We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields. But which are the best ones to start with? Many people think that a very abstract activity, like the playing of chess, would be best. It can also be maintained that it is best to provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand and speak English.
-- Alan M. Turing
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
SPECIES: Cranial Males SUBSPECIES: The Hacker (homo computatis) Courtship & Mating:
Due to extreme deprivation, HOMO COMPUTATIS maintains a near perpetual
state of sexual readiness. Courtship behavior alternates between
awkward shyness and abrupt advances. When he finally mates, he
chooses a female engineer with an unblinking stare, a tight mouth, and
a complete collection of Campbell's soup-can recipes. Track:
Trash cans full of pale green and white perforated paper and old
copies of the Allen-Bradley catalog. Comments:
Extremely fond of bad puns and jokes that need long explanations.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
If someone can point me to a good and _FREE_ backup software that keeps track of which files get stored on which tape, we can change to it.
-- Mike Neuffer, admin of i-Connect Corp.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
The following quote is from page 4-27 of the MSCP Basic Disk Functions Manual which is part of the UDA50 Programmers Doc Kit manuals:
As stated above, the host area of a disk is structured as a vector of logical blocks. From a performance viewpoint, however, it is more appropriate to view the host area as a four dimensional hyper-cube, the four dimensions being cylinder, group, track, and sector. . .. Referring to our hyper-cube analogy, the set of potentially accessible blocks form a line parallel to the track axis. This line moves parallel to the sector axis, wrapping around when it reaches the edge of the hyper-cube.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
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...
If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability.
-- Vannevar Bush
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
"Section 2.4.3.5 AWNS (Acceptor Wait for New Cycle State).
In AWNS the AH function indicates that it has received a multiline message byte.
In AWNS the RFD message must be sent false and the DAC message must be sent passive true.
The AH function must exit the AWNS and enter:
(1) The ANRS if DAV is false
(2) The AIDS if the ATN message is false and neither:
(a) The LADS is active
(b) Nor LACS is active"
-- from the IEEE Standard Digital Interface for
Programmable Instrumentation
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Seems a computer engineer, a systems analyst, and a programmer were driving down a mountain when the brakes gave out. They screamed down the mountain, gaining speed, but finally managed to grind to a halt, more by luck than anything else, just inches from a thousand foot drop to jagged rocks. They all got out of the car:
The computer engineer said, "I think I can fix it."
The systems analyst said, "No, no, I think we should take it into town and have a specialist look at it."
The programmer said, "OK, but first I think we should get back in and see if it does it again."
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
VMS Beer: Requires minimal user interaction, except for popping the top and sipping. However cans have been known on occasion to explode, or contain extremely un-beer-like contents.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician find themselves in an anecdote, indeed an anecdote quite similar to many that you have no doubt already heard. After some observations and rough calculations the engineer realizes the situation and starts laughing. A few minutes later the physicist understands too and chuckles to himself happily as he now has enough experimental evidence to publish a paper. This leaves the mathematician somewhat perplexed, as he had observed right away that he was the subject of an anecdote, and deduced quite rapidly the presence of humour from similar anecdotes, but considers this anecdote to be too trivial a corollary to be significant, let alone funny.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Too often people have come to me and said, "If I had just one wish for anything in all the world, I would wish for more user-defined equations in the HP-51820A Waveform Generator Software."
-- Instrument News
[Once is too often. Ed.]
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Three great scientific theories of the structure of the universe are the molecular, the corpuscular and the atomic. A fourth affirms, with Haeckel, the condensation or precipitation of matter from ether -- whose existence is proved by the condensation or precipitation... A fifth theory is held by idiots, but it is doubtful if they know any more about the matter than the others.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
As usual, this being a 1.3.x release, I haven't even compiled this kernel yet. So if it works, you should be doubly impressed.
-- Linus Torvalds, announcing kernel 1.3.3
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
"Yo, Mike!"
"Yeah, Gabe?"
"We got a problem down on Earth. In Utah."
"I thought you fixed that last century!"
"No, no, not that. Someone's found a security problem in the physics program. They're getting energy out of nowhere."
"Blessit! Lemme look... Hey, it's there all right! OK, just a sec... There, that ought to patch it. Dist it out, wouldja?"
-- Cold Fusion, 1989
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
As in Protestant Europe, by contrast, where sects divided endlessly into smaller competing sects and no church dominated any other, all is different in the fragmented world of IBM. That realm is now a chaos of conflicting norms and standards that not even IBM can hope to control. You can buy a computer that works like an IBM machine but contains nothing made or sold by IBM itself. Renegades from IBM constantly set up rival firms and establish standards of their own. When IBM recently abandoned some of its original standards and decreed new ones, many of its rivals declared a puritan allegiance to IBM's original faith, and denounced the company as a divisive innovator. Still, the IBM world is united by its distrust of icons and imagery. IBM's screens are designed for language, not pictures. Graven images may be tolerated by the luxurious cults, but the true IBM faith relies on the austerity of the word.
-- Edward Mendelson, "The New Republic", February 22, 1988
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Personally, I think my choice in the mostest-superlative-computer wars has to be the HP-48 series of calculators. They'll run almost anything. And if they can't, while I'll just plug a Linux box into the serial port and load up the HP-48 VT-100 emulator.
-- Jeff Dege, jdege@winternet.com
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
The most advantageous, pre-eminent thing thou canst do is not to exhibit nor display thyself within the limits of our galaxy, but rather depart instantaneously whence thou even now standest and flee to yet another rotten planet in the universe, if thou canst have the good fortune to find one.
-- Carlyle
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Men's skin is different from women's skin. It is usually bigger, and it has more snakes tattooed on it. Also, if you examine a woman's skin very closely, inch by inch, starting at her shapely ankles, then gently tracing the slender curve of her calves, then moving up to her...
[EDITOR'S NOTE: To make room for news articles about important world events such as agriculture, we're going to delete the next few square feet of the woman's skin. Thank you.]... until finally the two of you are lying there, spent, smoking your cigarettes, and suddenly it hits you: Human skin is actually made up of billions of tiny units of protoplasm, called "cells"! And what is even more interesting, the ones on the outside are all dying! This is a fact. Your skin is like an aggressive modern corporation, where the older veteran cells, who have finally worked their way to the top and obtained offices with nice views, are constantly being shoved out the window head first, without so much as a pension plan, by younger hotshot cells moving up from below.
-- Dave Barry, "Saving Face"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
One day it was announced that the young monk Kyogen had reached an enlightened state. Much impressed by this news, several of his peers went to speak with him.
"We have heard that you are enlightened. Is this true?" his fellow students inquired.
"It is", Kyogen answered.
"Tell us", said a friend, "how do you feel?"
"As miserable as ever", replied the enlightened Kyogen.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
When properly administered, vacations do not diminish productivity: for every week you're away and get nothing done, there's another when your boss is away and you get twice as much done.
-- Daniel B. Luten
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Bistromathics is simply a revolutionary new way of understanding the behavior of numbers. Just as Einstein observed that space was not an absolute, but depended on the observer's movement in space, and that time was not an absolute, but depended on the observer's movement in time, so it is now realized that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer's movement in restaurants.
-- Douglas Adams
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Slashdot Mirror
We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely
intellectual fields. But which are the best ones to start with? Many people
think that a very abstract activity, like the playing of chess, would be
best. It can also be maintained that it is best to provide the machine with
the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand
and speak English.
-- Alan M. Turing
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
The FIELD GUIDE to NORTH AMERICAN MALES
SPECIES: Cranial Males
SUBSPECIES: The Hacker (homo computatis)
Courtship & Mating:
Due to extreme deprivation, HOMO COMPUTATIS maintains a near perpetual
state of sexual readiness. Courtship behavior alternates between
awkward shyness and abrupt advances. When he finally mates, he
chooses a female engineer with an unblinking stare, a tight mouth, and
a complete collection of Campbell's soup-can recipes.
Track:
Trash cans full of pale green and white perforated paper and old
copies of the Allen-Bradley catalog.
Comments:
Extremely fond of bad puns and jokes that need long explanations.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what
the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be
replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another
theory which states that this has already happened.
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
If someone can point me to a good and _FREE_ backup software that keeps
track of which files get stored on which tape, we can change to it.
-- Mike Neuffer, admin of i-Connect Corp.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
>>> FreeOS is an english-centric name
:-)
Have you all been stuck in email, or have any of you tried
*pronouncing* that? free-oh-ess? free-ows? fritos?
-- Mark Eichin
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
this guy _is_ crazy
posix: from the looks of Enlightenment he's on LSD
LSD is nothing compared to what this guy's on..
-- Seen on #Unix
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
The following quote is from page 4-27 of the MSCP Basic Disk Functions
.
Manual which is part of the UDA50 Programmers Doc Kit manuals:
As stated above, the host area of a disk is structured as a vector of
logical blocks. From a performance viewpoint, however, it is more
appropriate to view the host area as a four dimensional hyper-cube, the
four dimensions being cylinder, group, track, and sector.
. .
Referring to our hyper-cube analogy, the set of potentially accessible
blocks form a line parallel to the track axis. This line moves
parallel to the sector axis, wrapping around when it reaches the edge
of the hyper-cube.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
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...
If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of
arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the physical
world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by
the use of the mathematics of probability.
-- Vannevar Bush
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
"Section 2.4.3.5 AWNS (Acceptor Wait for New Cycle State).
In AWNS the AH function indicates that it has received a
multiline message byte.
In AWNS the RFD message must be sent false and the DAC message
must be sent passive true.
The AH function must exit the AWNS and enter:
(1) The ANRS if DAV is false
(2) The AIDS if the ATN message is false and neither:
(a) The LADS is active
(b) Nor LACS is active"
-- from the IEEE Standard Digital Interface for
Programmable Instrumentation
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Seems a computer engineer, a systems analyst, and a programmer were
driving down a mountain when the brakes gave out. They screamed down the
mountain, gaining speed, but finally managed to grind to a halt, more by
luck than anything else, just inches from a thousand foot drop to jagged
rocks. They all got out of the car:
The computer engineer said, "I think I can fix it."
The systems analyst said, "No, no, I think we should take it
into town and have a specialist look at it."
The programmer said, "OK, but first I think we should get back
in and see if it does it again."
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
VMS Beer: Requires minimal user interaction, except for popping the top
and sipping. However cans have been known on occasion to explode, or
contain extremely un-beer-like contents.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician find themselves in an
anecdote, indeed an anecdote quite similar to many that you have no doubt
already heard. After some observations and rough calculations the
engineer realizes the situation and starts laughing. A few minutes later
the physicist understands too and chuckles to himself happily as he now
has enough experimental evidence to publish a paper. This leaves the
mathematician somewhat perplexed, as he had observed right away that he
was the subject of an anecdote, and deduced quite rapidly the presence of
humour from similar anecdotes, but considers this anecdote to be too
trivial a corollary to be significant, let alone funny.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Too often people have come to me and said, "If I had just one wish for
anything in all the world, I would wish for more user-defined equations
in the HP-51820A Waveform Generator Software."
-- Instrument News
[Once is too often. Ed.]
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Three great scientific theories of the structure of the universe are the ... A fifth
molecular, the corpuscular and the atomic. A fourth affirms, with
Haeckel, the condensation or precipitation of matter from ether -- whose
existence is proved by the condensation or precipitation
theory is held by idiots, but it is doubtful if they know any more about
the matter than the others.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
As usual, this being a 1.3.x release, I haven't even compiled this
kernel yet. So if it works, you should be doubly impressed.
-- Linus Torvalds, announcing kernel 1.3.3
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
"Yo, Mike!"
"Yeah, Gabe?"
"We got a problem down on Earth. In Utah."
"I thought you fixed that last century!"
"No, no, not that. Someone's found a security problem in the physics
program. They're getting energy out of nowhere."
"Blessit! Lemme look... Hey, it's
there all right! OK, just a sec...
There, that ought to patch it. Dist it out, wouldja?"
-- Cold Fusion, 1989
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Alex Buell: :o)
:-)
Or how about a Penguin logo painted in really really trippy
colours, and emblazoned with the word LSD.
Geert Uytterhoeven:
We already had that one, but unfortunately Russell King fixed that nasty
palette bug in drivers/video/fbcon.c
-- linux-kernel
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
As in Protestant Europe, by contrast, where sects divided endlessly into
smaller competing sects and no church dominated any other, all is different
in the fragmented world of IBM. That realm is now a chaos of conflicting
norms and standards that not even IBM can hope to control. You can buy a
computer that works like an IBM machine but contains nothing made or sold by
IBM itself. Renegades from IBM constantly set up rival firms and establish
standards of their own. When IBM recently abandoned some of its original
standards and decreed new ones, many of its rivals declared a puritan
allegiance to IBM's original faith, and denounced the company as a divisive
innovator. Still, the IBM world is united by its distrust of icons and
imagery. IBM's screens are designed for language, not pictures. Graven
images may be tolerated by the luxurious cults, but the true IBM faith relies
on the austerity of the word.
-- Edward Mendelson, "The New Republic", February 22, 1988
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Personally, I think my choice in the mostest-superlative-computer wars has to
be the HP-48 series of calculators. They'll run almost anything. And if they
can't, while I'll just plug a Linux box into the serial port and load up the
HP-48 VT-100 emulator.
-- Jeff Dege, jdege@winternet.com
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
The most advantageous, pre-eminent thing thou canst do is not to exhibit
nor display thyself within the limits of our galaxy, but rather depart
instantaneously whence thou even now standest and flee to yet another rotten
planet in the universe, if thou canst have the good fortune to find one.
-- Carlyle
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Men's skin is different from women's skin. It is usually bigger, and ...
... until finally the two of you are lying there, spent, smoking your
it has more snakes tattooed on it. Also, if you examine a woman's skin
very closely, inch by inch, starting at her shapely ankles, then gently
tracing the slender curve of her calves, then moving up to her
[EDITOR'S NOTE: To make room for news articles about important world events
such as agriculture, we're going to delete the next few square feet of the
woman's skin. Thank you.]
cigarettes, and suddenly it hits you: Human skin is actually made up of
billions of tiny units of protoplasm, called "cells"! And what is even more
interesting, the ones on the outside are all dying! This is a fact. Your
skin is like an aggressive modern corporation, where the older veteran
cells, who have finally worked their way to the top and obtained offices
with nice views, are constantly being shoved out the window head first,
without so much as a pension plan, by younger hotshot cells moving up from
below.
-- Dave Barry, "Saving Face"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
One day it was announced that the young monk Kyogen had reached
an enlightened state. Much impressed by this news, several of his peers
went to speak with him.
"We have heard that you are enlightened. Is this true?" his fellow
students inquired.
"It is", Kyogen answered.
"Tell us", said a friend, "how do you feel?"
"As miserable as ever", replied the enlightened Kyogen.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
When properly administered, vacations do not diminish productivity: for
every week you're away and get nothing done, there's another when your boss
is away and you get twice as much done.
-- Daniel B. Luten
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Bistromathics is simply a revolutionary new way of understanding the
behavior of numbers. Just as Einstein observed that space was not an
absolute, but depended on the observer's movement in space, and that
time was not an absolute, but depended on the observer's movement in
time, so it is now realized that numbers are not absolute, but depend
on the observer's movement in restaurants.
-- Douglas Adams
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...