Dictionary De - En
De - Es
De - Pt| Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) | by Linux fortune |
| Only the fittest survive. The vanquished acknowledge their unworthiness by placing a classified ad with the ritual phrase "must sell -- best offer," and thereafter dwell in infamy, relegated to discussing gas mileage and lawn food. But if successful, you join the elite sodality that spends hours unpurifying the dialect of the tribe with arcane talk of bits and bytes, RAMS and ROMS, hard disks and baud rates. Are you obnoxious, obsessed? It's a modest price to pay. For you have tapped into the same awesome primal power that produces credit-card billing errors and lost plane reservations. Hail, postindustrial warrior, subduer of Bounceoids, pride of the cosmos, keeper of the silicone creed: Computo, ergo sum. The force is with you -- at 110 volts. May your RAMS be fruitful and multiply. -- Curt Suplee, "Smithsonian", 4/83 | |
| Once, when the secrets of science were the jealously guarded property of a small priesthood, the common man had no hope of mastering their arcane complexities. Years of study in musty classrooms were prerequisite to obtaining even a dim, incoherent knowledge of science. Today all that has changed: a dim, incoherent knowledge of science is available to anyone. -- Tom Weller, "Science Made Stupid" | |
| Brief History Of Linux (#21) The GNU Project Meet Richard M. Stallman, an MIT hacker who would found the GNU Project and create Emacs, the operating-system-disguised-as-a-text-editor. RMS, the first member of the Three Initials Club (joined by ESR and JWZ), experienced such frustration with software wrapped in arcane license agreements that he embarked on the GNU Project to produce free software. His journey began when he noticed this fine print for a printer driver: You do not own this software. You own a license to use one copy of this software, a license that we can revoke at any time for any reason whatsoever without a refund. You may not copy, distribute, alter, disassemble, or hack the software. The source code is locked away in a vault in Cleveland. If you say anything negative about this software you will be in violation of this license and required to forfeit your soul and/or first born child to us. The harsh wording of the license shocked RMS. The computer industry was in it's infancy, which could only mean it was going to get much, much worse. | |
| > Is there an API or other means to determine what video card, namely the > chipset, that the user has installed on his machine? On a modern X86 machine use the PCI/AGP bus data. On a PS/2 use the MCA bus data. On nubus use the nubus probe data. On old style ISA bus PCs done a large pointy hat and spend several years reading arcane and forbidden scrolls - Alan Cox on hardware probing | |
