Dictionary De - En
De - Es
De - Pt| Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) | by Linux fortune |
| Many companies that have made themselves dependent on [the equipment of a certain major manufacturer] (and in doing so have sold their soul to the devil) will collapse under the sheer weight of the unmastered complexity of their data processing systems. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra, SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 17, Number 5 | |
| Why did the Roman Empire collapse? What is the Latin for office automation? | |
| Perfection is acheived only on the point of collapse. - C. N. Parkinson | |
| ...One thing is that, unlike any other Western democracy that I know of, this country has operated since its beginnings with a basic distrust of government. We are constituted not for efficient operation of government, but for minimizing the possibility of abuse of power. It took the events of the Roosevelt era -- a catastrophic economic collapse and a world war -- to introduce the strong central government that we now know. But in most parts of the country today, the reluctance to have government is still strong. I think, barring a series of catastrophic events, that we can look to at least another decade during which many of the big problems around this country will have to be addressed by institutions other than federal government. - Bobby R. Inman, Admiral, USN, Retired, former director of Naval Intelligence, vice director of the DIA, former director of the NSA, deputy directory of Central Intelligence, former chairman and CEO of MCC. [the statist opinions expressed herein are not those of the cookie editor -ed.] | |
| "Although Poles suffer official censorship, a pervasive secret police and laws similar to those in the USSR, there are thousands of underground publications, a legal independent Church, private agriculture, and the East bloc's first and only independent trade union federation, NSZZ Solidarnosc, which is an affiliate of both the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions and the World Confederation of Labor. There is literally a world of difference between Poland - even in its present state of collapse - and Soviet society at the peak of its "glasnost." This difference has been maintained at great cost by the Poles since 1944. -- David Phillips, SUNY at Buffalo, about establishing a gateway from EARN (Eurpoean Academic Research Network) to Poland | |
| When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere. -- R.A. Heinlein, "Time Enough For Love" | |
| Mid-Twenties Breakdown: A period of mental collapse occurring in one's twenties, often caused by an inability to function outside of school or structured environments coupled with a realization of one's essential aloneness in the world. Often marks induction into the ritual of pharmaceutical usage. -- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture" | |
| When things go well, expect something to explode, erode, collapse or just disappear. | |
| To a Californian, all New Yorkers are cold; even in heat they rarely go above fifty-eight degrees. If you collapse on a street in New York, plan to spend a few days there. -- From "East vs. West: The War Between the Coasts | |
| There is no choice before us. Either we must Succeed in providing the rational coordination of impulses and guts, or for centuries civilization will sink into a mere welter of minor excitements. We must provide a Great Age or see the collapse of the upward striving of the human race. -- Alfred North Whitehead | |
| The Fastest Defeat In Chess The big name for us in the world of chess is Gibaud, a French chess master. In Paris during 1924 he was beaten after only four moves by a Monsieur Lazard. Happily for posterity, the moves are recorded and so chess enthusiasts may reconstruct this magnificent collapse in the comfort of their own homes. Lazard was black and Gibaud white: 1: P-Q4, Kt-KB3 2: Kt-Q2, P-K4 3: PxP, Kt-Kt5 4: P-K6, Kt-K6 White then resigns on realizing that a fifth move would involve either a Q-KR5 check or the loss of his queen. -- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures" | |
| Some of you ... may have decided that, this year, you're going to celebrate it the old-fashioned way, with your family sitting around stringing cranberries and exchanging humble, handmade gifts, like on "The Waltons". Well, you can forget it. If everybody pulled that kind of subversive stunt, the economy would collapse overnight. The government would have to intervene: it would form a cabinet-level Department of Holiday Gift-Giving, which would spend billions and billions of tax dollars to buy Barbie dolls and electronic games, which it would drop on the populace from Air Force jets, killing and maiming thousands. So, for the good of the nation, you should go along with the Holiday Program. This means you should get a large sum of money and go to a mall. -- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide" | |
| Brief History Of Linux (#13) Wanted: Eunuchs programmers Everything you know about the creation of the Unix operating system is wrong. We have uncovered the truth: Unix was a conspiracy hatched by Ritchie and Thompson to thwart the AT&T monopoly that they worked for. The system, code-named EUNUCHS (Electronic UNtrustworthy User-Condemning Horrible System), was horribly conceived, just as they had planned. The OS, quickly renamed to a more respectable "Unix", was adopted first by Ma Bell's Patent Department and then by the rest of the monopoly. AT&T saw an inexpensive, multi-user, portable operating system that it had all rights to; the authors, however, saw a horrible, multi-crashing system that the Evil Ma Bell Empire would become hopelessly dependent on. AT&T would go bankrupt trying to maintain the system and eventually collapse. That didn't happen. Ritchie and Thompson were too talented to create a crappy operating system; no matter how hard they tried the system was too good. Their last ditch effort to sabotage the system by recoding it obfuscated C was unsuccessful. Before long Unix spread outside of Bell Labs and their conspiracy collapsed. | |
| Microsoft Website Crashes, World Does Not Come To An End REDMOND, WA -- In a crushing blow to Bill Gates' ego, world civilization did not collapse when the Microsoft website was offline for an extended period last week. During the anti-trust trial, Microsoft's lawyers repeatedly warned that if the company was broken up or dealt any other penalty (no matter how trivial), it would not only cost the tech industry billions of dollars, but it could decimate the entire world economy and even bring about the start of World War III. At the risk of sounding like a biased, slanted, overzealous journalist, let me just say: Yeah, right! The stunning realization that the world does not revolve around Redmond (yet) has plunged many Microsoft executives into shock. "But microsoft.com is the single most important website in the world! And Microsoft is the single most important company in the Universe! This can't be happening! Why isn't civilization teetering on the edge right now?" said one depressed President Of Executive Vice. | |
| Yes, we're all anti-american terrorists who plan to make the US economy collapse by inventing lots of new words which will have to be added to the dictionary, making the US economy unable to support the ever-growing dictionaries and ensuring the Americans will be unable to (learn to) spell, leaving them dead in the water if there's ever a linguistic war between them and the UK. - Rik van Riel explaining the real reason behind spelling mistakes in the linux kernel | |
| If I had a Q-TIP, I could prevent th' collapse of NEGOTIATIONS!! | |
