Life, Universe and Everything

Life

• A little progress everyday ends up in BIG results!

• Michelangelo decorated a ceiling, but I am sure he had loftier things on his mind.

• “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” – Benjamin Franklin, 1759

• Do not confuse “duty” with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different. Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily. Paying that debt can entail anything from years of patient work to instant willingness to die. Difficult it may be, but the reward is self-respect. –Robert A. Heinlein

• In life, after we get past the stage of fear, I think it is a never ending stage of adventure.

• “Now, Now”, cried the Queen, “Faster,Faster”. - Alice in Wonderland.

• Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise. –Sigmund Freud

• When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. –Sherlock Holmes

• What Linux myths or misconceptions do you find particularly galling?. Torvalds responds.

  I don’t get upset that easily, so I can’t say that there is any in particular that I find galling. One myth that I find interesting, but which has nothing to do with Linux or even the IT sector in particular, is the myth of how a single person or even a single company makes a huge difference in the market. It’s the belief that things happen because somebody was visionary and “planned” it that way. Sometimes the people themselves seem to believe it, and then the myth becomes hubris.

  I have to continually try to explain to people that no, I don’t “control” what happens in Linux. It’s about having an environment that is conducive to development, not so much about any particular leader. And I think that is true in most cases, be it the “great sport coach” or the “great spiritual leader.”

• You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however. - Richard Bach

• A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Universe

• Mathematics should be taught as art for art’s sake. These mundane “useful” aspects would follow naturally as a trivial by-product. Beethovan could easily write an advertising jingle, but his motivation for learning music was to create something beautiful.
• Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting. - Gottfried Leibniz

Everything

• Linux: Because a PC is a terrible thing to waste. (By komarimf@craft.camp.clarkson.edu, Mark Komarinski)
• The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to the constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable pi can be given that value with the DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of PI change. - FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers.
• All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors.
• “I could have made money [by joining the proprietary software world], and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place.” Richard Stallman, GNU Project (http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html).
• Programming is the art of writing essays in crystal clear prose and making them executable - Per Brinch Hansen
• You know you have acheived perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away. - Antoine Saint Exupery.
• Beg your pardon, Sir, but your excuse, “We’ve always done it this way,’ is the most damaging phrase in the language.” - Admiral Grace Murray Hooper
• Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute. – Abelson & Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

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• It’s a magical world, Hobbes, ol’ buddy... Let’s go exploring! –:Calvin and Hobbes