Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) | by Linux fortune |
Television is now so desperately hungry for material that it is scraping the top of the barrel. -- Gore Vidal | |
"Computer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable. As in all the arts, a romance with the material must be well under way. If we value the lifelong learning of arts and letters as a springboard for personal and societal growth, should any less effort be spent to make computing a part of our lives?" -- Alan Kay, "Computer Software", Scientific American, September 1984 | |
People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. -- John Kenneth Galbraith | |
Rhode's Law: When any principle, law, tenet, probability, happening, circumstance, or result can in no way be directly, indirectly, empirically, or circuitously proven, derived, implied, inferred, induced, deducted, estimated, or scientifically guessed, it will always for the purpose of convenience, expediency, political advantage, material gain, or personal comfort, or any combination of the above, or none of the above, be unilaterally and unequivocally assumed, proclaimed, and adhered to as absolute truth to be undeniably, universally, immutably, and infinitely so, until such time as it becomes advantageous to assume otherwise, maybe. | |
Boomer Envy: Envy of material wealth and long-range material security accrued by older members of the baby boom generation by virtue of fortunate births. -- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture" | |
Lessness: A philosophy whereby one reconciles oneself with diminishing expectations of material wealth: "I've given up wanting to make a killing or be a bigshot. I just want to find happiness and maybe open up a little roadside cafe in Idaho." -- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture" | |
Conspicuous Minimalism: A life-style tactic similar to Status Substitution. The nonownership of material goods flaunted as a token of moral and intellectual superiority. -- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture" | |
A book is the work of a mind, doing its work in the way that a mind deems best. That's dangerous. Is the work of some mere individual mind likely to serve the aims of collectively accepted compromises, which are known in the schools as 'standards'? Any mind that would audaciously put itself forth to work all alone is surely a bad example for the students, and probably, if not downright antisocial, at least a little off-center, self-indulgent, elitist. ... It's just good pedagogy, therefore, to stay away from such stuff, and use instead, if film-strips and rap-sessions must be supplemented, 'texts,' selected, or prepared, or adapted, by real professionals. Those texts are called 'reading material.' They are the academic equivalent of the 'listening material' that fills waiting-rooms, and the 'eating material' that you can buy in thousands of convenient eating resource centers along the roads. -- The Underground Grammarian | |
Once Again From the Top Correction notice in the Miami Herald: "Last Sunday, The Herald erroneously reported that original Dolphin Johnny Holmes had been an insurance salesman in Raleigh, North Carolina, that he had won the New York lottery in 1982 and lost the money in a land swindle, that he had been charged with vehicular homicide, but acquitted because his mother said she drove the car, and that he stated that the funniest thing he ever saw was Flipper spouting water on George Wilson. Each of these items was erroneous material published inadvertently. He was not an insurance salesman in Raleigh, did not win the lottery, neither he nor his mother was charged or involved in any way with vehicular homicide, and he made no comment about Flipper or George Wilson. The Herald regrets the errors." -- "The Progressive", March, 1987 | |
If you haven't enjoyed the material in the last few lectures then a career in chartered accountancy beckons. -- Advice from the lecturer in the middle of the Stochastic Systems course. | |
Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley's Lover has just been reissued by the Grove Press, and this pictorial account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is full of considerable interest to outdoor minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper. Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour those sidelights on the management of a midland shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion the book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller's "Practical Gamekeeping." -- Ed Zern, "Field and Stream" (Nov. 1959) | |
Linux Dominates Academic Research A recent survey of colleges and high school reveals that Linux, Open Source Software, and Microsoft are favorite topics for research projects. Internet Censorship, a popular topic for the past two years, was supplanted by Biology of Penguins as another of this year's most popular subjects for research papers. "The Internet has changed all the rules," one college professor told Humorix. "Nobody wants to write papers about traditional topics like the death penalty, freedom of speech, abortion, juvenile crime, etc. Most of the research papers I've seen the past year have been computer related, and most of the reference material has come from the Net. This isn't necessarily good; there's a lot of crap on the Net. One student tried to use 'Bob's Totally Wicked Anti-Microsoft Homepage of Doom' and 'The Support Group for People Used by Microsoft' as primary sources of information for his paper about Microsoft." A high school English teacher added, "Plagarism is a problem with the Net. One of my students 'wrote' a brilliant piece about the free software revolution. Upon further inspection, however, almost everything was stolen from Eric S. Raymond's website. I asked the student, "What does noosphere mean?" He responded, 'New-what?' Needless to say, he failed the class." | |
The GPL Is Not Y2K-Compliant! BOSTON, MA -- Panic ensued earlier today at GNU Project Headquarters when it was discovered that the GNU General Public License is not ready for the year 2000. Thankfully, the panic quickly subsided when RMS posted an emergency diff file to Usenet that patches the GPL to eliminate the problem. The non-Y2K compliant material appears on lines 295 and 316 of version 2.0 of the GPL. Both lines contain the text, "Copyright (C) 19yy ", a classic example of unpreparedness for the year 2000. Microsoft was quick to respond to the news, saying in a rushed press release, "At least our license agreements don't contain any Y2K issues." The GNU Project immediately countered Microsoft's statement with a press release that said simply, "Whatever". | |
New Linux Companies Hope To Get Rich Quick (#2) Don't throw out that old Red Hat Linux 3.0 CD. A group of entrepreneurs are hording vintage Linux items in the hopes that they will become hot collector's items in the coming decades. The venture, called "Money Grows On Binary Trees", hopes to amass a warehouse full of old Linux distributions, books, stuffed penguins, promotional material, and Linus Torvalds autographs. "Nobody thought pieces of cardstock featuring baseball players would be worth anything..." the founder of Binary Trees said. "That 'Linux For Dummies' book sitting in your trash could be the next Babe Ruth card." The company organized a Linux Collectibles Convention last week in Silicon Valley, drawing in a respectable crowd of 1,500 people and 20 exhibitors. The big attraction was a "Windows For Dummies" book actually signed by Linus Torvalds. "He signed it back at a small Linux conference in '95," the owner explained. "He didn't realize it was a Dummies book because I had placed an O'Reilly cover on it... Somebody at the convention offered me $10,000 for it, but that seemed awfully low. I hope to sell it on eBay next month with a reserve price containing a significant number of zeros." | |
Brief History Of Linux (#12) A note from Bill Gates' second grade teacher: Billy has been having some trouble behaving in class lately... Last Monday he horded all of the crayons and refused to share, saying that he needed all 160 colors to maximize his 'innovation'. He then proceeded to sell little pieces of paper ("End-User License Agreement for Crayons" he called them) granting his classmates the 'non-transferable right' to use the crayons on a limited time basis in exchange for their lunch money... When I tried to stop Billy, he kept harping about his right to innovate and how my interference violated basic notions of free-market capitalism. "Holding a monopoly is not illegal," he rebutted. I chastised him for talking back, and then I took away the box of crayons so others could share them... angrily, he then pointed to a drawing of his hanging on the wall and yelled, "That's my picture! You don't have the right to present my copyrighted material in a public exhibition without my permission! You're pirating my intellectual property. Pirate! Pirate! Pirate!" I developed a headache that day that even the maximum dosage of Aspirin wasn't able to handle. And then on Tuesday, he conned several students out of their milk money by convincing them to play three-card Monty... | |
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" | |
<Endy> taniwha: Quote material :) <taniwha> Endy: :) <knghtbrd> Endy: I already snipped it |