Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) | by Linux fortune |
Anyone who has attended a USENIX conference in a fancy hotel can tell you that a sentence like "You're one of those computer people, aren't you?" is roughly equivalent to "Look, another amazingly mobile form of slime mold!" in the mouth of a hotel cocktail waitress. -- Elizabeth Zwicky | |
"I got into an elevator at work and this man followed in after me... I pushed '1' and he just stood there... I said 'Hi, where you going?' He said, 'Phoenix.' So I pushed Phoenix. A few seconds later the doors opened, two tumbleweeds blew in... we were in downtown Phoenix. I looked at him and said 'You know, you're the kind of guy I want to hang around with.' We got into his car and drove out to his shack in the desert. Then the phone rang. He said 'You get it.' I picked it up and said 'Hello?'... the other side said 'Is this Steven Wright?'... I said 'Yes...' The guy said 'Hi, I'm Mr. Jones, the student loan director from your bank... It seems you have missed your last 17 payments, and the university you attended said that they received none of the $17,000 we loaned you... we would just like to know what happened to the money?' I said, 'Mr. Jones, I'll give it to you straight. I gave all of the money to my friend Slick, and with it he built a nuclear weapon... and I would appreciate it if you never called me again." -- Steven Wright | |
Brief History Of Linux (#15) Too many hyphens: Traf-O-Data and Micro-soft Bill Gates and Paul Allen attended an exclusive private school in Seattle. In 1968, after raising $3,000 from a yard sale, they gained access to a timeshare computer and became addicted. After depleting their money learning BASIC and playing Solitaire, they convinced a company to give them free computer time in exchange for reporting bugs -- ironically, an early form of Open Source development! The two then founded a small company called Traf-O-Data that collected and analyzed traffic counts for municipalities using a crude device based on the Intel "Pretanium" 8008 CPU. They had some success at first, but ran into problems when they were unable to deliver their much hyped next-generation device called "TrafficX". An engineer is quoted as saying that "Traf-O-Data is the local leader in vaporware", the first documented usage of the term that has come to be synonymous with Bill Gates. Soon thereafter, the two developed their own BASIC interpreter, and sold it to MITS for their new Altair computer. April 4, 1975 is the fateful day that Micro-soft was founded in Albuquerque, NM as a language vendor. | |
"You would do well not to imagine profundity," he said. "Anything that seems of momentous occasion should be dwelt upon as though it were of slight note. Conversely, trivialities must be attended to with the greatest of care. Because death is momentous, give it no thought; because victory is important, give it no thought; because the method of achievement and discovery is less momentous than the effect, dwell always upon the method. You will strengthen yourself in this way." -- Jessica Salmonson, "The Swordswoman" |