If he once again pushes up his sleeves in order to compute for 3 days and 3 nights in a row, he will spend a quarter of an hour before to think which principles of computation shall be most appropriate.
-- Voltaire, "Diatribe du docteur Akakia"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
It is not that polar co-ordinates are complicated, it is simply that cartesian co-ordinates are simpler than they have a right to be.
-- Kleppner & Kolenhow, "An Introduction to Mechanics"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
He thought of Musashi, the Sword Saint, standing in his garden more than three hundred years ago. "What is the 'Body of a rock'?" he was asked. In answer, Musashi summoned a pupil of his and bid him kill himself by slashing his abdomen with a knife. Just as the pupil was about to comply, the Master stayed his hand, saying, "That is the 'Body of a rock'."
-- Eric Van Lustbader
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
The feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works, just as no gentleman wears a brown suit in the city. Colleges may be to blame. English majors are encouraged, I know, to hate chemistry and physics, and to be proud because they are not dull and creepy and humorless and war-oriented like the engineers across the quad. And our most impressive critics have commonly been such English majors, and they are squeamish about technology to this very day. So it is natural for them to despise science fiction.
-- Kurt Vonnegut Jr., "Science Fiction"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea...
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
The problem... is that we have run out of dinosaurs to form oil with. Scientists working for the Department of Energy have tried to form oil using other animals; they've piled thousands of tons of sand and Middle Eastern countries on top of cows, raccoons, haddock, laboratory rats, etc., but so far all they have managed to do is run up an enormous bulldozer-rental bill and anger a lot of Middle Eastern persons. None of the animals turned into oil, although most of the laboratory rats developed cancer.
-- Dave Barry, "Postpetroleum Guzzler"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around -- nobody big, I mean -- except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff -- I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye. I know it; I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy.
-- J.D. Salinger, "Catcher in the Rye"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Mr. Jones related an incident from "some time back" when IBM Canada Ltd. of Markham, Ont., ordered some parts from a new supplier in Japan. The company noted in its order that acceptable quality allowed for 1.5 per cent defects (a fairly high standard in North America at the time).
The Japanese sent the order, with a few parts packaged separately in plastic. The accompanying letter said: "We don't know why you want 1.5 per cent defective parts, but for your convenience, we've packed them separately."
-- Excerpted from an article in The (Toronto) Globe and Mail
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
"I quite agree with you," said the Duchess; "and the moral of that is -- `Be what you would seem to be' -- or, if you'd like it put more simply -- `Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.'"
-- Lewis Carrol, "Alice in Wonderland"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Brian Kernighan has an automobile which he helped design. Unlike most automobiles, it has neither speedometer, nor gas gauge, nor any of the numerous idiot lights which plague the modern driver. Rather, if the driver makes any mistake, a giant "?" lights up in the center of the dashboard. "The experienced driver", he says, "will usually know what's wrong."
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Every Solidarity center had piles and piles of paper... everyone was eating paper and a policeman was at the door. Now all you have to do is bend a disk.
-- A member of the outlawed Polish trade union, Solidarity,
commenting on the benefits of using computers in support
of their movement.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Do people like check the Debian website every 5 minutes to check it hasn't morphed into another one? Not that I'm one to talk, but some people seriously need to get a life
-- james on #Debian
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
There was, it appeared, a mysterious rite of initiation through which, in one way or another, almost every member of the team passed. The term that the old hands used for this rite -- West invented the term, not the practice -- was `signing up.' By signing up for the project you agreed to do whatever was necessary for success. You agreed to forsake, if necessary, family, hobbies, and friends -- if you had any of these left (and you might not, if you had signed up too many times before).
-- Tracy Kidder, "The Soul of a New Machine"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
-- Max Planck
- 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...
This "brain-damaged" epithet is getting sorely overworked. When we can speak of someone or something being flawed, impaired, marred, spoiled; batty, bedlamite, bonkers, buggy, cracked, crazed, cuckoo, daft, demented, deranged, loco, lunatic, mad, maniac, mindless, non compos mentis, nuts, Reaganite, screwy, teched, unbalanced, unsound, witless, wrong; senseless, spastic, spasmodic, convulsive; doped, spaced-out, stoned, zonked; {beef, beetle,block,dung,thick}headed, dense, doltish, dull, duncical, numskulled, pinhead; asinine, fatuous, foolish, silly, simple; brute, lumbering, oafish; half-assed, incompetent; backward, retarded, imbecilic, moronic; when we have a whole precisely nuanced vocabulary of intellectual abuse to draw upon, individually and in combination, isn't it a little to be limited to a single, now quite trite, adjective?
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
If just one piece of mail gets lost, well, they'll just think they forgot to send it. But if *two* pieces of mail get lost, hell, they'll just think the other guy hasn't gotten around to answering his mail. And if *fifty* pieces of mail get lost, can you imagine it, if *fifty* pieces of mail get lost, why they'll think someone *else* is broken! And if 1Gb of mail gets lost, they'll just *know* that Arpa [ucbarpa.berkeley.edu] is down and think it's a conspiracy to keep them from their God given right to receive Net Mail...
-- Casey Leedom
- 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...
We are preparing to think about contemplating preliminary work on plans to develop a schedule for producing the 10th Edition of the Unix Programmers Manual.
-- Andrew Hume
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
To converse at the distance of the Indes by means of sympathetic contrivances may be as natural to future times as to us is a literary correspondence.
-- Joseph Glanvill, 1661
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
If you rap your knuckles against a window jamb or door, if you brush your leg against a bed or desk, if you catch your foot in a curled- up corner of a rug, or strike a toe against a desk or chair, go back and repeat the sequence.
You will find yourself surprised how far off course you were to hit that window jamb, that door, that chair. Get back on course and do it again. How can you pilot a spacecraft if you can't find your way around your own apartment?
-- William S. Burroughs
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Slashdot Mirror
If he once again pushes up his sleeves in order to compute for 3 days
and 3 nights in a row, he will spend a quarter of an hour before to
think which principles of computation shall be most appropriate.
-- Voltaire, "Diatribe du docteur Akakia"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Convention organizer to Linus Torvalds: "You might like to come with us
to some licensed[1] place, and have some pizza."
Linus: "Oh, I did not know that you needed a license to eat pizza".
[1] Licenced - refers in Australia to a restaurant which has government
licence to sell liquor.
-- Linus at a talk at the Melbourne University
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Chapter 1
The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot
of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
-- Douglas Adams?
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Introducing, the 1010, a one-bit processor.
INSTRUCTION SET
Code Mnemonic What
0 NOP No Operation
1 JMP Jump (address specified by next 2 bits)
Now Available for only 12 1/2 cents!
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
I never thought that I'd see the say where Netscape is free software and
X11 is proprietary. We live in interesting times.
-- Matt Kimball
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
It is not that polar co-ordinates are complicated, it is simply
that cartesian co-ordinates are simpler than they have a right to be.
-- Kleppner & Kolenhow, "An Introduction to Mechanics"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
He thought of Musashi, the Sword Saint, standing in his garden more than
three hundred years ago. "What is the 'Body of a rock'?" he was asked.
In answer, Musashi summoned a pupil of his and bid him kill himself by
slashing his abdomen with a knife. Just as the pupil was about to comply,
the Master stayed his hand, saying, "That is the 'Body of a rock'."
-- Eric Van Lustbader
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
The feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer
and understand how a refrigerator works, just as no gentleman wears a brown
suit in the city. Colleges may be to blame. English majors are encouraged,
I know, to hate chemistry and physics, and to be proud because they are not
dull and creepy and humorless and war-oriented like the engineers across the
quad. And our most impressive critics have commonly been such English majors,
and they are squeamish about technology to this very day. So it is natural
for them to despise science fiction.
-- Kurt Vonnegut Jr., "Science Fiction"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the ...
Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an
utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life
forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches
are a pretty neat idea
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
The problem ... is that we have run out of dinosaurs to form oil with.
Scientists working for the Department of Energy have tried to form oil using
other animals; they've piled thousands of tons of sand and Middle Eastern
countries on top of cows, raccoons, haddock, laboratory rats, etc., but so
far all they have managed to do is run up an enormous bulldozer-rental bill
and anger a lot of Middle Eastern persons. None of the animals turned into
oil, although most of the laboratory rats developed cancer.
-- Dave Barry, "Postpetroleum Guzzler"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this
big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around --
nobody big, I mean -- except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy
cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go
over the cliff -- I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're
going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do
all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye. I know it; I know it's crazy,
but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy.
-- J.D. Salinger, "Catcher in the Rye"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Mr. Jones related an incident from "some time back" when IBM Canada
Ltd. of Markham, Ont., ordered some parts from a new supplier in Japan. The
company noted in its order that acceptable quality allowed for 1.5 per cent
defects (a fairly high standard in North America at the time).
The Japanese sent the order, with a few parts packaged separately in
plastic. The accompanying letter said: "We don't know why you want 1.5 per
cent defective parts, but for your convenience, we've packed them separately."
-- Excerpted from an article in The (Toronto) Globe and Mail
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
"I quite agree with you," said the Duchess; "and the moral of
that is -- `Be what you would seem to be' -- or, if you'd like it put
more simply -- `Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it
might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not
otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be
otherwise.'"
-- Lewis Carrol, "Alice in Wonderland"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Brian Kernighan has an automobile which he helped design.
Unlike most automobiles, it has neither speedometer, nor gas gauge, nor
any of the numerous idiot lights which plague the modern driver.
Rather, if the driver makes any mistake, a giant "?" lights up in the
center of the dashboard. "The experienced driver", he says, "will
usually know what's wrong."
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Every Solidarity center had piles and piles of paper ... everyone was
eating paper and a policeman was at the door. Now all you have to do is
bend a disk.
-- A member of the outlawed Polish trade union, Solidarity,
commenting on the benefits of using computers in support
of their movement.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Do people like check the Debian website every 5 minutes to check it hasn't morphed into another one?
Not that I'm one to talk, but some people seriously need to get a life
-- james on #Debian
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
There was, it appeared, a mysterious rite of initiation through which,
in one way or another, almost every member of the team passed. The term
that the old hands used for this rite -- West invented the term, not the
practice -- was `signing up.' By signing up for the project you agreed
to do whatever was necessary for success. You agreed to forsake, if
necessary, family, hobbies, and friends -- if you had any of these left
(and you might not, if you had signed up too many times before).
-- Tracy Kidder, "The Soul of a New Machine"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and
making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually
die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
-- Max Planck
- 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...
This "brain-damaged" epithet is getting sorely overworked. When we can
speak of someone or something being flawed, impaired, marred, spoiled;
batty, bedlamite, bonkers, buggy, cracked, crazed, cuckoo, daft, demented,
deranged, loco, lunatic, mad, maniac, mindless, non compos mentis, nuts,
Reaganite, screwy, teched, unbalanced, unsound, witless, wrong; senseless,
spastic, spasmodic, convulsive; doped, spaced-out, stoned, zonked; {beef,
beetle,block,dung,thick}headed, dense, doltish, dull, duncical, numskulled,
pinhead; asinine, fatuous, foolish, silly, simple; brute, lumbering, oafish;
half-assed, incompetent; backward, retarded, imbecilic, moronic; when we have
a whole precisely nuanced vocabulary of intellectual abuse to draw upon,
individually and in combination, isn't it a little to be
limited to a single, now quite trite, adjective?
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
If just one piece of mail gets lost, well, they'll just think they forgot ...
to send it. But if *two* pieces of mail get lost, hell, they'll just think
the other guy hasn't gotten around to answering his mail. And if *fifty*
pieces of mail get lost, can you imagine it, if *fifty* pieces of mail get
lost, why they'll think someone *else* is broken! And if 1Gb of mail gets
lost, they'll just *know* that Arpa [ucbarpa.berkeley.edu] is down and
think it's a conspiracy to keep them from their God given right to receive
Net Mail
-- Casey Leedom
- 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...
We are preparing to think about contemplating preliminary work on plans to
develop a schedule for producing the 10th Edition of the Unix Programmers
Manual.
-- Andrew Hume
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
To converse at the distance of the Indes by means of sympathetic contrivances
may be as natural to future times as to us is a literary correspondence.
-- Joseph Glanvill, 1661
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
If you rap your knuckles against a window jamb or door, if you
brush your leg against a bed or desk, if you catch your foot in a curled-
up corner of a rug, or strike a toe against a desk or chair, go back and
repeat the sequence.
You will find yourself surprised how far off course you were to
hit that window jamb, that door, that chair. Get back on course and do it
again. How can you pilot a spacecraft if you can't find your way around
your own apartment?
-- William S. Burroughs
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...