even eagle flew; And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod The high untrespassed sanctity of space, Put out my hand, and touched the face of God. -- John Gillespie Magee Jr., "High Flight" | |
| Once upon this midnight incoherent, While you pondered sentient and crystalline, Over many a broken and subordinate Volume of gnarly lore, While I pestered, nearly singing, Sudddenly there came a hewing, As of someone profusely skulking, Skulking at my chamber door. | |
| Proposed Country & Western Song Titles I Don't Mind If You Lie to Me, As Long As I Ain't Lyin' Alone I Wouldn't Take You to a Dog Fight Even If I Thought You Could Win If You Leave Me, Walk Out Backwards So I'll Think You're Comin' In Since You Learned to Lip-Sync, I'm At Your Disposal My John Deere Was Breaking Your Field, While Your Dear John Was Breaking My Heart Don't Cry, Little Darlin', You're Waterin' My Beer Tennis Must Be Your Racket, 'Cause Love Means Nothin' to You When You Say You Love Me, You're Full of Prunes, 'Cause Living With You Is the Pits I Wanted Your Hand in Marriage but All I Got Was the Finger -- "Wordplay" | |
| Remember thee Ay, thou poor ghost while memory holds a seat In this distracted globe. Remember thee! Yea, from the table of my memory I'll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, That youth and observation copied there. -- William Shakespeare, "Hamlet" | |
| Take a look around you, tell me what you see, A girl who thinks she's ordinary lookin' she has got the key. If you can get close enough to look into her eyes There's something special right behind the bitterness she hides. And you're fair game, You never know what she'll decide, you're fair game, Just relax, enjoy the ride. Find a way to reach her, make yourself a fool, But do it with a little class, disregard the rules. 'Cause this one knows the bottom line, couldn't get a date. The ugly duckling striking back, and she'll decide her fate. (chorus) The ones you never notice are the ones you have to watch. She's pleasant and she's friendly while she's looking at your crotch. Try your hand at conversation, gossip is a lie, And sure enough she'll take you home and make you wanna die. (chorus) -- Crosby, Stills, Nash, "Fair Game" | |
| The garden is in mourning; The rain falls cool among the flowers. Summer shivers quietly On its way towards its end. Golden leaf after leaf Falls from the tall acacia. Summer smiles, astonished, feeble, In this dying dream of a garden. For a long while, yet, in the roses, She will linger on, yearning for peace, And slowly Close her weary eyes. -- Hermann Hesse, "September" | |
| The Worst Lines of Verse For a start, we can rule out James Grainger's promising line: "Come, muse, let us sing of rats." Grainger (1721-67) did not have the courage of his convictions and deleted these words on discovering that his listeners dissolved into spontaneous laughter the instant they were read out. No such reluctance afflicted Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833-70) who was inspired by the subject of war. "Flash! flash! bang! bang! and we blazed away, And the grey roof reddened and rang; Flash! flash! and I felt his bullet flay The tip of my ear. Flash! bang!" By contrast, Cheshire cheese provoked John Armstrong (1709-79): "... that which Cestria sends, tenacious paste of solid milk..." While John Bidlake was guided by a compassion for vegetables: "The sluggard carrot sleeps his day in bed, The crippled pea alone that cannot stand." George Crabbe (1754-1832) wrote: "And I was ask'd and authorized to go To seek the firm of Clutterbuck and Co." William Balmford explored the possibilities of religious verse: "So 'tis with Christians, Nature being weak While in this world, are liable to leak." And William Wordsworth showed that he could do it if he really tried when describing a pond: "I've measured it from side to side; Tis three feet long and two feet wide." -- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures" | |
| Those who sweat in flames of hell, Leaden eared, some thought their bowels Here's the reason that they fell: Lispeth forth the sweetest vowels. While on earth they prayed in SAS, These they offered up in praise PL/1, or other crass, Thinking all this fetid haze Vulgar tongue. A rapsody sung. Some the lord did sorely try Jabber of the mindless horde Assembling all their pleas in hex. Sequel next did mock the lord Speech as crabbed as devil's crable Slothful sequel so enfangled Hex that marked on Tower Babel Its speaker's lips became entangled The highest rung. In his bung. Because in life they prayed so ill And offered god such swinish swill Now they sweat in flames of hell Sweat from lack of APL Sweat dung! | |
| "Twas bergen and the eirie road Did mahwah into patterson: "Beware the Hopatcong, my son! All jersey were the ocean groves, The teeth that bite, the nails And the red bank bayonne. that claw! Beware the bound brook bird, and shun He took his belmar blade in hand: The kearney communipaw." Long time the folsom foe he sought Till rested he by a bayway tree And, as in nutley thought he stood, And stood a while in thought. The Hopatcong with eyes of flame, Came whippany through the englewood, One, two, one, two, and through And garfield as it came. and through The belmar blade went hackensack! "And hast thou slain the Hopatcong? He left it dead and with it's head Come to my arms, my perth amboy! He went weehawken back. Hohokus day! Soho! Rahway!" He caldwell in his joy. Did mahwah into patterson: All jersey were the ocean groves, And the red bank bayonne. -- Paul Kieffer | |
| 'Twas the night before crisis, and all through the house, Not a program was working not even a browse. The programmers were wrung out too mindless to care, Knowing chances of cutover hadn't a prayer. The users were nestled all snug in their beds, While visions of inquiries danced in their heads. When out in the lobby there arose such a clatter, I sprang from my tube to see what was the matter. And what to my wondering eyes should appear, But a Super Programmer, oblivious to fear. More rapid than eagles, his programs they came, And he whistled and shouted and called them by name; On Update! On Add! On Inquiry! On Delete! On Batch Jobs! On Closing! On Functions Complete! His eyes were glazed over, his fingers were lean, From Weekends and nights in front of a screen. A wink of his eye, and a twist of his head, Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread... -- "Twas the Night before Crisis" | |
| Two men looked out from the prison bars, One saw mud-- The other saw stars. Now let me get this right: two prisoners are looking out the window. While one of them was looking at all the mud -- the other one got hit in the head. | |
| What segment's this, that, laid to rest On FHA0, is sleeping? What system file, lay here a while This, this is "acct.run," While hackers around it were weeping? Accounting file for everyone. Dump, dump it and type it out, The file, the highseg of login. Why lies it here, on public disk And why is it now unprotected? A bug in incant, made it thus. Mount, mount all your DECtapes now And copy the file somehow, somehow. The problem has not been corrected. Dump, dump it and type it out, The file, the highseg of login. -- to Greensleeves | |
| When users see one GUI as beautiful, other user interfaces become ugly. When users see some programs as winners, other programs become lossage. Pointers and NULLs reference each other. High level and assembler depend on each other. Double and float cast to each other. High-endian and low-endian define each other. While and until follow each other. Therefore the Guru programs without doing anything and teaches without saying anything. Warnings arise and he lets them come; processes are swapped and he lets them go. He has but doesn't possess, acts but doesn't expect. When his work is done, he deletes it. That is why it lasts forever. | |
| While Europe's eye is fix'd on mighty things, The fate of empires and the fall of kings; While quacks of State must each produce his plan, And even children lisp the Rights of Man; Amid this mighty fuss just let me mention, The Rights of Woman merit some attention. -- Robert Burns, Address on "The Rights of Woman", 26/10 1792 | |
| While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. -- Edgar Allan Poe, "The Raven" [Quoted in "VMS Internals and Data Structures", V4.4, when referring to hardware interrupts.] And now I see with eye serene The very pulse of the machine. -- William Wordsworth, "She Was a Phantom of Delight" [Quoted in "VMS Internals and Data Structures", V4.4, when referring to software interrupts.] | |
| While walking down a crowded City street the other day, I heard a little urchin To a comrade turn and say, "Say, Chimmey, lemme tell youse, I'd be happy as a clam If only I was de feller dat Me mudder t'inks I am. "She t'inks I am a wonder, My friends, be yours a life of toil An' she knows her little lad Or undiluted joy, Could never mix wit' nuttin' You can learn a wholesome lesson Dat was ugly, mean or bad. From that small, untutored boy. Oh, lot o' times I sit and t'ink Don't aim to be an earthly saint How nice, 'twould be, gee whiz! With eyes fixed on a star: If a feller was de feller Just try to be the fellow that Dat his mudder t'inks he is." Your mother thinks you are. -- Will S. Adkin, "If I Only Was the Fellow" | |
| Why are you watching The washing machine? I love entertainment So long as it's clean. Professor Doberman: While the preceding poem is unarguably a change from the guarded pessimism of "The Hound of Heaven," it cannot be regarded as an unqualified improvement. Obscurity is of value only when it tends to clarify the poetic experience. As much as one is compelled to admire the poem's technique, one must question whether its byplay of complex literary allusions does not in fact distract from the unity of the whole. In the final analysis, one receives the distinct impression that the poem's length could safely have been reduced by a factor of eight or ten without sacrificing any of its meaning. It is to be hoped that further publication of this poem can be suspended pending a thorough investigation of its potential subversive implications. | |
| Be cheerful while you are alive. -- Phathotep, 24th Century B.C. | |
| Better hope the life-inspector doesn't come around while you have your life in such a mess. | |
| Don't go surfing in South Dakota for a while. | |
| Stay away from hurricanes for a while. | |
| While you recently had your problems on the run, they've regrouped and are making another attack. | |
| Your object is to save the world, while still leading a pleasant life. | |
| COONDOG MEMORY (heard in Rutledge, Missouri, about eighteen years ago) Now, this dog is for sale, and she can not only follow a trail twice as old as the average dog can, but she's got a pretty good memory to boot. For instance, last week this old boy who lives down the road from me, and is forever stinkmouthing my hounds, brought some city fellow around to try out ol' Sis here. So I turned her out south of the house and she made two or three big swings back and forth across the edge of the woods, set back her head, bayed a couple of times, cut straight through the woods, come to a little clearing, jumped about three foot straight up in the air, run to the other side, and commenced to letting out a racket like she had something treed. We went over there with our flashlights and shone them up in the tree but couldn't catch no shine offa coon's eyes, and my neighbor sorta indicated that ol' Sis might be a little crazy, `cause she stood right to the tree and kept singing up into it. So I pulled off my coat and climbed up into the branches, and sure enough, there was a coon skeleton wedged in between a couple of branches about twenty foot up. Now as I was saying, she can follow a pretty old trail, but this fellow was still calling her crazy or touched `cause she had hopped up in the air while she was crossing the clearing, until I reminded him that the Hawkins' had a fence across there about five years back. Now, this dog is for sale. -- News that stayed News: Ten Years of Coevolution Quarterly | |
| Fortune finishes the great quotations, #15 "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses." And while you're at it, throw in a couple of those Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders. | |
| I would be batting the big feller if they wasn't ready with the other one, but a left-hander would be the thing if they wouldn't have knowed it already because there is more things involved than could come up on the road, even after we've been home a long while. -- Casey Stengel | |
| Two brothers, Mort and Bill, like to sail. While Bill has a great deal of experience, he certainly isn't the rigger Mort is. | |
| 3M, under the Scotch brand name, manufactures a fine adhesive for art and display work. This product is called "Craft Mount". 3M suggests that to obtain the best results, one should make the bond "while the adhesive is wet, aggressively tacky." I did not know what "aggressively tacky" meant until I read today's fortune. [And who said we didn't offer equal time, huh? Ed.] | |
| "I'm a doctor, not a mechanic." -- "The Doomsday Machine", when asked if he had heard of the idea of a doomsday machine. "I'm a doctor, not an escalator." -- "Friday's Child", when asked to help the very pregnant Ellen up a steep incline. "I'm a doctor, not a bricklayer." -- Devil in the Dark", when asked to patch up the Horta. "I'm a doctor, not an engineer." -- "Mirror, Mirror", when asked by Scotty for help in Engineering aboard the ISS Enterprise. "I'm a doctor, not a coalminer." -- "The Empath", on being beneath the surface of Minara 2. "I'm a surgeon, not a psychiatrist." -- "City on the Edge of Forever", on Edith Keeler's remark that Kirk talked strangely. "I'm no magician, Spock, just an old country doctor." -- "The Deadly Years", to Spock while trying to cure the aging effects of the rogue comet near Gamma Hydra 4. "What am I, a doctor or a moonshuttle conductor?" -- "The Corbomite Maneuver", when Kirk rushed off from a physical exam to answer the alert. | |
| You are an excellent tactician, Captain. You let your second in command attack while you sit and watch for weakness. -- Khan Noonian Singh, "Space Seed", stardate 3141.9 | |
| "`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. | |
| "The story goes that I first had the idea for THHGTTG while lying drunk in a field in Innsbruck (or `Spain' as the BBC TV publicity department authorititively has it, probably because it's easier to spell)." - Foreward by DNA. FORD Six pints of bitter. And quickly please, the world's about to end. BARMAN Oh yes, sir? Nice weather for it. | |
| Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there and what's so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get _____there. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be. -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" | |
| I have a switch in my apartment that doesn't do anything. Every once in a while I turn it on and off. On and off. On and off. One day I got a call from a woman in France who said "Cut it out!" -- Steven Wright | |
| "The reason for the success of this somewhat communist-sounding strategy, while the failure of communism itself is visible around the world, is that the economics of information are fundamentaly different from those of other products." -- Bruce Perens, on Open Source software. (Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly and Associates) | |
| "The funny thing is if you actually read those papers, you find that, while the researchers were applying thier optomizational tricks on a microkernel, in fact those same tricks could be applied to traditional kernels to accelerate thier execution." -- Linus Torvalds on Microkernels (Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly and Associates) | |
| "While not obviously a business-friendly licensem there are certain aspects of the GNU license which are attractive, believe it or not, for commercial purposes." -- Brian Behlendorf on OSS (Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly and Associates) | |
| What If Bill Gates Was a Stand-Up Comedian? 1. None of his jokes would be funny. 2. Subliminal message hyping Microsoft and Windows 98 would be inserted throughout his performance. 3. The audio system (running Windows NT) would always crash right before Bill got to a punch line. At that time one of the managers would announce, "Please hold tight while we diagnose this intermittent issue." 4. Tickets for Bill's show would be handed out for free in an attempt to attract customers away from Netscape's shows. 5. Industry pundits would call Bill's show "innovative" and would ask "Why doesn't IBM have a stand-up routine? This is exactly why OS/2 is failing in the market." 6. Bill's show would be called "ActiveHumor 98" 7. In a perfect imitation of his Windows 95 OS, Bill wouldn't be able to tell a joke and walk around at the same time. 8. Audience members would have to sign a License Agreement in which one of the terms is "I agree never to watch Linus Torvalds' show, 'GNU/Humorux'". 9. All audience members would receive a free CD of Internet Explorer 4.0, with FakeJava(R) and ActiveHex(tm) technology. 10. Bill Gates would appear on Saturday Night Live, causing ratings to drop even further. | |
| You Might be a Microsoft Employee If... 1. When a Microsoft program crashes for the millionth time, you say "Oh, well!" and reboot without any negative thoughts 2. The Windows 95 startup screen (the clouds) makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside 3. You fully understand why Windows 95's Shutdown Option has to be accessed from the Start Menu 4. You believe Internet Explorer's security flaws were slipped in by a crack team of Netscape programmers 5. You keep valuable papers near your fireplace. Therefore, you are comfortable with Windows 95's "may-delete-it-at-anytime" philosophy 6. You're the Bob that Microsoft Bob was named after 7. Instead of "I'd rather be fishing," your bumper sticker says, "I'd rather be writing buggy Microsoft code" 8. You know the technical difference between OLE 1.0 and OLE 2.0 9. You've ever completed your income taxes while waiting for Windows 95 to boot, and didn't think anything of it 10. You run Solitaire more than any other program, and therefore you consider your computer a Dedicated Solitaire Engine (DSE) | |
| ...A Microsoft spokesperson said, "while fighting software piracy is good for our business, highway robbery is our business." -- From a Slashdot.org post | |
| Red Hat Unveils New Ad Campaign Linux distributor Red Hat has announced plans for a $650,000 ad campaign. The ads will appear on several major newspapers as well as on a few selected websites. "These ads will be targetted towards Windows users who are fed up but aren't aware of any OS alternatives," a Red Hat spokesman said. "We feel that there is a large audience for this." One of the ads will be a half page spread showing two computers side-by-side: a Wintel and a Linux box. The title asks "Is your operating system ready for the year 2000?" Both computers have a calendar/clock display showing. The Windows box shows "12:00:01AM -- January 1, 1900" while the Linux box shows "12:00:01AM -- January 1, 2000". The tagline at the bottom says "Linux -- a century ahead of the competition." | |
| Linux Drinking Game (Abridged) With a group of friends, take turns reading articles about Linux from popular media sources (Ziff-Davis AnchorDesk is recommended) or postings on Usenet (try alt.fan.bill-gates). If the author says one of the things below, take a drink. Continue until everyone involved is plastered. - Linux will never go mainstream - Any platform that can't run Microsoft Office [or some other Microsoft "solution"] sucks - Linux is hard to install - Linux tech support is lacking - No one ever got fired for choosing Microsoft - Any OS with a command line interface is primitive - Microsoft is an innovative company - Could you get fired for choosing Linux? - Linux was created by a bunch of snot-nosed 14 year old hackers with acne and no life - Security through obscurity is the way to go - Linus and Unix are 70s technology while NT is 90s technology - All Linux software must be released under the GPL - Linux is a great piece of shareware | |
| Tux Penguin Boxing Match LAS VEGAS, NV -- The unofficial Linux mascot Tux the Penguin will face his arch rival the BSD Daemon in a boxing match this Saturday night. The match is part of the International Computer Mascot Boxing Federation's First Annual World Championship Series. The winner will advance to face one of the Intel "Bunny People". Boxing pundits favor Tux as the winner. Last week Tux won his first match in the Championship Series against Wilbur the Gimp. "The Gimp didn't have a chance," one spectator said. "With Tux's ability to run at top speeds of over 100mph, I don't see how he could possibly lose." The BSD Daemon, however, is certainly a formidible opponent. While boxing rules prohibit the Daemon from using his patented pitchfork, his pointy horns are permitted in the ring. Some observers think the whole Computer Mascot Boxing Federation is a fake. "WWF is all scripted," one sports writer pointed out. "And so is this. You actually think that a penguin is capable of boxing? The idea of a penguin fighting a demon is patently absurd. This whole Championship Series has no doubt been scripted. It's probably nothing more than two little kids in penguin and demon suits duking it out in a boxing ring. What a waste of time." | |
| Increased Electricity Consumption Blamed on Linux WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The US Department of Energy claims Linux is partially responsible for the increased demand for electricity during the past year. Electricity use was up 2.5% from January to September of 1998 compared with the same period in 1997. "While some of the increase can be attributed to higher temperatures over the summer," one Department bureaucrat explained, "Linux is certainly a contributor to the increased demand for power." When asked for clarification, the bureaucrat responded, "In the past, most PCs have been turned off when not in use. Linux users, on the other hand, usually don't turn off their computers. They leave them on, hoping to increase their uptime to impress their friends. And since Linux rarely crashes the entire system, those computers stay on for weeks, months, even years at a time. With Linux use continuing to grow, we expect demand for electricity to increase steadily over the next several years." In response to the news, several utility companies have announced plans to give away free Linux CDs to paying customers who request them. One anonymous executive said, "The more people who use Linux, the more power they consume. The more electricity they use, the more money we make. It's a win-win combination." Yesterday Linus Torvalds was nominated as a candidate for the Assocation of American Utility Companies Person of the Year. | |
| Humorix Holiday Gift Idea #4 Microsoft Destruction Kit Price: US$29.95 (more with optional digital camera or shotgun) Producer: The Fuzzier Image; 1-800-BILL-SUX Mix an Internet Explorer CD-ROM, a rocket launcher, and a flamethrower. What do you have? A whole lot of fun! The Microsoft Destruction Kit is the best way to destroy those Microsoft CD-ROMs you no longer need now that you've discovered Linux. You can launch the CD (and registration forms, manuals, retail boxes, license agreements, etc.) and pepper it with bullets, all while capturing the event with a digital camera. Or, you can use the included miniature flamethrower to burn the evil CD to a crisp. The kit comes with a set of IE 4.0 CDs to get you started. Tell Microsoft "where *you* want it to go today" in style with the Microsoft Destruction Kit. | |
| Humorix Holiday Gift Idea #7 Bluescreen Computer Case US$27.97 at Bud's Beige Box Bazaar Real Geeks may not admit to using Windows, but there's still countless geeks out there who must suffer through the humiliation of using Windows while at work. The patent-not-pending Bluescreen Case, though, will ease the stress of working with Microsoft "solutions". This computer case is very similar to other beige boxes, but with one important difference: the reboot button is covered with a picture of Bill Gates. When the machine bluescreens for the millionth time, all you have to do is punch Bill Gates in the face as hard as you can, and the computer will restart. This provides invaluable therapeutic stress relief. | |
| Microsoft Open Source Solitaire REDMOND, WA -- In a first attempt at "embrace-and-extend" of open source software, Microsoft will release its popular Solitaire and FreeCell games as open source under the MILA (Microsoft Innovative License Agreement). According to a Microsoft press release, the Visual C++ source code for the two games will be available from the Microsoft website "in the first quarter" (no year was specified). Industry pundits hail the move as revolutionary. "Microsoft's release of its most popular Windows feature as open source software demonstrates just how innovative the company really is. The DoJ is clearly barking up the wrong tree," wrote one Ziff-Davis flunkie. One executive at a large company said, "Freely available source code is the best idea Microsoft has ever invented." One Linux developer told Humorix, "Let's just hope some fool doesn't try to port this thing to Linux. Imagine the havoc that could ensue if a bunch of core Linux contributors downloaded Solitaire and became addicted to it. It would be a disaster! Linux and open source development would grind to a halt while the hackers wasted their time playing Solitaire or FreeCell. 'Just one more game...' they would say." | |
| New Crime Identified: "Tech Rage" HARRISBURG, IL -- The police department in this Illinois town has coined a new term for a growing trend in crime: "tech rage". Tech rage shares many similarities with another modern crime, "road rage", but instead of affecting drivers, tech rage is experienced by disgruntled computer users. The first documented case of tech rage involves a Microsoft salesman, Bob Glutzfield, who convinced the local TV station to "upgrade" its computer systems from Macintosh to Wintel. While the migration seemed successful at first, the Blue Screen became more prevalent during the following months. Then, in January, the entire computer system crashed in the middle of the weather forecast during the 10 o'clock evening news. Viewers could plainly see the Blue Screen of Death showing in the monitors behind James Roland, the chief meteorologist. The instability of Windows 98 stretched Roland's patience until he snapped last week and succumbed to tech rage. Roland tracked down the Microsoft salesman and followed him one evening to his apartment. The weatherman yelled at the bewildered Microserf, "You [expletive]! Because of you, I'm the [expletive] laughing stock of Southern Illinois!" and then proceeded to beat him up. Roland is currently out on bond pending trial next month. | |
| Jargon Coiner (#2) An irregular feature that aims to give you advance warning of new jargon that we've just made up. * SLASHDUP EFFECT, THE: Accidentally posting two or more duplicate comments to Slashdot, usually as the result of hitting ENTER at the wrong time or fumbling with the Preview option. * YOU'VE GOT SLOGAN: The tendency for reporters to parody the stupid "You've Got Mail" saying when writing about AOL. Example: "You've Got Spam", "You've Got Merger" (the headline for an article about the Netscape/AOL Merger From Hell) * PENGUINIZATION: Ongoing trend to slap a picture of Tux Penguin next to anything even remotely related to Linux. * IDLESURF: Aimless surfing of the Internet; looking for something interesting to read while killing time. Often involves reloaded the Slashdot homepage every 5 minutes to see if a new article has been posted. | |
| This is excellent news! I haven't thought about remedies yet... well, you know, I can think of one thing the court should do: require that Microsoft remove the Dancing Paper Clip and associated crap from Office... Oh, and while they're at it, get rid of those multi-megabyte easter eggs. Why does Excel need a flight simulator? So I can see the Blue Screen of Death in 3D? Oh, and another thing, the court needs to put a hex on ActiveX... -- Anonymous Coward's response to Judge Jackson's harsh Findings Of Fact against Microsoft | |
| Linux World Domination: Not A Joke! WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Senator Fattecat (R-WA) is pushing for a ban on Finnish-produced software. His chief of staff, Ms. Dee Septive, has published a 200-page report revealing "the Helsinkian Underground", a Finnish world domination plot hatched in 1943. The Fattecat expose describes Finland's recent scheme involving free software. "Linux, originally called Freix (FREIX Retrieves Electronic Intelligence X), is a scheme to infiltrate the Western world with a 'free' operating system with nasty backdoors hidden within its obfuscated source code. IRC (Intelligence Relaying Code) is another Finnish innovation designed for spying purposes." Linus Torvalds plays a prominent role in the conspiracy. "That old story about Linus developing a Unix clone in his spare time while at University is a lark," the report states. "Indeed, the name Linux ("Line X") was coined because the kernel can extract any arbitrary line of intelligence from any document it has access to." | |
| New Linux Companies Hope To Get Rich Quick (#3) In the "Cathedral and the Bazaar", ESR mentions that one motivation behind Open Source software is ego-gratification. That's where OpenEgo, Inc. comes in. For a fee, the hackers at OpenEgo will produce a piece of Open Source software and distribute it in your name, thus building up your reputation and ego. You can quickly become the envy of all your friends -- without lifting a finger. Want a higher-paying tech job? With OpenEgo's services, you'll look like an Open Source pro in no time, and have dozens of hot job offers from across the country. Says the OpenEgo sales literature, "Designing, implementing, maintaining, and promoting a successful Open Source project is a pain. However, at OpenEgo, we do all the work while you reap all the rewards..." A page on the OpenEgo site claims, "We produced a Linux kernel patch for one customer last year that was immediately accepted by Linus Torvalds... Within days the person gained employment at Transmeta and is now on the road to IPO riches..." Prices range from $1,000 for a small program to $5,000 for a kernel patch. | |
| 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. | |
| Security Holes Found In Microsoft Easter Eggs REDMOND, WA -- It's damage control time for the Microsoft Marketing Machine. Not only have exploits been found in IE, Outlook, and even the Dancing Paper Clip, but now holes have been uncovered in Excel's Flight Simulator and Word's pinball game. "If you enter Excel 97's flight simulator and then hit the F1, X, and SysRq keys while reading a file from Drive A:, you automatically gain Administrator rights on Windows NT," explained the security expert who first discovered the problem. "And that's just the tip of the iceberg." Office 97 and 2000 both contain two hidden DLLs, billrulez.dll and eastereggs.dll, that are marked as "Safe for scripting" but are not. Arbitrary Visual BASIC code can be executed using these files. More disturbing, however, are the undocumented API calls "ChangeAllPasswordsToDefault", "OpenBackDoor", "InitiateBlueScreenNow", and "UploadRegistryToMicrosoft" within easter~1.dll. Microsoft spokesdroids have already hailed the problem as "an insignificant byproduct of Microsoft innovation." | |
| Brief History Of Linux (#2) Hammurabi's Open-Source Code Hammurabi became king of Babylonia around 1750BC. Under his reign, a sophisticated legal code developed; Version 1, containing 282 clauses, was carved into a large rock column open to the public. However, the code contained several errors (Hammurabi must have been drunk), which numerous citizens demanded be fixed. One particularly brave Babylonian submitted to the king's court a stack of cloth patches that, when affixed to the column, would cover up and correct the errors. With the king's approval, these patches were applied to the legal code; within a month a new corrected rock column (Version 2.0) was officially announced. While future kings never embraced this idea (who wanted to admit they made a mistake?), the concept of submitting patches to fix problems is now taken for granted in modern times. | |
| Brief History Of Linux (#5) English Flame War The idea behind Slashdot-style discussions is not new; it dates back to London in 1699. A newspaper that regularly printed Letters To The Editor sparked a heated debate over the question, "When would the 18th Century actually begin, 1700 or 1701?" The controversy quickly became a matter of pride; learned aristocrats argued for the correct date, 1701, while others maintained that it was really 1700. Another sizable third of participants asked, "Who cares?" Ordinarily such a trivial matter would have died down, except that one 1700er, fed up with the snobbest 1701 rhetoric of the educated class, tracked down one letter-writer and hurled a flaming log into his manor house in spite. The resulting fire was quickly doused, but the practice known as the "flame war" had been born. More flames were exchanged between other 1700ers and 1701ers for several days, until the Monarch sent out royal troops to end the flamage. | |
| Brief History Of Linux (#7) The Rise of Geeks The late 19th Century saw the rise and fall of "geeks", wild carnival performers who bit the heads off live chickens. This vocal minority, outcast from mainstream society, clamored for respect, but failed. Their de facto spokesman, Tom Splatz, tried to expose America to their plight in his 312-page book, "Geeks". In the book Splatz documented the life of two Idahoan geeks with no social life as they made a meager living traveling the Pacific Northwest in circuses. While Splatz's masterpiece was a commercial failure, the book did set a world record for using the term "geek" a total of 6,143 times. | |
| 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 (#14) Military Intelligence: Not an oxymoron in 1969 It was the Department Of Defense that commissioned the ARPANET in 1969, a rare example of the US military breaking away from its official motto, "The Leading Edge Of Yesterday's Technology(tm)". In the years leading up to 1969, packet switching technology had evolved enough to make the ARPANET possible. Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc. received the ARPA contract in 1968 for packet switching "Interface Message Processors". US Senator Edward Kennedy, always on the ball, sent a telegram to BBN praising them for their non-denominational "Interfaith" Message Processors, an act unsurpassed by elected representatives until Al Gore invented the Internet years later. While ARPANET started with only four nodes in 1969, it evolved rapidly. Email was first used in 1971; by 1975 the first mailing list, MsgGroup, was created by Steve Walker when he sent a "First post!" messages to it. In 1979 all productive use of ARPANET ceased when USENET and the first MUD were created. In 1983, when the network surpassed 1,000 hosts, a study showed that 90.4% of all traffic was devoted to email and USENET flame wars. | |
| 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 (#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. | |
| Brief History Of Linux (#26) On the surface, Transmeta was a secretive startup that hired Linus Torvalds in 1996 as their Alpha Geek to help develop some kind of microprocessor. Linus, everyone found out later, was actually hired as part of a low-budget yet high-yield publicity stunt. While other dotcoms were burning millions on glitzy marketing campaigns nobody remembers and Superbowl ads displayed while jocks went to the bathroom, Transmeta was spending only pocket change on marketing. Most of that pocket change went towards hosting the Transmeta website (the one that wasn't there yet) which, incidentally, contained more original content and received more visitors than the typical dotcom portal. Microsoft relies on vaporware and certain ahem stipends given to journalists in order to generate buzz and hype for new products, but Transmeta only needed Non-Disclosure Agreements and the Personality Cult of Linus to build up its buzz. When the secret was finally unveiled, the Slashdot crowd was all excited about low-power mobile processors and code-morphing algorithms -- for a couple days. Then everyone yawned and went back to playing Quake. It's still not entirely clear when Transmeta is actually supposed to start selling something. | |
| Won't Somebody Please Think Of The Microsoft Shareholder's Children? The Evil Monopoly will soon be a duopoly of MICROS~1 and MICROS~2 now that Judge Jackson has made his ruling. Geeks everywhere are shedding tears of joy, while Microsoft investors are shedding real tears. But not everybody is ecstatic about the ruling. "It dawned on me today that if Microsoft is broken up, we won't have anyone to bash anymore. We can have that," said Rob Graustein, the founder of the new "Save Microsoft Now! Campaign". Rob continued, "I know what you're thinking! I have not been assimilated... er, hired... by Microsoft. I'm not crazy. I haven't been paid off. My life as a geek revolves around bashing Microsoft. I mean, I own the world's largest collection of anti-Microsoft T-shirts and underwear. It's time to take a stand against the elimination of Geek Enemy #1." Most observers agree that Mr. Graustein's brain has gone 404. "This guy is nuts! Support Microsoft? I can't believe I'm hearing this. Even fake news sites couldn't make up this kind of insanity." | |
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| Unobfuscated Perl (#1) A rogue group of Perl hackers has presented a plan to add a "use really_goddamn_strict" pragma that would enforce readability and UNobfuscation. With this pragma in force, the Perl compiler might say: * Warning: Program contains zero comments. You've probably never seen or used one before; they begin with a # symbol. Please start using them or else a representative from the nearest Perl Mongers group will come to your house and beat you over the head with a cluestick. * Warning: Program uses a cute trick at line 125 that might make sense in C. But this isn't C! * Warning: Code at line 412 indicates that programmer is an idiot. Please correct error between chair and monitor. * Warning: While There's More Than One Way To Do It, your method at line 523 is particularly stupid. Please try again. | |
| Unobfuscated Perl (#2) A rogue group of Perl hackers has presented a plan to add a "use really_goddamn_strict" pragma that would enforce readability and UNobfuscation. With this pragma in force, the Perl compiler might say: * Warning: Write-only code detected between lines 612 and 734. While this code is perfectly legal, you won't have any clue what it does in two weeks. I recommend you start over. * Warning: Code at line 1,024 is indistinguishable from line noise or the output of /dev/random * Warning: Have you ever properly indented a piece of code in your entire life? Evidently not. * Warning: I think you can come up with a more descriptive variable name than "foo" at line 1,523. * Warning: Programmer attempting to re-invent the wheel at line 2,231. There's a function that does the exact same thing on CPAN -- and it actually works. | |
| Ted Turner Unveils All-Commercial Channel For years, the pundits have predicted that the Web would become more like television. However, media tycoon Ted Turner is pursuing the exact opposite. Taking a cue from pop-under advertisements, Flash ads, get-rich-quick spam emails, viral marketing, and "Gator" programs, Turner has unveiled "TCC", the Turner Commercial Channel, for cable TV. TCC will feature "shows" like "Best Commercials That You've Seen A Million Times", "Life Is A Slogan, Just Buy It", and "Name That Jingle". These shows will occupy about 30% of the screen, while several rows of marquees at the bottom will flash various advertising messages. An animated "TCC" watermark will float around the screen while corporate logos are flashed randomly in the corners. Meanwhile, "pop-up ads" will randomly appear that obscure the other ads. These pop-ups will sometimes be further obscured by meta-pop-ups. Likewise, corporate jingles will play in the background, interfering with other jingles and advertising sounds. | |
| As Easy As /usr/src/linux Wiping the sweat from his brow, the contestant diligently continues to recite, "'i' equals 'NR' underscore 'TASKS' semicolon newline 'p' equals ampersand 'task' bracket 'NR' underscore 'TASKS' close-bracket semicolon newline while parens minus minus 'i' parens brace if parens star minus..." Bzzzt! One of the judges says, "You missed an exclamation point. Ten point penalty for that error." The contestant realizes it's all over. He had spent 500 hours memorizing the source code to the Linux 0.01 kernel and then blew it all by forgetting one stupid ASCII character in sched.c. Welcome to the First Annual Linux Kernel Memorization Contest in New Haven, Connecticut, where the stakes are high and the frustration is simply unbearable. Linuxer longhairs from all over the globe have descended on the Offramp Motel to show off their memorization skills in front of a crowd of... dozens. "Those math freaks can memorize PI and other irrational constants all they want. I'll stick with the Linux 0.01 kernel source code thank you very much," said Bob Notmyrealname, the organizer of the event. % | |
| 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." | |
| "...A strange enigma is man!" "Someone calls him a soul concealed in an animal," I suggested. "Winwood Reade is good upon the subject," said Holmes. "He remarked that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician." -- Sherlock Holmes, "The Sign of Four" | |
| Enjoy yourself while you're still old. | |
| Everthing is farther away than it used to be. It is even twice as far to the corner and they have added a hill. I have given up running for the bus; it leaves earlier than it used to. It seems to me they are making the stairs steeper than in the old days. And have you noticed the smaller print they use in the newspapers? There is no sense in asking anyone to read aloud anymore, as everbody speaks in such a low voice I can hardly hear them. The material in dresses is so skimpy now, especially around the hips and waist, that it is almost impossible to reach one's shoelaces. And the sizes don't run the way they used to. The 12's and 14's are so much smaller. Even people are changing. They are so much younger than they used to be when I was their age. On the other hand people my age are so much older than I am. I ran into an old classmate the other day and she has aged so much that she didn't recognize me. I got to thinking about the poor dear while I was combing my hair this morning and in so doing I glanced at my own reflection. Really now, they don't even make good mirrors like they used to. Sandy Frazier, "I Have Noticed" | |
| If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats. | |
| It does not matter if you fall down as long as you pick up something from the floor while you get up. | |
| It seemed the world was divided into good and bad people. The good ones slept better... while the bad ones seemed to enjoy the waking hours much more. -- Woody Allen, "Side Effects" | |
| Largest Number of Driving Test Failures By April 1970 Mrs. Miriam Hargrave had failed her test thirty-nine times. In the eight preceding years she had received two hundred and twelve driving lessons at a cost of L300. She set the new record while driving triumphantly through a set of red traffic lights in Wakefield, Yorkshire. Disappointingly, she passed at the fortieth attempt (3 August 1970) but eight years later she showed some of her old magic when she was reported as saying that she still didn't like doing right-hand turns. -- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures" | |
| Many mental processes admit of being roughly measured. For instance, the degree to which people are bored, by counting the number of their fidgets. I not infrequently tried this method at the meetings of the Royal Geographical Society, for even there dull memoirs are occasionally read. [...] The use of a watch attracts attention, so I reckon time by the number of my breathings, of which there are 15 in a minute. They are not counted mentally, but are punctuated by pressing with 15 fingers successively. The counting is reserved for the fidgets. These observations should be confined to persons of middle age. Children are rarely still, while elderly philosophers will sometimes remain rigid for minutes altogether. -- Francis Galton, 1909 | |
| Since we have to speak well of the dead, let's knock them while they're alive. -- John Sloan | |
| The best that we can do is to be kindly and helpful toward our friends and fellow passengers who are clinging to the same speck of dirt while we are drifting side by side to our common doom. -- Clarence Darrow | |
| The Least Successful Defrosting Device The all-time record here is held by Mr. Peter Rowlands of Lancaster whose lips became frozen to his lock in 1979 while blowing warm air on it. "I got down on my knees to breathe into the lock. Somehow my lips got stuck fast." While he was in the posture, an old lady passed an inquired if he was all right. "Alra? Igmmlptk", he replied at which point she ran away. "I tried to tell her what had happened, but it came out sort of... muffled," explained Mr. Rowlands, a pottery designer. He was trapped for twenty minutes ("I felt a bit foolish") until constant hot breathing brought freedom. He was subsequently nicknamed "Hot Lips". -- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures" | |
| The strong give up and move away, while the weak give up and stay. | |
| While anyone can admit to themselves they were wrong, the true test is admission to someone else. | |
| While having never invented a sin, I'm trying to perfect several. | |
| While most peoples' opinions change, the conviction of their correctness never does. | |
| While we are sleeping, two-thirds of the world is plotting to do us in. -- Dean Rusk | |
| While you don't greatly need the outside world, it's still very reassuring to know that it's still there. | |
| While your friend holds you affectionately by both your hands you are safe, for you can watch both of his. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" | |
| <sadie> ata: do you get some help from promise while developing the patch ? <ata> sadie: pass me a toke of what ever you are smokin' - Andre Hedrik on #kernelnewbies | |
| Basically, I want people to know that when they use binary-only modules, it's THEIR problem. I want people to know that in their bones, and I want it shouted out from the rooftops. I want people to wake up in a cold sweat every once in a while if they use binary-only modules. - Linus Torvalds on linux-kernel | |
| Davide Libenzi wrote: > It's not easy to get this right anyway. Balancing the pull and push mechanisms in the scheduler while trying to predict the future? "Not easy" is an excellent description. - Rusty Russell on linux-kernel | |
| The ancient masters were subtle, mysterious, profound, responsive. The depth of their knowledge is unfathomable. Because it is unfathomable, All we can do is describe their appearance. Watchful, like men crossing a winter stream. Alert, like men aware of danger. Courteous, like visiting guests. Yielding like ice about to melt. Simple, like uncarved blocks of wood. Hollow, like caves. Opaque, like muddy pools. Who can wait quietly while the mud settles? Who can remain still until the moment of action? Observers of the Tao do not seek fulfillment. Not seeking fulfillment, they are not swayed by desire for change. | |
| Empty yourself of everything. Let the mind become still. The ten thousand things rise and fall while the Self watches their return. They grow and flourish and then return to the source. Returning to the source is stillness, which is the way of nature. The way of nature is unchanging. Knowing constancy is insight. Not knowing constancy leads to disaster. Knowing constancy, the mind is open. With an open mind, you will be openhearted. Being openhearted, you will act royally. Being royal, you will attain the divine. Being divine, you will be at one with the Tao. Being at one with the Tao is eternal. And though the body dies, the Tao will never pass away. | |
| A small country has fewer people. Though there are machines that can work ten to a hundred times faster than man, they are not needed. The people take death seriously and do not travel far. Though they have boats and carriages, no one uses them. Though they have armor and weapons, no one displays them. Men return to the knotting of rope in place of writing. Their food is plain and good, their clothes fine but simple, their homes secure; They are happy in their ways. Though they live within sight of their neighbors, And crowing cocks and barking dogs are heard across the way, Yet they leave each other in peace while they grow old and die. | |
| A young married couple had their first child. Their original pride and joy slowly turned to concern however, for after a couple of years the child had never uttered any form of speech. They hired the best speech therapists, doctors, psychiatrists, all to no avail. The child simply refused to speak. One morning when the child was five, while the husband was reading the paper, and the wife was feeding the dog, the little kid looks up from his bowl and said, "My cereal's cold." The couple is stunned. The man, in tears, confronts his son. "Son, after all these years, why have you waited so long to say something?". Shrugs the kid, "Everything's been okay 'til now". | |
| Any father who thinks he's all important should remind himself that this country honors fathers only one day a year while pickles get a whole week. | |
| Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing. -- Phyllis Diller There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse. -- Quentin Crisp | |
| My ritual differs slightly. What I do, first thing [in the morning], is I hop into the shower stall. Then I hop right back out, because when I hopped in I landed barefoot right on top of See Threepio, a little plastic robot character from "Star Wars" whom my son, Robert, likes to pull the legs off of while he showers. Then I hop right back into the stall because our dog, Earnest, who has been alone in the basement all night building up powerful dog emotions, has come bounding and quivering into the bathroom and wants to greet me with 60 or 70 thousand playful nips, any one of which -- bear in mind that I am naked and, without my contact lenses, essentially blind -- could result in the kind of injury where you have to learn a whole new part if you want to sing the "Messiah," if you get my drift. Then I hop right back out, because Robert, with that uncanny sixth sense some children have -- you cannot teach it; they either have it or they don't -- has chosen exactly that moment to flush one of the toilets. Perhaps several of them. -- Dave Barry | |
| While the year 2000 (y2k) problem is not an issue for us, all Linux implementations will impacted by the year 2038 (y2.038k) issue. The Debian Project is committed to working with the industry on this issue and we will have our full plans and strategy posted by the first quarter of 2020. | |
| "...It was a lot faster than I thought it was going to be, much faster than NT. If further speed increases are done to the server for the final release, Oracle is going to be able to wipe their ass with SQL SERVER and hand it back to M$ while the Oracle admins ... migrate their databases over to Linux!" | |
| Basically, I want people to know that when they use binary-only modules, it's THEIR problem. I want people to know that in their bones, and I want it shouted out from the rooftops. I want people to wake up in a cold sweat every once in a while if they use binary-only modules. -- Linus Torvalds | |
| do { : } while (!HELL_FROZEN_OVER); | |
| Given some of the recent threads, the interactive discussions might need to be conducted on canvas, in the presence of a referee, while wearing padded gloves. ;-) -- Phil Hands | |
| "Nvidia's OpenGL drivers are my "gold standard", and it has been quite a while since I have had to report a problem to them, and even their brand new extensions work as documented the first time I try them. When I have a problem on an Nvidia, I assume that it is my fault. With anyone else's drivers, I assume it is their fault. This has turned out correct almost all the time." -- John Carmack | |
| In Lowes Crossroads, Delaware, it is a violation of local law for any pilot or passenger to carry an ice cream cone in their pocket while either flying or waiting to board a plane. | |
| Loud burping while walking around the airport is prohibited in Halstead, Kansas. | |
| This product is meant for educational purposes only. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental. Void where prohibited. Some assembly may be required. Batteries not included. Contents may settle during shipment. Use only as directed. May be too intense for some viewers. If condition persists, consult your physician. No user-serviceable parts inside. Breaking seal constitutes acceptance of agreement. Not responsible for direct, indirect, incidental or consequential damages resulting from any defect, error or failure to perform. Slippery when wet. For office use only. Substantial penalty for early withdrawal. Do not write below this line. Your cancelled check is your receipt. Avoid contact with skin. Employees and their families are not eligible. Beware of dog. Driver does not carry cash. Limited time offer, call now to insure prompt delivery. Use only in well-ventilated area. Keep away from fire or flame. Some equipment shown is optional. Price does not include taxes, dealer prep, or delivery. Penalty for private use. Call toll free before digging. Some of the trademarks mentioned in this product appear for identification purposes only. All models over 18 years of age. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. Postage will be paid by addressee. Apply only to affected area. One size fits all. Many suitcases look alike. Edited for television. No solicitors. Reproduction strictly prohibited. Restaurant package, not for resale. Objects in mirror are closer than they appear. Decision of judges is final. This supersedes all previous notices. No other warranty expressed or implied. | |
| Before he became a hermit, Zarathud was a young Priest, and took great delight in making fools of his opponents in front of his followers. One day Zarathud took his students to a pleasant pasture and there he confronted The Sacred Chao while She was contentedly grazing. "Tell me, you dumb beast," demanded the Priest in his commanding voice, "why don't you do something worthwhile? What is your Purpose in Life, anyway?" Munching the tasty grass, The Sacred Chao replied "MU". (The Chinese ideogram for NO-THING.) Upon hearing this, absolutely nobody was enlightened. Primarily because nobody understood Chinese. -- Camden Benares, "Zen Without Zen Masters" | |
| I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest. | |
| It is said that the lonely eagle flies to the mountain peaks while the lowly ant crawls the ground, but cannot the soul of the ant soar as high as the eagle? | |
| Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great crystal river. Each creature in its own manner clung tightly to the twigs and rocks of the river bottom, for clinging was their way of life, and resisting the current what each had learned from birth. But one creature said at last, "I trust that the current knows where it is going. I shall let go, and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom." The other creatures laughed and said, "Fool! Let go, and that current you worship will throw you tumbled and smashed across the rocks, and you will die quicker than boredom!" But the one heeded them not, and taking a breath did let go, and at once was tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks. Yet, in time, as the creature refused to cling again, the current lifted him free from the bottom, and he was bruised and hurt no more. And the creatures downstream, to whom he was a stranger, cried, "See a miracle! A creature like ourselves, yet he flies! See the Messiah, come to save us all!" And the one carried in the current said, "I am no more Messiah than you. The river delight to lift us free, if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure. But they cried the more, "Saviour!" all the while clinging to the rocks, making legends of a Saviour. -- Richard Bach | |
| "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 | |
| Well, he thought, since neither Aristotelian Logic nor the disciplines of Science seemed to offer much hope, it's time to go beyond them... Drawing a few deep even breaths, he entered a mental state practiced only by Masters of the Universal Way of Zen. In it his mind floated freely, able to rummage at will among the bits and pieces of data he had absorbed, undistracted by any outside disturbances. Logical structures no longer inhibited him. Pre-conceptions, prejudices, ordinary human standards vanished. All things, those previously trivial as well as those once thought important, became absolutely equal by acquiring an absolute value, revealing relationships not evident to ordinary vision. Like beads strung on a string of their own meaning, each thing pointed to its own common ground of existence, shared by all. Finally, each began to melt into each, staying itself while becoming all others. And Mind no longer contemplated Problem, but became Problem, destroying Subject-Object by becoming them. Time passed, unheeded. Eventually, there was a tentative stirring, then a decisive one, and Nakamura arose, a smile on his face and the light of laughter in his eyes. -- Wayfarer | |
| You can't mend a wristwatch while falling from an airplane. | |
| Personally, I think my choice in the mostest-superlative-computer wars has to be the HP-48 series of calculators. They'll run almost anything. And if they can't, while I'll just plug a Linux box into the serial port and load up the HP-48 VT-100 emulator. -- Jeff Dege, jdege@winternet.com | |
| > The day people think linux would be better served by somebody else (FSF > being the natural alternative), I'll "abdicate". I don't think that > it's something people have to worry about right now - I don't see it > happening in the near future. I enjoy doing linux, even though it does > mean some work, and I haven't gotten any complaints (some almost timid > reminders about a patch I have forgotten or ignored, but nothing > negative so far). > > Don't take the above to mean that I'll stop the day somebody complains: > I'm thick-skinned (Lasu, who is reading this over my shoulder commented > that "thick-HEADED is closer to the truth") enough to take some abuse. > If I weren't, I'd have stopped developing linux the day ast ridiculed me > on c.o.minix. What I mean is just that while linux has been my baby so > far, I don't want to stand in the way if people want to make something > better of it (*). > > Linus > > (*) Hey, maybe I could apply for a saint-hood from the Pope. Does > somebody know what his email-address is? I'm so nice it makes you puke. -- Taken from Linus's reply to someone worried about the future of Linux | |
| Besides, its really not worthwhile to use more than two times your physical ram in swap (except in a select few situations). The performance of the system becomes so abysmal you'd rather heat pins under your toenails while reciting Windows95 source code and staring at porn flicks of Bob Dole than actually try to type something. -- seen on c.o.l.development.system, about the size of the swap space | |
| 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 | |
| | |-sshd---tcsh-+-dpkg-buildpacka---rules---sh---make---make---sh---make---sh---make---sh---make---sh---make---sh---make -- While packaging XFree86 for Debian GNU/Linux | |
| Remember: While root can do most everything, there are certain privileges that only a partner can grant. -- Telsa Gwynne | |
| modconf (0.2.37) stable unstable; urgency=medium [...] * Eduard Bloch: - fixed Makefile broken Marcin Owsiany a while ago. The default manpage has been overwritten with the polish translation. I still wonder why nobody noticed this before. Closes: #117474 [...] -- Eduard Bloch <blade@debian.org> Sun, 28 Oct 2001 12:53:27 +0100 | |
| A holding company is a thing where you hand an accomplice the goods while the policeman searches you. | |
| Important letters which contain no errors will develop errors in the mail. Corresponding errors will show up in the duplicate while the Boss is reading it. Vital papers will demonstrate their vitality by spontaneously moving from where you left them to where you can't find them. | |
| Lavish spending can be disastrous. Don't buy any lavishes for a while. | |
| Money can't buy happiness, but it can make you awfully comfortable while you're being miserable. -- C.B. Luce | |
| The best executive is one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it. -- Theodore Roosevelt | |
| The error of youth is to believe that intelligence is a substitute for experience, while the error of age is to believe experience is a substitute for intelligence. -- Lyman Bryson | |
| While money can't buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery. | |
| While money doesn't buy love, it puts you in a great bargaining position. | |
| The birds are singing, the flowers are budding, and it is time for Miss Manners to tell young lovers to stop necking in public. It's not that Miss Manners is immune to romance. Miss Manners has been known to squeeze a gentleman's arm while being helped over a curb, and, in her wild youth, even to press a dainty slipper against a foot or two under the dinner table. Miss Manners also believes that the sight of people strolling hand in hand or arm in arm or arm in hand dresses up a city considerably more than the more familiar sight of people shaking umbrellas at one another. What Miss Manners objects to is the kind of activity that frightens the horses on the street... | |
| I think I'll KILL myself by leaping out of this 14th STORY WINDOW while reading ERICA JONG'S poetry!! | |
| I'm QUIETLY reading the latest issue of "BOWLING WORLD" while my wife and two children stand QUIETLY BY ... | |
| Place me on a BUFFER counter while you BELITTLE several BELLHOPS in the Trianon Room!! Let me one of your SUBSIDIARIES! | |
| While my BRAINPAN is being refused service in BURGER KING, Jesuit priests are DATING CAREER DIPLOMATS!! | |
| While you're chewing, think of STEVEN SPIELBERG'S bank account ... his will have the same effect as two "STARCH BLOCKERS"! | |
| You should all JUMP UP AND DOWN for TWO HOURS while I decide on a NEW CAREER!! | |
| It is a well known fact that warriors and wizards do not get along, because one side considers the other side to be a collection of bloodthirsty idiots who can't walk and think at the same time, while the other side is naturally suspicious of a body of men who mumble a lot and wear long dresses. Oh, say the wizards, if we're going to be like that, then, what about all those studded collars and oiled muscles down at the Young Men's Pagan Association? To which the heroes reply, that's a pretty good allegation from a bunch of wimpsoes who won't go near a woman on account, can you believe it, of their mystical power being sort of drained out. Right, say the wizards, that just about does it, you and your leather posing pouches. Oh yeah, say the the heroes, why don't you ... -- Terry Pratchett, "The Light Fantastic" | |
| A CODE OF ETHICAL BEHAVIOR FOR PATIENTS: 7. PAY YOUR MEDICAL BILLS PROMPTLY AND WILLINGLY. You should consider it a privilege to contribute, however modestly, to the well-being of physicians and other humanitarians. 8. DO NOT SUFFER FROM AILMENTS THAT YOU CANNOT AFFORD. It is sheer arrogance to contract illnesses that are beyond your means. 9. NEVER REVEAL ANY OF THE SHORTCOMINGS THAT HAVE COME TO LIGHT IN THE COURSE OF TREATMENT BY YOUR DOCTOR. The patient-doctor relationship is a privileged one, and you have a sacred duty to protect him from exposure. 10. NEVER DIE WHILE IN YOUR DOCTOR'S PRESENCE OR UNDER HIS DIRECT CARE. This will only cause him needless inconvenience and embarrassment. | |
| Fortune's Exercising Truths: 1: Richard Simmons gets paid to exercise like a lunatic. You don't. 2. Aerobic exercises stimulate and speed up the heart. So do heart attacks. 3. Exercising around small children can scar them emotionally for life. 4. Sweating like a pig and gasping for breath is not refreshing. 5. No matter what anyone tells you, isometric exercises cannot be done quietly at your desk at work. People will suspect manic tendencies as you twitter around in your chair. 6. Next to burying bones, the thing a dog enjoys mosts is tripping joggers. 7. Locking four people in a tiny, cement-walled room so they can run around for an hour smashing a little rubber ball -- and each other -- with a hard racket should immediately be recognized for what it is: a form of insanity. 8. Fifty push-ups, followed by thirty sit-ups, followed by ten chin-ups, followed by one throw-up. 9. Any activity that can't be done while smoking should be avoided. | |
