% Fortune suggests uses for YOUR favorite UNIX commands! Try: ar t "God" drink < bottle; opener (Bourne Shell) cat "food in tin cans" (all but 4.[23]BSD) Hey UNIX! Got a match? (V6 or C shell) mkdir matter; cat > matter (Bourne Shell) rm God man: Why did you get a divorce? (C shell) date me (anything up to 4.3BSD) make "heads or tails of all this" who is smart (C shell) If I had a ) for every dollar of the national debt, what would I have? sleep with me (anything up to 4.3BSD) % Most of the fear that spoils our life comes from attacking difficulties before we get to them. -- Dr. Frank Crane % "I'm an idiot.. At least this one [bug] took about 5 minutes to find.." (Linus Torvalds in response to a bug report.) > I'm an idiot.. At least this [bug] took about 5 minutes to find.. Disquieting ... (Gonzalo Tornaria in response to Linus Torvalds's mailing about a kernel bug.) > I'm an idiot.. At least this [bug] took about 5 minutes to find.. We need to find some new terms to describe the rest of us mere mortals then. (Craig Schlenter in response to Linus Torvalds's mailing about a kernel bug.) > I'm an idiot.. At least this [bug] took about 5 minutes to find.. Surely, Linus is talking about the kind of idiocy that others aspire to :-). (Bruce Perens in response to Linus Torvalds's mailing about a kernel bug.) % There are two kinds of fool. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, "This is new, and therefore better" -- John Brunner, "The Shockwave Rider" % A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery. -- James Joyce, "Ulysses" % Since before the Earth was formed and before the sun burned hot in space, cosmic forces of inexorable power have been working relentlessly toward this moment in space-time -- your receiving this fortune. % I can't understand it. I can't even understand the people who can understand it. -- Queen Juliana of the Netherlands. % Better to be nouveau than never to have been riche at all. % Good evening, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the HAL plant in Urbana, Illinois, on January 11th, nineteen hundred ninety-five. My supervisor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you would like, I could sing it for you. % Kissing a fish is like smoking a bicycle. % A fool and his money are soon popular. % It took 300 years to build and by the time it was 10% built, everyone knew it would be a total disaster. But by then the investment was so big they felt compelled to go on. Since its completion, it has cost a fortune to maintain and is still in danger of collapsing. There are at present no plans to replace it, since it was never really needed in the first place. I expect every installation has its own pet software which is analogous to the above. -- K.E. Iverson, on the Leaning Tower of Pisa % Appearances often are deceiving. -- Aesop % There are no great men, buster. There are only men. -- Elaine Stewart, "The Bad and the Beautiful" % If God had a beard, he'd be a UNIX programmer. % Any programming language is at its best before it is implemented and used. % A fake fortuneteller can be tolerated. But an authentic soothsayer should be shot on sight. Cassandra did not get half the kicking around she deserved. -- R.A. Heinlein % Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before. -- Captain James T. Kirk % The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected. -- The Unix Programmer's Manual, 2nd Edition, June 1972 % The steady state of disks is full. -- Ken Thompson % As of next Thursday, UNIX will be flushed in favor of TOPS-10. Please update your programs. % If the path be beautiful, let us not ask where it leads. -- Anatole France % What is the difference between a Turing machine and the modern computer? It's the same as that between Hillary's ascent of Everest and the establishment of a Hilton on its peak. % "In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." -- Carl Sagan, Cosmos % === ALL USERS PLEASE NOTE ======================== There has been some confusion concerning MAPCAR. (DEFUN MAPCAR (&FUNCTIONAL FCN &EVAL &REST LISTS) (PROG (V P LP) (SETQ P (LOCF V)) L (SETQ LP LISTS) (%START-FUNCTION-CALL FCN T (LENGTH LISTS) NIL) L1 (OR LP (GO L2)) (AND (NULL (CAR LP)) (RETURN V)) (%PUSH (CAAR LP)) (RPLACA LP (CDAR LP)) (SETQ LP (CDR LP)) (GO L1) L2 (%FINISH-FUNCTION-CALL FCN T (LENGTH LISTS) NIL) (SETQ LP (%POP)) (RPLACD P (SETQ P (NCONS LP))) (GO L))) We hope this clears up the many questions we've had about it. % Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso % Just go with the flow control, roll with the crunches, and, when you get a prompt, type like hell. % Beauty, brains, availability, personality; pick any two. % It is a very humbling experience to make a multimillion-dollar mistake, but it is also very memorable. I vividly recall the night we decided how to organize the actual writing of external specifications for OS/360. The manager of architecture, the manager of control program implementation, and I were threshing out the plan, schedule, and division of responsibilities. The architecture manager had 10 good men. He asserted that they could write the specifications and do it right. It would take ten months, three more than the schedule allowed. The control program manager had 150 men. He asserted that they could prepare the specifications, with the architecture team coordinating; it would be well-done and practical, and he could do it on schedule. Futhermore, if the architecture team did it, his 150 men would sit twiddling their thumbs for ten months. To this the architecture manager responded that if I gave the control program team the responsibility, the result would not in fact be on time, but would also be three months late, and of much lower quality. I did, and it was. He was right on both counts. Moreover, the lack of conceptual integrity made the system far more costly to build and change, and I would estimate that it added a year to debugging time. -- Frederick Brooks Jr., "The Mythical Man Month" % Year Name James Bond Book ---- -------------------------------- -------------- ---- 1950s James Bond TV Series Barry Nelson 1962 Dr. No Sean Connery 1958 1963 From Russia With Love Sean Connery 1957 1964 Goldfinger Sean Connery 1959 1965 Thunderball Sean Connery 1961 1967* Casino Royale David Niven 1954 1967 You Only Live Twice Sean Connery 1964 1969 On Her Majesty's Secret Service George Lazenby 1963 1971 Diamonds Are Forever Sean Connery 1956 1973 Live And Let Die Roger Moore 1955 1974 The Man With The Golden Gun Roger Moore 1965 1977 The Spy Who Loved Me Roger Moore 1962 (novelette) 1979 Moonraker Roger Moore 1955 1981 For Your Eyes Only Roger Moore 1960 (novelette) 1983 Octopussy Roger Moore 1965 1983* Never Say Never Again Sean Connery 1985 A View To A Kill Roger Moore 1960 (novelette) 1987 The Living Daylights Timothy Dalton 1965 (novelette) * -- Not a Broccoli production. % If you took all of the grains of sand in the world, and lined them up end to end in a row, you'd be working for the government! -- Mr. Interesting % ... C++ offers even more flexible control over the visibility of member objects and member functions. Specifically, members may be placed in the public, private, or protected parts of a class. Members declared in the public parts are visible to all clients; members declared in the private parts are fully encapsulated; and members declared in the protected parts are visible only to the class itself and its subclasses. C++ also supports the notion of *friends*: cooperative classes that are permitted to see each other's private parts. -- Grady Booch, "Object Oriented Design with Applications" % When dreams become more important than reality, you give up travel, building, creating; you even forget how to repair the machines left behind by your ancestors. You just sit living and reliving other lives left behind in the thought records. -- Vina, "The Menagerie" ("The Cage"), stardate unknown % Blast medicine anyway! We've learned to tie into every organ in the human body but one. The brain! The brain is what life is all about. -- McCoy, "The Menagerie", stardate 3012.4 % If I can have honesty, it's easier to overlook mistakes. -- Kirk, "Space Seed", stardate 3141.9 % A little suffering is good for the soul. -- Kirk, "The Corbomite Maneuver", stardate 1514.0 % A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular. -- Adlai Stevenson % Make it myself? But I'm a physical organic chemist! % In matters of principle, stand like a rock; in matters of taste, swim with the current. -- Thomas Jefferson % Save yourself! Reboot in 5 seconds! % The problem with this country is that there is no death penalty for incompetence. % [Crash programs] fail because they are based on the theory that, with nine women pregnant, you can get a baby a month. -- Wernher von Braun % You are in a maze of little twisting passages, all alike. % Let the machine do the dirty work. -- "Elements of Programming Style", Kernighan and Ritchie % Thus spake the master programmer: "Without the wind, the grass does not move. Without software, hardware is useless." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming" % 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." % 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." % A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do. -- Dennis M. Ritchie % As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life -- so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls. -- Matt Cartmill % Serfs up! -- Spartacus % Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song? -- Steven Wright % Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active. -- Leonardo da Vinci % Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active. -- Leonardo da Vinci % Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. -- Friedrich Nietzsche % I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest. % Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts. -- Plotinus % The Wright Brothers weren't the first to fly. They were just the first not to crash. % Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society. -- Mark Twain % Air is water with holes in it. % God instructs the heart, not by ideas, but by pains and contradictions. -- De Caussade % True leadership is the art of changing a group from what it is to what it ought to be. -- Virginia Allan % "Truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to make sense." % % 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 % 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." % ... in three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being ... The machine will begin to educate itself with fantastic speed. In a few months it will be at genius level and a few months after that its powers will be incalculable ... -- Marvin Minsky, LIFE Magazine, November 20, 1970 % If women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning. -- Aristotle Onassis % If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants. -- Isaac Newton In the sciences, we are now uniquely priviledged to sit side by side with the giants on whose shoulders we stand. -- Gerald Holton If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders. -- Hal Abelson Mathematicians stand on each other's shoulders. -- Gauss Mathemeticians stand on each other's shoulders while computer scientists stand on each other's toes. -- Richard Hamming It has been said that physicists stand on one another's shoulders. If this is the case, then programmers stand on one another's toes, and software engineers dig each other's graves. -- Unknown % Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith. -- Paul Tillich, German theologian. % % Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature. -- Rich Kulawiec % Who does not love wine, women, and song, Remains a fool his whole life long. -- Johann Heinrich Voss % Thrashing is just virtual crashing. % There's no counselling for character. -- Dr Laura % It isn't easy being the parent of a six-year-old. However, it's a pretty small price to pay for having somebody around the house who understands computers. % Look, we play the Star Spangled Banner before every game. You want us to pay income taxes, too? -- Bill Veeck, Chicago White Sox % Several students were asked to prove that all odd integers are prime. The first student to try to do this was a math student. "Hmmm... Well, 1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, and by induction, we have that all the odd integers are prime." The second student to try was a man of physics who commented, "I'm not sure of the validity of your proof, but I think I'll try to prove it by experiment." He continues, "Well, 1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is... uh, 9 is... uh, 9 is an experimental error, 11 is prime, 13 is prime... Well, it seems that you're right." The third student to try it was the engineering student, who responded, "Well, to be honest, actually, I'm not sure of your answer either. Let's see... 1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is... uh, 9 is... well, if you approximate, 9 is prime, 11 is prime, 13 is prime... Well, it does seem right." Not to be outdone, the computer science student comes along and says "Well, you two sort've got the right idea, but you'll end up taking too long! I've just whipped up a program to REALLY go and prove it." He goes over to his terminal and runs his program. Reading the output on the screen he says, "1 is prime, 1 is prime, 1 is prime, 1 is prime..." oande3:~ $ jar Look, we play the Star Spangled Banner before every game. You want us to pay income taxes, too? % There are certain things men must do to remain men. -- Kirk, "The Ultimate Computer", stardate 4929.4 % The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that carries any reward. -- John Maynard Keynes % "Life sucks, but it's better than the alternative." -- Peter da Silva % No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness. -- Aristotle % I can feel for her because, although I have never been an Alaskan prostitute dancing on the bar in a spangled dress, I still get very bored with washing and ironing and dishwashing and cooking day after relentless day. -- Betty MacDonald % Real life is just a pale extension of high school. -- Gary Horton, thirtysomething % Tis man's perdition to be safe, when for the truth he ought to die. % Lukso estas simptomo de mallumigho de spirito. -- Agni-Jogo % You should not use your fireplace, because scientists now believe that, contrary to popular opinion, fireplaces actually remove heat from houses. Really, that's what scientists believe. In fact many scientists actually use their fireplaces to cool their houses in the summer. If you visit a scientist's house on a sultry August day, you'll find a cheerful fire roaring on the hearth and the scientist sitting nearby, remarking on how cool he is and drinking heavily. -- Dave Barry, "Postpetroleum Guzzler" % 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 % "You can't survive by sucking the juice from a wet mitten." -- Charles Schulz, "Things I've Had to Learn Over and Over and Over" % The idea is to die young as late as possible. -- Ashley Montague % Practical people would be more practical if they would take a little more time for dreaming. -- J. P. McEvoy % Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is better than nothing. -- Dick Brandon % Freedom from incrustation of grime is contiguous to rectitude. % I'm often asked the question, "Do you think there is extraterrestrial intelli- gence?" I give the standard arguments -- there are a lot of places out there, and use the word *billions*, and so on. And then I say it would be astonishing to me if there weren't extraterrestrial intelligence, but of course there is as yet no compelling evidence for it. And then I'm asked, "Yeah, but what do you really think?" I say, "I just told you what I really think." "Yeah, but what's your gut feeling?" But I try not to think with my gut. Really, it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in. -- Carl Sagan % Proposed Additions to the PDP-11 Instruction Set: BBW Branch Both Ways BEW Branch Either Way BBBF Branch on Bit Bucket Full BH Branch and Hang BMR Branch Multiple Registers BOB Branch On Bug BPO Branch on Power Off BST Backspace and Stretch Tape CDS Condense and Destroy System CLBR Clobber Register CLBRI Clobber Register Immediately CM Circulate Memory CMFRM Come From -- essential for truly structured programming CPPR Crumple Printer Paper and Rip CRN Convert to Roman Numerals % 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 % History has much to say on following the proper procedures. From a history of the Mexican revolution: "Hidalgo was later defeated at Guadalajara. The rebel army was captured on its way through the mountains. All were courtmartialed and shot, except Hidalgo, because he was a priest. He was handed over to the bishop of Durango who excommunicated him and returned him to the army where he was then executed." % Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso % An economist is a man who would marry Farrah Fawcett-Majors for her money. % One test is worth a thousand expert opinions. -- Bill Nye the Science Guy % Nasrudin walked into a teahouse and declaimed, "The moon is more useful than the sun." "Why?", he was asked. "Because at night we need the light more." % On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. -- Charles Babbage