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It is trivial to do trivial things in any language.

Uh, well, not any language.

Here's a counterexample: Intercal

:-)

Read more of his writings, especially his Sex God stuff:
Well, what do you think happens when you start channelling the freaking God of Sex Himself? Yes, ESR is a self-confessed Sex God.

Read more of his writings, especially his Sex God stuff:
Well, what do you think happens when you start channelling the freaking God of Sex Himself? Yes, ESR is a self-confessed Sex God.

It's well known that ESR has some neurological problems. This is sad, because I wonder if some of his ability to reason and understand polite inquiries from companies trying to do him a favor has been affected.

A: No.

Q: Should I include quotations after my reply?

I have contributed substantial code and documentation to the standard environment of the Python language. The post-1.5.1 versions of the standard rfc822.py, cmd.py, sendmail.py, and multifile.py modules have my work in them. I wrote shlex.py, and netrc.py outright. I have also contributed to the Python Image Library; my pildriver image-calculator script is included in it. In July 2000 I was given write access to the Python CVS repository, and am now officially a co-developer of the language.

This is another

This is another

I've googled and couldn't find anything about him being a Python committer, and he doesn't mention it in his resume (you'd think he would).

As for him having "piles of credits in the Linux kernel", here's the relevant extract from the kernel's CREDITS file :

N: Eric S. Raymond
E: esr@thyrsus.com
W: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/
D: terminfo master file maintainer
D: Editor: Installation HOWTO, Distributions HOWTO, XFree86 HOWTO
D: Author: fetchmail, Emacs VC mode, Emacs GUD mode

Call that a "pile" ?

And yes, Python is not outdated, but I leave it to you to find anything else currently relevant in his resume. The guy's stuck in the 80's.

Sorry to burst your bubble if you're a fan. I used to like him too back in 97 when he first published "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", but he's been going downhill ever since.

As for "what rock I've been living under", just google my name.

ESR software page
ESR projects page
ESR continuity page (appears to be a will)

The more notable that I am aware and use daily or monthly are termcap, ncurses, INTERCAL, fetchmail, sed, gif2png, and gpsd. He also is contributor of a false english dialect that tends to do more harm than good; The Jargon File (aka the Hacker's Dictionary).

Happy to help.

ESR software page
ESR projects page
ESR continuity page (appears to be a will)

The more notable that I am aware and use daily or monthly are termcap, ncurses, INTERCAL, fetchmail, sed, gif2png, and gpsd. He also is contributor of a false english dialect that tends to do more harm than good; The Jargon File (aka the Hacker's Dictionary).

Happy to help.

ESR software page
ESR projects page
ESR continuity page (appears to be a will)

The more notable that I am aware and use daily or monthly are termcap, ncurses, INTERCAL, fetchmail, sed, gif2png, and gpsd. He also is contributor of a false english dialect that tends to do more harm than good; The Jargon File (aka the Hacker's Dictionary).

Happy to help.

More 'How I Like To Play' by ESR.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/graphics/raymond007-6.jpg
http://www.catb.org/~esr/graphics/raymond007-7.jpg

More 'How I Like To Play' by ESR.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/graphics/raymond007-6.jpg
http://www.catb.org/~esr/graphics/raymond007-7.jpg

What were you going to do with the rest of your afternoon, offer jobs to Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds?

Methinks that over-reaches just a little. Apart from the fact that "propaganda" is a poor choice of word - although it may describe ESR's output - open source pioneers were working effectively in principle long before ESR was out of diapers.

Despite ESR's strenuous self-promotion, the fact is that RMS was of course principally responsible for what we know as open source philosophy and its legal framework. ESR is only one of the slightly loopy hangers-on... valuable, but as is usually the case, in inverse proportion to his ego.

And then there is the Second Act, in which he plans to take credit for the inevitable disintegration of M$. Sorry Eric, that's going to take the whole community to achieve, unless you plan to take your arsenal to Redmond...

Right, because we all know ESR is on the same level with those two guys because he's responsible for uh... What exactly did he do?

Just for the uninformed (sorry for ruining the joke...) :

Write / maintain software.

Write books, the most known being "The Cathedral and the Bazaar".

Direct from his homepage.

Right, because we all know ESR is on the same level with those two guys because he's responsible for uh... What exactly did he do?

Just for the uninformed (sorry for ruining the joke...) :

Write / maintain software.

Write books, the most known being "The Cathedral and the Bazaar".

Direct from his homepage.

Right, because we all know ESR is on the same level with those two guys because he's responsible for uh... What exactly did he do?

Just for the uninformed (sorry for ruining the joke...) :

Write / maintain software.

Write books, the most known being "The Cathedral and the Bazaar".

Direct from his homepage.

What a pompous ass.

I agree his letter was way over the top.

I also think this says quite a lot.

[horrific pic warning]

Really? This is who we have evangalizing for us? I quit...

His page :

http://www.catb.org/~esr/

Energy saving tech is available -- many new hamsterettes have an on-off switch. I personally got a few old ones on eBay without such a switch, and the bats would die after two weeks, but having a few NiMH's around worked around that problem just fine.

"insanely great" is well known. In fact, it's in the Jargon File

Indeed. I always preferred the seventh definition offered in the jargon file:

7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.

since this seems to me to be the closest to the spirit of hacking. Hell, I know some talented hardware hackers that would rule out any definition restricting "hacking" to software (as many definitions do). In fact, I know plenty of people with the hacker nature who've never touched a computer.

Likewise, the best definition for "a hack" I ever saw was roughly:

Hack: The appropriate application of ingenuity

Likewise, hacking would then become "appropriately applying ingenuity", and a hacker would be "one who applies ingenuity appropriately".

What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0

Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.

Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.

These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.

Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

How foolish of me... I linked to a dead-tree copy of the book instead of the online free version. My bad!

The point being made (as I tried elsewhere in this thread, badly) was that you don't necessarily have to store all the data on the chip itself; you just need some kind of ID - a cookie - in order to tie it into something else.

In my home town there's a carpark where you get a little plastic disk (like a fat yellow coin) when you drive in. I used to wonder how they recorded your arrival time on it to calculate the fee. Then I realised they don't need to.

All those devices require that you go into the big blue room. Why not just use ssh or vnc or something?

Punctuation stays inside the quotes.

When discussing technology, I tend to disagree with this rule and agree with ESR. Example: Open a command prompt and type "dir." Now does that mean type dir or type dir. ?

It's in the freaking jargon file. We've heard it...

p.s. your punishment is to read the rest.

(I am a native English speaker, and I've long given up correcting people's grammar, spelling, punctuation, and logic around here. What depresses me isn't that people make mistakes -- we all do that -- but that they don't care. Being able to communicate clearly with others is important, people! And every mistake makes it that bit harder to follow your meaning.

As ESR says, "We've found by experience that people who are careless and sloppy writers are usually also careless and sloppy at thinking and coding (often enough to bet on, anyway). [...] you will get a limited amount of slack for spelling and grammar errors -- but no extra slack at all for laziness (and yes, we can usually spot that difference).")

If the company doesn't feel okay about GPLing this piece of software, but doesn't really care about hanging on to it you might be able to talk them into simply disclaiming copyrights over it. One imagines that copyrights would then devolve to you, and you could GPL it.

Outside of that check out ESR's various works for "business minded" reasons to go "open source". He has particularly compelling arguments for just the sort of thing you've written.

-Peter

Wow. I really thought "seriously, though, folks" was hitting people over the head with a big club labeled "THIS IS A JOKE, LAUGH HA HA". Too unsubtle. I see I was wrong. "Twit."

As for where the period goes, I stand by my internal style guide. The period is not part of the phrase I was giving, and hence not inside the quotes. This comes from a programmer's sensibility, because, well, this is a nerd site and all, and I am one. Programmer, I mean. Nerd, too, I suppose.

Anyway, if you were trolling me by simulating thickness of skull, hey, you win. Congratulations.

... any software ...

And I'll extend that again to the challenge of getting anything to do something it wasn't designed to do... (cf. definition 7.)

...copy and paste code that looks applicable to the task at hand, and then lose valuable time trying to make it all work and control what was created ...

This is what I call "Cargo cult programming" -- when you copy something that worked somewhere else, make what look to be the appropriate changes, and hope.

Although not admirable, I have done this a number of times. (JCL! Argh!) Sometimes you just need to make a minor change to a program in a language you don't know.

The Jargon file has a slightly different definition of cargo cult programming.'

Note that this jargon file entry refers to internet users as "old-timers" a mere two years later in 1993:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/September-t hat-never-ended.html

And Sonny, next time save it for the script kiddies. Some of us were "old-timers" before you ever heard of computers. Most especially you can stick your public graffiti (Wiki, Everything I&II, etc.) where the sun don't shine when it comes to citing it as an authorative source; anybody can write it. Granted, you can change the definition of what a "web page" is to include the latest technology, your choice of proprietary system, etc, and claim to have been "first". By the same logic, SCO owns Linux, everybody who's ever created a .gif file owes Unisys a settlement, and Microsoft invented the GUI. But a web page is JUST files on a server. A web site is JUST a server with files that's accessible to other computers via some kind of wire. It gets tricky, here, because the old acoustic modems weren't "wires" as such, at one point, they were rubber cups you set the old-fashioned kind of phone reciever in. And don't get me started on RFC 1149 (proposed in 1990)!

And if ignorance were light bulbs, you'd be General Electric.

Could it be that the bogon is the negative information mediator particle?

PygmySurfer (442860)

Your UID isn't low enough. Clearly you're not old enough to be a Real Programmer.

Not that I'm saying I am, of course, not with UID 780K+...

Also, note that all nouns can be verbed.

Excellent idea! I nominate INTERCAL as the language of choice for this exercise.

/* You are not expected to understand this */

evil and rude!

There's a whole cage full of you guys at the zoo. I'm sure they aren't losing any sleep.

Doesn't matter much anyway; LARTing a wanker like you is a one-banana problem.

Can you download the email from AOL, or is it webmail only? I would look at a combination of fetchmail http://www.catb.org/~esr/fetchmail/ to get the mail and gmail loader http://www.marklyon.org/gmail/ to load it to gmail.

Even if the AOL email is webmail only, someone may have a tool to get the email and put it into mbox format. A quick google shows that web2pop http://www.jmasoftware.com/english/ might be helpful.

What ever way you go, it'll probably be held together with spit and duct tape, but it's only a one time thing.

Good luck.

Spam from the Jargon File.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/hack.html

First "how do I play sounds when I get new email" and now "how do I pop up dialogs on a regular basis"? Ask Slashdot is obviously following the rest of Slashdot downhill in quality.

If you use KDE, try `kdialog --msgbox "This is your reminder"` from remind, cron, at, whatever you already have hooked up. Other environments have similar commands, but because you didn't give any idea of what environment you are using, it's impossible to give any specific advice.

Try reading How To Ask Questions The Smart Way. In fact, please Slashdot editors, make it mandatory for people to do this before submitting Ask Slashdots.

Well, ESR hardly seemed like a big OS/2 fan, considering the jargon file entry for it:

The anointed successor to MS-DOS for Intel 286- and 386-based micros; proof that IBM/Microsoft couldn't get it right the second time, either. Often called 'Half-an-OS'. Mentioning it is usually good for a cheap laugh among hackers -- the design was so baroque, and the implementation of 1.x so bad, that three years after introduction you could still count the major apps shipping for it on the fingers of two hands -- in unary. The 2.x versions were said to have improved somewhat, and informed hackers rated them superior to Microsoft Windows (an endorsement which, however, could easily be construed as damning with faint praise).

http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/O/OS-2.html

In short, this pretty much nails OS/2's coffin closed.

Regardless, there isn't much I can think of that OS/2 offered that the Linux distros don't by way of the GUI. Toolbox? Use GNOME panels and drawers. Fixpaks? Don't need to download and install - Mandrake has URPMI, Debian (and debian based) has APT, and Gentoo has emerge, and all three do that for you. Workplace shell? Nautilus does a good job.

I'm going to miss the old half-an-OS, though - it was a damn good product that didn't crash without a good reason, and would've beaten Windows 95 if it weren't for poor marketing.