Dictionary De - En
De - Es
De - Pt| Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) | by Linux fortune |
| Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea. -- John Ciardi | |
| Prizes are for children. -- Charles Ives, upon being given, but refusing, the Pulitzer prize | |
| /* * [...] Note that 120 sec is defined in the protocol as the maximum * possible RTT. I guess we'll have to use something other than TCP * to talk to the University of Mars. * PAWS allows us longer timeouts and large windows, so once implemented * ftp to mars will work nicely. */ (from /usr/src/linux/net/inet/tcp.c, concerning RTT [retransmission timeout]) | |
| In Marseilles they make half the toilet soap we consume in America, but the Marseillaise only have a vague theoretical idea of its use, which they have obtained from books of travel. -- Mark Twain | |
| A programmer is a person who passes as an exacting expert on the basis of being able to turn out, after innumerable punching, an infinite series of incomprehensible answers calculated with micrometric precisions from vague assumptions based on debatable figures taken from inconclusive documents and carried out on instruments of problematical accuracy by persons of dubious reliability and questionable mentality for the avowed purpose of annoying and confounding a hopelessly defenseless department that was unfortunate enough to ask for the information in the first place. -- IEEE Grid newsmagazine | |
| At first sight, the idea of any rules or principles being superimposed on the creative mind seems more likely to hinder than to help, but this is quite untrue in practice. Disciplined thinking focuses inspiration rather than blinkers it. -- G.L. Glegg, "The Design of Design" | |
| I asked the engineer who designed the communication terminal's keyboards why these were not manufactured in a central facility, in view of the small number needed [1 per month] in his factory. He explained that this would be contrary to the political concept of local self-sufficiency. Therefore, each factory needing keyboards, no matter how few, manufactures them completely, even molding the keypads. -- Isaac Auerbach, IEEE "Computer", Nov. 1979 | |
| I'm sure that VMS is completely documented, I just haven't found the right manual yet. I've been working my way through the manuals in the document library and I'm half way through the second cabinet, (3 shelves to go), so I should find what I'm looking for by mid May. I hope I can remember what it was by the time I find it. I had this idea for a new horror film, "VMS Manuals from Hell" or maybe "The Paper Chase : IBM vs. DEC". It's based on Hitchcock's "The Birds", except that it's centered around a programmer who is attacked by a swarm of binder pages with an index number and the single line "This page intentionally left blank." -- Alex Crain | |
| In fact, S. M. Simpson, eventually devised an efficient 24-point Fourier transform, which was a precursor to the Cooley-Tukey fast Fourier transform in 1965. The FFT made all of Simpson's efficient autocorrelation and spectrum programs instantly obsolete, on which he had worked half a lifetime. -- Proc. IEEE, Sept. 1982, p.900 | |
| Norbert Weiner was the subject of many dotty professor stories. Weiner was, in fact, very absent minded. The following story is told about him: when they moved from Cambridge to Newton his wife, knowing that he would be absolutely useless on the move, packed him off to MIT while she directed the move. Since she was certain that he would forget that they had moved and where they had moved to, she wrote down the new address on a piece of paper, and gave it to him. Naturally, in the course of the day, an insight occurred to him. He reached in his pocket, found a piece of paper on which he furiously scribbled some notes, thought it over, decided there was a fallacy in his idea, and threw the piece of paper away. At the end of the day he went home (to the old address in Cambridge, of course). When he got there he realized that they had moved, that he had no idea where they had moved to, and that the piece of paper with the address was long gone. Fortunately inspiration struck. There was a young girl on the street and he conceived the idea of asking her where he had moved to, saying, "Excuse me, perhaps you know me. I'm Norbert Weiner and we've just moved. Would you know where we've moved to?" To which the young girl replied, "Yes, Daddy, Mommy thought you would forget." The capper to the story is that I asked his daughter (the girl in the story) about the truth of the story, many years later. She said that it wasn't quite true -- that he never forgot who his children were! The rest of it, however, was pretty close to what actually happened... -- Richard Harter | |
| Now she speaks rapidly. "Do you know *why* you want to program?" He shakes his head. He hasn't the faintest idea. "For the sheer *joy* of programming!" she cries triumphantly. "The joy of the parent, the artist, the craftsman. "You take a program, born weak and impotent as a dimly-realized solution. You nurture the program and guide it down the right path, building, watching it grow ever stronger. Sometimes you paint with tiny strokes, a keystroke added here, a keystroke changed there." She sweeps her arm in a wide arc. "And other times you savage whole *blocks* of code, ripping out the program's very *essence*, then beginning anew. But always building, creating, filling the program with your own personal stamp, your own quirks and nuances. Watching the program grow stronger, patching it when it crashes, until finally it can stand alone -- proud, powerful, and perfect. This is the programmer's finest hour!" Softly at first, then louder, he hears the strains of a Sousa march. "This ... this is your canvas! your clay! Go forth and create a masterwork!" | |
| Rattling around the back of my head is a disturbing image of something I saw at the airport ... Now I'm remembering, those giant piles of computer magazines right next to "People" and "Time" in the airport store. Does it bother anyone else that half the world is being told all of our hard-won secrets of computer technology? Remember how all the lawyers cried foul when "How to Avoid Probate" was published? Are they taking no-fault insurance lying down? No way! But at the current rate it won't be long before there are stacks of the "Transactions on Information Theory" at the A&P checkout counters. Who's going to be impressed with us electrical engineers then? Are we, as the saying goes, giving away the store? -- Robert W. Lucky, IEEE President | |
| Real computer scientists despise the idea of actual hardware. Hardware has limitations, software doesn't. It's a real shame that Turing machines are so poor at I/O. | |
| Real software engineers don't like the idea of some inexplicable and greasy hardware several aisles away that may stop working at any moment. They have a great distrust of hardware people, and wish that systems could be virtual at *___all* levels. They would like personal computers (you know no one's going to trip over something and kill your DFA in mid-transit), except that they need 8 megabytes to run their Correctness Verification Aid packages. | |
| "Section 2.4.3.5 AWNS (Acceptor Wait for New Cycle State). In AWNS the AH function indicates that it has received a multiline message byte. In AWNS the RFD message must be sent false and the DAC message must be sent passive true. The AH function must exit the AWNS and enter: (1) The ANRS if DAV is false (2) The AIDS if the ATN message is false and neither: (a) The LADS is active (b) Nor LACS is active" -- from the IEEE Standard Digital Interface for Programmable Instrumentation | |
| Several students were asked to prove that all odd integers are prime. The first student to try to do this was a math student. "Hmmm... Well, 1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, and by induction, we have that all the odd integers are prime." The second student to try was a man of physics who commented, "I'm not sure of the validity of your proof, but I think I'll try to prove it by experiment." He continues, "Well, 1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is... uh, 9 is... uh, 9 is an experimental error, 11 is prime, 13 is prime... Well, it seems that you're right." The third student to try it was the engineering student, who responded, "Well, to be honest, actually, I'm not sure of your answer either. Let's see... 1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is... uh, 9 is... well, if you approximate, 9 is prime, 11 is prime, 13 is prime... Well, it does seem right." Not to be outdone, the computer science student comes along and says "Well, you two sort've got the right idea, but you'll end up taking too long! I've just whipped up a program to REALLY go and prove it." He goes over to his terminal and runs his program. Reading the output on the screen he says, "1 is prime, 1 is prime, 1 is prime, 1 is prime..." | |
| "Text processing has made it possible to right-justify any idea, even one which cannot be justified on any other grounds." -- J. Finnegan, USC. | |
| The idea that an arbitrary naive human should be able to properly use a given tool without training or understanding is even more wrong for computing than it is for other tools (e.g. automobiles, airplanes, guns, power saws). -- Doug Gwyn | |
| Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (10) Sorry, but that's too useful. (9) Dammit, little-endian systems *are* more consistent! (8) I'm on the committee and I *still* don't know what the hell #pragma is for. (7) Well, it's an excellent idea, but it would make the compilers too hard to write. (6) Them bats is smart; they use radar. (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here? (4) How many times do we have to tell you, "No prior art!" (3) Ha, ha, I can't believe they're actually going to adopt this sucker. (2) Thank you for your generous donation, Mr. Wirth. (1) Gee, I wish we hadn't backed down on 'noalias'. | |
| UNIX Trix For those of you in the reseller business, here is a helpful tip that will save your support staff a few hours of precious time. Before you send your next machine out to an untrained client, change the permissions on /etc/passwd to 666 and make sure there is a copy somewhere on the disk. Now when they forget the root password, you can easily login as an ordinary user and correct the damage. Having a bootable tape (for larger machines) is not a bad idea either. If you need some help, give us a call. -- CommUNIXque 1:1, ASCAR Business Systems | |
| X windows: We will dump no core before its time. One good crash deserves another. A bad idea whose time has come. And gone. We make excuses. It didn't even look good on paper. You laugh now, but you'll be laughing harder later! A new concept in abuser interfaces. How can something get so bad, so quickly? It could happen to you. The art of incompetence. You have nothing to lose but your lunch. When uselessness just isn't enough. More than a mere hindrance. It's a whole new barrier! When you can't afford to be right. And you thought we couldn't make it worse. If it works, it isn't X windows. | |
| You know you've been sitting in front of your Lisp machine too long when you go out to the junk food machine and start wondering how to make it give you the CADR of Item H so you can get that yummie chocolate cupcake that's stuck behind the disgusting vanilla one. | |
| Any great truth can -- and eventually will -- be expressed as a cliche -- a cliche is a sure and certain way to dilute an idea. For instance, my grandmother used to say, "The black cat is always the last one off the fence." I have no idea what she meant, but at one time, it was undoubtedly true. -- Solomon Short | |
| You can move the world with an idea, but you have to think of it first. | |
| 186,000 Miles per Second. It's not just a good idea. IT'S THE LAW. | |
| The idea of man leaving this earth and flying to another celestial body and landing there and stepping out and walking over that body has a fascination and a driving force that can get the country to a level of energy, ambition, and will that I do not see in any other undertaking. I think if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that we needed that impetus extremely strongly. I sincerely believe that the space program, with its manned landing on the moon, if wisely executed, will become the spearhead for a broad front of courageous and energetic activities in all the fields of endeavour of the human mind - activities which could not be carried out except in a mental climate of ambition and confidence which such a spearhead can give. - Dr. Martin Schwarzschild, 1962, in "The History of Manned Space Flight" | |
| Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their hearts, without anguish in mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God idea, not God Himself. - Miguel de Unamuno, Spanish philosopher and writer | |
| "My sense of purpose is gone! I have no idea who I AM!" "Oh, my God... You've.. You've turned him into a DEMOCRAT!" -- Doonesbury | |
| ...Veloz is indistinguishable from hundreds of other electronics businesses in the Valley, run by eager young engineers poring over memory dumps late into the night. The difference is that a bunch of self-confessed "car nuts" are making money doing what they love: writing code and driving fast. -- "Electronics puts its foot on the gas", IEEE Spectrum, May 88 | |
| What the gods would destroy they first submit to an IEEE standards committee. | |
| In recognizing AT&T Bell Laboratories for corporate innovation, for its invention of cellular mobile communications, IEEE President Russell C. Drew referred to the cellular telephone as a "basic necessity." How times have changed, one observer remarked: many in the room recalled the advent of direct dialing. -- The Institute, July 1988, pg. 11 | |
| The essential ideas of Algol 68 were that the whole language should be precisely defined and that all the pieces should fit together smoothly. The basic idea behind Pascal was that it didn't matter how vague the language specification was (it took *years* to clarify) or how many rough edges there were, as long as the CDC Pascal compiler was fast. -- Richard A. O'Keefe | |
| "The fundamental principle of science, the definition almost, is this: the sole test of the validity of any idea is experiment." -- Richard P. Feynman | |
| David Brinkley: The daily astrological charts are precisely where, in my judgment, they belong, and that is on the comic page. George Will: I don't think astrology belongs even on the comic pages. The comics are making no truth claim. Brinkley: Where would you put it? Will: I wouldn't put it in the newspaper. I think it's transparent rubbish. It's a reflection of an idea that we expelled from Western thought in the sixteenth century, that we are in the center of a caring universe. We are not the center of the universe, and it doesn't care. The star's alignment at the time of our birth -- that is absolute rubbish. It is not funny to have it intruded among people who have nuclear weapons. Sam Donaldson: This isn't something new. Governor Ronald Reagan was sworn in just after midnight in his first term in Sacramento because the stars said it was a propitious time. Will: They [horoscopes] are utter crashing banalities. They could apply to anyone and anything. Brinkley: When is the exact moment [of birth]? I don't think the nurse is standing there with a stopwatch and a notepad. Donaldson: If we're making decisions based on the stars -- that's a cockamamie thing. People want to know. -- "This Week" with David Brinkley, ABC Television, Sunday, May 8, 1988, excerpts from a discussion on Astrology and Reagan | |
| The reported resort to astrology in the White House has occasioned much merriment. It is not funny. Astrological gibberish, which means astrology generally, has no place in a newspaper, let alone government. Unlike comics, which are part of a newspaper's harmless pleasure and make no truth claims, astrology is a fraud. The idea that it gets a hearing in government is dismaying. -- George Will, Washing Post Writers Group | |
| "Freedom is still the most radical idea of all." -- Nathaniel Branden | |
| "To undertake a project, as the word's derivation indicates, means to cast an idea out ahead of oneself so that it gains autonomy and is fulfilled not only by the efforts of its originator but, indeed, independently of him as well. -- Czeslaw Milosz | |
| Well, punk is kind of anti-ethical, anyway. Its ethics, so to speak, include a disdain for ethics in general. If you have to think about some- thing so hard, then it's bullshit anyway; that's the idea. Punks are anti- ismists, to coin a term. But nonetheless, they have a pretty clearly defined stance and image, and THAT is what we hang the term `punk' on. -- Jeff G. Bone | |
| ...cyberpunk wants to see the mind as mechanistic & duplicable, challenging basic assumptions about the nature of individuality & self. That seems all the better reason to assume that cyberpunk art & music is essentially mindless garbagio. Willy certainly addressed this idea in "Count Zero," with Katatonenkunst, the automatic box-maker and the girl's observation that the real art was the building of the machine itself, rather than its output. -- Eliot Handelman | |
| The Seventh Edition licensing procedures are, I suppose, still in effect, though I doubt that tapes are available from AT&T. At any rate, whatever restrictions the license imposes still exist. These restrictions were and are reasonable for places that just want to run the system, but don't allow many of the things that Minix was written for, like study of the source in classes, or by individuals not in a university or company. I've always thought that Minix was a fine idea, and competently done. As for the size of v7, wc -l /usr/sys/*/*.[chs] is 19271. -- Dennis Ritchie, 1989 | |
| "We dedicated ourselves to a powerful idea -- organic law rather than naked power. There seems to be universal acceptance of that idea in the nation." -- Supreme Court Justice Potter Steart | |
| A bureaucrat's idea of cleaning up his files is to make a copy of everything before he destroys it. | |
| A long memory is the most subversive idea in America. | |
| Gentlemen, Whilst marching from Portugal to a position which commands the approach to Madrid and the French forces, my officers have been diligently complying with your requests which have been sent by H.M. ship from London to Lisbon and thence by dispatch to our headquarters. We have enumerated our saddles, bridles, tents and tent poles, and all manner of sundry items for which His Majesty's Government holds me accountable. I have dispatched reports on the character, wit, and spleen of every officer. Each item and every farthing has been accounted for, with two regrettable exceptions for which I beg your indulgence. Unfortunately the sum of one shilling and ninepence remains unaccounted for in one infantry battalion's petty cash and there has been a hideous confusion as the the number of jars of raspberry jam issued to one cavalry regiment during a sandstorm in western Spain. This reprehensible carelessness may be related to the pressure of circumstance, since we are war with France, a fact which may come as a bit of a surprise to you gentlemen in Whitehall. This brings me to my present purpose, which is to request elucidation of my instructions from His Majesty's Government so that I may better understand why I am dragging an army over these barren plains. I construe that perforce it must be one of two alternative duties, as given below. I shall pursue either one with the best of my ability, but I cannot do both: 1. To train an army of uniformed British clerks in Spain for the benefit of the accountants and copy-boys in London or perchance: 2. To see to it that the forces of Napoleon are driven out of Spain. -- Duke of Wellington, to the British Foreign Office, London, 1812 | |
| I used to be a rebel in my youth. This cause... that cause... (chuckle) I backed 'em ALL! But I learned. Rebellion is simply a device used by the immature to hide from his own problems. So I lost interest in politics. Now when I feel aroused by a civil rights case or a passport hearing... I realize it's just a device. I go to my analyst and we work it out. You have no idea how much better I feel these days. -- J. Feiffer | |
| Reporter (to Mahatma Gandhi): Mr Gandhi, what do you think of Western Civilization? Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea. | |
| The IRS spends God knows how much of your tax money on these toll-free information hot lines staffed by IRS employees, whose idea of a dynamite tax tip is that you should print neatly. If you ask them a real tax question, such as how you can cheat, they're useless. So, for guidance, you want to look to big business. Big business never pays a nickel in taxes, according to Ralph Nader, who represents a big consumer organization that never pays a nickel in taxes... -- Dave Barry, "Sweating Out Taxes" | |
| 186,282 miles per second: It isn't just a good idea, it's the law! | |
| Bore, n.: A guy who wraps up a two-minute idea in a two-hour vocabulary. -- Walter Winchell | |
| Concept, n.: Any "idea" for which an outside consultant billed you more than $25,000. | |
| Cruickshank's Law of Committees: If a committee is allowed to discuss a bad idea long enough, it will inevitably decide to implement the idea simply because so much work has already been done on it. | |
| curtation, n.: The enforced compression of a string in the fixed-length field environment. The problem of fitting extremely variable-length strings such as names, addresses, and item descriptions into fixed-length records is no trivial matter. Neglect of the subtle art of curtation has probably alienated more people than any other aspect of data processing. You order Mozart's "Don Giovanni" from your record club, and they invoice you $24.95 for MOZ DONG. The witless mapping of the sublime onto the ridiculous! Equally puzzling is the curtation that produces the same eight characters, THE BEST, whether you order "The Best of Wagner", "The Best of Schubert", or "The Best of the Turds". Similarly, wine lovers buying from computerized wineries twirl their glasses, check their delivery notes, and inform their friends, "A rather innocent, possibly overtruncated CAB SAUV 69 TAL." The squeezing of fruit into 10 columns has yielded such memorable obscenities as COX OR PIP. The examples cited are real, and the curtational methodology which produced them is still with us. MOZ DONG n. Curtation of Don Giovanni by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte, as performed by the computerized billing ensemble of the Internat'l Preview Society, Great Neck (sic), N.Y. -- Stan Kelly-Bootle, "The Devil's DP Dictionary" | |
| Iles's Law: There is always an easier way to do it. When looking directly at the easy way, especially for long periods, you will not see it. Neither will Iles. | |
| Malek's Law: Any simple idea will be worded in the most complicated way. | |
| manual, n.: A unit of documentation. There are always three or more on a given item. One is on the shelf; someone has the others. The information you need is in the others. -- Ray Simard | |
| McGowan's Madison Avenue Axiom: If an item is advertised as "under $50", you can bet it's not $19.95. | |
| Mollison's Bureaucracy Hypothesis: If an idea can survive a bureaucratic review and be implemented it wasn't worth doing. | |
| Mustgo, n.: Any item of food that has been sitting in the refrigerator so long it has become a science project. -- Sniglets, "Rich Hall & Friends" | |
| On-line, adj.: The idea that a human being should always be accessible to a computer. | |
| Paul's Law: In America, it's not how much an item costs, it's how much you save. | |
| The Modelski Chain Rule: (1) Look intently at the problem for several minutes. Scratch your head at 20-30 second intervals. Try solving the problem on your Hewlett-Packard. (2) Failing this, look around at the class. Select a particularly bright-looking individual. (3) Procure a large chain. (4) Walk over to the selected student and threaten to beat him severely with the chain unless he gives you the answer to the problem. Generally, he will. It may also be a good idea to give him a sound thrashing anyway, just to show you mean business. | |
| Let's remind ourselves that last year's fresh idea is today's cliche. -- Austen Briggs | |
| I used to have nightmares that the Grinch's dog would kidnap me and make me dress up in a halter-top and hot pants and listen to Burl Ives records. -- Robin, "Anything But Love", 12/18/91. | |
| 1/2 oz. gin 1/2 oz. vodka 1/2 oz. rum (preferably dark) 3/4 oz. tequilla 1/2 oz. triple sec 1/2 oz. orange juice 3/4 oz. sour mix 1/2 oz. cola shake with ice and strain into frosted glass. Long Island Iced Tea | |
| Recipe for a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster: (1) Take the juice from one bottle of Ol' Janx Spirit (2) Pour into it one measure of water from the seas of Santraginus V (Oh, those Santraginean fish!) (3) Allow 3 cubes of Arcturan Mega-gin to melt into the mixture (properly iced or the benzine is lost.) (4) Allow four liters of Fallian marsh gas to bubble through it. (5) Over the back of a silver spoon, float a measure of Qualactin Hypermint extract. (6) Drop in the tooth of an Algolian Suntiger. Watch it dissolve. (7) Sprinkle Zamphuor. (8) Add an olive. (9) Drink... but... very carefully... | |
| A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea. -- John Ciardi | |
| No matter who you are, some scholar can show you the great idea you had was had by someone before you. | |
| Fortune presents: USEFUL PHRASES IN ESPERANTO, #1. ^Cu vi parolas angle? Do you speak English? Mi ne komprenas. I don't understand. Vi estas la sola esperantisto kiun mi You're the only Esperanto speaker renkontas. I've met. La ^ceko estas enpo^stigita. The check is in the mail. Oni ne povas, ^gin netrovi. You can't miss it. Mi nur rigardadas. I'm just looking around. Nu, ^sajnis bona ideo. Well, it seemed like a good idea. | |
| In America, it's not how much an item costs, it's how much you save. | |
| 1.79 x 10^12 furlongs per fortnight -- it's not just a good idea, it's the law! | |
| Always think of something new; this helps you forget your last rotten idea. -- Seth Frankel | |
| Chapter 2: Newtonian Growth and Decay The growth-decay formulas were developed in the trivial fashion by Isaac Newton's famous brother Phigg. His idea was to provide an equation that would describe a quantity that would dwindle and dwindle, but never quite reach zero. Historically, he was merely trying to work out his mortgage. Another versatile equation also emerged, one which would define a function that would continue to grow, but never reach unity. This equation can be applied to charging capacitors, over-damped springs, and the human race in general. | |
| Math is like love -- a simple idea but it can get complicated. -- R. Drabek | |
| One day this guy is finally fed up with his middle-class existence and decides to do something about it. He calls up his best friend, who is a mathematical genius. "Look," he says, "do you suppose you could find some way mathematically of guaranteeing winning at the race track? We could make a lot of money and retire and enjoy life." The mathematician thinks this over a bit and walks away mumbling to himself. A week later his friend drops by to ask the genius if he's had any success. The genius, looking a little bleary-eyed, replies, "Well, yes, actually I do have an idea, and I'm reasonably sure that it will work, but there a number of details to be figured out. After the second week the mathematician appears at his friend's house, looking quite a bit rumpled, and announces, "I think I've got it! I still have some of the theory to work out, but now I'm certain that I'm on the right track." At the end of the third week the mathematician wakes his friend by pounding on his door at three in the morning. He has dark circles under his eyes. His hair hasn't been combed for many days. He appears to be wearing the same clothes as the last time. He has several pencils sticking out from behind his ears and an almost maniacal expression on his face. "WE CAN DO IT! WE CAN DO IT!!" he shrieks. "I have discovered the perfect solution!! And it's so EASY! First, we assume that horses are perfect spheres in simple harmonic motion..." | |
| The Man Who Almost Invented The Vacuum Cleaner The man officially credited with inventing the vacuum cleaner is Hubert Cecil Booth. However, he got the idea from a man who almost invented it. In 1901 Booth visited a London music-hall. On the bill was an American inventor with his wonder machine for removing dust from carpets. The machine comprised a box about one foot square with a bag on top. After watching the act -- which made everyone in the front six rows sneeze -- Booth went round to the inventor's dressing room. "It should suck not blow," said Booth, coming straight to the point. "Suck?", exclaimed the enraged inventor. "Your machine just moves the dust around the room," Booth informed him. "Suck? Suck? Sucking is not possible," was the inventor's reply and he stormed out. Booth proved that it was by the simple expedient of kneeling down, pursing his lips and sucking the back of an armchair. "I almost choked," he said afterwards. -- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures" | |
| Two men are in a hot-air balloon. Soon, they find themselves lost in a canyon somewhere. One of the three men says, "I've got an idea. We can call for help in this canyon and the echo will carry our voices to the end of the canyon. Someone's bound to hear us by then!" So he leans over the basket and screams out, "Helllloooooo! Where are we?" (They hear the echo several times). Fifteen minutes later, they hear this echoing voice: "Helllloooooo! You're lost!" The shouter comments, "That must have been a mathematician." Puzzled, his friend asks, "Why do you say that?" "For three reasons. First, he took a long time to answer, second, he was absolutely correct, and, third, his answer was absolutely useless." | |
| Weinberg, as a young grocery clerk, advised the grocery manager to get rid of rutabagas which nobody ever bought. He did so. "Well, kid, that was a great idea," said the manager. Then he paused and asked the killer question, "NOW what's the least popular vegetable?" Law: Once you eliminate your #1 problem, #2 gets a promotion. -- Gerald Weinberg, "The Secrets of Consulting" | |
| I don't care for the Sugar Smacks commercial. I don't like the idea of a frog jumping on my Breakfast. -- Lowell, Chicago Reader 10/15/82 | |
| The basic menu item, in fact the ONLY menu item, would be a food unit called the "patty," consisting of -- this would be guaranteed in writing -- "100 percent animal matter of some kind." All patties would be heated up and then cooled back down in electronic devices immediately before serving. The Breakfast Patty would be a patty on a bun with lettuce, tomato, onion, egg, Ba-Ko-Bits, Cheez Whiz, a Special Sauce made by pouring ketchup out of a bottle and a little slip of paper stating: "Inspected by Number 12." The Lunch or Dinner Patty would be any Breakfast Patties that didn't get sold in the morning. The Seafood Lover's Patty would be any patties that were starting to emit a serious aroma. Patties that were too rank even to be Seafood Lover's Patties would be compressed into wads and sold as "Nuggets." -- Dave Barry, "'Mister Mediocre' Restaurants" | |
| Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow -- T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Man" [Quoted in "VMS Internals and Data Structures", V4.4, when referring to system service dispatching.] | |
| If Dr. Seuss Were a Technical Writer..... Here's an easy game to play. Here's an easy thing to say: If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port, And the bus is interrupted as a very last resort, And the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort, Then the socket packet pocket has an error to report! If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash, And the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash, And your data is corrupted 'cause the index doesn't hash, then your situation's hopeless, and your system's gonna crash! You can't say this? What a shame, sir! We'll find you another game, sir. If the label on the cable on the table at your house, Says the network is connected to the button on your mouse, But your packets want to tunnel on another protocol, That's repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall, And your screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss, So your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse, Then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang, 'Cause as sure as I'm a poet, the sucker's gonna hang! When the copy of your floppy's getting sloppy on the disk, And the microcode instructions cause unnecessary risc, Then you have to flash your memory and you'll want to ram your rom. Quickly turn off the computer and be sure to tell your mom! -- DementDJ@ccip.perkin-elmer.com (DementDJ) [rec.humor.funny] | |
| Once again dread deed is done. Canon sleeps, his all-knowing eye shaded to human chance and circumstance. Peace reigns anew o'er Pine Valley, but Canon's sleep is troubled. Beware, scant days past the Ides of July. Impatient hands wait eagerly to grasp, to hold scant moments of time wrested from life in the full glory of Canon's power; held captive by his unblinking eye. Three golden orbs stand watch; one each to toll the day, hour, minute until predestiny decrees his reawakening. When that feared moment arives, "Ask not for whom the bell tolls, It tolls for thee." -- "I extended the loan on your Camera, at the Pine Valley Pawn Shop today" | |
| Payeen to a Twang Derrida Ore-Ida potato. If you dared, I'd ask you to go dig up your ides under brown- tubered skies. where pitchforked you will ask Derrida? | |
| Well, fancy giving money to the Government! Might as well have put it down the drain. Fancy giving money to the Government! Nobody will see the stuff again. Well, they've no idea what money's for -- Ten to one they'll start another war. I've heard a lot of silly things, but, Lor'! Fancy giving money to the Government! -- A.P. Herbert | |
| MARTA WAS WATCHING THE FOOTBALL GAME with me when she said, "You know most of these sports are based on the idea of one group protecting its territory from invasion by another group." "Yeah," I said, trying not to laugh. Girls are funny. -- Jack Handley, The New Mexican, 1988. | |
| I realize that command does have its fascination, even under circumstances such as these, but I neither enjoy the idea of command nor am I frightened of it. It simply exists, and I will do whatever logically needs to be done. -- Spock, "The Galileo Seven", stardate 2812.7 | |
| "I'm a doctor, not a mechanic." -- "The Doomsday Machine", when asked if he had heard of the idea of a doomsday machine. "I'm a doctor, not an escalator." -- "Friday's Child", when asked to help the very pregnant Ellen up a steep incline. "I'm a doctor, not a bricklayer." -- Devil in the Dark", when asked to patch up the Horta. "I'm a doctor, not an engineer." -- "Mirror, Mirror", when asked by Scotty for help in Engineering aboard the ISS Enterprise. "I'm a doctor, not a coalminer." -- "The Empath", on being beneath the surface of Minara 2. "I'm a surgeon, not a psychiatrist." -- "City on the Edge of Forever", on Edith Keeler's remark that Kirk talked strangely. "I'm no magician, Spock, just an old country doctor." -- "The Deadly Years", to Spock while trying to cure the aging effects of the rogue comet near Gamma Hydra 4. "What am I, a doctor or a moonshuttle conductor?" -- "The Corbomite Maneuver", when Kirk rushed off from a physical exam to answer the alert. | |
| "It's hard to believe that something which is neither seen nor felt can do so much harm." "That's true. But an idea can't be seen or felt. And that's what kept the Troglytes in the mines all these centuries. A mistaken idea." -- Vanna and Kirk, "The Cloud Minders", stardate 5819.0 | |
| The idea of male and female are universal constants. -- Kirk, "Metamorphosis", stardate 3219.8 | |
| "The story goes that I first had the idea for THHGTTG while lying drunk in a field in Innsbruck (or `Spain' as the BBC TV publicity department authorititively has it, probably because it's easier to spell)." - Foreward by DNA. FORD Six pints of bitter. And quickly please, the world's about to end. BARMAN Oh yes, sir? Nice weather for it. | |
| Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea ... -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" | |
| I have a friend whose a billionaire. He invented Cliff's notes. When I asked him how he got such a great idea he said, "Well first I... I just... to make a long story short..." -- Steven Wright | |
| The basic idea behind malls is that they are more convenient than cities. Cities contain streets, which are dangerous and crowded and difficult to park in. Malls, on the other hand, have parking lots, which are also dangerous and crowded and difficult to park in, but -- here is the big difference -- in mall parking lots, THERE ARE NO RULES. You're allowed to do anything. You can drive as fast as you want in any direction you want. I was once driving in a mall parking lot when my car was struck by a pickup truck being driven backward by a squat man with a tattoo that said "Charlie" on his forearm, who got out and explained to me, in great detail, why the accident was my fault, his reasoning being that he was violent and muscular, whereas I was neither. This kind of reasoning is legally valid in mall parking lots. -- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide" | |
| "The idea of abstracting away the one thing that must be blindingly fast, the kernel, is inherently counter productive." -- Linus Torvalds on Microkernels (Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly & Associates) | |
| Hear me out. Linux is Microsoft's main competition right now. Because of this we are forcing them to "innovate", something they would usually avoid. Now if MS Bob has taught us anything, Microsoft is not a company that should be innovating. When they do, they don't come up with things like "better security" or "stability", they come back with "talking paperclips", and "throw in every usless feature we can think of, memory footprint be dammed". Unfortunatly, they also come up with the bright idea of executing email. Now MIME attachments aren't enough, they want you to be able to run/open attachments right when you get them. This sounds like a good idea to people who believe renaming directories to folders made computing possible for the common man, but security wise it's like vigorously shaking a package from the Unibomber. So my friends, we are to blame. We pushed them into frantically trying to invent "necessary" features to stay on top, and look where it got us. Many of us are watching our beloved mail servers go down under the strain and rebuilding our company's PC because of our pointless competition with MS. I implore you to please drop Linux before Microsoft innovates again. -- From a Slashdot.org post in regards to the ILOVEYOU email virus | |
| Missouri Town Changes Name to 'Linux' LINUX, MO -- The small Missouri town of Linn, county seat of Osage County, announced yesterday that it will be henceforth called 'Linux'. Mayor Bob Farrow said, "Linn needed something to put it on the map. A few weeks ago my daughter mentioned that she installed Linux on her computer and how great she thought it was. I thought to myself, 'Self, changing the town's name to 'Linux' could be an opportunity to attract attention -- and money -- to our town. We could even hold a Linux Convention at the community center.' So I approached the city council about the idea, and they loved it. The rest is history." Farrow's daughter is organizing the Linux Linux User Group. She hopes to be able to hold a Linux Convention this fall. "The Linn, er, Linux community center probably won't be big enough, we'll probably have to hold it in nearby Jefferson City," she said. The mayor does have one reservation. "How the hell do you pronounce Linux?" One of the mayor's contenders in the next election, Mr. Noah Morals, says he will start an ad campaign calling Bob Farrow "the Incumbent Liar of LIE-nucks". Needless to say, the mayor usually pronounces Linux as "LIH-nucks". | |
| Tux Penguin Boxing Match LAS VEGAS, NV -- The unofficial Linux mascot Tux the Penguin will face his arch rival the BSD Daemon in a boxing match this Saturday night. The match is part of the International Computer Mascot Boxing Federation's First Annual World Championship Series. The winner will advance to face one of the Intel "Bunny People". Boxing pundits favor Tux as the winner. Last week Tux won his first match in the Championship Series against Wilbur the Gimp. "The Gimp didn't have a chance," one spectator said. "With Tux's ability to run at top speeds of over 100mph, I don't see how he could possibly lose." The BSD Daemon, however, is certainly a formidible opponent. While boxing rules prohibit the Daemon from using his patented pitchfork, his pointy horns are permitted in the ring. Some observers think the whole Computer Mascot Boxing Federation is a fake. "WWF is all scripted," one sports writer pointed out. "And so is this. You actually think that a penguin is capable of boxing? The idea of a penguin fighting a demon is patently absurd. This whole Championship Series has no doubt been scripted. It's probably nothing more than two little kids in penguin and demon suits duking it out in a boxing ring. What a waste of time." | |
| Humorix Holiday Gift Idea #1 Linux-of-the-Month Club Price: US$60 for a one year membership Producer: CheapNybbles; 1-800-LINUX-CD It's the gift that keeps on giving. Every month a CD-ROM with a different Linux distribution or BSD Unix flavor will be sent in the mail. This is the perfect gift for those that have been using Slackware since day one and haven't gotten around to trying another distribution. Or, for those friends or relatives that still cling to Windows, a Linux-of-the-Month club membership is the perfect way to say, "Your OS sucks". | |
| Humorix Holiday Gift Idea #2 Nerd Trading Cards Price: $10/pack Producer: Bottomms; 1-800-NRDS-ROK Forget baseball, nerd trading cards are the future. Now your kids can collect and trade cards of their favorite open source hackers and computer industry figures. Some of the cards included feature Linus Torvalds, Richard M. Stallman, and Larry Wall. Also contains cards for companies (Red Hat, Netscape, Transmeta, etc.), specific open source programs (Apache, Perl, Mozilla, etc.), and well-known websites (Slashdot, Freshmeat, etc.). Each card features a full-color picture on the front and complete information and statistics on back. Some of the cards have even been autographed. Quit trying to search eBay.com for a Mark McGwire rookie card and collect nerd cards instead! | |
| Humorix Holiday Gift Idea #3 iTux Penguin Computer Price: $999.95 for base model Producer: Orange Computer, Co.; 1-800-GET-ITUX Based on the Slashdot comments, response to the Apple iMac from the Linux community was lukewarm at best. Orange Computer, Co., has picked up where Apple left behind and produced the iTux computer specifically for Linux users who want to "Think a lot different". The self-contained iTux computer system is built in the shape of Tux the Penguin. Its 15 inch monitor (17 inch available next year) is located at Tux's large belly. The penguin's two feet make up the split ergonomic keyboard (without those annoying Windows keys, of course). A 36X CD-ROM drive fits into Tux's mouth. Tux's left eye is actually the reboot button (can be reconfigured for other purposes since it is rarely used) and his right eye is the power button. The iTux case opens up from the back, allowing easy access for screwdriver-wielding nerds into Tux's guts. The US$995.95 model contains an Alpha CPU and all the usual stuff found in a Linux-class machine. More expensive models, to be debuted next year, will feature dual or quad Alpha CPUs and a larger size. | |
| Humorix Holiday Gift Idea #4 Microsoft Destruction Kit Price: US$29.95 (more with optional digital camera or shotgun) Producer: The Fuzzier Image; 1-800-BILL-SUX Mix an Internet Explorer CD-ROM, a rocket launcher, and a flamethrower. What do you have? A whole lot of fun! The Microsoft Destruction Kit is the best way to destroy those Microsoft CD-ROMs you no longer need now that you've discovered Linux. You can launch the CD (and registration forms, manuals, retail boxes, license agreements, etc.) and pepper it with bullets, all while capturing the event with a digital camera. Or, you can use the included miniature flamethrower to burn the evil CD to a crisp. The kit comes with a set of IE 4.0 CDs to get you started. Tell Microsoft "where *you* want it to go today" in style with the Microsoft Destruction Kit. | |
| Humorix Holiday Gift Idea #5 AbsoluteZero(tm) Cryogenic Refrigerator $29,999.95 for economy model at Cryo-Me-A-River, Inc. The pundits have been hyping new technology allowing your home appliances to have Internet access. Most people aren't too keen with the thought of their refrigerator sharing an IP address with their can opener. But with the new AbsoluteZero(tm) Refrigerator, that might change. This is not a fridge for your food -- it's a fridge for your overclocked, overheating CPU. You stick your computer inside, bolt the door shut, turn the temperature down to 5 degrees Kelvin, and you've got the perfect environment for accelerating your CPU to 1 Terahertz or more. This cryogenic cooling system may not actually reach absolute zero, but it comes mighty close. Unfortunately, the AbsoluteZero(tm) is the size of a small house, consumes a constant stream of liquid nitrogen, and requires it's own nuclear reactor (not included). But that's a small price to pay for the ability to play Quake 3 at 100,000 frames per second. | |
| Humorix Holiday Gift Idea #6 Hearing Un-aid US$129.95 at The Fuzzier Projection Co. It's a scene we can all identify with: you're at a boring company meeting, trying to read the latest Slashdot headlines on your PalmPilot, but you can't concentrate because the PHB is rambling in a loud, booming voice about e-infomediary-substrategic-paradigms and meta-content-aggregation-relationship-corridors. With the Hearing Un-aid(tm), you can put a stop to incessant buzzword-speak by your boss. Unlike a hearing aid, which amplifies sound, the Hearing Un-aid dampens noise, so you can easily tune out the board meeting and instead focus on something far more important, such as downloading Humorix stories. If you happen to miss something important (yeah, right) and your boss accuses you of not paying attention, you can simply point to your hearing "aid" and respond, "What was that? I couldn't hear you because of my temporary hearing loss." | |
| Humorix Holiday Gift Idea #7 Bluescreen Computer Case US$27.97 at Bud's Beige Box Bazaar Real Geeks may not admit to using Windows, but there's still countless geeks out there who must suffer through the humiliation of using Windows while at work. The patent-not-pending Bluescreen Case, though, will ease the stress of working with Microsoft "solutions". This computer case is very similar to other beige boxes, but with one important difference: the reboot button is covered with a picture of Bill Gates. When the machine bluescreens for the millionth time, all you have to do is punch Bill Gates in the face as hard as you can, and the computer will restart. This provides invaluable therapeutic stress relief. | |
| Humorix Holiday Gift Idea #8 Bob's Map to the Homes of the Rich & Geeky US$29.95 at BobsEcommerceSite.com Hollywood is full of shady street-side vendors selling "maps to the homes of the rich and famous" that are actually photocopies of photocopies of photocopies of an old 1984 Rand McNally map. But what about the Bay Area? Wouldn't you like to visit the homes and driveways of the rich and geeky in Silicon Valley? Wouldn't you like to see Linus Torvalds' residence? Wouldn't you like to drive by the home of permanent-interim-CEO Steve Jobs? Wouldn't you like to spit on the driveway of Bill Gates? Well, now you can. Bob's Map to the Homes of the Rich & Geeky is a full-color 128 page atlas filled with detailed instructions for finding the homes of 1,024 of the world's most famous geeks. From San Jose, to Seattle, to Austin, to Boston, Bob's Map is your passport to gawk at the homes of the rich and geeky. | |
| Humorix Holiday Gift Idea #9 Dial-A-Detective $499.95/year; 1-888-BYE-SPAM This detective firm is not what you'd expect. Instead of tracking murderers or unfaithful husbands, this band of rogue private investigators goes after something just as sinister -- spammers. For a modest annual retainer fee, these spam detectives will track down the source of every piece of spam you receive. Using the latest in forensic technology, they will bring you the virtual scalp of the spammer -- their name, home address, social-security number, and, more importantly, credit card numbers. At this point you are free to pursue the evil spammer as you see fit. If your friend or relative is sick of receiving wave after wave of "Find Out Anything About Anyone" spams, give them a subscription to Dial-A-Detective, and they'll find out anything about any spammer -- for real. | |
| Microsoft Open Source Solitaire REDMOND, WA -- In a first attempt at "embrace-and-extend" of open source software, Microsoft will release its popular Solitaire and FreeCell games as open source under the MILA (Microsoft Innovative License Agreement). According to a Microsoft press release, the Visual C++ source code for the two games will be available from the Microsoft website "in the first quarter" (no year was specified). Industry pundits hail the move as revolutionary. "Microsoft's release of its most popular Windows feature as open source software demonstrates just how innovative the company really is. The DoJ is clearly barking up the wrong tree," wrote one Ziff-Davis flunkie. One executive at a large company said, "Freely available source code is the best idea Microsoft has ever invented." One Linux developer told Humorix, "Let's just hope some fool doesn't try to port this thing to Linux. Imagine the havoc that could ensue if a bunch of core Linux contributors downloaded Solitaire and became addicted to it. It would be a disaster! Linux and open source development would grind to a halt while the hackers wasted their time playing Solitaire or FreeCell. 'Just one more game...' they would say." | |
| New Linux Companies Hope To Get Rich Quick (#4) The buzz surrounding Linux and Open Source during 1999 has produced a large number of billionnaires. However, people who weren't employed by Red Hat or VA Linux, or who didn't receive The Letter, are still poor. The visionaries at The IPO Factory want to change all that. As the name suggests, this company helps other businesses get off the ground, secure investments from Venture Capitalists, and eventually hold an IPO that exits the stratosphere. "You can think of us as meta-VCs," the IPO Factory's founder said. "You provide the idea... and we do the rest. If your company doesn't hold a successful IPO, you get your money back, guaranteed!" He added quickly, "Of course, if you do undergo a billion dollar IPO, we get to keep 25% of your stock." The company's first customer, LinuxOne, has been a failure. "From now on we're only going to service clients that actually have a viable product," an IPO Factory salesperson admitted. "Oh, and we've learned our lesson: it's not a good idea to cut-and-paste large sections from Red Hat's S-1 filing." | |
| Brief History Of Linux (#2) Hammurabi's Open-Source Code Hammurabi became king of Babylonia around 1750BC. Under his reign, a sophisticated legal code developed; Version 1, containing 282 clauses, was carved into a large rock column open to the public. However, the code contained several errors (Hammurabi must have been drunk), which numerous citizens demanded be fixed. One particularly brave Babylonian submitted to the king's court a stack of cloth patches that, when affixed to the column, would cover up and correct the errors. With the king's approval, these patches were applied to the legal code; within a month a new corrected rock column (Version 2.0) was officially announced. While future kings never embraced this idea (who wanted to admit they made a mistake?), the concept of submitting patches to fix problems is now taken for granted in modern times. | |
| Brief History Of Linux (#5) English Flame War The idea behind Slashdot-style discussions is not new; it dates back to London in 1699. A newspaper that regularly printed Letters To The Editor sparked a heated debate over the question, "When would the 18th Century actually begin, 1700 or 1701?" The controversy quickly became a matter of pride; learned aristocrats argued for the correct date, 1701, while others maintained that it was really 1700. Another sizable third of participants asked, "Who cares?" Ordinarily such a trivial matter would have died down, except that one 1700er, fed up with the snobbest 1701 rhetoric of the educated class, tracked down one letter-writer and hurled a flaming log into his manor house in spite. The resulting fire was quickly doused, but the practice known as the "flame war" had been born. More flames were exchanged between other 1700ers and 1701ers for several days, until the Monarch sent out royal troops to end the flamage. | |
| Brief History Of Linux (#22) RMS had a horrible, terrible dream set in 2020 in which all of society was held captive by copyright law. In particular, everyone's brain waves were monitored by the US Dept. of Copyrights. If your thoughts referenced a copyrighted idea, you had to pay a royalty. To make it worse, a handful of corporations held fully 99.9% of all intellectual property rights. Coincidentally, Bill Gates experienced a similar dream that same night. To him, however, it was not a horrible, terrible nightmare, but a wonderful utopian vision. The thought of lemmings... er, customers paying a royalty everytime they hummed a copyrighted song in their head or remembered a passage in a book was simply too marvelous for the budding monopolist. RMS, waking up from his nightmare, vowed to fight the oncoming Copyright Nightmare. The GNU Project was born. His plan called for a kernel, compiler, editor, and other tools. Unfortunately, RMS became bogged down with Emacs that the kernel, HURD, was shoved on the back burner. Built with LISP (Lots of Incomprehensible Statements with Parentheses), Emacs became bloated in a way no non-Microsoft program ever has. Indeed, for a short while RMS pretended that Emacs really was the GNU OS kernel. | |
| Severe Acronym Shortage Cripples Computer Industry SILICON VALLEY, CALIFORNIA (SVC) -- According to a recent study by the Blartner Group, 99.5% of all possible five letter combinations have already been appropriated for computer industry acronyms. The impending shortage of 5LC's is casting a dark shadow over the industry, which relies heavily on short, easy-to-remember acronyms for everything. "Acronym namespace collisions (ANCs) are increasing at a fantastic rate and threaten the very fabric of the computing world," explained one ZD pundit. "For example, when somebody talks about XP, I don't know whether they mean eXtreme Programming or Microsoft's eXceptionally Pathetic operating system. We need to find a solution now or chaos will result." Leaders of several SVC companies have floated the idea of an "industry-wide acronym conservation protocol" (IWACP -- one of the few 5LCs not already appropriated). Explained Bob Smith, CTO of IBM, "If companies would voluntarily limit the creation of new acronyms while recycling outdated names, we could reduce much of the pollution within the acronym namespace ourselves. The last thing we want is for Congress to get involved and try to impose a solution for this SAS (Severe Acronym Shortage) that would likely only create many new acronyms in the process." | |
| Exhilaration is that feeling you get just after a great idea hits you, and just before you realize what is wrong with it. | |
| For an idea to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned. | |
| The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein -- it rejects it. -- P. Medawar | |
| > around line mm/vmscan.c:487 that says: Yeah, yeah, it's 7PM Christmas Eve over there, and you're in the middle of your Christmas dinner. You might feel that it's unreasonable of me to ask you to test out my latest crazy idea. How selfish of you. Get back there in front of the computer NOW. Christmas can wait. Linus "the Grinch" Torvalds | |
| "Wichert> Why would anyone want to do this? Probably because it's a completely stupid idea that serves no purpose whatsoever." - Jes Sorenson on moving copyright headers to footers | |
| Drivers are a more complex issue. I'm not opposed to binary only drivers, providing its easy to tell they are there and dump all bug reports about them. Freedom generally includes the right to give up freedom. I'll tell people its a bad idea but once they get caught, well it was their right to do so... - Alan Cox on linux-kernel | |
| James Simmons wrote: > Crap can work. Given enough thrust pigs will fly, but it's not necessary a > good idea. [ Alexander Viro on linux-kernel ] Watch the attributions. With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them as they fly overhead. From RFC1925, R Callon, 1996. - Al Viro on linux-kernel | |
| > The only idea is that 2.4.x kernel turns off cache (L1 & L2) on > processor (on my cpu). How can I check it? Any ideas? We don't touch the caches like that. First guess is to disable the ACPI support, because we've seen that do a million bogus things - Alan Cox explaining the merits of ACPI on linux-kernel | |
| I have a better idea: force CONFIG_DEBUG_* if CONFIG_DEVFS_FS had been set _and_ taint the kernel with new flag - Known_Crap - Al Viro on irc | |
| The idea is to die young as late as possible. -- Ashley Montague | |
| <RoboHak> hmm, lunch does sound like a good idea <Knghtbrd> would taste like a good idea too | |
| <netgod> Feanor: u have no idea of the depth of the stupidty of american law | |
| <dhd> is there a special christmas pack for quake <dhd> where you get to be like the santa robot on futurama? <dunham> dhd: that would be a rather unbalanced game... <Knghtbrd> dunham: that's the idea. ;> | |
| <Knghtbrd> Trust us, we know what we're doing... We may have no idea HOW we're doing it, but we know WHAT we're doing. | |
| <taniwha> Knghtbrd: we should do a quake episode :knee deep in the code": you run around shooting at bugs:) <Knghtbrd> taniwha: I'll pass the idea on to OpenQuartz ;> | |
| ... Our second completely true news item was sent to me by Mr. H. Boyce Connell Jr. of Atlanta, Ga., where he is involved in a law firm. One thing I like about the South is, folks there care about tradition. If somebody gets handed a name like "H. Boyce," he hangs on to it, puts it on his legal stationery, even passes it to his son, rather than do what a lesser person would do, such as get it changed or kill himself. -- Dave Barry, "This Column is Nothing but the Truth!" | |
| An idea is an eye given by God for the seeing of God. Some of these eyes we cannot bear to look out of, we blind them as quickly as possible. -- Russell Hoban, "Pilgermann" | |
| An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it. | |
| When you are young, you enjoy a sustained illusion that sooner or later something marvelous is going to happen, that you are going to transcend your parents' limitations... At the same time, you feel sure that in all the wilderness of possibility; in all the forests of opinion, there is a vital something that can be known -- known and grasped. That we will eventually know it, and convert the whole mystery into a coherent narrative. So that then one's true life -- the point of everything -- will emerge from the mist into a pure light, into total comprehension. But it isn't like that at all. But if it isn't, where did the idea come from, to torture and unsettle us? -- Brian Aldiss, "Helliconia Summer" | |
| /* * [...] Note that 120 sec is defined in the protocol as the maximum * possible RTT. I guess we'll have to use something other than TCP * to talk to the University of Mars. * PAWS allows us longer timeouts and large windows, so once implemented * ftp to mars will work nicely. */ -- from /usr/src/linux/net/inet/tcp.c, concerning RTT [round trip time] | |
| I've no idea when Linus is going to release 2.0.24, but if he takes too long Im going to release a 2.0.24unoff and he can sound off all he likes. -- Alan Cox | |
| Winnuke in one line? No problem: perl -MIO::Socket -e 'IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerAddr=>"bad.dude.com:139")->send("bye",MSG_OOB)' And formatted so it's a little easier to read: #!/usr/bin/perl use IO::Socket; IO::Socket::INET ->new(PeerAddr=>"bad.dude.com:139") ->send("bye", MSG_OOB); -- Randal Schwartz | |
| Column 1 Column 2 Column 3 0. integrated 0. management 0. options 1. total 1. organizational 1. flexibility 2. systematized 2. monitored 2. capability 3. parallel 3. reciprocal 3. mobility 4. functional 4. digital 4. programming 5. responsive 5. logistical 5. concept 6. optional 6. transitional 6. time-phase 7. synchronized 7. incremental 7. projection 8. compatible 8. third-generation 8. hardware 9. balanced 9. policy 9. contingency The procedure is simple. Think of any three-digit number, then select the corresponding buzzword from each column. For instance, number 257 produces "systematized logistical projection," a phrase that can be dropped into virtually any report with that ring of decisive, knowledgeable authority. "No one will have the remotest idea of what you're talking about," says Broughton, "but the important thing is that they're not about to admit it." -- Philip Broughton, "How to Win at Wordsmanship" | |
| Dear Mister Language Person: What is the purpose of the apostrophe? Answer: The apostrophe is used mainly in hand-lettered small business signs to alert the reader than an "S" is coming up at the end of a word, as in: WE DO NOT EXCEPT PERSONAL CHECK'S, or: NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY ITEM'S. Another important grammar concept to bear in mind when creating hand- lettered small-business signs is that you should put quotation marks around random words for decoration, as in "TRY" OUR HOT DOG'S, or even TRY "OUR" HOT DOG'S. -- Dave Barry, "Tips for Writer's" | |
| I'm always looking for a new idea that will be more productive than its cost. -- David Rockefeller | |
| My idea of roughing it is when room service is late. | |
| My idea of roughing it turning the air conditioner too low. | |
| Now, you might ask, "How do I get one of those complete home tool sets for under $4?" An excellent question. Go to one of those really cheap discount stores where they sell plastic furniture in colors visible from the planet Neptune and where they have a food section specializing in cardboard cartons full of Raisinets and malted milk balls manufactured during the Nixon administration. In either the hardware or housewares department, you'll find an item imported from an obscure Oriental country and described as "Nine Tools in One", consisting of a little handle with interchangeable ends representing inscrutable Oriental notions of tools that Americans might use around the home. Buy it. This is the kind of tool set professionals use. Not only is it inexpensive, but it also has a great safety feature not found in the so-called quality tools sets: The handle will actually break right off if you accidentally hit yourself or anything else, or expose it to direct sunlight. -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw" | |
| Of all possible committee reactions to any given agenda item, the reaction that will occur is the one which will liberate the greatest amount of hot air. -- Thomas L. Martin | |
| Several years ago, some smart businessmen had an idea: Why not build a big store where a do-it-yourselfer could get everything he needed at reasonable prices? Then they decided, nah, the hell with that, let's build a home center. And before long home centers were springing up like crabgrass all over the United States. -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw" | |
| The idea there was that consumers would bring their broken electronic devices, such as television sets and VCR's, to the destruction centers, where trained personnel would whack them (the devices) with sledgehammers. With their devices thus permanently destroyed, consumers would then be free to go out and buy new devices, rather than have to fritter away years of their lives trying to have the old ones repaired at so-called "factory service centers," which in fact consist of two men named Lester poking at the insides of broken electronic devices with cheap cigars and going, "Lookit all them WIRES in there!" -- Dave Barry, "'Mister Mediocre' Restaurants" | |
| The time spent on any item of the agenda [of a finance committee] will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved. -- C.N. Parkinson | |
| Their idea of an offer you can't refuse is an offer... and you'd better not refuse. | |
| What they say: What they mean: New Different colors from previous version. All New Not compatible with previous version. Exclusive Nobody else has documentation. Unmatched Almost as good as the competition. Design Simplicity The company wouldn't give us any money. Fool-proof Operation All parameters are hard-coded. Advanced Design Nobody really understands it. Here At Last Didn't get it done on time. Field Tested We don't have any simulators. Years of Development Finally got one to work. Unprecedented Performance Nothing ever ran this slow before. Revolutionary Disk drives go 'round and 'round. Futuristic Only runs on a next generation supercomputer. No Maintenance Impossible to fix. Performance Proven Worked through Beta test. Meets Tough Quality Standards It compiles without errors. Satisfaction Guaranteed We'll send you another pack if it fails. Stock Item We shipped it before and can do it again. | |
| When the lodge meeting broke up, Meyer confided to a friend. "Abe, I'm in a terrible pickle! I'm strapped for cash and I haven't the slightest idea where I'm going to get it from!" "I'm glad to hear that," answered Abe. "I was afraid you might have some idea that you could borrow from me!" | |
| XVI: In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one aircraft. This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy 3-1/2 days each per week except for leap year, when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day. XVII: Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the Second Law of Thermodynamics, i.e., it always increases. XVIII: It is very expensive to achieve high unreliability. It is not uncommon to increase the cost of an item by a factor of ten for each factor of ten degradation accomplished. XIX: Although most products will soon be too costly to purchase, there will be a thriving market in the sale of books on how to fix them. XX: In any given year, Congress will appropriate the amount of funding approved the prior year plus three-fourths of whatever change the administration requests -- minus 4-percent tax. -- Norman Augustine | |
| XXXVI: The thickness of the proposal required to win a multimillion dollar contract is about one millimeter per million dollars. If all the proposals conforming to this standard were piled on top of each other at the bottom of the Grand Canyon it would probably be a good idea. XXXVII: Ninety percent of the time things will turn out worse than you expect. The other 10 percent of the time you had no right to expect so much. XXXVIII: The early bird gets the worm. The early worm ... gets eaten. XXXIX: Never promise to complete any project within six months of the end of the year -- in either direction. XL: Most projects start out slowly -- and then sort of taper off. -- Norman Augustine | |
| Falling in Love When two people have been on enough dates, they generally fall in love. You can tell you're in love by the way you feel: your head becomes light, your heart leaps within you, you feel like you're walking on air, and the whole world seems like a wonderful and happy place. Unfortunately, these are also the four warning signs of colon disease, so it's always a good idea to check with your doctor. -- Dave Barry | |
| "I'll tell you what I know, then," he decided. "The pin I'm wearing means I'm a member of the IA. That's Inamorati Anonymous. An inamorato is somebody in love. That's the worst addiction of all." "Somebody is about to fall in love," Oedipa said, "you go sit with them, or something?" "Right. The whole idea is to get where you don't need it. I was lucky. I kicked it young. But there are sixty-year-old men, believe it or not, and women even older, who might wake up in the night screaming." "You hold meetings, then, like the AA?" "No, of course not. You get a phone number, an answering service you can call. Nobody knows anybody else's name; just the number in case it gets so bad you can't handle it alone. We're isolates, Arnold. Meetings would destroy the whole point of it." -- Thomas Pynchon, "The Crying of Lot 49" | |
| Can I have an IMPULSE ITEM instead? | |
| I've got an IDEA!! Why don't I STARE at you so HARD, you forget your SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER!! | |
