The basic idea behind malls is that they are more convenient than cities. Cities contain streets, which are dangerous and crowded and difficult to park in. Malls, on the other hand, have parking lots, which are also dangerous and crowded and difficult to park in, but -- here is the big difference -- in mall parking lots, THERE ARE NO RULES. You're allowed to do anything. You can drive as fast as you want in any direction you want. I was once driving in a mall parking lot when my car was struck by a pickup truck being driven backward by a squat man with a tattoo that said "Charlie" on his forearm, who got out and explained to me, in great detail, why the accident was my fault, his reasoning being that he was violent and muscular, whereas I was neither. This kind of reasoning is legally valid in mall parking lots.
-- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
A master was asked the question, "What is the Way?" by a curious monk.
"It is right before your eyes," said the master.
"Why do I not see it for myself?"
"Because you are thinking of yourself."
"What about you: do you see it?"
"So long as you see double, saying `I don't', and `you do', and so on, your eyes are clouded," said the master.
"When there is neither `I' nor `You', can one see it?"
"When there is neither `I' nor `You', who is the one that wants to see it?"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
(German philosopher) Georg Wilhelm Hegel, on his deathbed, complained, "Only one man ever understood me." He fell silent for a while and then added, "And he didn't understand me."
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
I would rather spend 10 hours reading someone else's source code than 10 minutes listening to Musak waiting for technical support which isn't.
-- Dr. Greg Wettstein, Roger Maris Cancer Center
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Science is built up of facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.
-- Jules Henri Poincar'e
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
"Seven years and six months!" Humpty Dumpty repeated thoughtfully. "An uncomfortable sort of age. Now if you'd asked MY advice, I'd have said 'Leave off at seven' -- but it's too late now."
"I never ask advice about growing," Alice said indignantly.
"Too proud?" the other enquired.
Alice felt even more indignant at this suggestion. "I mean," she said, "that one can't help growing older."
"ONE can't, perhaps," said Humpty Dumpty; "but TWO can. With proper assistance, you might have left off at seven."
-- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking-Glass"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #14 -- VALGOL
VALGOL is enjoying a dramatic surge of popularity across the industry. VALGOL commands include REALLY, LIKE, WELL, and Y*KNOW. Variables are assigned with the =LIKE and =TOTALLY operators. Other operators include the "California booleans", AX and NOWAY. Loops are accomplished with the FOR SURE construct. A simple example:
LIKE, Y*KNOW(I MEAN)START
IF PIZZA =LIKE BITCHEN AND
GUY =LIKE TUBULAR AND
VALLEY GIRL =LIKE GRODY**MAX(FERSURE)**2
THEN
FOR I =LIKE 1 TO OH*MAYBE 100
DO*WAH - (DITTY**2); BARF(I)=TOTALLY GROSS(OUT)
SURE
LIKE, BAG THIS PROGRAM; REALLY; LIKE TOTALLY(Y*KNOW); IM*SURE
GOTO THE MALL
VALGOL is also characterized by its unfriendly error messages. For example, when the user makes a syntax error, the interpreter displays the message GAG ME WITH A SPOON! A successful compile may be termed MAXIMALLY AWESOME!
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
As to house maintenance, does it involve problem solfing? If so, your hacker can safely be left to deall with the panning (for the musement value, if nothering ese).
-- Telsa Gwynne
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
...He who laughs does not believe in what he laughs at, but neither does he hate it. Therefore, laughing at evil means not preparing oneself to combat it, and laughing at good means denying the power through which good is self-propagating.
-- Umberto Eco, "The Name of the Rose"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
I for one cannot protest the recent M.T.A. fare hike and the accompanying promises that this would in no way improve service. For the transit system, as it now operates, has hidden advantages that can't be measured in monetary terms.
Personally, I feel that it is well worth 75 cents or even $1 to have that unimpeachable excuse whenever I am late to anything: "I came by subway." Those four words have such magic in them that if Godot should someday show up and mumble them, any audience would instantly understand his long delay.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Perhaps the RBLing (Realtime Black Hole) of msn.com recently, which prevented a large amount of mail going out for about 4 days, has had a positive influence in Redmond. They did agree to work on their anti-relay capabilities at their POPs to get the RBL lifted.
-- Bill Campbell on Smail3-users
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
>>> Internal error in fortune program: >>> fnum=2987 n=45 flag=1 goose_level=-232323 >>> Please write down these values and notify fortune program administrator.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
I had a feeling once about mathematics -- that I saw it all. Depth beyond depth was revealed to me -- the Byss and the Abyss. I saw -- as one might see the transit of Venus or even the Lord Mayor's Show -- a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly why it happened and why tergiversation was inevitable -- but it was after dinner and I let it go.
-- Winston Churchill
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Ha. I say let them try -- even vi+perl couldn't match the power of an editor which is, after all, its own OS.;-)
-- Johnie Ingram on debian-devel, about linking vim with libperl.so
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
In the middle of a wide field is a pot of gold. 100 feet to the north stands a smart manager. 100 feet to the south stands a dumb manager. 100 feet to the east is the Easter Bunny, and 100 feet to the west is Santa Claus.
Q: Who gets to the pot of gold first? A: The dumb manager. All the rest are myths.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
A doctor, an architect, and a computer scientist were arguing about whose profession was the oldest. In the course of their arguments, they got all the way back to the Garden of Eden, whereupon the doctor said, "The medical profession is clearly the oldest, because Eve was made from Adam's rib, as the story goes, and that was a simply incredible surgical feat."
The architect did not agree. He said, "But if you look at the Garden itself, in the beginning there was chaos and void, and out of that the Garden and the world were created. So God must have been an architect."
The computer scientist, who'd listened carefully to all of this, then commented, "Yes, but where do you think the chaos came from?"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Eudaemonic research proceeded with the casual mania peculiar to this part of the world. Nude sunbathing on the back deck was combined with phone calls to Advanced Kinetics in Costa Mesa, American Laser Systems in Goleta, Automation Industries in Danbury, Connecticut, Arenberg Ultrasonics in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, and Hewlett Packard in Sunnyvale, California, where Norman Packard's cousin, David, presided as chairman of the board. The trick was to make these calls at noon, in the hope that out-to-lunch executives would return them at their own expense. Eudaemonic Enterprises, for all they knew, might be a fast-growing computer company branching out of the Silicon Valley. Sniffing the possibility of high-volume sales, these executives little suspected that they were talking on the other end of the line to a naked physicist crazed over roulette.
-- Thomas Bass, "The Eudaemonic Pie"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Fortune suggests uses for YOUR favorite UNIX commands!
Try:
[Where is Jimmy Hoffa? (C shell)
^How did the^sex change operation go? (C shell)
"How would you rate BSD vs. System V?
%blow (C shell)
'thou shalt not mow thy grass at 8am' (C shell)
got a light? (C shell)
!!:Say, what do you think of margarine? (C shell)
PATH=pretending!/usr/ucb/which sense (Bourne shell)
make love
make "the perfect dry martini"
man -kisses dog (anything up to 4.3BSD)
i=Hoffa ; >$i; $i; rm $i; rm $i (Bourne shell)
- 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...
By the way, I can hardly feel sorry for you... All last night I had to listen to her tears, so great they were redirected to a stream. What? Of _course_ you didn't know. You and your little group no longer have any permissions around here. She changed her.lock files, too.
-- Kevin M. Bealer, commenting on the private life of a Linux nerd
- 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...
Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio, replied: "You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Keep me informed on the behaviour of this kernel.. As the "BugFree(tm)" series didn't turn out too well, I'm starting a new series called the "ItWorksForMe(tm)" series, of which this new kernel is yet another shining example.
-- Linus, in the announcement for 1.3.29
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
When you are about to do an objective and scientific piece of investigation of a topic, it is well to gave the answer firmly in hand, so that you can proceed forthrightly, without being deflected or swayed, directly to the goal.
-- Amrom Katz
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
There are three possibilities: Pioneer's solar panel has turned away from the sun; there's a large meteor blocking transmission; someone loaded Star Trek 3.2 into our video processor.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
The basic idea behind malls is that they are more convenient than cities.
Cities contain streets, which are dangerous and crowded and difficult to
park in. Malls, on the other hand, have parking lots, which are also
dangerous and crowded and difficult to park in, but -- here is the big
difference -- in mall parking lots, THERE ARE NO RULES. You're allowed to
do anything. You can drive as fast as you want in any direction you want.
I was once driving in a mall parking lot when my car was struck by a pickup
truck being driven backward by a squat man with a tattoo that said "Charlie"
on his forearm, who got out and explained to me, in great detail, why the
accident was my fault, his reasoning being that he was violent and muscular,
whereas I was neither. This kind of reasoning is legally valid in mall
parking lots.
-- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
A master was asked the question, "What is the Way?" by a curious monk.
"It is right before your eyes," said the master.
"Why do I not see it for myself?"
"Because you are thinking of yourself."
"What about you: do you see it?"
"So long as you see double, saying `I don't', and `you do', and so
on, your eyes are clouded," said the master.
"When there is neither `I' nor `You', can one see it?"
"When there is neither `I' nor `You',
who is the one that wants to see it?"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
(German philosopher) Georg Wilhelm Hegel, on his deathbed, complained,
"Only one man ever understood me." He fell silent for a while and then added,
"And he didn't understand me."
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
I would rather spend 10 hours reading someone else's source code than
10 minutes listening to Musak waiting for technical support which isn't.
-- Dr. Greg Wettstein, Roger Maris Cancer Center
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Science is built up of facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection
of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.
-- Jules Henri Poincar'e
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
"Seven years and six months!" Humpty Dumpty repeated thoughtfully.
"An uncomfortable sort of age. Now if you'd asked MY advice, I'd have
said 'Leave off at seven' -- but it's too late now."
"I never ask advice about growing," Alice said indignantly.
"Too proud?" the other enquired.
Alice felt even more indignant at this suggestion. "I mean,"
she said, "that one can't help growing older."
"ONE can't, perhaps," said Humpty Dumpty; "but TWO can. With
proper assistance, you might have left off at seven."
-- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking-Glass"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #14 -- VALGOL
VALGOL is enjoying a dramatic surge of popularity across the
industry. VALGOL commands include REALLY, LIKE, WELL, and Y*KNOW.
Variables are assigned with the =LIKE and =TOTALLY operators. Other
operators include the "California booleans", AX and NOWAY. Loops are
accomplished with the FOR SURE construct. A simple example:
LIKE, Y*KNOW(I MEAN)START
IF PIZZA =LIKE BITCHEN AND
GUY =LIKE TUBULAR AND
VALLEY GIRL =LIKE GRODY**MAX(FERSURE)**2
THEN
FOR I =LIKE 1 TO OH*MAYBE 100
DO*WAH - (DITTY**2); BARF(I)=TOTALLY GROSS(OUT)
SURE
LIKE, BAG THIS PROGRAM; REALLY; LIKE TOTALLY(Y*KNOW); IM*SURE
GOTO THE MALL
VALGOL is also characterized by its unfriendly error messages. For
example, when the user makes a syntax error, the interpreter displays the
message GAG ME WITH A SPOON! A successful compile may be termed MAXIMALLY
AWESOME!
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
As to house maintenance, does it involve problem solfing? If so,
your hacker can safely be left to deall with the panning (for the
musement value, if nothering ese).
-- Telsa Gwynne
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
does he hate it. Therefore, laughing at evil means not preparing oneself to
combat it, and laughing at good means denying the power through which good is
self-propagating.
-- Umberto Eco, "The Name of the Rose"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
I for one cannot protest the recent M.T.A. fare hike and the
accompanying promises that this would in no way improve service. For
the transit system, as it now operates, has hidden advantages that
can't be measured in monetary terms.
Personally, I feel that it is well worth 75 cents or even $1 to
have that unimpeachable excuse whenever I am late to anything: "I came
by subway." Those four words have such magic in them that if Godot
should someday show up and mumble them, any audience would instantly
understand his long delay.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Perhaps the RBLing (Realtime Black Hole) of msn.com recently, which
prevented a large amount of mail going out for about 4 days, has had a
positive influence in Redmond. They did agree to work on their anti-relay
capabilities at their POPs to get the RBL lifted.
-- Bill Campbell on Smail3-users
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
>>> Internal error in fortune program:
>>> fnum=2987 n=45 flag=1 goose_level=-232323
>>> Please write down these values and notify fortune program administrator.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
I had a feeling once about mathematics -- that I saw it all. Depth beyond
depth was revealed to me -- the Byss and the Abyss. I saw -- as one might
see the transit of Venus or even the Lord Mayor's Show -- a quantity passing
through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly
why it happened and why tergiversation was inevitable -- but it was after
dinner and I let it go.
-- Winston Churchill
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Ha. I say let them try -- even vi+perl couldn't match the power of an ;-)
editor which is, after all, its own OS.
-- Johnie Ingram on debian-devel, about linking vim with libperl.so
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
In the middle of a wide field is a pot of gold. 100 feet to the north stands
a smart manager. 100 feet to the south stands a dumb manager. 100 feet to
the east is the Easter Bunny, and 100 feet to the west is Santa Claus.
Q: Who gets to the pot of gold first?
A: The dumb manager. All the rest are myths.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
A doctor, an architect, and a computer scientist were arguing about
whose profession was the oldest. In the course of their arguments, they
got all the way back to the Garden of Eden, whereupon the doctor said, "The
medical profession is clearly the oldest, because Eve was made from Adam's
rib, as the story goes, and that was a simply incredible surgical feat."
The architect did not agree. He said, "But if you look at the Garden
itself, in the beginning there was chaos and void, and out of that the Garden
and the world were created. So God must have been an architect."
The computer scientist, who'd listened carefully to all of this, then
commented, "Yes, but where do you think the chaos came from?"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Eudaemonic research proceeded with the casual mania peculiar to this part of
the world. Nude sunbathing on the back deck was combined with phone calls to
Advanced Kinetics in Costa Mesa, American Laser Systems in Goleta, Automation
Industries in Danbury, Connecticut, Arenberg Ultrasonics in Jamaica Plain,
Massachusetts, and Hewlett Packard in Sunnyvale, California, where Norman
Packard's cousin, David, presided as chairman of the board. The trick was to
make these calls at noon, in the hope that out-to-lunch executives would return
them at their own expense. Eudaemonic Enterprises, for all they knew, might be
a fast-growing computer company branching out of the Silicon Valley. Sniffing
the possibility of high-volume sales, these executives little suspected that
they were talking on the other end of the line to a naked physicist crazed
over roulette.
-- Thomas Bass, "The Eudaemonic Pie"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Fortune suggests uses for YOUR favorite UNIX commands!
/usr/ucb/which sense (Bourne shell)
Try:
[Where is Jimmy Hoffa? (C shell)
^How did the^sex change operation go? (C shell)
"How would you rate BSD vs. System V?
%blow (C shell)
'thou shalt not mow thy grass at 8am' (C shell)
got a light? (C shell)
!!:Say, what do you think of margarine? (C shell)
PATH=pretending!
make love
make "the perfect dry martini"
man -kisses dog (anything up to 4.3BSD)
i=Hoffa ; >$i; $i; rm $i; rm $i (Bourne shell)
- 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...
By the way, I can hardly feel sorry for you... All last night I had to listen .lock files, too.
to her tears, so great they were redirected to a stream. What? Of _course_
you didn't know. You and your little group no longer have any permissions
around here. She changed her
-- Kevin M. Bealer, commenting on the private life of a Linux nerd
- 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...
Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio, replied: "You see, wire
telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New
York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this?
And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they
receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Keep me informed on the behaviour of this kernel.. As the "BugFree(tm)"
series didn't turn out too well, I'm starting a new series called the
"ItWorksForMe(tm)" series, of which this new kernel is yet another
shining example.
-- Linus, in the announcement for 1.3.29
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
When you are about to do an objective and scientific piece of investigation
of a topic, it is well to gave the answer firmly in hand, so that you can
proceed forthrightly, without being deflected or swayed, directly to the goal.
-- Amrom Katz
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
There are three possibilities: Pioneer's solar panel has turned away from
the sun; there's a large meteor blocking transmission; someone loaded Star
Trek 3.2 into our video processor.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...