Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) | by Linux fortune |
On the other hand, the TCP camp also has a phrase for OSI people. There are lots of phrases. My favorite is `nitwit' -- and the rationale is the Internet philosophy has always been you have extremely bright, non-partisan researchers look at a topic, do world-class research, do several competing implementations, have a bake-off, determine what works best, write it down and make that the standard. The OSI view is entirely opposite. You take written contributions from a much larger community, you put the contributions in a room of committee people with, quite honestly, vast political differences and all with their own political axes to grind, and four years later you get something out, usually without it ever having been implemented once. So the Internet perspective is implement it, make it work well, then write it down, whereas the OSI perspective is to agree on it, write it down, circulate it a lot and now we'll see if anyone can implement it after it's an international standard and every vendor in the world is committed to it. One of those processes is backwards, and I don't think it takes a Lucasian professor of physics at Oxford to figure out which. -- Marshall Rose, "The Pied Piper of OSI" | |
You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing viability of FORTRAN. -- Alan Perlis | |
"This knowledge I pursure is the finest pleasure I have ever known. I could no sooner give it up that I could the very air that I breath." -- Paolo Uccello, Renaissance artist, discoverer of the laws of perspective | |
So we get to my point. Surely people around here read things that aren't on the *Officially Sanctioned Cyberpunk Reading List*. Surely we don't (any of us) really believe that there is some big, deep political and philosophical message in all this, do we? So if this `cyberpunk' thing is just a term of convenience, how can somebody sell out? If cyberpunk is just a word we use to describe a particular style and imagery in sf, how can it be dead? Where are the profound statements that the `Movement' is or was trying to make? I think most of us are interested in examining and discussing literary (and musical) works that possess a certain stylistic excellence and perhaps a rather extreme perspective; this is what CP is all about, no? Maybe there should be a newsgroup like, say, alt.postmodern or somthing. Something less restrictive in scope than alt.cyberpunk. -- Jeff G. Bone | |
If builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, Jolt Cola would be a Fortune-500 company. If builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, you'd be able to buy a nice little colonial split-level at Babbages for $34.95. If programmers wrote programs the way builders build buildings, we'd still be using autocoder and running compile decks. -- Peter da Silva and Karl Lehenbauer, a different perspective | |
Graduating seniors, parents and friends... Let me begin by reassuring you that my remarks today will stand up to the most stringent requirements of the new appropriateness. The intra-college sensitivity advisory committee has vetted the text of even trace amounts of subconscious racism, sexism and classism. Moreover, a faculty panel of deconstructionists have reconfigured the rhetorical components within a post-structuralist framework, so as to expunge any offensive elements of western rationalism and linear logic. Finally, all references flowing from a white, male, eurocentric perspective have been eliminated, as have any other ruminations deemed denigrating to the political consensus of the moment. Thank you and good luck. -- Doonesbury, the University Chancellor's graduation speech. | |
"There are a billion people in China. And I want them to be able to pass notes to each other written in Perl. I want them to be able to write poetry in Perl. That is my vision of the Future. My chosen perspective." -- Larry Wall (Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly and Associates) | |
But modifying dpkg is infeasible, and we've agreed to, among other things, keep the needs of our users at the forefront of our minds. And from a user's perspective, something that keeps the system tidy in the normal case, and works *now*, is much better than idealistic fantasies like a working dpkg. -- Manoj Srivastava |