Gordian Knot

The knot that a fellow from northern England, a Geordie, was using to hold up his breeches. He was a point scout in Alexander the Great's army, and just before they set off, he found he couldn't undo the knot so he could take a leak. Alexander, wondering why the army hadn't actually moved, walked up to the head of the column and found the problem - all these people standing around, and none of them could undo the Geordian knot. Not a man to stand on ceremony, Alexander just grabbed the unfortunate geordie by the throat, stabbed him to death, and announced to the surprised onlookers - "That's how you deal with a Geordian knot! Now get %#&!in' moving!"

Cultural note: Geordies inhabit the north of England, whereas Glasgow is inhabited by Glaswegians. -- DavidMcNicol (och aye the noo ... etc.)

My father was a Geordie from Ashington, told the standard line about Geordies, "Jack, look, there's a stranger to town. Let's hoy a brick at 'im." He had a few other good stories to tell about wearing kilts to school and being a Geordie in London. And of course I'm named after Alexander (in a 'Gordian' fashion). But he never told me about Alexander killing one of my forebearers for tying too good a knot. -- AlistairCockburn

http://alt.xmission.com/~gordian/gordian.knot.html | http://www.livius.org/aj-al/alexander/alexander_t06.html

Mmmm... not correct in all respects I think. The parable tells of using an unanticipated (orthogonal) solution to render a particularly vexing problem completely irrelevant. In the case of the GordianKnot, the vexing problem was "how can this very complicated knot be untied?" Alexander's solution: cut the knot completely in half with one swipe of his sword. Not exactly the intended solution, or even a meaningful solution, but certainly one way to remove the difficulty. A modern-day analogy could go something like this: I have this one dll file in Windows that keeps on crashing and giving me strange results; how can I fix it? If you fix the problem by deleting Windows and installing Linux, you have cut the GordianKnot of your problem. -- AndyPierce

Which also proves that GordianKnots? and Moebius strips are similar. Split one in half and you get two new whole ones: Not with the moebius strip you don't: cut it longways down the middle and you get a single double-length one. Only a double twist moebius strip gives two new strips --AndrewCates your machine no longer has a .dll problem, but you have to configure X, and - oh my - where do I buy photoshop for Linux? You don't. You install TheGimp instead, which probably comes with your distribution.

Of course, solving either of those knots lands you back at square one, although with the dll fixed after a clean install. -- http://daveatron.com/

And here I thought the knot was a metaphorical device for some mathematical problem.

Off topic: Hey, but configuring a Linux system is WAY more fun that fixing a Windows installation--especially since we're now (as of XP) punished for just completely reinstalling.

(Unfunny story: Added a disk drive to the family PC. (Being a geek, I use Linux on my machines, of course!) System said I had to register or no joy after three days. I try, but told I've already done it too often (4 times) and must call Mr. Bill, personally. I do and (eventually) get him or one of his minions on the line. We play twenty questions about why I've reinstalled soooo many times. I manage to keep my cool because this person is just doing their job and is not personally responsible for imposing such draconian, unprecidented, immbecillic,(..., 9, 10) So now I'm on probation with MS. (The company, not the somewhat, although not entirely, dissimilar disease.))

[Really? I thought you could reinstall on the same hardware, or even hardware that was almost the same. I thought you could make a number of changes to major hardware components before XP thought someone was trying to hijack it to another machine.]

[This is likely the reason that MS's biggest competition for XP is old Win98 installations.]