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  fortune index  all fortunes 
  
 |  |  | #2051 |  | On a clear disk you can seek forever. -- P. Denning
 
 |  |  |  | #2052 |  | On the eighth day, God created FORTRAN. 
 |  |  |  | #2053 |  | On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. -- Cartoon caption
 
 |  |  |  | #2054 |  | On the other hand, the TCP camp also has a phrase for OSI people. There are lots of phrases.  My favorite is `nitwit' -- and the rationale
 is the Internet philosophy has always been you have extremely bright,
 non-partisan researchers look at a topic, do world-class research, do
 several competing implementations, have a bake-off, determine what works
 best, write it down and make that the standard.
 The OSI view is entirely opposite.  You take written contributions
 from a much larger community, you put the contributions in a room of
 committee people with, quite honestly, vast political differences and all
 with their own political axes to grind, and four years later you get
 something out, usually without it ever having been implemented once.
 So the Internet perspective is implement it, make it work well,
 then write it down, whereas the OSI perspective is to agree on it, write
 it down, circulate it a lot and now we'll see if anyone can implement it
 after it's an international standard and every vendor in the world is
 committed to it.  One of those processes is backwards, and I don't think
 it takes a Lucasian professor of physics at Oxford to figure out which.
 -- Marshall Rose, "The Pied Piper of OSI"
 
 |  |  |  | #2055 |  | 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
 
 |  |  |  | #2056 |  | "One Architecture, One OS" also translates as "One Egg, One Basket". 
 |  |  |  | #2057 |  | "One basic notion underlying Usenet is that it is a cooperative." 
 Having been on USENET for going on ten years, I disagree with this.
 The basic notion underlying USENET is the flame.
 -- Chuq Von Rospach
 
 |  |  |  | #2058 |  | One day a student came to Moon and said, "I understand how to make a better garbage collector.  We must keep a reference count of the pointers
 to each cons."
 Moon patiently told the student the following story -- "One day a
 student came to Moon and said, "I understand how to make a better garbage
 collector..."
 
 |  |  |  | #2059 |  | One good reason why computers can do more work than people is that they never have to stop and answer the phone.
 
 |  |  |  | #2060 |  | ... one of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of
 their C programs.
 -- Robert Firth
 
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