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Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) by Linux fortune

Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must
have somebody to divide it with.
                -- Mark Twain
A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
                -- Alan Perlis
===  ALL USERS PLEASE NOTE  ========================

CAR and CDR now return extra values.

The function CAR now returns two values.  Since it has to go to the trouble
to figure out if the object is carcdr-able anyway, we figured you might as
well get both halves at once.  For example, the following code shows how to
destructure a cons (SOME-CONS) into its two slots (THE-CAR and THE-CDR):

        (MULTIPLE-VALUE-BIND (THE-CAR THE-CDR) (CAR SOME-CONS) ...)

For symmetry with CAR, CDR returns a second value which is the CAR of the
object.  In a related change, the functions MAKE-ARRAY and CONS have been
fixed so they don't allocate any storage except on the stack.  This should
hopefully help people who don't like using the garbage collector because
it cold boots the machine so often.
An interpretation _I satisfies a sentence in the table language if and only if
each entry in the table designates the value of the function designated by the
function constant in the upper-left corner applied to the objects designated
by the corresponding row and column labels.
                -- Genesereth & Nilsson, "Logical foundations of Artificial
                   Intelligence"
Hacker's Guide To Cooking:
2 pkg. cream cheese (the mushy white stuff in silver wrappings that doesn't
        really  come from Philadelphia after all; anyway, about 16 oz.)
1 tsp. vanilla  extract  (which is more alcohol than vanilla and pretty
        strong so this part you *GOTTA* measure)
1/4 cup sugar (but honey works fine too)
8 oz. Cool Whip (the fluffy stuff devoid of nutritional value that you
        can squirt all over your friends and lick off...)
"Blend all together until creamy with no lumps."  This is where you get to
        join(1) all the raw data in a big buffer and then filter it through
        merge(1m) with the -thick option, I mean, it starts out ultra lumpy
        and icky looking and you have to work hard to mix it.  Try an electric
        beater if you have a cat(1) that can climb wall(1s) to lick it off
        the ceiling(3m).
"Pour into a graham cracker crust..."  Aha, the BUGS section at last.  You
        just happened  to have a GCC sitting around under /etc/food, right?
        If not, don't panic(8), merely crumble a rand(3m) handful of innocent
        GCs into a suitable tempfile and mix in some melted butter.
"...and  refrigerate for an hour."  Leave the  recipe's  stdout in a fridge
        for 3.6E6 milliseconds while you work on cleaning up stderr, and
        by time out your cheesecake will be ready for stdin.
He's like a function -- he returns a value, in the form of his opinion.
It's up to you to cast it into a void or not.
                -- Phil Lapsley
Niklaus Wirth has lamented that, whereas Europeans pronounce his name correctly
(Ni-klows Virt), Americans invariably mangle it into (Nick-les Worth).  Which
is to say that Europeans call him by name, but Americans call him by value.
Real computer scientists admire ADA for its overwhelming aesthetic
value but they find it difficult to actually program in it, as it is
much too large to implement.  Most computer scientists don't notice
this because they are still arguing over what else to add to ADA.
***** Special AI Seminar (abstract)

It has been widely recognized that AI programs require expert knowledge
in order to perform well in complex domains.  But knowledge alone is not
sufficient for some applications; wisdom is needed as well.  Accordingly,
we have developed a new approach to artificial intelligence which we call
"wisdom engineering".  As a test of our ideas, we have written IMMANUEL, a
wisdom based system for the task domain of western philosophical thought.  
IMMANUEL was supplied initially with 200 wisdom units which contained wisdom
about such elementary concepts as mind, matter, being, nothingness, and so
forth.  IMMANUEL was then allowed to run freely, guided by the heuristic
rules contained in its heterarchically organized meta wisdom base.  IMMANUEL
succeeded in rediscovering most of the important philosophical ideas developed
in western culture over the course of the last 25 centuries, including those
underlying Plato's theory of government, Kant's metaphysics, Nietzsche's theory
of value, and Husserl's phenomenology.  In this seminar, we will describe
IMMANUEL's achievements and internal architecture.  We will also briefly
discuss our recent efforts to apply wisdom engineering to oil exploration.
The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants;
instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the
variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead
of the longer form of the constant.  This also simplifies modifying the
program, should the value of pi change.
                -- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers
The value of a program is proportional to the weight of its output.
This process can check if this value is zero, and if it is, it does
something child-like.
                -- Forbes Burkowski, CS 454, University of Washington
Wasn't there something about a PASCAL programmer knowing the value of
everything and the Wirth of nothing?
Why are programmers non-productive?
Because their time is wasted in meetings.

Why are programmers rebellious?
Because the management interferes too much.

Why are the programmers resigning one by one?
Because they are burnt out.

Having worked for poor management, they no longer value their jobs.
                -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
Worthless.
                -- Sir George Bidell Airy, KCB, MA, LLD, DCL, FRS, FRAS
                   (Astronomer Royal of Great Britain), estimating for the
                   Chancellor of the Exchequer the potential value of the
                   "analytical engine" invented by Charles Babbage, September
                   15, 1842.
Cheap things are of no value, valuable things are not cheap.
You may call me by my name, Wirth, or by my value, Worth.
- Nicklaus Wirth
"Computer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to
make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable.
As in all the arts, a romance with the material must be well under way.  If
we value the lifelong learning of arts and letters as a springboard for
personal and societal growth, should any less effort be spent to make computing
a part of our lives?"
-- Alan Kay, "Computer Software", Scientific American, September 1984
Do not underestimate the value of print statements for debugging.
Do not underestimate the value of print statements for debugging.
Don't have aesthetic convulsions when using them, either.
"The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children
produce adults."
-- Peter De Vries
Inadmissible:  Not competent to be considered.  Said of certain kinds of
testimony which juries are supposed to be unfit to be entrusted with,
and which judges, therefore, rule out, even of proceedings before themselves
alone.  Hearsay evidence is inadmissible because the person quoted was
unsworn and is not before the court for examination; yet most momentous
actions, military, political, commercial and of every other kind, are
daily undertaken on hearsay evidence.  There is no religion in the world
that has any other basis than hearsay evidence.  Revelation is hearsay
evidence; that the Scriptures are the word of God we have only the
testimony of men long dead whose identy is not clearly established and
who are not known to have been sworn in any sense.  Under the rules of
evidence as they now exist in this country, no single assertion in the
Bible has in its support any evidence admissible in a court of law...

But as records of courts of justice are admissible, it can easily be proved
that powerful and malevolent magicians once existed and were a scourge to
mankind.  The evidence (including confession) upon which certain women
were convicted of witchcraft and executed was without a flaw; it is still
unimpeachable.  The judges' decisions based on it were sound in logic and
in law.  Nothing in any existing court was ever more thoroughly proved than
the charges of witchcraft and sorcery for which so many suffered death.
If there were no witches, human testimony and human reason are alike
destitute of value.  --Ambrose Bierce
"In corporate life, I think there are three important areas which contracts
can't deal with, the area of conflict, the area of change and area of reaching
potential.  To me a covenant is a relationship that is based on such things
as shared ideals and shared value systems and shared ideas and shared
agreement as to the processes we are going to use for working together.  In
many cases they develop into real love relationships."
-- Max DePree, chairman and CEO of Herman Miller Inc., "Herman Miller's
   Secrets of Corporate Creativity", The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 1988
"Pseudocode can be used to some extent to aid the maintenance
process.  However, pseudocode that is highly detailed -
approaching the level of detail of the code itself - is not of
much use as maintenance documentation.  Such detailed
documentation has to be maintained almost as much as the code,
thus doubling the maintenance burden.  Furthermore, since such
voluminous pseudocode is too distracting to be kept in the
listing itself, it must be kept in a separate folder.  The
result: Since pseudocode - unlike real code - doesn't have to be
maintained, no one will maintain it.  It will soon become out of
date and everyone will ignore it.  (Once, I did an informal
survey of 42 shops that used pseudocode.  Of those 42, 0 [zero!],
found that it had any value as maintenance documentation."
         --Meilir Page-Jones, "The Practical Guide to Structured
           Design", Yourdon Press (c) 1988
Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.
        -- Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy,
           Ecole Superieure de Guerre
Computer science:
        (1) A study akin to numerology and astrology, but lacking the
           precision of the former and the success of the latter.
        (2) The protracted value analysis of algorithms.
        (3) The costly enumeration of the obvious.
        (4) The boring art of coping with a large number of trivialities.
        (5) Tautology harnessed in the service of Man at the speed of light.
        (6) The Post-Turing decline in formal systems theory.
economics, n.:
        Economics is the study of the value and meaning of J.K. Galbraith.
                -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac"
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.
neutron bomb, n.:
        An explosive device of limited military value because, as
        it only destroys people without destroying property, it
        must be used in conjunction with bombs that destroy property.
Ritchie's Rule:
        (1) Everything has some value -- if you use the right currency.
        (2) Paint splashes last longer than the paint job.
        (3) Search and ye shall find -- but make sure it was lost.
Theorem: All positive integers are equal.
Proof: Sufficient to show that for any two positive integers, A and B, A = B.
        Further, it is sufficient to show that for all N > 0, if A and B
        (positive integers) satisfy (MAX(A, B) = N) then A = B.

Proceed by induction:
        If N = 1, then A and B, being positive integers, must both be 1.
        So A = B.

Assume that the theorem is true for some value k.  Take A and B with
        MAX(A, B) = k+1.  Then  MAX((A-1), (B-1)) = k.  And hence
        (A-1) = (B-1).  Consequently, A = B.
write-protect tab, n.:
        A small sticker created to cover the unsightly notch carelessly left
        by disk manufacturers.  The use of the tab creates an error message
        once in a while, but its aesthetic value far outweighs the momentary
        inconvenience.
                -- Robb Russon
Do YOU have redeeming social value?
Every paper published in a respectable journal should have a preface by
the author stating why he is publishing the article, and what value he
sees in it.  I have no hope that this practice will ever be adopted.
                -- Morris Kline
"If value corrupts then absolute value corrupts absolutely."
Matter will be damaged in direct proportion to its value.
Go placidly amid the noise and waste, and remember what value there may
be in owning a piece thereof.
                -- National Lampoon, "Deteriorata"
Why are you watching
The washing machine?
I love entertainment
So long as it's clean.

Professor Doberman:
        While the preceding poem is unarguably a change from the guarded
pessimism of "The Hound of Heaven," it cannot be regarded as an unqualified
improvement.  Obscurity is of value only when it tends to clarify the poetic
experience.  As much as one is compelled to admire the poem's technique, one
must question whether its byplay of complex literary allusions does not in
fact distract from the unity of the whole.  In the final analysis, one
receives the distinct impression that the poem's length could safely have
been reduced by a factor of eight or ten without sacrificing any of its
meaning.  It is to be hoped that further publication of this poem can be
suspended pending a thorough investigation of its potential subversive
implications.
Try to value useful qualities in one who loves you.
Your true value depends entirely on what you are compared with.
        The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on
the subject of towels.
        Most importantly, a towel has immense psychological value.  For
some reason, if a non-hitchhiker discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel
with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a
toothbrush, washcloth, flask, gnat spray, space suit, etc., etc.  Furthermore,
the non-hitchhiker will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or
a dozen other items that he may have "lost".  After all, any man who can
hitch the length and breadth of the Galaxy, struggle against terrible odds,
win through and still know where his towel is, is clearly a man to be
reckoned with.
                -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
                The Three Major Kind of Tools

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

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

* Tools that nobody should ever use because the potential danger is far
greater than the value of any project that could possibly result.
(Power saws, power drills, power staplers, any kind of tool that uses
any kind of power more advanced than flashlight batteries.)
                -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"
Microsoft seems to have gotten a lot of mileage out of the C2 rating for
NT with no network connection.  I wonder if a B3 rating for Linux with no
power cord might be of value.
But since I knew now that I could hope for nothing of greater value than
frivolous pleasures, what point was there in denying myself of them?  
                -- M. Proust
No one so thoroughly appreciates the value of constructive criticism as the
one who's giving it.
                -- Hal Chadwick
The average nutritional value of promises is roughly zero.
Because you want to win benchmarketing exercises, not demonstrate that your
architecture has any value in the real world whatsoever.  Because you know
that you can induce people with financial approval to make stupid and
irrational decisions based on irrelevant data.

        - Rodger Donaldson about benchmarking on linux-kernel
The softest thing in the universe
Overcomes the hardest thing in the universe.
That without substance can enter where there is no room.
Hence I know the value of non-action.

Teaching without words and work without doing
Are understood by very few.
There is a saying among soldiers:
  I dare not make the first move but would rather play the guest;
  I dare not advance an inch but would rather withdraw a foot.

This is called marching without appearing to move,
Rolling up your sleeves without showing your arm,
Capturing the enemy without attacking,
Being armed without weapons.

There is no greater catastrophe than underestimating the enemy.
By underestimating the enemy, I almost lost what I value.

Therefore when the battle is joined,
The underdog will win.
Why are the people starving?
Because the rulers eat up the money in taxes.
Therefore the people are starving.

Why are the people rebellious?
Because the rulers interfere too much.
Therefore they are rebellious.

Why do the people think so little of death?
Because the rulers demand too much of life.
Therefore the people take death lightly.

Having little to live on, one knows better than to value life too much.
Techical solutions are not a matter of voting. Two legislations in the US
states almost decided that the value of Pi be 3.14, exactly. Popular vote
does not make for a correct solution.
        -- Manoj Srivastava
<Deek> change all cvar->value = X to use Cvar_Set()
<theoddone33> that didn't happen in oldtree
<Deek> Actually, it did.
<Knghtbrd> yeah - two weeks later.
Hmm...  Which would do a better job at driving physicists crazy?  Travel
faster than light, or a floating-point boolean value?
        -- Michael Mol
... but as records of courts and justice are admissible, it can easily be
proved that powerful and malevolent magicians once existed and were a scourge
to mankind.  The evidence (including confession) upon which certain women
were convicted of witchcraft and executed was without a flaw; it is still
unimpeachable.  The judges' decisions based on it were sound in logic and
in law.  Nothing in any existing court was ever more thoroughly proved than
the charges of witchcraft and sorcery for which so many suffered death.  If
there were no witches, human testimony and human reason are alike destitute
of value.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
[District Attorneys] learn in District Attorney School that there are
two sure-fire ways to get a lot of favorable publicity:

(1) Go down and raid all the lockers in the local high school and
    confiscate 53 marijuana cigarettes and put them in a pile and hold
    a press conference where you announce that they have a street value
    of $850 million.  These raids never fail, because ALL high schools,
    including brand-new, never-used ones, have at least 53 marijuana
    cigarettes in the lockers.  As far as anyone can tell, the locker
    factory puts them there.
(2) Raid an "adult book store" and hold a press conference where you
    announce you are charging the owner with 850 counts of being a
    piece of human sleaze.  This also never fails, because you always
    get a conviction.  A juror at a pornography trial is not about to
    state for the record that he finds nothing obscene about a movie
    where actors engage in sexual activities with live snakes and a
    fire extinguisher.  He is going to convict the bookstore owner, and
    vote for the death penalty just to make sure nobody gets the wrong
    impression.
                -- Dave Barry, "Pornography"
I value kindness to human beings first of all, and kindness to animals.  I
don't respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected
with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger,
the food cheaper, and old men and women warmer in the winter, and happier
in the summer.
                -- Brendan Behan
        In "King Henry VI, Part II," Shakespeare has Dick Butcher suggest to
his fellow anti-establishment rabble-rousers, "The first thing we do, let's
kill all the lawyers."  That action may be extreme but a similar sentiment
was expressed by Thomas K. Connellan, president of The Management Group, Inc.
Speaking to business executives in Chicago and quoted in Automotive News,
Connellan attributed a measure of America's falling productivity to an excess
of attorneys and accountants, and a dearth of production experts.  Lawyers
and accountants "do not make the economic pie any bigger; they only figure
out how the pie gets divided.  Neither profession provides any added value
to product."
        According to Connellan, the highly productive Japanese society has
10 lawyers and 30 accountants per 100,000 population.  The U.S. has 200
lawyers and 700 accountants.  This suggests that "the U.S. proportion of
pie-bakers and pie-dividers is way out of whack."  Could Dick Butcher have
been an efficiency expert?
                -- Motor Trend, May 1983
        Well, he thought, since neither Aristotelian Logic nor the disciplines
of Science seemed to offer much hope, it's time to go beyond them...
        Drawing a few deep even breaths, he entered a mental state practiced
only by Masters of the Universal Way of Zen.  In it his mind floated freely,
able to rummage at will among the bits and pieces of data he had absorbed,
undistracted by any outside disturbances.  Logical structures no longer
inhibited him. Pre-conceptions, prejudices, ordinary human standards vanished.
All things, those previously trivial as well as those once thought important,
became absolutely equal by acquiring an absolute value, revealing relationships
not evident to ordinary vision.  Like beads strung on a string of their own
meaning, each thing pointed to its own common ground of existence, shared by
all.  Finally, each began to melt into each, staying itself while becoming
all others.  And Mind no longer contemplated Problem, but became Problem,
destroying Subject-Object by becoming them.
        Time passed, unheeded.
        Eventually, there was a tentative stirring, then a decisive one, and
Nakamura arose, a smile on his face and the light of laughter in his eyes.
                -- Wayfarer
<rm_-rf_> The real value of KDE is that they inspired and push the
          development of GNOME :-)
        -- #Debian
As to house maintenance, does it involve problem solfing?  If so,
your hacker can safely be left to deall with the panning (for the
musement value, if nothering ese).
        -- Telsa Gwynne
... a thing called Ethics, whose nature was confusing but if you had it you
were a High-Class Realtor and if you hadn't you were a shyster, a piker and
a fly-by-night.  These virtues awakened Confidence and enabled you to handle
Bigger Propositions.  But they didn't imply that you were to be impractical
and refuse to take twice the value for a house if a buyer was such an idiot
that he didn't force you down on the asking price.
                -- Sinclair Lewis, "Babbitt"
If you would know the value of money, go try to borrow some.
                -- Ben Franklin
        NEW YORK-- Kraft Foods, Inc. announced today that its board of
directors unanimously rejected the $11 billion takeover bid by Philip
Morris and Co. A Kraft spokesman stated in a press conference that the
offer was rejected because the $90-per-share bid did not reflect the
true value of the company.
        Wall Street insiders, however, tell quite a different story.
Apparently, the Kraft board of directors had all but signed the takeover
agreement when they learned of Philip Morris' marketing plans for one of
their major Middle East subsidiaries.  To a person, the board voted to
reject the bid when they discovered that the tobacco giant intended to
reorganize Israeli Cheddar, Ltd., and name the new company Cheeses of Nazareth.
double value;                /* or your money back! */
short changed;               /* so triple your money back! */
             -- Larry Wall in cons.c from the perl source code
I might be able to shoehorn a reference count in on top of the numeric
value by disallowing multiple references on scalars with a numeric value,
but it wouldn't be as clean.  I do occasionally worry about that. --lwall
Any false value is gonna be fairly boring in Perl, mathematicians
notwithstanding.
             -- Larry Wall in <199707300650.XAA05515@wall.org>
Most places distinguish them merely by using the appropriate value.
Hooray for context...
             -- Larry Wall in <199708040319.UAA16213@wall.org>
There's some entertainment value in watching people juggle nitroglycerin.
             -- Larry Wall in <199712041747.JAA18908@wall.org>
No guarantee of accuracy or completeness!
©TU Chemnitz, 2006-2024
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