Brahma said: Well, after hearing ten thousand explanations, a fool is no wiser. But an intelligent man needs only two thousand five hundred.
-- The Mahabharata
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Hardware met Software on the road to Changtse. Software said: "You are the Yin and I am the Yang. If we travel together we will become famous and earn vast sums of money." And so the pair set forth together, thinking to conquer the world.
Presently, they met Firmware, who was dressed in tattered rags, and hobbled along propped on a thorny stick. Firmware said to them: "The Tao lies beyond Yin and Yang. It is silent and still as a pool of water. It does not seek fame, therefore nobody knows its presence. It does not seeks fortune, for it is complete within itself. It exists beyond space and time."
Software and Hardware, ashamed, returned to their homes.
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Take your dying with some seriousness, however. Laughing on the way to your execution is not generally understood by less advanced life forms, and they'll call you crazy.
-- "Messiah's Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Conceptual integrity in turn dictates that the design must proceed from one mind, or from a very small number of agreeing resonant minds.
-- Frederick Brooks Jr., "The Mythical Man Month"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
There are three schools of magic. One: State a tautology, then ring the changes on its corollaries; that's philosophy. Two: Record many facts. Try to find a pattern. Then make a wrong guess at the next fact; that's science. Three: Be aware that you live in a malevolent Universe controlled by Murphy's Law, sometimes offset by Brewster's Factor; that's engineering.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
If the Tao is great, then the operating system is great. If the operating system is great, then the compiler is great. If the compiler is great, then the application is great. If the application is great, then the user is pleased and there is harmony in the world.
The Tao gave birth to machine language. Machine language gave birth to the assembler.
The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages.
Each language has its purpose, however humble. Each language expresses the Yin and Yang of software. Each language has its place within the Tao.
But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it.
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
I am amazed that no-one's based a commercial distribution on Debian yet - it is by far the most solid UNIX-like OS I've ever installed, and I've played with HP/UX, Solaris, FreeBSD, BSDi, and SCO (not to mention OS/2, Novell, Win95/NT)
-- Nathan E. Norman
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
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!"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining.
-- Jeff Raskin
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.
-- Ernest Rutherford, after he had split the atom for
the first time
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
The misnaming of fields of study is so common as to lead to what might be general systems laws. For example, Frank Harary once suggested the law that any field that had the word "science" in its name was guaranteed thereby not to be a science. He would cite as examples Military Science, Library Science, Political Science, Homemaking Science, Social Science, and Computer Science. Discuss the generality of this law, and possible reasons for its predictive power.
-- Gerald Weinberg, "An Introduction to General Systems
Thinking"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Fellow programmer, greetings! You are reading a letter which will bring you luck and good fortune. Just mail (or UUCP) ten copies of this letter to ten of your friends. Before you make the copies, send a chip or other bit of hardware, and 100 lines of 'C' code to the first person on the list given at the bottom of this letter. Then delete their name and add yours to the bottom of the list.
Don't break the chain! Make the copy within 48 hours. Gerald R. of San Diego failed to send out his ten copies and woke the next morning to find his job description changed to "COBOL programmer." Fred A. of New York sent out his ten copies and within a month had enough hardware and software to build a Cray dedicated to playing Zork. Martha H. of Chicago laughed at this letter and broke the chain. Shortly thereafter, a fire broke out in her terminal and she now spends her days writing documentation for IBM PC's.
Don't break the chain! Send out your ten copies today! For example, if \thinmskip = 3mu, this makes \thickmskip = 6mu. But if you also want to use \skip12 for horizontal glue, whether in math mode or not, the amount of skipping will be in points (e.g., 6pt). The rule is that glue in math mode varies with the size only when it is an \mskip; when moving between an mskip and ordinary skip, the conversion factor 1mu=1pt is always used. The meaning of '\mskip\skip12' and '\baselineskip=\the\thickmskip' should be clear.
-- Donald Knuth, TeX 82 -- Comparison with TeX80
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Grand Master Turing once dreamed that he was a machine. When he awoke he exclaimed:
"I don't know whether I am Turing dreaming that I am a machine,
or a machine dreaming that I am Turing!"
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
To understand this important story, you have to understand how the telephone company works. Your telephone is connected to a local computer, which is in turn connected to a regional computer, which is in turn connected to a loudspeaker the size of a garbage truck on the lawn of Edna A. Bargewater of Lawrence, Kan.
Whenever you talk on the phone, your local computer listens in. If it suspects you're going to discuss an intimate topic, it notifies the computer above it, which listens in and decides whether to alert the one above it, until finally, if you really humiliate yourself, maybe break down in tears and tell your closest friend about a sordid incident from your past involving a seedy motel, a neighbor's spouse, an entire religious order, a garden hose and six quarts of tapioca pudding, the top computer feeds your conversation into Edna's loudspeaker, and she and her friends come out on the porch to listen and drink gin and laugh themselves silly.
-- Dave Barry, "Won't It Be Just Great Owning Our Own Phones?"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Competitive fury is not always anger. It is the true missionary's courage and zeal in facing the possibility that one's best may not be enough.
-- Gene Scott
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
We knew from experience that the essence of communal computing, as supplied by remote-access, time-shared machines, is not just to type programs into a terminal instead of a keypunch, but to encourage close communication.
-- Dennis Ritchie
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
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.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
The more pretentious a corporate name, the smaller the organization. (For instance, The Murphy Center for Codification of Human and Organizational Law, contrasted to IBM, GM, AT&T...)
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining.
-- Jeff Raskin
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
vi is [[13~^[[15~^[[15~^[[19~^[[18~^ a muk[^[[29~^[[34~^[[26~^[[32~^ch better editor than this emacs. I know I^[[14~'ll get flamed for this but the truth has to be said. ^[[D^[[D^[[D^[[D ^[[D^[^[[D^[[D^[[B^ exit ^X^C quit:x:wq dang it:w:w:w:x ^C^C^Z^D
-- Jesper Lauridsen from alt.religion.emacs
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
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"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Ever since prehistoric times, wise men have tried to understand what, exactly, make people laugh. That's why they were called "wise men." All the other prehistoric people were out puncturing each other with spears, and the wise men were back in the cave saying: "How about: Would you please take my wife? No. How about: Here is my wife, please take her right now. No How about: Would you like to take something? My wife is available. No. How about..."
-- Dave Barry, "Why Humor is Funny"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
This is a logical analogy too... anyone who's been around, knows the world is run by paenguins. Always a paenguin behind the curtain, really getting things done. And paenguins in politics--who can deny it?
-- Kevin M. Bealer, commenting on the penguin Linux logo
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
... Linux und seine Programme sind damit so etwas wie ein real existierender Sozialismus der besseren Art...
-- Christian Seel in der Berliner Morgenpost v. 9.3.1997
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
This quote is taken from the Diamondback, the University of Maryland student newspaper, of Tuesday, 3/10/87.
One disadvantage of the Univac system is that it does not use
Unix, a recently developed program which translates from one
computer language to another and has a built-in editing system
which identifies errors in the original program.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Slashdot Mirror
Brahma said: Well, after hearing ten thousand explanations, a fool is no
wiser. But an intelligent man needs only two thousand five hundred.
-- The Mahabharata
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Hardware met Software on the road to Changtse. Software said: "You
are the Yin and I am the Yang. If we travel together we will become famous
and earn vast sums of money." And so the pair set forth together, thinking
to conquer the world.
Presently, they met Firmware, who was dressed in tattered rags, and
hobbled along propped on a thorny stick. Firmware said to them: "The Tao
lies beyond Yin and Yang. It is silent and still as a pool of water. It does
not seek fame, therefore nobody knows its presence. It does not seeks fortune,
for it is complete within itself. It exists beyond space and time."
Software and Hardware, ashamed, returned to their homes.
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Take your dying with some seriousness, however. Laughing on the way to
your execution is not generally understood by less advanced life forms,
and they'll call you crazy.
-- "Messiah's Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Conceptual integrity in turn dictates that the design must proceed
from one mind, or from a very small number of agreeing resonant minds.
-- Frederick Brooks Jr., "The Mythical Man Month"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
There are three schools of magic. One: State a tautology, then ring the
changes on its corollaries; that's philosophy. Two: Record many facts.
Try to find a pattern. Then make a wrong guess at the next fact; that's
science. Three: Be aware that you live in a malevolent Universe controlled
by Murphy's Law, sometimes offset by Brewster's Factor; that's engineering.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
If the Tao is great, then the operating system is great. If the
operating system is great, then the compiler is great. If the compiler
is great, then the application is great. If the application is great, then
the user is pleased and there is harmony in the world.
The Tao gave birth to machine language. Machine language gave birth
to the assembler.
The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand
languages.
Each language has its purpose, however humble. Each language
expresses the Yin and Yang of software. Each language has its place within
the Tao.
But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it.
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
I am amazed that no-one's based a commercial distribution on Debian
yet - it is by far the most solid UNIX-like OS I've ever installed,
and I've played with HP/UX, Solaris, FreeBSD, BSDi, and SCO (not to
mention OS/2, Novell, Win95/NT)
-- Nathan E. Norman
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Now she speaks rapidly. "Do you know *why* you want to program?" ... this is your canvas! your clay! Go forth and create a masterwork!"
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 post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual
way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of
complaining.
-- Jeff Raskin
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind
of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation
of these atoms is talking moonshine.
-- Ernest Rutherford, after he had split the atom for
the first time
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
The misnaming of fields of study is so common as to lead to what might be
general systems laws. For example, Frank Harary once suggested the law that
any field that had the word "science" in its name was guaranteed thereby
not to be a science. He would cite as examples Military Science, Library
Science, Political Science, Homemaking Science, Social Science, and Computer
Science. Discuss the generality of this law, and possible reasons for its
predictive power.
-- Gerald Weinberg, "An Introduction to General Systems
Thinking"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Fellow programmer, greetings! You are reading a letter which will bring
you luck and good fortune. Just mail (or UUCP) ten copies of this letter
to ten of your friends. Before you make the copies, send a chip or
other bit of hardware, and 100 lines of 'C' code to the first person on the
list given at the bottom of this letter. Then delete their name and add
yours to the bottom of the list.
Don't break the chain! Make the copy within 48 hours. Gerald R. of San
Diego failed to send out his ten copies and woke the next morning to find
his job description changed to "COBOL programmer." Fred A. of New York sent
out his ten copies and within a month had enough hardware and software to
build a Cray dedicated to playing Zork. Martha H. of Chicago laughed at
this letter and broke the chain. Shortly thereafter, a fire broke out in
her terminal and she now spends her days writing documentation for IBM PC's.
Don't break the chain! Send out your ten copies today!
For example, if \thinmskip = 3mu, this makes \thickmskip = 6mu. But if
you also want to use \skip12 for horizontal glue, whether in math mode or
not, the amount of skipping will be in points (e.g., 6pt). The rule is
that glue in math mode varies with the size only when it is an \mskip;
when moving between an mskip and ordinary skip, the conversion factor
1mu=1pt is always used. The meaning of '\mskip\skip12' and
'\baselineskip=\the\thickmskip' should be clear.
-- Donald Knuth, TeX 82 -- Comparison with TeX80
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Grand Master Turing once dreamed that he was a machine. When he awoke
he exclaimed:
"I don't know whether I am Turing dreaming that I am a machine,
or a machine dreaming that I am Turing!"
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
To understand this important story, you have to understand how the telephone
company works. Your telephone is connected to a local computer, which is in
turn connected to a regional computer, which is in turn connected to a
loudspeaker the size of a garbage truck on the lawn of Edna A. Bargewater of
Lawrence, Kan.
Whenever you talk on the phone, your local computer listens in. If it
suspects you're going to discuss an intimate topic, it notifies the computer
above it, which listens in and decides whether to alert the one above it,
until finally, if you really humiliate yourself, maybe break down in tears
and tell your closest friend about a sordid incident from your past
involving a seedy motel, a neighbor's spouse, an entire religious order, a
garden hose and six quarts of tapioca pudding, the top computer feeds your
conversation into Edna's loudspeaker, and she and her friends come out on
the porch to listen and drink gin and laugh themselves silly.
-- Dave Barry, "Won't It Be Just Great Owning Our Own Phones?"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Competitive fury is not always anger. It is the true missionary's courage
and zeal in facing the possibility that one's best may not be enough.
-- Gene Scott
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
We knew from experience that the essence of communal computing, as
supplied by remote-access, time-shared machines, is not just to type
programs into a terminal instead of a keypunch, but to encourage close
communication.
-- Dennis Ritchie
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Hacker's Guide To Cooking: /etc/food, right?
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
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.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
The more pretentious a corporate name, the smaller the organization. (For ...)
instance, The Murphy Center for Codification of Human and Organizational Law,
contrasted to IBM, GM, AT&T
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual
way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of
complaining.
-- Jeff Raskin
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
vi is [[13~^[[15~^[[15~^[[19~^[[18~^ a :x :wq dang it :w:w:w :x ^C^C^Z^D
muk[^[[29~^[[34~^[[26~^[[32~^ch better editor than this emacs. I know
I^[[14~'ll get flamed for this but the truth has to be
said. ^[[D^[[D^[[D^[[D ^[[D^[^[[D^[[D^[[B^
exit ^X^C quit
-- Jesper Lauridsen from alt.religion.emacs
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
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"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Ever since prehistoric times, wise men have tried to understand what, ..."
exactly, make people laugh. That's why they were called "wise men." All the
other prehistoric people were out puncturing each other with spears, and the
wise men were back in the cave saying: "How about: Would you please take my
wife? No. How about: Here is my wife, please take her right now. No How
about: Would you like to take something? My wife is available. No. How
about
-- Dave Barry, "Why Humor is Funny"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
This is a logical analogy too... anyone who's been around, knows the world is
run by paenguins. Always a paenguin behind the curtain, really getting things
done. And paenguins in politics--who can deny it?
-- Kevin M. Bealer, commenting on the penguin Linux logo
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
... Linux und seine Programme sind damit
so etwas wie ein real existierender Sozialismus der besseren Art...
-- Christian Seel in der Berliner Morgenpost v. 9.3.1997
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
This quote is taken from the Diamondback, the University of Maryland
student newspaper, of Tuesday, 3/10/87.
One disadvantage of the Univac system is that it does not use
Unix, a recently developed program which translates from one
computer language to another and has a built-in editing system
which identifies errors in the original program.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...