fortunes

早期freebsd实现

The lady, indignant, removed her ear.
"I will not stay," she said with a pout,
"To hear my character lied about!"
		-- Gopete Sherany
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A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is
not worth knowing.
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A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program
in than some that do.
		-- Dennis M. Ritchie
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A large number of installed systems work by fiat.  That is, they work
by being declared to work.
		-- Anatol Holt
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A Law of Computer Programming:
	Make it possible for programmers to write in English and you
will find the programmers cannot write in English.
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A limerick packs laughs anatomical
Into space that is quite economical.
	But the good ones I've seen
	So seldom are clean,
And the clean ones so seldom are comical.
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A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of
nothing.
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A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.
		-- H. H. Munroe
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A long memory is the most subversive idea in America.
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A long-forgotten loved one will appear soon.  Buy the negatives at any
price.
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A Los Angeles judge ruled that "a citizen may snore with immunity in
his own home, even though he may be in possession of unusual and
exceptional ability in that particular field."
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A lot of people are afraid of heights.  Not me.  I'm afraid of widths.
		-- Steve Wright
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A lot of people I know believe in positive thinking, and so do I.  I
believe everything positively stinks.
		-- Lew Col
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	A man goes to a tailor to try on a new custom-made suit.  The
first thing he notices is that the arms are too long.
	"No problem," says the tailor.  "Just bend them at the elbow
and hold them out in front of you.  See, now it's fine."
	"But the collar is up around my ears!"
	"It's nothing.  Just hunch your back up a little ... no, a
little more ... that's it."
	"But I'm stepping on my cuffs!"  the man cries in desperation.
	"Nu, bend you knees a little to take up the slack.  There you
go.  Look in the mirror -- the suit fits perfectly."
	So, twisted like a pretzel, the man lurches out onto the
street.  Reba and Florence see him go by.
	"Oh, look," says Reba, "that poor man!"
	"Yes," says Florence, "but what a beautiful suit."
		-- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish"
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A man said to the Universe: "Sir, I exist!"

"However," replied the Universe, "the fact has not created in me a
sense of obligation."
		-- Stephen Crane
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A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small package.
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	A master was explaining the nature of Tao to one of his
novices.  "The Tao is embodied in all software -- regardless of how
insignificant," said the master.

	"Is Tao in a hand-held calculator?" asked the novice.

	"It is," came the reply.

	"Is the Tao in a video game?" continued the novice.

	"It is even in a video game," said the master.

	"And is the Tao in the DOS for a personal computer?"

	The master coughed and shifted his position slightly.  "The
lesson is over for today," he said.
		-- "The Tao of Programming"
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A mathematician is a machine for converting coffee into theorems.
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A Mexican newspaper reports that bored Royal Air Force pilots stationed
on the Falkland Islands have devised what they consider a marvelous new
game.  Noting that the local penguins are fascinated by airplanes, the
pilots search out a beach where the birds are gathered and fly slowly
along it at the water's edge.  Perhaps ten thousand penguins turn their
heads in unison watching the planes go by, and when the pilots turn
around and fly back, the birds turn their heads in the opposite
direction, like spectators at a slow-motion tennis match.  Then, the
paper reports, "The pilots fly out to sea and directly to the penguin
colony and overfly it.  Heads go up, up, up, and ten thousand penguins
fall over gently onto their backs.
		-- Audobon Society Magazine
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	A musician of more ambition than talent composed an elegy at
the death of composer Edward MacDowell.  She played the elegy for the
pianist Josef Hoffman, then asked his opinion.  "Well, it's quite
nice," he replied, but don't you think it would be better if ..."
	"If what?"  asked the composer.
	"If ... if you had died and MacDowell had written the elegy?"
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A neighbor came to Nasrudin, asking to borrow his donkey.  "It is out
on loan," the teacher replied.  At that moment, the donkey brayed
loudly inside the stable.  "But I can hear it bray, over there."  "Whom
do you believe," asked Nasrudin, "me or a donkey?"
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A new dramatist of the absurd
Has a voice that will shortly be heard.
	I learn from my spies
	He's about to devise
An unprintable three-letter word.
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A new koan:

	If you have some ice cream, I will give it to you.

	If you have no ice cream, I will take it away from you.

It is an ice cream koan.
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A new supply of round tuits has arrived and are available from Mary.
Anyone who has been putting off work until they got a round tuit now
has no excuse for further procrastination.
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A New York City judge ruled that if two women behind you at the movies
insist on discussing the probable outcome of the film, you have the
right to turn around and blow a Bronx cheer at them.
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A New York City ordinance prohibits the shooting of rabbits from the
rear of a Third Avenue street car -- if the car is in motion.
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	A novel approach is to remove all power from the system, which
removes most system overhead so that resources can be fully devoted to
doing nothing.  Benchmarks on this technique are promising; tremendous
amounts of nothing can be produced in this manner.  Certain hardware
limitations can limit the speed of this method, especially in the
larger systems which require a more involved & less efficient
power-down sequence.
	An alternate approach is to pull the main breaker for the
building, which seems to provide even more nothing, but in truth has
bugs in it, since it usually inhibits the systems which keep the beer
cool.
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A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power
off and on.  Knight, seeing what the student was doing spoke sternly:
"You can not fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no
understanding of what is going wrong."  Knight turned the machine off
and on.  The machine worked.
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A nuclear war can ruin your whole day.
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A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
		-- Gloria Steinem
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A penny saved is ridiculous.
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A person is just about as big as the things that make them angry.
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A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.
		-- George Wald
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A pig is a jolly companion,
Boar, sow, barrow, or gilt --
A pig is a pal, who'll boost your morale, 
Though mountains may topple and tilt.
When they've blackballed, bamboozled, and burned you,
When they've turned on you, Tory and Whig,
Though you may be thrown over by Tabby and Rover,
You'll never go wrong with a pig, a pig,
You'll never go wrong with a pig!
		-- Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"
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	 A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling
			  by Mark Twain

	For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped
to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer
be part of the alphabet.  The only kase in which "c" would be retained
would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later.  Year 2
might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the
same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with
"i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
	Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear
with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12
or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants.
Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi
ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz
ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.
	Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud
hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
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"A power so great, it can only be used for Good or Evil!"
		-- Firesign Theatre, "The Giant Rat of Summatra"
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A priest asked: What is Fate, Master?

And he answered:

It is that which gives a beast of burden its reason for existence.

It is that which men in former times had to bear upon their backs.

It is that which has caused nations to build byways from City to City
upon which carts and coaches pass, and alongside which inns have come
to be built to stave off Hunger, Thirst and Weariness.

And that is Fate?  said the priest.

Fate ... I thought you said Freight, responded the Master.

That's all right, said the priest.  I wanted to know what Freight was
too.
		-- Kehlog Albran, "The Profit"
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	A priest was walking along the cliffs at Dover when he came
upon two locals pulling another man ashore on the end of a rope.
"That's what I like to see", said the priest, "A man helping his fellow
man".
	As he was walking away, one local remarked to the other, "Well,
he sure doesn't know the first thing about shark fishing."
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A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.
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"A programmer is a person who passes as an exacting expert on the basis
of being able to turn out, after innumerable punching, an infinite
series of incomprehensive answers calculated with micrometric
precisions from vague assumptions based on debatable figures taken from
inconclusive documents and carried out on instruments of problematical
accuracy by persons of dubious reliability and questionable mentality
for the avowed purpose of annoying and confounding a hopelessly
defenseless department that was unfortunate enough to ask for the
information in the first place."
		-- IEEE Grid news magazine
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A psychiatrist is a person who will give you expensive answers that
your wife will give you for free.
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A public debt is a kind of anchor in the storm; but if the anchor be
too heavy for the vessel, she will be sunk by that very weight which
was intended for her preservation.
		-- Colton
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A putt that stops close enough to the cup to inspire such comments as
"you could blow it in" may be blown in.  This rule does not apply if
the ball is more than three inches from the hole, because no one wants
to make a travesty of the game.
		-- Donald A. Metz
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"A raccoon tangled with a 23,000 volt line today.  The results blacked
out 1400 homes and, of course, one raccoon."
		-- Steel City News
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"A radioactive cat has eighteen half-lives."
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A reading from the Book of Armaments, Chapter 4, Verses 16 to 20:

Then did he raise on high the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, saying,
"Bless this, O Lord, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to tiny
bits, in thy mercy."  And the people did rejoice and did feast upon the
lambs and toads and tree-sloths and fruit-bats and orangutans and
breakfast cereals ... Now did the Lord say, "First thou pullest the
Holy Pin.  Then thou must count to three.  Three shall be the number of
the counting and the number of the counting shall be three.  Four shalt
thou not count, neither shalt thou count two, excepting that thou then
proceedeth to three.  Five is right out.  Once the number three, being
the number of the counting, be reached, then lobbest thou the Holy Hand
Grenade in the direction of thine foe, who, being naughty in my sight,
shall snuff it."
		-- Monty Python, "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"
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A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices
that the system works.
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A real person has two reasons for doing anything ... a good reason and
the real reason.
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A recent study has found that concentrating on difficult off-screen
objects, such as the faces of loved ones, causes eye strain in computer
scientists.  Researchers into the phenomenon cite the added
concentration needed to "make sense" of such unnatural three
dimensional objects ...
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A Riverside, California, health ordinance states that two persons may
not kiss each other without first wiping their lips with carbolized
rosewater.
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A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man
contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
		-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities will
keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those
that are worth committing.
		-- Samuel Butler
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		A Severe Strain on the Credulity

As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even to the highest
parts of the earth's atmospheric envelope, Professor Goddard's rocket
is a practicable and therefore promising device.  It is when one
considers the multiple-charge rocket as a traveler to the moon that one
begins to doubt ... for after the rocket quits our air and really
starts on its journey, its flight would be neither accelerated nor
maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might have left.
Professor Goddard, with his "chair" in Clark College and countenancing
of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to
re-action, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum
against which to react ... Of course he only seems to lack the
knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.
		-- New York Times Editorial, 1920
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A sine curve goes off to infinity or at least the end of the blackboard
		-- Prof. Steiner
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... A solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he
was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity.
		-- Mark Twain
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A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows.
		-- O'Henry
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A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures.
		-- Daniel Webster
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A student who changes the course of history is probably taking an
exam.
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A student, in hopes of understanding the Lambda-nature, came to
Greenblatt.  As they spoke a Multics system hacker walked by.  "Is it
true," asked the student, "that PL-1 has many of the same data types as
Lisp?"  Almost before the student had finished his question, Greenblatt
shouted, "FOO!", and hit the student with a stick.
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A successful [software] tool is one that was used to do something
undreamed of by its author.
		-- S. C. Johnson
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A tautology is a thing which is tautological.
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A total abstainer is one who abstains from everything but abstention,
and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
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A transistor protected by a fast-acting fuse will protect the fuse by
blowing first.
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A triangle which has an angle of 135 degrees is called an obscene
triangle.
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A truly wise man never plays leapfrog with a unicorn.