This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard dying... but nobody thought so. This was a future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vice... but nobody admitted it.
-- Alfred Bester, "The Stars My Destination"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
When we understand knowledge-based systems, it will be as before -- except our fingertips will have been singed.
-- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
DOS Air: All the passengers go out onto the runway, grab hold of the plane, push it until it gets in the air, hop on, jump off when it hits the ground again. Then they grab the plane again, push it back into the air, hop on, et cetera.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
The hieroglyphics are all unreadable except for a notation on the back, which reads "Genuine authentic Egyptian papyrus. Guaranteed to be at least 5000 years old."
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
"I recommend this candidate with no qualifications whatsoever."
(Yes, that about sums it up.) "The amount of mathematics she knows will surprise you."
(And I recommend not giving that school a dime...) "I simply can't say enough good things about him."
(What a screw-up.) "I am pleased to say that this candidate is a former colleague of mine."
(I can't tell you how happy I am that she left our firm.) "When this person left our employ, we were quite hopeful he would go a long way with his skills."
(We hoped he'd go as far as possible.) "You won't find many people like her."
(In fact, most people can't stand being around her.) "I cannot reccommend him too highly."
(However, to the best of my knowledge, he has never committed a
felony in my presence.)
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
"I went to a job interview the other day, the guy asked me if I had any questions , I said yes, just one, if you're in a car traveling at the speed of light and you turn your headlights on, does anything happen?
He said he couldn't answer that, I told him sorry, but I couldn't work for him then.
-- Steven Wright
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Nasrudin returned to his village from the imperial capital, and the villagers gathered around to hear what had passed. "At this time," said Nasrudin, "I only want to say that the King spoke to me." All the villagers but the stupidest ran off to spread the wonderful news. The remaining villager asked, "What did the King say to you?" "What he said -- and quite distinctly, for everyone to hear -- was 'Get out of my way!'" The simpleton was overjoyed; he had heard words actually spoken by the King, and seen the very man they were spoken to.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
I was in this prematurely air conditioned supermarket and there were all these aisles and there were these bathing caps you could buy that had these kind of Fourth of July plumes on them that were red and yellow and blue and I wasn't tempted to buy one but I was reminded of the fact that I had been avoiding the beach.
-- Lucinda Childs "Einstein On The Beach"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
There is is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.
-- Ken Olsen (President of Digital Equipment Corporation),
Convention of the World Future Society, in Boston, 1977
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
One thing they don't tell you about doing experimental physics is that sometimes you must work under adverse conditions... like a state of sheer terror.
-- W.K. Hartmann
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the emnity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institutions and merely lukewarm defenders in those who would gain by the new ones.
-- Niccolo Machiavelli, 1513
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
But the greatest Electrical Pioneer of them all was Thomas Edison, who was a brilliant inventor despite the fact that he had little formal education and lived in New Jersey. Edison's first major invention in 1877, was the phonograph, which could soon be found in thousands of American homes, where it basically sat until 1923, when the record was invented. But Edison's greatest achievement came in 1879, when he invented the electric company. Edison's design was a brilliant adaptation of the simple electrical circuit: the electric company sends electricity through a wire to a customer, then immediately gets the electricity back through another wire, then (this is the brilliant part) sends it right back to the customer again.
This means that an electric company can sell a customer the same batch of electricity thousands of times a day and never get caught, since very few customers take the time to examine their electricity closely. In fact the last year any new electricity was generated in the United States was 1937; the electric companies have been merely re-selling it ever since, which is why they have so much free time to apply for rate increases.
-- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
> I thing you're missing the capability of Makefiles.
It takes several _hours_ to do `make' a second time on my machine with the latest glibc sources (and no files are recompiled a second time). I think I'll remove `build' after changing one file if I want to recompile it.
-- Juan Cespedes
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Looks like the channel is back to normal:)
You mean it's not scrolling faster than anyone can read?:)
-- Seen on #Debian after the release of Debian 2.0
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
How many seconds are there in a year? If I tell you there are 3.155 x 10^7, you won't even try to remember it. On the other hand, who could forget that, to within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury.
-- Tom Duff, Bell Labs
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Take the folks at Coca-Cola. For many years, they were content to sit back and make the same old carbonated beverage. It was a good beverage, no question about it; generations of people had grown up drinking it and doing the experiment in sixth grade where you put a nail into a glass of Coke and after a couple of days the nail dissolves and the teacher says: "Imagine what it does to your TEETH!" So Coca-Cola was solidly entrenched in the market, and the management saw no need to improve...
-- Dave Barry, "In Search of Excellence"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow enobled and no-one dare criticise it.
-- Pierre Gallois
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Celestial navigation is based on the premise that the Earth is the center of the universe. The premise is wrong, but the navigation works. An incorrect model can be a useful tool.
-- Kelvin Throop III
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Welcome to UNIX! Enjoy your session! Have a great time! Note the use of exclamation points! They are a very effective method for demonstrating excitement, and can also spice up an otherwise plain-looking sentence! However, there are drawbacks! Too much unnecessary exclaiming can lead to a reduction in the effect that an exclamation point has on the reader! For example, the sentence
Jane went to the store to buy bread
should only be ended with an exclamation point if there is something sensational about her going to the store, for example, if Jane is a cocker spaniel or if Jane is on a diet that doesn't allow bread or if Jane doesn't exist for some reason! See how easy it is?! Proper control of exclamation points can add new meaning to your life! Call now to receive my free pamphlet, "The Wonder and Mystery of the Exclamation Point!"! Enclose fifteen(!) dollars for postage and handling! Operators are standing by! (Which is pretty amazing, because they're all cocker spaniels!)
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Ever wondered about the origins of the term "bugs" as applied to computer technology? U.S. Navy Capt. Grace Murray Hopper has firsthand explanation. The 74-year-old captain, who is still on active duty, was a pioneer in computer technology during World War II. At the C.W. Post Center of Long Island University, Hopper told a group of Long Island public school adminis- trators that the first computer "bug" was a real bug--a moth. At Harvard one August night in 1945, Hopper and her associates were working on the "granddaddy" of modern computers, the Mark I. "Things were going badly; there was something wrong in one of the circuits of the long glass-enclosed computer," she said. "Finally, someone located the trouble spot and, using ordinary tweezers, removed the problem, a two-inch moth. From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it." Hopper said that when the veracity of her story was questioned recently, "I referred them to my 1945 log book, now in the collection of the Naval Surface Weapons Center, and they found the remains of that moth taped to the page in question."
[actually, the term "bug" had even earlier usage in
regard to problems with radio hardware. Ed.]
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Dear Mister Language Person: What is the purpose of the apostrophe?
Answer: The apostrophe is used mainly in hand-lettered small business signs to alert the reader than an "S" is coming up at the end of a word, as in: WE DO NOT EXCEPT PERSONAL CHECK'S, or: NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY ITEM'S. Another important grammar concept to bear in mind when creating hand- lettered small-business signs is that you should put quotation marks around random words for decoration, as in "TRY" OUR HOT DOG'S, or even TRY "OUR" HOT DOG'S.
-- Dave Barry, "Tips for Writer's"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Exxon's 'Universe of Energy' tends to the peculiar rather than the humorous... After [an incomprehensible film montage about wind and sun and rain and strip mines and] two or three minutes of mechanical confusion, the seats locomote through a short tunnel filled with clock-work dinosaurs. The dinosaurs are depicted without accuracy and too close to your face.
"One of the few real novelties at Epcot is the use of smell to aggravate illusions. Of course, no one knows what dinosaurs smelled like, but Exxon has decided they smelled bad.
"At the other end of Dino Ditch... there's a final, very addled message about facing challengehood tomorrow-wise. I dozed off during this, but the import seems to be that dinosaurs don't have anything to do with energy policy and neither do you."
-- P.J. O'Rourke, "Holidays in Hell"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Evolution is as much a fact as the earth turning on its axis and going around the sun. At one time this was called the Copernican theory; but, when evidence for a theory becomes so overwhelming that no informed person can doubt it, it is customary for scientists to call it a fact. That all present life descended from earlier forms, over vast stretches of geologic time, is as firmly established as Copernican cosmology. Biologists differ only with respect to theories about how the process operates.
-- Martin Gardner, "Irving Kristol and the Facts of Life".
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
The so-called "desktop metaphor" of today's workstations is instead an "airplane-seat" metaphor. Anyone who has shuffled a lap full of papers while seated between two portly passengers will recognize the difference -- one can see only a very few things at once.
-- Fred Brooks
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings:
(10) Sorry, but that's too useful.
(9) Dammit, little-endian systems *are* more consistent!
(8) I'm on the committee and I *still* don't know what the hell
#pragma is for.
(7) Well, it's an excellent idea, but it would make the compilers too
hard to write.
(6) Them bats is smart; they use radar.
(5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in
here?
(4) How many times do we have to tell you, "No prior art!"
(3) Ha, ha, I can't believe they're actually going to adopt this
sucker.
(2) Thank you for your generous donation, Mr. Wirth.
(1) Gee, I wish we hadn't backed down on 'noalias'.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Slashdot Mirror
This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard
dying... but nobody thought so. This was a future of fortune and theft,
pillage and rapine, culture and vice... but nobody admitted it.
-- Alfred Bester, "The Stars My Destination"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
When we understand knowledge-based systems, it will be as before --
except our fingertips will have been singed.
-- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
DOS Air:
All the passengers go out onto the runway, grab hold of the plane, push it
until it gets in the air, hop on, jump off when it hits the ground again.
Then they grab the plane again, push it back into the air, hop on, et
cetera.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
The hieroglyphics are all unreadable except for a notation on the back,
which reads "Genuine authentic Egyptian papyrus. Guaranteed to be at
least 5000 years old."
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
What they said:
What they meant:
"I recommend this candidate with no qualifications whatsoever."
(Yes, that about sums it up.)
"The amount of mathematics she knows will surprise you."
(And I recommend not giving that school a dime...)
"I simply can't say enough good things about him."
(What a screw-up.)
"I am pleased to say that this candidate is a former colleague of mine."
(I can't tell you how happy I am that she left our firm.)
"When this person left our employ, we were quite hopeful he would go
a long way with his skills."
(We hoped he'd go as far as possible.)
"You won't find many people like her."
(In fact, most people can't stand being around her.)
"I cannot reccommend him too highly."
(However, to the best of my knowledge, he has never committed a
felony in my presence.)
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
"I went to a job interview the other day, the guy asked me if I had any
questions , I said yes, just one, if you're in a car traveling at the
speed of light and you turn your headlights on, does anything happen?
He said he couldn't answer that, I told him sorry, but I couldn't work
for him then.
-- Steven Wright
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Nasrudin returned to his village from the imperial capital, and the villagers
gathered around to hear what had passed. "At this time," said Nasrudin, "I
only want to say that the King spoke to me." All the villagers but the
stupidest ran off to spread the wonderful news. The remaining villager
asked, "What did the King say to you?" "What he said -- and quite distinctly,
for everyone to hear -- was 'Get out of my way!'" The simpleton was overjoyed;
he had heard words actually spoken by the King, and seen the very man they
were spoken to.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
I was in this prematurely air conditioned supermarket and there were all
these aisles and there were these bathing caps you could buy that had these
kind of Fourth of July plumes on them that were red and yellow and blue and
I wasn't tempted to buy one but I was reminded of the fact that I had been
avoiding the beach.
-- Lucinda Childs "Einstein On The Beach"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
There is is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.
-- Ken Olsen (President of Digital Equipment Corporation),
Convention of the World Future Society, in Boston, 1977
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
One thing they don't tell you about doing experimental physics is that
sometimes you must work under adverse conditions... like a state of sheer
terror.
-- W.K. Hartmann
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more
doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than the creation of
a new system. For the initiator has the emnity of all who would profit
by the preservation of the old institutions and merely lukewarm defenders
in those who would gain by the new ones.
-- Niccolo Machiavelli, 1513
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
But the greatest Electrical Pioneer of them all was Thomas Edison, who was a
brilliant inventor despite the fact that he had little formal education and
lived in New Jersey. Edison's first major invention in 1877, was the
phonograph, which could soon be found in thousands of American homes, where
it basically sat until 1923, when the record was invented. But Edison's
greatest achievement came in 1879, when he invented the electric company.
Edison's design was a brilliant adaptation of the simple electrical circuit:
the electric company sends electricity through a wire to a customer, then
immediately gets the electricity back through another wire, then (this is
the brilliant part) sends it right back to the customer again.
This means that an electric company can sell a customer the same batch of
electricity thousands of times a day and never get caught, since very few
customers take the time to examine their electricity closely. In fact the
last year any new electricity was generated in the United States was 1937;
the electric companies have been merely re-selling it ever since, which is
why they have so much free time to apply for rate increases.
-- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
> I thing you're missing the capability of Makefiles.
It takes several _hours_ to do `make' a second time on my
machine with the latest glibc sources (and no files are recompiled a
second time). I think I'll remove `build' after changing one file if
I want to recompile it.
-- Juan Cespedes
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Looks like the channel is back to normal :) :)
You mean it's not scrolling faster than anyone can read?
-- Seen on #Debian after the release of Debian 2.0
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
How many seconds are there in a year? If I tell you there are
3.155 x 10^7, you won't even try to remember it. On the other hand,
who could forget that, to within half a percent, pi seconds is a
nanocentury.
-- Tom Duff, Bell Labs
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Take the folks at Coca-Cola. For many years, they were content ...
to sit back and make the same old carbonated beverage. It was a good
beverage, no question about it; generations of people had grown up
drinking it and doing the experiment in sixth grade where you put a
nail into a glass of Coke and after a couple of days the nail dissolves
and the teacher says: "Imagine what it does to your TEETH!" So Coca-Cola
was solidly entrenched in the market, and the management saw no need to
improve
-- Dave Barry, "In Search of Excellence"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out but tomfoolery.
But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine,
is somehow enobled and no-one dare criticise it.
-- Pierre Gallois
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Celestial navigation is based on the premise that the Earth is the center
of the universe. The premise is wrong, but the navigation works. An
incorrect model can be a useful tool.
-- Kelvin Throop III
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Welcome to UNIX! Enjoy your session! Have a great time! Note the
use of exclamation points! They are a very effective method for
demonstrating excitement, and can also spice up an otherwise plain-looking
sentence! However, there are drawbacks! Too much unnecessary exclaiming
can lead to a reduction in the effect that an exclamation point has on
the reader! For example, the sentence
Jane went to the store to buy bread
should only be ended with an exclamation point if there is something
sensational about her going to the store, for example, if Jane is a
cocker spaniel or if Jane is on a diet that doesn't allow bread or if
Jane doesn't exist for some reason! See how easy it is?! Proper control
of exclamation points can add new meaning to your life! Call now to receive
my free pamphlet, "The Wonder and Mystery of the Exclamation Point!"!
Enclose fifteen(!) dollars for postage and handling! Operators are
standing by! (Which is pretty amazing, because they're all cocker spaniels!)
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Ever wondered about the origins of the term "bugs" as applied to computer
technology? U.S. Navy Capt. Grace Murray Hopper has firsthand explanation.
The 74-year-old captain, who is still on active duty, was a pioneer in
computer technology during World War II. At the C.W. Post Center of Long
Island University, Hopper told a group of Long Island public school adminis-
trators that the first computer "bug" was a real bug--a moth. At Harvard
one August night in 1945, Hopper and her associates were working on the
"granddaddy" of modern computers, the Mark I. "Things were going badly;
there was something wrong in one of the circuits of the long glass-enclosed
computer," she said. "Finally, someone located the trouble spot and, using
ordinary tweezers, removed the problem, a two-inch moth. From then on, when
anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it." Hopper
said that when the veracity of her story was questioned recently, "I referred
them to my 1945 log book, now in the collection of the Naval Surface Weapons
Center, and they found the remains of that moth taped to the page in
question."
[actually, the term "bug" had even earlier usage in
regard to problems with radio hardware. Ed.]
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Dear Mister Language Person: What is the purpose of the apostrophe?
Answer: The apostrophe is used mainly in hand-lettered small business signs
to alert the reader than an "S" is coming up at the end of a word, as in:
WE DO NOT EXCEPT PERSONAL CHECK'S, or: NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY ITEM'S.
Another important grammar concept to bear in mind when creating hand- lettered
small-business signs is that you should put quotation marks around random
words for decoration, as in "TRY" OUR HOT DOG'S, or even TRY "OUR" HOT DOG'S.
-- Dave Barry, "Tips for Writer's"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Exxon's 'Universe of Energy' tends to the peculiar rather than the ... After [an incomprehensible film montage about wind and sun and ... there's a final, very addled
humorous
rain and strip mines and] two or three minutes of mechanical confusion, the
seats locomote through a short tunnel filled with clock-work dinosaurs.
The dinosaurs are depicted without accuracy and too close to your face.
"One of the few real novelties at Epcot is the use of smell to
aggravate illusions. Of course, no one knows what dinosaurs smelled like,
but Exxon has decided they smelled bad.
"At the other end of Dino Ditch
message about facing challengehood tomorrow-wise. I dozed off during this,
but the import seems to be that dinosaurs don't have anything to do with
energy policy and neither do you."
-- P.J. O'Rourke, "Holidays in Hell"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Evolution is as much a fact as the earth turning on its axis and going around
the sun. At one time this was called the Copernican theory; but, when
evidence for a theory becomes so overwhelming that no informed person can
doubt it, it is customary for scientists to call it a fact. That all present
life descended from earlier forms, over vast stretches of geologic time, is
as firmly established as Copernican cosmology. Biologists differ only with
respect to theories about how the process operates.
-- Martin Gardner, "Irving Kristol and the Facts of Life".
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
The so-called "desktop metaphor" of today's workstations is instead an
"airplane-seat" metaphor. Anyone who has shuffled a lap full of papers
while seated between two portly passengers will recognize the difference --
one can see only a very few things at once.
-- Fred Brooks
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings:
(10) Sorry, but that's too useful.
(9) Dammit, little-endian systems *are* more consistent!
(8) I'm on the committee and I *still* don't know what the hell
#pragma is for.
(7) Well, it's an excellent idea, but it would make the compilers too
hard to write.
(6) Them bats is smart; they use radar.
(5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in
here?
(4) How many times do we have to tell you, "No prior art!"
(3) Ha, ha, I can't believe they're actually going to adopt this
sucker.
(2) Thank you for your generous donation, Mr. Wirth.
(1) Gee, I wish we hadn't backed down on 'noalias'.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...