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Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) by Linux fortune

not enough memory, go get system upgrade
You're out of memory
kernel panic: write-only-memory (/dev/wom0) capacity exceeded.
Write-only-memory subsystem too slow for this machine. Contact your local dealer.
Your/our computer(s) had suffered a memory leak, and we are waiting for them to be topped up.
Stray Alpha Particles from memory packaging caused Hard Memory Error on Server.
The Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest is held ever year at San Jose State
Univ.  by Professor Scott Rice.  It is held in memory of Edward George
Earle Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), a rather prolific and popular (in his
time) novelist.  He is best known today for having written "The Last
Days of Pompeii."

Whenever Snoopy starts typing his novel from the top of his doghouse,
beginning "It was a dark and stormy night..." he is borrowing from Lord
Bulwer-Lytton.  This was the line that opened his novel, "Paul Clifford,"
written in 1830.  The full line reveals why it is so bad:

        It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents -- except
        at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of
        wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene
        lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty
        flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
We were young and our happiness dazzled us with its strength.  But there was
also a terrible betrayal that lay within me like a Merle Haggard song at a
French restaurant. [...]
        I could not tell the girl about the woman of the tollway, of her milk
white BMW and her Jordache smile.  There had been a fight.  I had punched her
boyfriend, who fought the mechanical bulls.  Everyone told him, "You ride the
bull, senor.  You do not fight it."  But he was lean and tough like a bad
rib-eye and he fought the bull.  And then he fought me.  And when we finished
there were no winners, just men doing what men must do. [...]
        "Stop the car," the girl said.
        There was a look of terrible sadness in her eyes.  She knew about the
woman of the tollway.  I knew not how.  I started to speak, but she raised an
arm and spoke with a quiet and peace I will never forget.
        "I do not ask for whom's the tollway belle," she said, "the tollway
belle's for thee."
        The next morning our youth was a memory, and our happiness was a lie.
Life is like a bad margarita with good tequila, I thought as I poured whiskey
onto my granola and faced a new day.
                -- Peter Applebome, International Imitation Hemingway
                   Competition
Any given program will expand to fill available memory.
VMS-F-PDGERS, pudding between the ears
If a 6600 used paper tape instead of core memory, it would use up tape
at about 30 miles/second.
                -- Grishman, Assembly Language Programming
Memory fault - where am I?
Memory fault -- brain fried
Memory fault -- core...uh...um...core... Oh dammit, I forget!
Proposed Additions to the PDP-11 Instruction Set:

BBW        Branch Both Ways
BEW        Branch Either Way
BBBF        Branch on Bit Bucket Full
BH        Branch and Hang
BMR        Branch Multiple Registers
BOB        Branch On Bug
BPO        Branch on Power Off
BST        Backspace and Stretch Tape
CDS        Condense and Destroy System
CLBR        Clobber Register
CLBRI        Clobber Register Immediately
CM        Circulate Memory
CMFRM        Come From -- essential for truly structured programming
CPPR        Crumple Printer Paper and Rip
CRN        Convert to Roman Numerals
Proposed Additions to the PDP-11 Instruction Set:

DC        Divide and Conquer
DMPK        Destroy Memory Protect Key
DO        Divide and Overflow
EMPC        Emulate Pocket Calculator
EPI        Execute Programmer Immediately
EROS        Erase Read Only Storage
EXCE        Execute Customer Engineer
HCF        Halt and Catch Fire
IBP        Insert Bug and Proceed
INSQSW        Insert into queue somewhere (for FINO queues [First in never out])
PBC        Print and Break Chain
PDSK        Punch Disk
Proposed Additions to the PDP-11 Instruction Set:

PI        Punch Invalid
POPI        Punch Operator Immediately
PVLC        Punch Variable Length Card
RASC        Read And Shred Card
RPM        Read Programmers Mind
RSSC        reduce speed, step carefully  (for improved accuracy)
RTAB        Rewind tape and break
RWDSK        rewind disk
RWOC        Read Writing On Card
SCRBL        scribble to disk  - faster than a write
SLC        Search for Lost Chord
SPSW        Scramble Program Status Word
SRSD        Seek Record and Scar Disk
STROM        Store in Read Only Memory
TDB        Transfer and Drop Bit
WBT        Water Binary Tree
Shopping at this grody little computer store at the Galleria for a
totally awwwesome Apple.  Fer suuure.  I mean Apples are nice you know?
But, you know, there is this cute guy who works there and HE says that
VAX's are cooler!  I mean I don't really know, you know? He says that he
has this totally tubular VAX at home and it's stuffed with memory-to-the-max!
Right, yeah.  And he wants to take me home to show it to me.  Oh My God!
I'm suuure.  Gag me with a Prime!
Speaking as someone who has delved into the intricacies of PL/I, I am sure
that only Real Men could have written such a machine-hogging, cycle-grabbing,
all-encompassing monster.  Allocate an array and free the middle third?
Sure!  Why not?  Multiply a character string times a bit string and assign the
result to a float decimal?  Go ahead!  Free a controlled variable procedure
parameter and reallocate it before passing it back?  Overlay three different
types of variable on the same memory location?  Anything you say!  Write a
recursive macro?  Well, no, but Real Men use rescan.  How could a language
so obviously designed and written by Real Men not be intended for Real Man use?
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.]
Unix gives you just enough rope to hang yourself -- and then a couple
of more feet, just to be sure.
                -- Eric Allman

... We make rope.
                -- Rob Gingell on Sun Microsystem's new virtual memory.
Your program is sick!  Shoot it and put it out of its memory.
A good memory does not equal pale ink.
A place for everything and everything in its place.
                -- Isabella Mary Beeton, "The Book of Household Management"

        [Quoted in "VMS Internals and Data Structures", V4.4, when
         referring to memory management system services.]
The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order
of space and time.  -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Remember thee
Ay, thou poor ghost while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe.  Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there.
Hamlet, I : v : 95   William Shakespeare
"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
...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
"The net result is a system that is not only binary compatible with 4.3 BSD,
but is even bug for bug compatible in almost all features."
-- Avadit Tevanian, Jr., "Architecture-Independent Virtual Memory Management
   for Parallel and Distributed Environments:  The Mach Approach"
A long memory is the most subversive idea in America.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty
nights -- or very early mornings -- when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and,
instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at
a hundred miles an hour ... booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at
the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which
turnoff to take when I got to the other end ... but being absolutely certain
that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were
just as high and wild as I was: no doubt at all about that.
                -- Hunter S. Thompson
"The Right Honorable Gentleman is indebted to his memory for his jests
and to his imagination for his facts."
                -- Sheridan
Bubble Memory, n.:
        A derogatory term, usually referring to a person's intelligence.
        See also "vacuum tube".
Cache:
        A very expensive part of the memory system of a computer that no one
        is supposed to know is there.
Creditor, n.:
        A man who has a better memory than a debtor.
Engram, n.:
        1. The physical manifestation of human memory -- "the engram."
2. A particular memory in physical form.  [Usage note:  this term is no longer
in common use.  Prior to Wilson and Magruder's historic discovery, the nature
of the engram was a topic of intense speculation among neuroscientists,
psychologists, and even computer scientists.  In 1994 Professors M. R. Wilson
and W. V. Magruder, both of Mount St. Coax University in Palo Alto, proved
conclusively that the mammalian brain is hardwired to interpret a set of
thirty seven genetically transmitted cooperating TECO macros.  Human memory
was shown to reside in 1 million Q-registers as Huffman coded uppercase-only
ASCII strings.  Interest in the engram has declined substantially since that
time.]
                -- New Century Unabridged English Dictionary,
                   3rd edition, 2007 A.D.
Hurewitz's Memory Principle:
        The chance of forgetting something is directly proportional
        to... to... uh.....
Laws of Computer Programming:
        (1) Any given program, when running, is obsolete.
        (2) Any given program costs more and takes longer.
        (3) If a program is useful, it will have to be changed.
        (4) If a program is useless, it will have to be documented.
        (5) Any given program will expand to fill all available memory.
        (6) The value of a program is proportional the weight of its output.
        (7) Program complexity grows until it exceeds the capability of
                the programmer who must maintain it.
Random, n.:
        As in number, predictable.  As in memory access, unpredictable.
Memory should be the starting point of the present.
The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue, a custom
whereof the memory of man runneth not howsomever to the contrary, nohow.
When your memory goes, forget it!
The Commandments of the EE:

(9)        Trifle thee not with radioactive tubes and substances lest thou
        commence to glow in the dark like a lightning bug, and thy wife be
        frustrated and have not further use for thee except for thy wages.
(10)        Commit thou to memory all the words of the prophets which are
        written down in thy Bible which is the National Electrical Code,
        and giveth out with the straight dope and consoleth thee when
        thou hast suffered a ream job by the chief electrician.
(11)        When thou muckest about with a device in an unthinking and/or
        unknowing manner, thou shalt keep one hand in thy pocket.  Better
        that thou shouldest keep both hands in thy pockets than
        experimentally determine the electrical potential of an
        innocent-seeming device.
There was a writer in 'Life' magazine ... who claimed that rabbits have
no memory, which is one of their defensive mechanisms.  If they recalled
every close shave they had in the course of just an hour life would become
insupportable.
                -- Kurt Vonnegut
As with most fine things, chocolate has its season.  There is a simple
memory aid that you can use to determine whether it is the correct time
to order chocolate dishes: any month whose name contains the letter A,
E, or U is the proper time for chocolate.
                -- Sandra Boynton, "Chocolate: The Consuming Passion"
Lobster:
        Everyone loves these delectable crustaceans, but many cooks are
squeamish about placing them into boiling water alive, which is the only
proper method of preparing them.  Frankly, the easiest way to eliminate your
guilt is to establish theirs by putting them on trial before they're cooked.
The fact is, lobsters are among the most ferocious predators on the sea
floor, and you're helping reduce crime in the reefs.  Grasp the lobster
behind the head, look it right in its unmistakably guilty eyestalks and say,
"Where were you on the night of the 21st?", then flourish a picture of a
scallop or a sole and shout, "Perhaps this will refresh that crude neural
apparatus you call a memory!"  The lobster will squirm noticeably.  It may
even take a swipe at you with one of its claws.  Incorrigible.  Pop it into
the pot.  Justice has been served, and shortly you and your friends will
be, too.
                -- Dave Barry, "Cooking: The Art of Using Appliances and
                   Utensils into Excuses and Apologies"
I gave my love an Apple, that had no core;
I gave my love a building, that had no floor;
I wrote my love a program, that had no end;
I gave my love an upgrade, with no cryin'.

How can there be an Apple, that has no core?
How can there be a building, that has no floor?
How can there be a program, that has no end?
How can there be an upgrade, with no cryin'?

An Apple's MOS memory don't use no core!
A building that's perfect, it has no flaw!
A program with GOTOs, it has no end!
I lied about the upgrade, with no cryin'!
I've built a better model than the one at Data General
For data bases vegetable, animal, and mineral
My OS handles CPUs with multiplexed duality;
My PL/1 compiler shows impressive functionality.
My storage system's better than magnetic core polarity,
You never have to bother checking out a bit for parity;
There isn't any reason to install non-static floor matting;
My disk drive has capacity for variable formatting.

I feel compelled to mention what I know to be a gloating point:
There's lots of room in memory for variables floating-point,
Which shows for input vegetable, animal, and mineral
I've built a better model than the one at Data General.

                -- Steve Levine, "A Computer Song" (To the tune of
                   "Modern Major General", from "Pirates of Penzance",
                   by Gilbert & Sullivan)
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]
In high school in Brooklyn
I was the baseball manager,
proud as I could be
I chased baseballs,
gathered thrown bats
handed out the towels                        Eventually, I bought my own
It was very important work                but it was dark blue while
for a small spastic kid,                the official ones were green
but I was a team member                        Nobody ever said anything
When the team got                        to me about my blue jacket;
their warm-up jackets                        the guys were my friends
I didn't get one                        Yet it hurt me all year
Only the regular team                        to wear that blue jacket
got these jackets, and                        among all those green ones
surely not a manager                        Even now, forty years after,
                                        I still recall that jacket
                                        and the memory goes on hurting.
                -- Bart Lanier Safford III, "An Obscured Radiance"
Nature to all things fixed the limits fit,
And wisely curbed proud man's pretending wit.
As on the land while here the ocean gains,
In other parts it leaves wide sandy plains;
Thus in the soul while memory prevails,
The solid power of understanding fails;
Where beams of warm imagination play,
The memory's soft figures melt away.
                -- Alexander Pope (on runtime bounds checking?)
No plain fanfold paper could hold that fractal Puff --
He grew so fast no plotting pack could shrink him far enough.
Compiles and simulations grew so quickly tame
And swapped out all their data space when Puff pushed his stack frame.
        (refrain)
Puff, he grew so quickly, while others moved like snails
And mini-Puffs would perch themselves on his gigantic tail.
All the student hackers loved that fractal Puff
But DCS did not like Puff, and finally said, "Enough!"
        (refrain)
Puff used more resources than DCS could spare.
The operator killed Puff's job -- he didn't seem to care.
A gloom fell on the hackers; it seemed to be the end,
But Puff trapped the exception, and grew from naught again!
        (refrain)
Refrain:
        Puff the fractal dragon was written in C,
        And frolicked while processes switched in mainframe memory.
        Puff the fractal dragon was written in C,
        And frolicked while processes switched in mainframe memory.
Remember thee
Ay, thou poor ghost while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe.  Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there.
                -- William Shakespeare, "Hamlet"
What pains others pleasures me,
At home am I in Lisp or C;
There i couch in ecstasy,
'Til debugger's poke i flee,
Into kernel memory.
In system space, system space, there shall i fare--
Inside of a VAX on a silicon square.
Yea from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records.
                -- Hamlet
        COONDOG MEMORY
        (heard in Rutledge, Missouri, about eighteen years ago)

Now, this dog is for sale, and she can not only follow a trail twice as
old as the average dog can, but she's got a pretty good memory to boot.
For instance, last week this old boy who lives down the road from me, and
is forever stinkmouthing my hounds, brought some city fellow around to
try out ol' Sis here.  So I turned her out south of the house and she made
two or three big swings back and forth across the edge of the woods, set
back her head, bayed a couple of times, cut straight through the woods,
come to a little clearing, jumped about three foot straight up in the air,
run to the other side, and commenced to letting out a racket like she had
something treed.  We went over there with our flashlights and shone them
up in the tree but couldn't catch no shine offa coon's eyes, and my
neighbor sorta indicated that ol' Sis might be a little crazy, `cause she
stood right to the tree and kept singing up into it.  So I pulled off my
coat and climbed up into the branches, and sure enough, there was a coon
skeleton wedged in between a couple of branches about twenty foot up.
Now as I was saying, she can follow a pretty old trail, but this fellow
was still calling her crazy or touched `cause she had hopped up in the
air while she was crossing the clearing, until I reminded him that the
Hawkins' had a fence across there about five years back.  Now, this dog
is for sale.
                -- News that stayed News: Ten Years of Coevolution Quarterly
This fortune soaks up 47 times its own weight in excess memory.
The memory management in Windows 95 can be used to frighten small children.
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
Right now hundreds of Anonymous Cowards are cheering the fact that only
Windows boobs are victims of ILOVEYOU and other email viruses. I realize
Outlook is so insecure that using it is like posting a sign outside your
door saying, "DOOR UNLOCKED -- ROB ME!". However, Linux isn't immune. If I
had a dollar for every pine buffer overflow uncovered, I could buy a
truckload of fresh herring.

I expect the next mass email virus to spread will be cross-platform. If
the recipient is a Windows/Outlook luser, they'll get hit. If the
recipient is a Linux/pine user, they'll find themselves staring at a
self-executing bash script that's has just allocated 1 petabyte of memory
and crashed the system (or worse).

Either that or the next mass email virus will only damage Linux systems. I
can just see Bill Gates assigning some junior programmer that very task.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.

   -- A speech given at the First Annual Connecticut Conspiracy]
      Convention (ConConCon) by an anonymous creature said to
      be "wearing what appeared to be a tuxedo".
Everyone complains of his memory, no one of his judgement.
What you see is from outside yourself, and may come, or not, but is beyond
your control.  But your fear is yours, and yours alone, like your voice, or
your fingers, or your memory, and therefore yours to control.  If you feel
powerless over your fear, you have not yet admitted that it is yours, to do
with as you will.
                -- Marion Zimmer Bradley, "Stormqueen"
There seems to be a bug in the mail routing again. It may be related to the
recent problem with ditto copier history outbreaks on Linux S/390 and the
infamous 'pdp-11 memory subsystem' article routing bug that plagued
comp.os.minix once.

In the meantime can people check that their mailer hasnt spontaneously added
linux-kernel to their history articles before posting them ?

        - Alan Cox about off topic cross posting on lkml
<Russ> I think the linux 2.4 VM is broken...it says, "warning, your memory
       is not optimized, click here to get memturbo". Is riel aware of
       this problem?

        - Russ Dill on #kernelnewbies
(But Intel has redefined the memory ordering so many times that they might
redefine it in the future too and say that dependent loads are ok. I
suspect most of the definitions are of the type "Oh, it used to be ok in
the implementation even though it wasn't defined, and it turns out that
Windows doesn't work if we change it, so we'll define darkness to be the
new standard"..)

        - Linus Torvalds
Why not have an old-fashioned Christmas for your family this year? Just
picture the scene in your living room on Christmas morning as your children
open their old-fashioned presents.

Your 11-year-old son: "What the heck is this?"

You:        "A spinning top!  You spin it around, and then eventually it falls
down.  What fun!  Ha, ha!"

Son:        "Is this a joke?  Jason Thompson's parents got him a computer with
two disk drives and 128 kilobytes of random-access memory, and I get this
cretin TOP?"

Your 8-year-old daughter: "You think that's bad?  Look at this."

You:        "It's figgy pudding!  What a treat!"

Daughter: "It looks like goat barf."
                -- Dave Barry, "Simple, Homespun Gifts"
<FrikaC> I should probably reboot...
<FrikaC> ok brb
<FrikaC> So, what apart form avoiding virii, memory leaks, and rampant
         crashing does Linux reallhy offer :)
<LordHavoc> reliable multitasking?
The memory management on the PowerPC can be used to frighten small children.
        -- Linus Torvalds
Well, hey, let's just make everything into a closure, and then we'll
have our general garbage collector, installed by "use less memory".
             -- Larry Wall in <199710221744.KAA24484@wall.org>
Happiness is good health and a bad memory.
                -- Ingrid Bergman
No guarantee of accuracy or completeness!
©TU Chemnitz, 2006-2024
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