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Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) by Linux fortune

FORTUNE DISCUSSES THE OBSCURE FILMS: #5

THE ATOMIC GRANDMOTHER:
        This humorous but heart-warming story tells of an elderly woman
        forced to work at a nuclear power plant in order to help the family
        make ends meet.  At night, granny sits on the porch, tells tales
        of her colorful past, and the family uses her to cook barbecues
        and to power small electrical appliances.  Maureen Stapleton gives
        a glowing performance.
Software uses US measurements, but the OS is in metric...
101 USES FOR A DEAD MICROPROCESSOR
        (1)  Scarecrow for centipedes
        (2)  Dead cat brush
        (3)  Hair barrettes
        (4)  Cleats
        (5)  Self-piercing earrings
        (6)  Fungus trellis
        (7)  False eyelashes
        (8)  Prosthetic dog claws
        .
        .
        .
        (99)  Window garden harrow (pulled behind Tonka tractors)
        (100) Killer velcro
        (101) Currency
===  ALL USERS PLEASE NOTE  ========================

A new system, the CIRCULATORY system, has been added.

The long-experimental CIRCULATORY system has been released to users.  The
Lisp Machine uses Type B fluid, the L machine uses Type A fluid.  When the
switch to Common Lisp occurs both machines will, of course, be Type O.
Please check fluid level by using the DIP stick which is located in the
back of VMI monitors.  Unchecked low fluid levels can cause poor paging
performance.
Fortune suggests uses for YOUR favorite UNIX commands!

Try:
        [Where is Jimmy Hoffa?                        (C shell)
        ^How did the^sex change operation go?        (C shell)
        "How would you rate BSD vs. System V?
        %blow                                        (C shell)
        'thou shalt not mow thy grass at 8am'        (C shell)
        got a light?                                (C shell)
        !!:Say, what do you think of margarine?        (C shell)
        PATH=pretending! /usr/ucb/which sense        (Bourne shell)
        make love
        make "the perfect dry martini"
        man -kisses dog                                (anything up to 4.3BSD)
        i=Hoffa ; >$i; $i; rm $i; rm $i                (Bourne shell)
Fortune suggests uses for YOUR favorite UNIX commands!

Try:
        ar t "God"
        drink < bottle; opener                        (Bourne Shell)
        cat "food in tin cans"                        (all but 4.[23]BSD)
        Hey UNIX!  Got a match?                        (V6 or C shell)
        mkdir matter; cat > matter                (Bourne Shell)
        rm God
        man: Why did you get a divorce?                (C shell)
        date me                                        (anything up to 4.3BSD)
        make "heads or tails of all this"
        who is smart
                                                (C shell)
        If I had a ) for every dollar of the national debt, what would I have?
        sleep with me                                (anything up to 4.3BSD)
        Risch's decision procedure for integration, not surprisingly,
uses a recursion on the number and type of the extensions from the
rational functions needed to represent the integrand.  Although the
algorithm follows and critically depends upon the appropriate structure
of the input, as in the case of multivariate factorization, we cannot
claim that the algorithm is a natural one.  In fact, the creator of
differential algebra, Ritt, committed suicide in the early 1950's,
largely, it is claimed, because few paid attention to his work.  Probably
he would have received more attention had he obtained the algorithm as well.
                -- Joel Moses, "Algorithms and Complexity", ed. J.F. Traub
The beer-cooled computer does not harm the ozone layer.
                -- John M. Ford, a.k.a. Dr. Mike

        [If I can read my notes from the Ask Dr. Mike session at Baycon, I
         believe he added that the beer-cooled computer uses "Forget Only
         Memory".  Ed.]
There has also been some work to allow the interesting use of macro names.
For example, if you wanted all of your "creat()" calls to include read
permissions for everyone, you could say

        #define creat(file, mode)        creat(file, mode | 0444)

        I would recommend against this kind of thing in general, since it
hides the changed semantics of "creat()" in a macro, potentially far away
from its uses.
        To allow this use of macros, the preprocessor uses a process that
is worth describing, if for no other reason than that we get to use one of
the more amusing terms introduced into the C lexicon.  While a macro is
being expanded, it is temporarily undefined, and any recurrence of the macro
name is "painted blue" -- I kid you not, this is the official terminology
-- so that in future scans of the text the macro will not be expanded
recursively.  (I do not know why the color blue was chosen; I'm sure it
was the result of a long debate, spread over several meetings.)
                -- From Ken Arnold's "C Advisor" column in Unix Review
Try to find the real tense of the report you are reading:  Was it done, is
it being done, or is something to be done?  Reports are now written in four
tenses:  past tense, present tense, future tense, and pretense.  Watch for
novel uses of CONGRAM (CONtractor GRAMmar), defined by the imperfect past,
the insufficient present, and the absolutely perfect future.
                -- Amrom Katz
"IBM uses what I like to call the 'hole-in-the-ground technique'
to destroy the competition..... IBM digs a big HOLE in the
ground and covers it with leaves. It then puts a big POT
OF GOLD nearby. Then it gives the call, 'Hey, look at all
this gold, get over here fast.' As soon as the competitor
approaches the pot, he falls into the pit"
- John C. Dvorak
"If you want to eat hippopatomus, you've got to pay the freight."
-- attributed to an IBM guy, about why IBM software uses so much memory
egrep patterns are full regular expressions; it uses a fast deterministic
algorithm that sometimes needs exponential space.
-- unix manuals
[Astrology is] 100 percent hokum, Ted.  As a matter of fact, the first edition
of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, written in 1771 -- 1771! -- said that this
belief system is a subject long ago ridiculed and reviled.  We're dealing with
beliefs that go back to the ancient Babylonians.  There's nothing there....
It sounds a lot like science, it sounds like astronomy.  It's got technical
terms.  It's got jargon.  It confuses the public....The astrologer is quite
glib, confuses the public, uses terms which come from science, come from
metaphysics, come from a host of fields, but they really mean nothing.  The
fact is that astrological beliefs go back at least 2,500 years.  Now that
should be a sufficiently long time for astrologers to prove their case.  They
have not proved their case....It's just simply gibberish.  The fact is, there's
no theory for it, there are no observational data for it.  It's been tested
and tested over the centuries.  Nobody's ever found any validity to it at
all.  It is not even close to a science.  A science has to be repeatable, it
has to have a logical foundation, and it has to be potentially vulnerable --
you test it.  And in that astrology is reqlly quite something else.
-- Astronomer Richard Berendzen, President, American University, on ABC
    News "Nightline," May 3, 1988
        I think for the most part that the readership here uses the c-word in
a similar fashion.  I don't think anybody really believes in a new, revolution-
ary literature --- I think they use `cyberpunk' as a term of convenience to
discuss the common stylistic elements in a small subset of recent sf books.
-- Jeff G. Bone
"The Street finds its own uses for technology."
-- William Gibson
I would like to electrocute everyone who uses the word 'fair' in connection
with income tax policies.
                -- William F. Buckley
incentive program, n.:
        The system of long and short-term rewards that a corporation uses
        to motivate its people.  Still, despite all the experimentation with
        profit sharing, stock options, and the like, the most effective
        incentive program to date seems to be "Do a good job and you get to
        keep it."
Schmidt's Observation:
        All things being equal, a fat person uses more soap
        than a thin person.
Do not clog intellect's sluices with bits of knowledge of questionable uses.
Often statistics are used as a drunken man uses lampposts -- for support
rather than illumination.
A is for awk, which runs like a snail, and
B is for biff, which reads all your mail.
C is for cc, as hackers recall, while
D is for dd, the command that does all.
E is for emacs, which rebinds your keys, and
F is for fsck, which rebuilds your trees.
G is for grep, a clever detective, while
H is for halt, which may seem defective.
I is for indent, which rarely amuses, and
J is for join, which nobody uses.
K is for kill, which makes you the boss, while
L is for lex, which is missing from DOS.
M is for more, from which less was begot, and
N is for nice, which it really is not.
O is for od, which prints out things nice, while
P is for passwd, which reads in strings twice.
Q is for quota, a Berkeley-type fable, and
R is for ranlib, for sorting ar table.
S is for spell, which attempts to belittle, while
T is for true, which does very little.
U is for uniq, which is used after sort, and
V is for vi, which is hard to abort.
W is for whoami, which tells you your name, while
X is, well, X, of dubious fame.
Y is for yes, which makes an impression, and
Z is for zcat, which handles compression.
                -- THE ABC'S OF UNIX
Chivalry, Schmivalry!
        Roger the thief has a
        method he uses for
        sneaky attacks:
Folks who are reading are
        Characteristically
        Always Forgetting to
        Guard their own bac ...
Ever since I was a young boy,
I've hacked the ARPA net,
From Berkeley down to Rutgers,                He's on my favorite terminal,
Any access I could get,                        He cats C right into foo,
But ain't seen nothing like him,        His disciples lead him in,
On any campus yet,                        And he just breaks the root,
That deaf, dumb, and blind kid,                Always has full SYS-PRIV's,
Sure sends a mean packet.                Never uses lint,
                                        That deaf, dumb, and blind kid,
                                        Sure sends a mean packet.
He's a UNIX wizard,
There has to be a twist.
The UNIX wizard's got                        Ain't got no distractions,
Unlimited space on disk.                Can't hear no whistles or bells,
How do you think he does it?                Can't see no message flashing,
I don't know.                                Types by sense of smell,
What makes him so good?                        Those crazy little programs,
                                        The proper bit flags set,
                                        That deaf, dumb, and blind kid,
                                        Sure sends a mean packet.
                -- UNIX Wizard
If a system is administered wisely,
its users will be content.
They enjoy hacking their code
and don't waste time implementing
labor-saving shell scripts.
Since they dearly love their accounts,
they aren't interested in other machines.
There may be telnet, rlogin, and ftp,
but these don't access any hosts.
There may be an arsenal of cracks and malware,
but nobody ever uses them.
People enjoy reading their mail,
take pleasure in being with their newsgroups,
spend weekends working at their terminals,
delight in the doings at the site.
And even though the next system is so close
that users can hear its key clicks and biff beeps,
they are content to die of old age
without ever having gone to see it.
                The Three Major Kind of Tools

* Tools for hittings things to make them loose or to tighten them up or
jar their many complex, sophisticated electrical parts in such a
manner that they function perfectly.  (These are your hammers, maces,
bludgeons, and truncheons.)

* Tools that, if dropped properly, can penetrate your foot.  (Awls)

* Tools that nobody should ever use because the potential danger is far
greater than the value of any project that could possibly result.
(Power saws, power drills, power staplers, any kind of tool that uses
any kind of power more advanced than flashlight batteries.)
                -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"
US Navy uses NT. Saddam, Gadafi, it's party time!

   -- Havlik Denis
The rules of editing press releases are:

1. Identify the crucial elements of the story.
2. Omit at least one of them.

   -- From a Slashdot.org post. We can only guess whether Microsoft
      uses this policy or not.
Jargon Coiner (#6)

An irregular feature that aims to give you advance warning of new jargon
that we've just made up.

* STOP MIRAGE: Trying to click on an imaginary Stop button on a program's
  toolbar after doing something you didn't want to. Usually caused as the
  result of excessive use of Netscape.

* YA-PREFIX: Putting "another" or "yet another" in front of a name or
  tacking "YA" in front of an acronym.

  Example: "We could ya-prefix this fortune by titling it 'Yet Another
  Lame List of Fabricated Jargon'."

* DOMAINEERING: Using a service like Netcraft to determine what operating
  system and webserver a particular domain is running.

* NOT-A-SALTINE EXPLANATION: The canned response given to someone who
  uses the term "hacker" instead of "cracker".
Affordable Virtual Beowulf Cluster

Every nerd drools over Beowulf clusters, but very few have even seen one,
much less own one. Until now, that is. Eric Gylgen, the open source hacker
famous for EviL (the dancing ASCII paperclip add-on to vi), is working on
a program that will emulate Beowulf clusters on a standard desktop PC.

"Of course," he added candidly, "the performance of my virtual cluster
will be many orders of magnitude less than a real cluster, but that's not
really the point. I just want to be able to brag that I run a 256 node
cluster. Nobody has to know I only spent $500 on the hardware it uses."

Eric has prior experience in this field. Last month he successfully built
a real 32 node Beowulf cluster out of Palm Pilots, old TI-8x graphing
calculators, various digital cameras, and even some TRS-80s.

He demonstrated a pre-alpha version of his VirtualEpicPoem software to us
yesterday. His Athlon machine emulated a 256 node Beowulf cluster in which
each node, running Linux, was emulating its own 16 node cluster in which
each node, running Bochs, was emulating VMWare to emulate Linux running
old Amiga software. The system was extremely slow, but it worked.
If Microsoft uses the breakup as an opportunity to port Office, and its
infernal Dancing Paper Clip, to my Linux operating system, heads will fly!
I'll track down that idiot who created Clippit and sic a killer penguin on
him!

   -- Linus Torvalds, when asked by Humorix for his reaction
      to the proposed Microsoft two-way split
Brief History Of Linux (#18)
There are lies, damned lies, and Microsoft brochures

Even from the very first day, the Microsoft Marketing Department was at
full throttle. Vaporware has always been their weapon of choice. Back when
MS-DOS 1.25 was released to OEMs, Microsoft handed out brochures touting
some of the features to be included in future versions, including:
Xenix-compatible pipes, process forks, multitasking, graphics and cursor
positioning, and multi-user support.

The brochure also stated, "MS-DOS has no practical limit on disk size.
MS-DOS uses 4-byte Xenix compatible pointers for file and disk capacity up
to 4 gigabytes." We would like to emphasize in true Dave Barry fashion
that we are not making this up.

Big vaporous plans were also in store for Microsoft's "Apple Killer"
graphical interface. In 1983 Microsoft innovated a new marketing ploy --
the rigged "smoke-and-mirrors" demo -- to showcase the "overlapping
windows" and "multitasking" features of Interface Manager, the predecessor
to Windows. These features never made it into Windows 1.0 -- which,
incidentally, was released 1.5 years behind schedule.
Look Out! It's Microsoft Outlook

An old maxim in the Unix community states, "All programs expand until they
can read mail... except Microsoft Outlook." Well, that's no longer true.
By taking advantage of loopholes in several undocumented APIs, a team of
geeks were able to transform Outlook from a virus-delivery system into an
actual mail client.

"It was quite a feat to accomplish this," said one of the geeks. "I mean,
the rat's nest that is the Windows API can be used to frighten small
children... or adults. And the frequency by which Outlook exploits are
discovered is directly proportional to the number of times Bill Gates uses
the word 'innovation'. But this is the first time somebody has discovered
a beneficial exploit."

Microsoft has vowed to release a patch to fix the uncovered security
flaws. "We simply cannot tolerate unauthorized reverse engineering and
hacking of our innovative solutions. Our Security Response Team will pull
an all-nighter to eliminate these known issues."
Unobfuscated Perl (#1)

A rogue group of Perl hackers has presented a plan to add a "use
really_goddamn_strict" pragma that would enforce readability and
UNobfuscation. With this pragma in force, the Perl compiler might say:

* Warning: Program contains zero comments. You've probably never seen or
  used one before; they begin with a # symbol. Please start using them or
  else a representative from the nearest Perl Mongers group will come to
  your house and beat you over the head with a cluestick.

* Warning: Program uses a cute trick at line 125 that might make sense in
  C. But this isn't C!

* Warning: Code at line 412 indicates that programmer is an idiot. Please
  correct error between chair and monitor.

* Warning: While There's More Than One Way To Do It, your method at line
  523 is particularly stupid. Please try again.
World Domination, One CPU Cycle At A Time

Forget about searching for alien signals or prime numbers. The real
distributed computing application is "Domination@World", a program to advocate
Linux and Apache to every website in the world that uses Windows and IIS.

The goal of the project is to probe every IP number to determine what kind of
platform each Net-connected machine is running. "That's a tall order... we
need lots of computers running our Domination@World clients to help probe
every nook and cranny of the Net," explained Mr. Zell Litt, the project head.

After the probing is complete, the second phase calls for the data to be
cross-referenced with the InterNIC whois database. "This way we'll have the
names, addresses, and phone numbers for every Windows-using system
administrator on the planet," Zell gloated. "That's when the fun begins."

The "fun" part involves LART (Linux Advocacy & Re-education Training), a plan
for extreme advocacy. As part of LART, each Linux User Group will receive a
list of the Windows-using weenies in their region. The LUG will then be able
to employ various advocacy techniques, ranging from a soft-sell approach
(sending the target a free Linux CD in the mail) all the way to "LARTcon 5"
(cracking into their system and forcibly installing Linux).
> Yes *please*! Finally we could introduce proper support for 64-bit
> inode numbers too!

Right.  As soon as userland is audited for places where it uses int
for storing inode numbers - just a couple of months after MS fixes
all security holes in their software.  By then we'll need 128bit time_t,
though...

        - Al Viro on linux-kernel
Know the strength of man,
But keep a woman's care!
Be the stream of the universe!
Being the stream of the universe,
Ever true and unswerving,
Become as a little child once more.

Know the white,
But keep the black!
Be an example to the world!
Being an example to the world,
Ever true and unwavering,
Return to the infinite.

Know honor,
Yet keep humility.
Be the valley of the universe!
Being the valley of the universe,
Ever true and resourceful,
Return to the state of the uncarved block.

When the block is carved, it becomes useful.
When the sage uses it, he becomes the ruler.
Thus, "A great tailor cuts little."
Good weapons are instruments of fear; all creatures hate them.
Therefore followers of Tao never use them.
The wise man prefers the left.
The man of war prefers the right.

Weapons are instruments of fear; they are not a wise man's tools.
He uses them only when he has no choice.
Peace and quiet are dear to his heart,
And victory no cause for rejoicing.
If you rejoice in victory, then you delight in killing;
If you delight in killing, you cannot fulfill yourself.

On happy occasions precedence is given to the left,
On sad occasions to the right.
In the army the general stands on the left,
The commander-in-chief on the right.
This means that war is conducted like a funeral.
When many people are being killed,
They should be mourned in heartfelt sorrow.
That is why a victory must be observed like a funeral.
A small country has fewer people.
Though there are machines that can work ten to a hundred times faster than man, they are not needed.
The people take death seriously and do not travel far.
Though they have boats and carriages, no one uses them.
Though they have armor and weapons, no one displays them.
Men return to the knotting of rope in place of writing.
Their food is plain and good, their clothes fine but simple, their homes secure;
They are happy in their ways.
Though they live within sight of their neighbors,
And crowing cocks and barking dogs are heard across the way,
Yet they leave each other in peace while they grow old and die.
Anyone who uses the phrase "easy as taking candy from a baby" has never
tried taking candy from a baby.
                -- Robin Hood
<Espy> we need to split main into"core" and "wtf-uses-this"
<Knghtbrd> the problem with the GNU coding standards is they ASSUME that
           everyone in the world uses emacs..  If that were the case, free
           software would die because we would all have wrist problems
           like RMS by now and no longer be able to code.  ;>
* seeS uses knghtbrd's comments as his signature
<knghtbrd> seeS: as soon as I typed them I realized I'd better snip them
           myself before someone else did  ;>
A would-be disciple came to Nasrudin's hut on the mountain-side.  Knowing
that every action of such an enlightened one is significant, the seeker
watched the teacher closely.  "Why do you blow on your hands?"  "To warm
myself in the cold."  Later, Nasrudin poured bowls of hot soup for himself
and the newcomer, and blew on his own.  "Why are you doing that, Master?"
"To cool the soup."  Unable to trust a man who uses the same process
to arrive at two different results -- hot and cold -- the disciple departed.
... of course, this probably only happens for tcsh which uses wait4(),
which is why I never saw it.  Serves people who use that abomination
right 8^)
        -- Linus Torvalds, about a patch that fixes getrusage for 1.3.26
* Jes wonders why so many people in here uses fooZZZZZ and foo_sleeping nicks
<peter> Jes: Because they are sleeping?
        -- Seen on #Linux
(6)        Men employees will be given time off each week for courting
        purposes, or two evenings a week if they go regularly to church.
(7)        After an employee has spent his thirteen hours of labor in the
        office, he should spend the remaining time reading the Bible
        and other good books.
(8)        Every employee should lay aside from each pay packet a goodly
        sum of his earnings for his benefit during his declining years,
        so that he will not become a burden on society or his betters.
(9)        Any employee who smokes Spanish cigars, uses alcoholic drink
        in any form, frequents pool tables and public halls, or gets
        shaved in a barber's shop, will give me good reason to suspect
        his worth, intentions, integrity and honesty.
(10)        The employee who has performed his labours faithfully and
        without a fault for five years, will be given an increase of
        five cents per day in his pay, providing profits from the
        business permit it.
                -- "Office Worker's Guide", New England Carriage Works, 1872
Randal said it would be tough to do in sed.  He didn't say he didn't
understand sed.  Randal understands sed quite well.  Which is why he
uses Perl.   :-)  -- Larry Wall in <7874@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
No guarantee of accuracy or completeness!
©TU Chemnitz, 2006-2024
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