Because the system that I have is currently working, but to maintain the security fixes I need to import garbage that trashes my current work flow, and which doesn't work well (for me) and which I don't want. Because I depend on a lot of different projects, and this sneaks in dependencies to several of them, which cause problems with others.
I don't like systemd because it increases the amount of work I must do, and updating my current system now automatically installs it. It has at least once rendered my computer unbootable, so that I had to reinstall a different system.
I don't want to fix it, I want to avoid it. And I... hate is slightly too strong a word, but strongly dislike... those people who took the working system and broke it.... which I count systemd as doing. I've finally made my peace with grub2, but I still find it inferior to grub in most ways. Systemd clearly intends to perform equivalent abominations on all of the system software interfaces.
O, and I don't trust an init system that has rendered my computer unbootable. Sysv-init never did that, though I've got to admit that I've done it...but when I did it, I could figure out how to correct it.
An X replacement isn't as bad as systemd. Not by any means. That said, I don't know enough about Wayland to say *it* isn't as bad, just that it's not necessarily as bad. After all, everything starts out only working on one system.
That said, until systemd is gone, I won't even be thinking about using Gnome3. And their reactions to user complaints during development are going to make it very difficult to convince me that they are worth looking at.
It might be interesting to do a genetic comparison of the two strains. There's various other evidence that the Chinese had, at least occasional, contact with somewhere around Peru. Not really convincing (to me), but definitely enough to make it seem plausible.
IIUC, the Carthagenians were more thorough that the US ever was. The records are a bit suspect though, as the Romans hated the Carthagenians, and that's where we get most of our information. OTOH, they approved of the Carthegenian handling of slaves. (One of?) the sole pieces of literature that they preserved from Carthegage was a book on how to manage slaves.
Actually there are several pieces of evidence that the Norse travelled widely in Northern America. Not convincing, and not proof, but quite suggestive. They also suggest that the particular people who left the evidence weren't killed, though there's no evidence that they ever returned home.
Do remember that the wandering Norse were usually second sons of the noble class, or members of their household. They didn't have much to come back to, so settling down in a tribe of natives wouldn't have been such a bad deal. And they had presents to win friendship with. Iron knives, e.g. Lief Ericsson's party did fairly well for months before the locals decided that this was just too many strangers camping on THEIR hunting grounds. (Or whatever really set them off. The explanation in the saga isn't any more the cause than Jenkin's ear was the cause of the "War of Jenkin's ear". It was just the final straw.) Lone wanderers wouldn't have caused that kind of problem, and would have seemed quite interresting.
That said, wandering around alone *is* dangerous. You wouldn't do it unless your boat was too damaged to trust for the trip back. But that's *not* an unreasonable supposition.
The vikings DID tell people. There was a failed attempt at a real estate deal. It's mentioned in the sagas, so it made it all the way into popular culture. But it was pagan literature, so the Church ignored it, and the Christian world, in general, didn't hear about it. (For that matter, I've never read "El Cid", but I'm rather sure he existed.)
FWIW, there have also been repeated stories of individuals who returned from the "new world". Most dating from long before Columbus. There's a story about an Irish saint, I believe that there's a similar (though less religious) story from Portugal. Etc. Nobody took them seriously enough to check, because doing so would be quite dangerous.
What Columbus did was start the first economically successful trans-oceanic contact. (Even that was on a hope until gold was discovered.)
Taking your point, but it's not even certain to be correct. There's minor evidence that the transition to human was sufficiently geographically spread to include to include not only Africa, and parts of Asia and Europe. Certainly the Neanderthal and Denisovian genes entered the gene-pool as we were becoming human, and the Denisovian genes apparently entered in Asia, while the Neanderthal genes probably entered in either Europe of the Middle East. This can be inferred from the populations where the respective genes are currently situated. And this, in turn, implies that the transition to humanity was a rather gradual process. I'm sure there were points of inflection, and several significan changes along the way, but the gene pool is sufficiently continuous (with local features) that it *must* have happened on a time scale that allowed the gene pool to become relatively homogenous across all three continents. (I'm not sure about Austrailia, but I think that the current aborigines were already fully human before they arrived.)
OTOH, it is worth remembering that just Africa alone holds greater human genetic diversity than the entire rest of the world. So that where most of the speciation happened.
I'm pretty sure that the G.P. intended that post as humorous. I didn't LOL, but I smiled. The weird thing is that people seem to taking it as straight.
No. What's troubling is that you believed them when they said it was to prevent bullying. That was clearly a lie from the beginning. If they wanted to prevent bullying they'd have just made it easy to ban communications from one account/IP#/etc. to a particular other. Sort of a more effective form of putting your hands over your ears and going la-la-la, except that you only block a small section of possibly incoming messages.
(Yes, I know you can reset your IP# if you're running through a NAT, and you could get another account, but making bullying that much more difficult would probably be enough to stop it. When the bully had to be in more effort to send a message than it takes the recipient to block all subsequent messages, it tends to lose it's attractiveness. Especially if all the feedback you get is that subsequent messages are silently dropped.)
And that's why no sane person will do it in C, but that doesn't mean it can't be done. You do need to write a lot of stuff that the C++ compiler includes built-in.
OTOH, I *am* talking above my head. But to me your explanation is why no sane person will do it, and doesn't speak to impossibility.
Sorry, but C++ literally cannot offer any feature which is impossible in C...except simplicity of source code. C++ source code can often be much simpler than any possible implementation in C, but anything that can be done in C++ can equally be done in C.
That said, it's often so much simpler to do in C++ that no reasonable person would do the equivalent thing in C.
Java handles unicode much better than does C++. It also handles strings better. And synchronization between threads.
N.B.: You *can* do all those things in C++, or even in C, but they're much nicer in Java.
OTOH, I despise the UTF-16 coding used by Java. Enough so that I generally prefer Python or Ruby. though if I don't need specialized libraries my real choice is D (Digital Mars D). See http://dlang.org/index.html .
This, however, doesn't mean that I think Java, Python, Ruby, or D are appropriate languages to write an OS in. For I deem that the best choices are C or Ada. You *could* do it in D, but you'd need to disable many of it's more desireable features for much of the code. (There are times when you really don't want garbage collection or the layers of indirection that make objects flexible. In D that means you don't use classes, but you can use structs.)
Correction: , is that a good C programmer can look at a piece ofwell writtenC code and have a pretty good idea of the machine code
I've had to maintain some real winners of C code where the programmer went hog-wild with macros. UGH. It was easier to rewrite everything than to understand what was being done.
OK. But I said prosecuted, not convicted. I didn't follow the case, but only ran across one article reporting on it. So they could even have been prosecuted under federal law, and maybe the judge took one look at the case and dismissed it. I wouldn't know.
For that matter, you can be convicted of almost anything if there's an enthusiastic prosecuter, an inept defense, and a lazy judge. The actual law is just a (hopefully respected) reference framework. And, IIUC, you can't introduce any new evidence in an appeal, so unless you can prove that you didn't have a good enough defense lawyer (quite difficult), you may well be sunk.
IIRC, people *have* been prosecuted for naked baby pictures. I think the case I'm remembering is from when people took film to a studio to be developed.
Ok. You are obviously much better informed than I am, and I guess you are quite pessimistic about the total amount of oil that would ever be found. But as prices rise, things which are hopelessly uneconomic become more plausible.
Mind you, I consider this totally the wrong way to go. But when prices rise enough there will be a lot more oil available. But there are lots of reasons that that it only becomes available when the prices rise dramatically. Small fields, difficult access, expensive construction, dangerous conditions, etc. Not to mention continuing CO2 pollution.
We *need* to develop renewable energy resources. I'm not really sure that we should be moving into full scale deployment now...except for cases where there isn't much downside, or whether the technology is already mature. (Hydro comes to mind.) But we need significant investment in developing renewable technologies to the "demonstration project" stage. (I.e., one step past the pilot project.) Some of the investment should continue to be in basic research, but more needs to be invested in moving from research result to useful plant. (Don't take that too literally. Rooftop solar isn't exactly a plant, but it falls within the pervue of what I mean.)
AFAIK, neither the deep ocean nore the sides of the continental shelf have yet been thoroughly explored. Some early explorations were discouraging, but MOST exploration is discouraging.
Have you noticed at all that these new finds are in areas where it is more expensive to extract the oil? Underwater is a lot more expensive than on land. Under the Arctic Ocean? Well, waiting 5 years will probably make it cheaper, as ice heaves are terrible to construct around. Of course, 5 years may not be long enough to clear the ice.
FWIW, I'd bet that there are lots of undiscovered oil fields under deep ocean, or perhaps that you need to access by drilling sideways into the continental shelf. But that's expensive even compared to working in the Arctic Ocean.
Additionally, of course, every gallon of oil we burn increases our CO2 level. That's not just greenhouse, that's also ocean acidification. But you can't measure the damage that is done in any one day...so you don't need to worry about that, right?
You aren't understanding. Since it was explained fairly clearly, I'd guess you don't want to understand. But I'll try again anyway.
These chips are broken. So they are sold cheap. You don't want to pay full price for seconds. Before they sell them, they use software to set the broken parts as not working. Some of them aren't broken enough that you'll immediately notice, but that doesn't mean they aren't broken.
Usually the breaks are only in one area. Some die didn't burn properly, or traces weren't properly laid down. Whatever. So that area is sealed off. The manufacturer doesn't do a detailed investigation of exactly what's broken, just one that's good enough so they can figure out what needs to be sealed off to have a working chip. Then the sell the working chip (with reduced functionality) for a much cheaper price.
So if you don't need the full functions of the chip, you can buy the cheaper, reduced functionality, model at a cheaper price.
IC manufacturers have been doing this since the i8086, or maybe the i80186. (Intel was the first one I ever heard of doing it.)
This is a deal for those who don't need the functionality of the full model. It also cuts the prices for those that do, as selling the seconds defrays some of the cost of manufacturing.
Those who are removing the imposed limits and selling the seconds as if they were first quality are the ones who are cheating the customers. They are also impugning the name of the original manufacturer.
Underwater earthquakes often, perhaps even usually, set off huge underwater landslides. Sometimes the tsunami from the landslide is worse than that from the quake. Quite often they will reinforce each other, at least in some directions.
So in this case it sounds like a huge earthquake acted in a normal way, but with an unfortunate direction of reinforcement. It also sounds as if it could have been a lot worse. The landslide was not huge as such things go. IIUC the one in Indonesia a year or so earlier had a larger associated landslide. And even that one is a lot smaller than some that there is evidence for. IIUC (again) a *LONG* time ago Puget Sound (in Washington on the Pacifc US coast) once had a much bigger tsunami that was triggered by an underwater landslide.
Please note: I am not an Oceanographer or even a Geologist. These "facts" are derived from general reading.
Mind you, doing it in a way so easily traceable is a sign of being so upset that you count as crazy, but there's often a reason (or more than one) that people go crazy.
FWIW, "going crazy" in ways analogous to this is a part of our evolutionary toolkit for dealing with abusive management. It doesn't work as well in modern society, as those in control have learned to isolate themselves from the possibility of retribution, but in earlier times reactions analogous to this would lead to the abused person being killed, and the abuser being injured, often permanently. Which would make it much easier for his successor to take him down. The math justifying this is too complex for me to follow, but those who have worked it out say "it's probably right". It does assume that most of our evolution happened in small groups of reasonably closely related individuals, but that seems a quite reasonable assumption.
You are right. But sometimes if you don't have a car, you don't have a job. If your car dies, what are you supposed to do? Some people can scrape together enough to get the use of a car. Clearly, however, they couldn't get access to the car where you looked.
Actually, often it would be cheaper to buy a car from the current owner, but that can take significantly longer, and by the time they got the car, they might no longer have the job. I'll agree that it can also be quicker, but it's a gamble. And how do you go to look for the car if you don't have a car?
That said, I'll agree that many people make choices that I consider stupid. But often they're making the best choice that they can.
FWIW, I only own a car so that my wife can drive. I don't drive. There was a time when I did, but *I* decided that I wasn't a safe driver.
You were right, however: I can't consider Wikipedia a better source than the history text I read in college.
(Actually, I'm always rather dubious about any "fact" that I find on Wikipedia. Many of them I have known-for-sure weren't facts at all. OTOH, most were indeed correct. But don't use it as a reference site for anything where anyone disagrees with it.)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 12-volume autobiographical work Confessions, was written in 1770. In Book 6, which was written around 1767, he recalls:
At length I recollected the thoughtless saying of a great princess, who, on being informed that the country people had no bread, replied, "Then let them eat pastry!"
So I guess my history book was wrong. And apparently nobody knowns who originally said it, either.
Slashdot Mirror
Because the system that I have is currently working, but to maintain the security fixes I need to import garbage that trashes my current work flow, and which doesn't work well (for me) and which I don't want. Because I depend on a lot of different projects, and this sneaks in dependencies to several of them, which cause problems with others.
I don't like systemd because it increases the amount of work I must do, and updating my current system now automatically installs it. It has at least once rendered my computer unbootable, so that I had to reinstall a different system.
I don't want to fix it, I want to avoid it. And I ... hate is slightly too strong a word, but strongly dislike ... those people who took the working system and broke it. ... which I count systemd as doing. I've finally made my peace with grub2, but I still find it inferior to grub in most ways. Systemd clearly intends to perform equivalent abominations on all of the system software interfaces.
O, and I don't trust an init system that has rendered my computer unbootable. Sysv-init never did that, though I've got to admit that I've done it...but when I did it, I could figure out how to correct it.
For my opinion, LXQT is *too* minimal. It's an interesting direction, and with some further development it may be a good choice, but not yet.
An X replacement isn't as bad as systemd. Not by any means. That said, I don't know enough about Wayland to say *it* isn't as bad, just that it's not necessarily as bad. After all, everything starts out only working on one system.
That said, until systemd is gone, I won't even be thinking about using Gnome3. And their reactions to user complaints during development are going to make it very difficult to convince me that they are worth looking at.
It might be interesting to do a genetic comparison of the two strains. There's various other evidence that the Chinese had, at least occasional, contact with somewhere around Peru. Not really convincing (to me), but definitely enough to make it seem plausible.
IIUC, the Carthagenians were more thorough that the US ever was. The records are a bit suspect though, as the Romans hated the Carthagenians, and that's where we get most of our information. OTOH, they approved of the Carthegenian handling of slaves. (One of?) the sole pieces of literature that they preserved from Carthegage was a book on how to manage slaves.
Actually there are several pieces of evidence that the Norse travelled widely in Northern America. Not convincing, and not proof, but quite suggestive. They also suggest that the particular people who left the evidence weren't killed, though there's no evidence that they ever returned home.
Do remember that the wandering Norse were usually second sons of the noble class, or members of their household. They didn't have much to come back to, so settling down in a tribe of natives wouldn't have been such a bad deal. And they had presents to win friendship with. Iron knives, e.g. Lief Ericsson's party did fairly well for months before the locals decided that this was just too many strangers camping on THEIR hunting grounds. (Or whatever really set them off. The explanation in the saga isn't any more the cause than Jenkin's ear was the cause of the "War of Jenkin's ear". It was just the final straw.) Lone wanderers wouldn't have caused that kind of problem, and would have seemed quite interresting.
That said, wandering around alone *is* dangerous. You wouldn't do it unless your boat was too damaged to trust for the trip back. But that's *not* an unreasonable supposition.
The vikings DID tell people. There was a failed attempt at a real estate deal. It's mentioned in the sagas, so it made it all the way into popular culture. But it was pagan literature, so the Church ignored it, and the Christian world, in general, didn't hear about it. (For that matter, I've never read "El Cid", but I'm rather sure he existed.)
FWIW, there have also been repeated stories of individuals who returned from the "new world". Most dating from long before Columbus. There's a story about an Irish saint, I believe that there's a similar (though less religious) story from Portugal. Etc. Nobody took them seriously enough to check, because doing so would be quite dangerous.
What Columbus did was start the first economically successful trans-oceanic contact. (Even that was on a hope until gold was discovered.)
Taking your point, but it's not even certain to be correct. There's minor evidence that the transition to human was sufficiently geographically spread to include to include not only Africa, and parts of Asia and Europe. Certainly the Neanderthal and Denisovian genes entered the gene-pool as we were becoming human, and the Denisovian genes apparently entered in Asia, while the Neanderthal genes probably entered in either Europe of the Middle East. This can be inferred from the populations where the respective genes are currently situated. And this, in turn, implies that the transition to humanity was a rather gradual process. I'm sure there were points of inflection, and several significan changes along the way, but the gene pool is sufficiently continuous (with local features) that it *must* have happened on a time scale that allowed the gene pool to become relatively homogenous across all three continents. (I'm not sure about Austrailia, but I think that the current aborigines were already fully human before they arrived.)
OTOH, it is worth remembering that just Africa alone holds greater human genetic diversity than the entire rest of the world. So that where most of the speciation happened.
I'm pretty sure that the G.P. intended that post as humorous. I didn't LOL, but I smiled. The weird thing is that people seem to taking it as straight.
No. What's troubling is that you believed them when they said it was to prevent bullying. That was clearly a lie from the beginning. If they wanted to prevent bullying they'd have just made it easy to ban communications from one account/IP#/etc. to a particular other. Sort of a more effective form of putting your hands over your ears and going la-la-la, except that you only block a small section of possibly incoming messages.
(Yes, I know you can reset your IP# if you're running through a NAT, and you could get another account, but making bullying that much more difficult would probably be enough to stop it. When the bully had to be in more effort to send a message than it takes the recipient to block all subsequent messages, it tends to lose it's attractiveness. Especially if all the feedback you get is that subsequent messages are silently dropped.)
And that's why no sane person will do it in C, but that doesn't mean it can't be done. You do need to write a lot of stuff that the C++ compiler includes built-in.
OTOH, I *am* talking above my head. But to me your explanation is why no sane person will do it, and doesn't speak to impossibility.
Sorry, but C++ literally cannot offer any feature which is impossible in C...except simplicity of source code. C++ source code can often be much simpler than any possible implementation in C, but anything that can be done in C++ can equally be done in C.
That said, it's often so much simpler to do in C++ that no reasonable person would do the equivalent thing in C.
Java handles unicode much better than does C++. It also handles strings better. And synchronization between threads.
N.B.: You *can* do all those things in C++, or even in C, but they're much nicer in Java.
OTOH, I despise the UTF-16 coding used by Java. Enough so that I generally prefer Python or Ruby. though if I don't need specialized libraries my real choice is D (Digital Mars D). See http://dlang.org/index.html .
This, however, doesn't mean that I think Java, Python, Ruby, or D are appropriate languages to write an OS in. For I deem that the best choices are C or Ada. You *could* do it in D, but you'd need to disable many of it's more desireable features for much of the code. (There are times when you really don't want garbage collection or the layers of indirection that make objects flexible. In D that means you don't use classes, but you can use structs.)
Correction:
, is that a good C programmer can look at a piece of well written C code and have a pretty good idea of the machine code
I've had to maintain some real winners of C code where the programmer went hog-wild with macros. UGH. It was easier to rewrite everything than to understand what was being done.
OK. But I said prosecuted, not convicted. I didn't follow the case, but only ran across one article reporting on it. So they could even have been prosecuted under federal law, and maybe the judge took one look at the case and dismissed it. I wouldn't know.
For that matter, you can be convicted of almost anything if there's an enthusiastic prosecuter, an inept defense, and a lazy judge. The actual law is just a (hopefully respected) reference framework. And, IIUC, you can't introduce any new evidence in an appeal, so unless you can prove that you didn't have a good enough defense lawyer (quite difficult), you may well be sunk.
Well, they never bullied me. And I feel the same way.
IIRC, people *have* been prosecuted for naked baby pictures. I think the case I'm remembering is from when people took film to a studio to be developed.
Ok. You are obviously much better informed than I am, and I guess you are quite pessimistic about the total amount of oil that would ever be found. But as prices rise, things which are hopelessly uneconomic become more plausible.
Mind you, I consider this totally the wrong way to go. But when prices rise enough there will be a lot more oil available. But there are lots of reasons that that it only becomes available when the prices rise dramatically. Small fields, difficult access, expensive construction, dangerous conditions, etc. Not to mention continuing CO2 pollution.
We *need* to develop renewable energy resources. I'm not really sure that we should be moving into full scale deployment now...except for cases where there isn't much downside, or whether the technology is already mature. (Hydro comes to mind.) But we need significant investment in developing renewable technologies to the "demonstration project" stage. (I.e., one step past the pilot project.) Some of the investment should continue to be in basic research, but more needs to be invested in moving from research result to useful plant. (Don't take that too literally. Rooftop solar isn't exactly a plant, but it falls within the pervue of what I mean.)
AFAIK, neither the deep ocean nore the sides of the continental shelf have yet been thoroughly explored. Some early explorations were discouraging, but MOST exploration is discouraging.
Have you noticed at all that these new finds are in areas where it is more expensive to extract the oil? Underwater is a lot more expensive than on land. Under the Arctic Ocean? Well, waiting 5 years will probably make it cheaper, as ice heaves are terrible to construct around. Of course, 5 years may not be long enough to clear the ice.
FWIW, I'd bet that there are lots of undiscovered oil fields under deep ocean, or perhaps that you need to access by drilling sideways into the continental shelf. But that's expensive even compared to working in the Arctic Ocean.
Additionally, of course, every gallon of oil we burn increases our CO2 level. That's not just greenhouse, that's also ocean acidification. But you can't measure the damage that is done in any one day...so you don't need to worry about that, right?
You aren't understanding. Since it was explained fairly clearly, I'd guess you don't want to understand. But I'll try again anyway.
These chips are broken. So they are sold cheap. You don't want to pay full price for seconds. Before they sell them, they use software to set the broken parts as not working. Some of them aren't broken enough that you'll immediately notice, but that doesn't mean they aren't broken.
Usually the breaks are only in one area. Some die didn't burn properly, or traces weren't properly laid down. Whatever. So that area is sealed off. The manufacturer doesn't do a detailed investigation of exactly what's broken, just one that's good enough so they can figure out what needs to be sealed off to have a working chip. Then the sell the working chip (with reduced functionality) for a much cheaper price.
So if you don't need the full functions of the chip, you can buy the cheaper, reduced functionality, model at a cheaper price.
IC manufacturers have been doing this since the i8086, or maybe the i80186. (Intel was the first one I ever heard of doing it.)
This is a deal for those who don't need the functionality of the full model. It also cuts the prices for those that do, as selling the seconds defrays some of the cost of manufacturing.
Those who are removing the imposed limits and selling the seconds as if they were first quality are the ones who are cheating the customers. They are also impugning the name of the original manufacturer.
Underwater earthquakes often, perhaps even usually, set off huge underwater landslides. Sometimes the tsunami from the landslide is worse than that from the quake. Quite often they will reinforce each other, at least in some directions.
So in this case it sounds like a huge earthquake acted in a normal way, but with an unfortunate direction of reinforcement. It also sounds as if it could have been a lot worse. The landslide was not huge as such things go. IIUC the one in Indonesia a year or so earlier had a larger associated landslide. And even that one is a lot smaller than some that there is evidence for. IIUC (again) a *LONG* time ago Puget Sound (in Washington on the Pacifc US coast) once had a much bigger tsunami that was triggered by an underwater landslide.
Please note: I am not an Oceanographer or even a Geologist. These "facts" are derived from general reading.
But which do you think is more common?
Mind you, doing it in a way so easily traceable is a sign of being so upset that you count as crazy, but there's often a reason (or more than one) that people go crazy.
FWIW, "going crazy" in ways analogous to this is a part of our evolutionary toolkit for dealing with abusive management. It doesn't work as well in modern society, as those in control have learned to isolate themselves from the possibility of retribution, but in earlier times reactions analogous to this would lead to the abused person being killed, and the abuser being injured, often permanently. Which would make it much easier for his successor to take him down. The math justifying this is too complex for me to follow, but those who have worked it out say "it's probably right". It does assume that most of our evolution happened in small groups of reasonably closely related individuals, but that seems a quite reasonable assumption.
You are right. But sometimes if you don't have a car, you don't have a job. If your car dies, what are you supposed to do? Some people can scrape together enough to get the use of a car. Clearly, however, they couldn't get access to the car where you looked.
Actually, often it would be cheaper to buy a car from the current owner, but that can take significantly longer, and by the time they got the car, they might no longer have the job. I'll agree that it can also be quicker, but it's a gamble. And how do you go to look for the car if you don't have a car?
That said, I'll agree that many people make choices that I consider stupid. But often they're making the best choice that they can.
FWIW, I only own a car so that my wife can drive. I don't drive. There was a time when I did, but *I* decided that I wasn't a safe driver.
You were right, however:
I can't consider Wikipedia a better source than the history text I read in college.
(Actually, I'm always rather dubious about any "fact" that I find on Wikipedia. Many of them I have known-for-sure weren't facts at all. OTOH, most were indeed correct. But don't use it as a reference site for anything where anyone disagrees with it.)
OTOH: (from http://www.phrases.org.uk/mean...)
So I guess my history book was wrong. And apparently nobody knowns who originally said it, either.