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Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) by Linux fortune

People in general do not willingly read if they have anything else to
amuse them.
                -- S. Johnson
The problems of business administration in general, and database management in
particular are much to difficult for people that think in IBMese, compounded
with sloppy english.
                -- Edsger Dijkstra
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
A serious public debate about the validity of astrology?  A serious believer
in the White House?  Two of them?  Give me a break.  What stifled my laughter
is that the image fits.  Reagan has always exhibited a fey indifference toward
science.  Facts, like numbers, roll off his back.  And we've all come to
accept it.  This time it was stargazing that became a serious issue....Not
that long ago, it was Reagan's support of Creationism....Creationists actually
got equal time with evolutionists.  The public was supposed to be open-minded
to the claims of paleontologists and fundamentalists, as if the two were
scientific colleagues....It has been clear for a long time that the president
is averse to science...In general, these attitudes fall onto friendly American
turf....But at the outer edges, this skepticism about science easily turns
into a kind of naive acceptance of nonscience, or even nonsense.  The same
people who doubt experts can also believe any quackery, from the benefits of
laetrile to eye of newt to the movment of planets.  We lose the capacity to
make rational -- scientific -- judgments.  It's all the same.
-- Ellen Goodman, The Boston Globe Newspaper Company-Washington Post Writers
    Group
        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
The problem with graduate students, in general, is that they have
to sleep every few days.
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.
"Once you realize that documentation should be laughed at, peed upon, put
on fire, and just ridiculed in general, THEN, and only then, have you reached
the level where you can safely read it and try to use it to actually implement
a driver."

        - Linus Torvalds
Alan Cox wrote:
> In theory however i2o is a standard and all i2o works alike. In practice i2o
> is a pseudo standard and nobody seems to interpret the spec the same way, the
> implementations all tend to have bugs and the hardware sometimes does too.

That's a pretty good description of standards in general, at least
when it comes to hardware :-)

        - Jens Axboe's interpretation of standards
What they said:
        What they meant:

"If you knew this person as well as I know him, you would think as much
of him as I do."
        (Or as little, to phrase it slightly more accurately.)
"Her input was always critical."
        (She never had a good word to say.)
"I have no doubt about his capability to do good work."
        (And it's nonexistent.)
"This candidate would lend balance to a department like yours, which
already has so many outstanding members."
        (Unless you already have a moron.)
"His presentation to my seminar last semester was truly remarkable:
one unbelievable result after another."
        (And we didn't believe them, either.)
"She is quite uniform in her approach to any function you may assign her."
        (In fact, to life in general...)
In general, if you think something isn't in Perl, try it out, because it
usually is.  :-)
             -- Larry Wall in <1991Jul31.174523.9447@netlabs.com>
In general, they do what you want, unless you want consistency.
             -- Larry Wall in the perl man page
No guarantee of accuracy or completeness!
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