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Scripting in csh is considered harmful. Since real console lovers don't differentiate between interactive use and script writing, this also applies to csh as an interactive shell. So no, csh is not the shell of choice, at least not for me.

When I first started learning about the concept of shells, I was moving from the MSDOS world.

One of the first things I remember reading was the FAQ describing the shell differences.

Imagine my surprise that the command line could hold so much control and there were other aspects of controlling a PC. I haven't looked back since, but that page really brings back some memories.

It's funny how something you read can cause one of those lightbulb moments.

In another news, the DARPA sponsored a secret project in TCPIP development to support the pigeon-cam early in the 90's. Due to its confidential nature, the details remain sketchy. To the best of my knowledge, it is the most comprehensive document leaked from the project so far. If you are onto spying technology, I recommend you to learn it by heart. It can be taken offline anytime....

Out here in the UK, BT charges 15/hour for an hour of 802.11b connectivity for their "OpenZone" service. They cite Microsoft Windows as a system requirement but you can get connectivity in Linux using IP-over-DNS, with the added benefit that it's absolutely free. I'd probably have willing to pay a reasonable amount for their service, but as long as they refuse to support Linux, people are just going to continue to freeload with IP-over-DNS.

IP-over-DNS? What's that, something like TCP/IP over bongo drums or TCP/IP over pigeons? Do you mean DHCP?

How do they make you pay with windows and not with linux?

Actually, the biggest problem with SMTP is that there is no way to assure whom the mail is coming from, and thus there is no accountability.

Yet again the same "SMTP has no authentication" canard. Explain to me what this is.

If anonymity was not possible, then spammers would disapper because they'd be found and subjected to their own treatment back on them.

More cluelessness. Spammers are not anonymous and never have been anonymous. We know who they are and have known all along, the only reason they continue is that law enforcement doesn't give a shit about spam. In fact, now that the US has legalized spam with the you-can-spam act, we can expect it to increase further still.

The way to stop spam is to throw the spammers in jail. As long as the political will to do that is lacking, spam will continue to get worse.

You said "Another option is get a UPS for your desktop. You can run the machine off of that when the power goes out, night, etc. and they are relatively cheap...if you get a 4 hour one... and can power other devices. The laptop and the UPC will trickle charge while juice is flowing, so you can be pretty sure that when the sun does set, you won't miss a beat with your tech."

Considering a 1000 VA UPS costs about $600 in my area and is only rated to operate for about 20 minutes, a 50W laptop would probably only operate for about 6 or so hours on it. For $200 you could buy a car battery (50 A-hrs at 12V), a battery charger, and a 100W inverter and operate for over 10 hours. Or a cheaper solution that I use is to get an emergency jump start kit (mine is 18 A-hr at 12V), and a cheap inverter. For less than $100 I have an extra 5 hrs of laptop time.

You also said: "Now... how exactly are you going to get on the net? Satellite? Pigeon?"

Fortunately, RFC 2549 exists for just this problem.

I'll show you how to distribute AC over IP

For those who haven't heard of it yet: TEI is an open SGML/XML format created for electronic editions of literary texts. It is as comprehensive and well-designed for text philology as DocBook is for technical documentation. The only drawback is that it is, like DocBook, very comprehensive and accurate in its markup tags (fulfilling all needs of academic editions of historical texts), so that for average readers, the trimmed-down TEI Lite DTD should do the job.

For e-literature collections created by professional philologists - such as the Victorian Women Writers Project, TEI already is the standard text format. Thanks to the SGML/XML toolchain, TEI sourcecode can, like DocBook, of course be painlessly transformed into HTML, txt, RTF, PDF etc. (TEI is, btw., also being mentioned in Eric S. Raymond's quite useful DocBook Demystification HOWTO.)

Florian

(philologist by profession)

It has been solved already by RFC 2550.

It pays to be update with current standards like RFCs. This standard (RFC 2550) has been made specifically for the reason that there can be no more date-bugs in the future.

Well, there has already been a solution proposed in RFC 2550, so there's nothing to worry about. On the other hand, 8000 years from now, changes in hardware (not only the actual machines, but also infrastructure like the power grid, preventing legacy hardware from being used) would probably have made most of today's software inoperable anyways.

Suppose Larry had used his considerable brainpower to make an interpreted version of C or C++, instead of making a completely new language?

Thats simple.

You would end up getting stupid things like CSH

And from that you get: Csh Programming Considered Harmful

For compiling software from scratch, it's not so big a deal to handle customizations the first time. If you're reconfiguring a machine, it can become a huge headache quickly. In either case, though, the argument misses the point -- it's not about finding your home in the namespace, but rather that the filesystem namespace shouldn't change radically even if the hard-disks under it do.

For most applications, the physical layout of disks and partitions on a machine should be irrelevant. It should only matter to diagnostic software whose purpose in life is to access those devices at the lowest levels. The OS should provide APIs or other interfaces for this purpose, and these paths should be separate from the generic file hierarchy that apps see. Witness /dev under *nix. I'm sure Windows has low-level APIs as well.

Addressing your statement: For a program that exercises the hardware to the extremes of its physical limitations (for example, a program to test solid fuel rocket motors) you can't afford the overhead, it's too inefficient to have opaque software layers between you and the circuitry. Device drivers and filesystem software should talk more directly to devices. (Actually, filesystems should talk to block abstractions that talk to devices, thereby enabling RAID and other such things.) High level apps talk to higher level interfaces, such as filesystems, databases, sockets.

If you're testing solid fuel rocket motors, then by all means, talk directly to the hardware. In fact, I imagine you're on something a little more controlled than a PC anyway. (Or maybe not -- look at Armadillo Aerospace and their PC-104 stack running Linux.) In contrast, web browsers shouldn't care about the fact that one of your hard drives is SCSI, one is IDE, that your browser cache is on a RAID partition, and that you use an accelerated video card. It shouldn't care if you're using WiFi, dialup, broadband, or TCP/IP over Avian Carrier. The fact that modern OSes insulate apps from these distracting distinctions is a Good Thing (TM).

Who wants to go back to the bad old days of DOS, where a telnet client had to include its own TCP/IP stack, and you were on your own to find a compatible packet driver for your ethernet card? Or, how about games that may or may not work with your sound card / video card / joystick combination? Who wants the era where each word processor came with its own set of printer drivers? ICK!

I personally view the traditional "C:\Program Files" to be a travesty -- it requires me to put all my stuff on the same HD as the OS, and to make sure it's big enough. I seem to recall that modern Windows lets you do *nix style mounting to some extent to get away from that issue, so maybe there's some light at the end of the tunnel. Fortunately, I only have to endure Windows at work, and I let Those Who Are Paid To Do So administer my machine.

A better solution would be eliminating the need for syndicators to constnantly poll waiting for RSS updates by using IP multicasting to notify syndicators of when the content of a particular RSS feed has changed. Multicast protocols which provide such announcements already exist, such as the Session Announcement Protocol which would notify those curious of updated RSS feeds. A URL to the updated feed would be provided, and afterwards whatever file transfer protocol you wish could be used to fetch the RSS feed itself, even BitTorrent.

Funny, since CORBA was largely backed by UNIX and both GNOME and KDE are largely built using shared libraries and component architectures. You know, since it follows the Rule of Separation to not couple general code to fixed interfaces.

i would say that textual interfaces were more popular before bandwidth started becoming readily available. the rise of bandwidth has seen a rise of GUI applications because it is quite feasible to VNC from home->work and to run GUI. before ADSL it was a pain in the arse and using textual interfaces was fast and convenient.

Take cdrecord. cdrecord does the same stuff that the windows cd-rom recording libraries do: write a cd-rom. How do you feed the windows libraries data to write? I don't know. Are they self-documented? Nope. How do you feed cd-record? The most obvious way: give it an image to write via stdin:

cat image.iso | cdrecord

If I didn't know this, cdrecord --help tells me what to do. man cdrecord has a longer explanation with examples. I can get the application, usable by end users, and place it inside my backup scripts. Do this with the windows libraries or Nero or some other burning application. Tell me how long do you have to sift through documentation to do this: Find a way to backup a disk partition to a cdrom using the windows libraries. In any unix, this is something like:

cat /dev/sda1 | cdrecord

Will a end-user have trouble using command line cdrecord? Naturally. But cdrecord is a core application, which shouldn't be used by end users. That's what the Rule of Separation is about. Grab krecord or something like that, and use it.

Read the article (I know, it will be hard to force yourself to do so if you are a slashdot regular :)) and then read this chapter from TAoUP.

I don't know if Spolsky didn't read this far, or if he's just a weak plagarist, or maybe this is the only part that made a big enough impression on him to merit rephrasing for his own column.

The only difference I see is POV, and substitute "mac" for "windows".

Most of the article is dead-on when it comes to the different cultures of development. However, the following

I've encountered too many Unix programmers who sneer at Windows programming, thinking that Windows is heathen and stupid.

[...]

It's rather rare to find such bigotry among Windows programmers, who are, on the whole, solution-oriented and non-ideological.

does not quite relect my personal experience, and I am mostly working in the Windows world (at the moment). The bigotry can be found everywhere, and I've given up on trying to explain the advantages of one culture to people who are claiming the superiority of the other one.

Let me emphasize what an interesting read the Raymond book is. Very much recommended. Certain issues are too often considered 'common knowledge', although they're not, and the book explains the Unix culture well to those who are interested in technology, regardless of ideology. After all, a lot of things can be used on Windows, too, although they may not be the usual way to do it.

Sometimes it helps to read an RFC when you have a question like this.

If Microsoft was trying to trademark "Operating System"

Microsoft Disk Operating System(TM)

Wow, do you think we could implement this with headers called Message-ID and In-Reply-To? And allow users to implement filters on the In-Reply-To or References headers?

Perhaps we could even create an RFC and give it the number 2822.

And if someone would only write a document describing how to correctly implement these headers in MUAs, we'd really be in business.

</sarcasm>

Really, it's a wonder that most mail clients make all of this so hard. Even Mozilla gets threading wrong, by refusing to allow them to be sorted by anything but Sent date, and always sorting them in your message list by the date of the *oldest* message in the thread, rather than the newest. It makes threads practically useless.

Despite my caustic comments above, it doesn't help that many popular client (like those by MS) don't properly implement In-Reply-To or References. As a result, most clients simply guess at threads by looking at Subjects.

Bill Bryson is good for a laugh, but according to this Space FAQ:

Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, the Saturn V blueprints have not been lost. They are kept at Marshall Space Flight Center on microfilm. The Federal Archives in East Point, GA also has 2900 cubic feet of Saturn documents. Rocketdyne has in its archives dozens of volumes from its Knowledge Retention Program. This effort was initiated in the late '60s to document every facet of F-1 and J-2 engine production to assist in any future re-start.

Long live sneakernet!!

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

However, there's also Asimov's Corollary to Clarke's First Law (1977):

When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion -- the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right.

Makes you wonder what'll go under the hammer next...

• a clue-by-four
• a LART
• a grue

In fact, I just had an idea. Head over to this entry in my journal and let's get some ideas of geek relics and the bids they might attract...

Actually, at Earth's distance from the Sun, the temperature of space is around 280K, or 7C

Check this out: SIP RFC and find out that SIP is not binary protocol. SIP looks like HTTP and XML combined. It has HTTP style headers and usually XML content (when needed). SIP is also very extensible and it already has extensions for chatting, conference calls, Push To talk etc. I have no idea about XMPP but SIP is pushed by many big players in the market (Nokia, other mobile manufacturers, Micro$oft, Apple apparently).

This *is* Unicode. To deal with Unicode, participants need to agree on an encoding, such as UTF-8, UTF-16, ISO-8859-1, etc. In this case, they have chosen a 7bit clean encoding method that means no changes need to be made to the DNS infrastructure and still usable by people using applications without Unicode domain name support.

An application that wants to support Unicode domains needs to implement RFC3490 (Internationalized Domain Names in Applications) and RFC3492 (Nameprep: A Stringprep Profile for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN)). Nameprep is sort of like an i18n version of lower(), used to compare domains unambiguously. IDNA defines the mechanism for encoding a Unicode domain into the ASCII clean representation. If people want to play, Python 2.3 has this out of the box:

% python
Python 2.3 (#1, Sep 13 2003, 00:49:11)
[GCC 3.3 20030304 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 1495)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> ascii = 'www.xn--rksmrgs-5wao1o.se'
>>> uni = ascii.decode('idna')
>>> print uni.encode('latin1') # Or whatever your terminal uses
www.r?ksm?rg?s.se
>>> uni.encode('idna')
'www.xn--rksmrgs-5wao1o.se'
> >> from encodings import idna
>>> idna.nameprep(u'WWW.MICROS\N{LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH DIAERESIS}FT.COM')
u'www.micros\xf6ft.com'
>> idna.nameprep(u'WWW.MICROS\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH DIAERESIS}FT.COM')
u'www.micros\xf6ft.com'

And yes, Virginia, there is nothing stopping you registing Unicode domain names in .com, .net, .org etc. right now, if you know how to encode them yourself. To the DNS system and most registrars they are just perfectly valid ASCII domain names, with the decoding left to the applications and/or network libraries. Dealing with US keyboards and obsolete browsers is left as an excercise for the reader.

This *is* Unicode. To deal with Unicode, participants need to agree on an encoding, such as UTF-8, UTF-16, ISO-8859-1, etc. In this case, they have chosen a 7bit clean encoding method that means no changes need to be made to the DNS infrastructure and still usable by people using applications without Unicode domain name support.

An application that wants to support Unicode domains needs to implement RFC3490 (Internationalized Domain Names in Applications) and RFC3492 (Nameprep: A Stringprep Profile for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN)). Nameprep is sort of like an i18n version of lower(), used to compare domains unambiguously. IDNA defines the mechanism for encoding a Unicode domain into the ASCII clean representation. If people want to play, Python 2.3 has this out of the box:

% python
Python 2.3 (#1, Sep 13 2003, 00:49:11)
[GCC 3.3 20030304 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 1495)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> ascii = 'www.xn--rksmrgs-5wao1o.se'
>>> uni = ascii.decode('idna')
>>> print uni.encode('latin1') # Or whatever your terminal uses
www.r?ksm?rg?s.se
>>> uni.encode('idna')
'www.xn--rksmrgs-5wao1o.se'
> >> from encodings import idna
>>> idna.nameprep(u'WWW.MICROS\N{LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH DIAERESIS}FT.COM')
u'www.micros\xf6ft.com'
>> idna.nameprep(u'WWW.MICROS\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH DIAERESIS}FT.COM')
u'www.micros\xf6ft.com'

And yes, Virginia, there is nothing stopping you registing Unicode domain names in .com, .net, .org etc. right now, if you know how to encode them yourself. To the DNS system and most registrars they are just perfectly valid ASCII domain names, with the decoding left to the applications and/or network libraries. Dealing with US keyboards and obsolete browsers is left as an excercise for the reader.

Microsoft Dream (2003)
End users are beginning to ask for it. They get jazzed about the idea of being able to start an IM session with somebody, then if that person goes offline at some point, the message being sent would be saved and retrieved at a later time.
IBM Reality (1972)
You can also leave a message for wdd to receive when he logs on by typing: send 'message' user(wdd) logon.

On the other hand, this is also quite convenient. I live in the US now, and I travel around quite a bit. I often surf on Swedish Internet sites, typically without access to a Swedish keyboard. It would not be very convenient if the domain names used non-English symbols.

Just type it in punycode. Easy!

Now I won't have to be limited to using a hyphen! I can register d[i-circ]xiechicks.com, or dixi[e-grave]chicks.com, or maybe dixie[c-cedil]hicks.com!

That last one would be doubly good, because if I understand the Punycode spec correctly, it'll get translated to ASCII as dixiehicks-XXXX.com. Not my opinion of the group, but maybe it would attract hits from the Toby Keith crowd.

Punycode

Might I refer you to RFC 2100? It explains why some hosts have such weird names sometimes. :)

TCP/IP over electricity lines is all so backwards and 90's. It's electricity over TCP/IP lines that is interesting today.

There's even a spec out (RFC3251) for public interoperability.

When will these people learn to keep up with the time around them?

Moderated down to -1 - Stupid.

no, it'll be up down up down left right left right A B A B Select Star.... wait, no, that's the secret +5 karma bonus code.

I agree that gestures are often over the top, a few of them are nice, forward and back and reload are handy, but the longer ones are ... well, the modern day equivalent of the quadruple bucky.

It would be a fun way to hide cookies in web pages...

But when there are well-established browser-side projects to manage this, integrated, across any website, with user-customization (or non-use), the point is what, again, exactly?

Reading this is taking too much time away from my own project to code the "Stop Loading this page" feature in javascript. (j/k)

This is just a plan to implement RFC 3514.

--
Benjamin Coates

I'm not so sure about that. NetWare came out after DOS, it's true. Here's an interesting history from the man who was liquidating the company before NetWare was developed. Keep in mind that Unix sourcecode was freely being shared amongst university students, not DOS. Considering that it was three BYU students who actually created NetWare, its not too far-fetched to think that Novell would license early Unix code to cover their butts, and may have even influenced their decision to buy the AT&T unit that owned the Unix sourcecode.

Another thing comes to mind. I remember a CNI instructor mentioning that NetWare had some Unix code in it.

= 9J =

Godwin's Law?
As a Usenet discussion (err, Slashdot discussion) grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

Have you actually read RFC 821? If so, perhaps you could point out exactly where the functionality of the guest-level account is specified? Or are you just talking out of your arse?

It wouldn't be mentioned in that RFC as I believe that was written before any form of user authentication was part of SMTP. AUTH SMTP is described in RFC 2554 - SMTP Service Extension for Authentication however it doesn't mention anything about a "guest" account specifically, just "accounts".

Modern SMTP mail systems are based on a number of RFC's - 2234, 1869, 1891, 2119, 2222, 2476, 2195, 821, 822

Turns out its actually a problem in SMTP's RFC

Have you actually read RFC 821? If so, perhaps you could point out exactly where the functionality of the guest-level account is specified? Or are you just talking out of your arse?

The "intellectual property" term is confusing enough, since it confuses petents, copyright, trademarks and trade secrets. Using the acronym "IP" only makes things worse. First time I read the headline I skipped the article thinking that it is about the IP addresses of some game users being stored. I am serious. I thought the article was about privacy issues, not the copyright issues which I am always trying to be up to date with. So I ask you, if you absolutely have to use the "intellectual property" oxymoron (just remember it is not a legal term and shows that you don't understand the law, which casts a serious doubt on Slashdot journalistic integrity) please at least don't use the even more confusing "IP" acronym for that.

Sorry for the typo, but you seem to have figured it out anyway, except for your contrived (or somewhat derisive?) complaint about the double-t. Anyway, lighten up a bit -- no derision was intended. It's an abbreviation. And I didn't make it up -- it's fairly common.

Note that even religious types sometimes use this abbreviation. Scan the google results and you'll see about 20k instances, not counting people with the name of alias "Xtian."

But, I suppose this FAQ entry for "Someone used the term Xtian, and I'm offended. What should I do?" might be more suitable for you:

Start by learning the history of term, to understand that there was likely no offense intended. X is an abbreviation for Christ, arising from the Greek term Christos, which starts with a Greek Chi, written as X. This usage dates back to the 1500s. Thus, the usage is not an attempt to "blot out" the name, or be offensive.

Xtians can be so touchy.

If we're doing this upstream, why not just require ISP's to use Ingress Filtering? Getting rid of the ability to spoof your IP makes it a lot harder to DOS.

Can you tell me the origins of the happy ball please?

Here you go.

Let us also not forget about implementing the Security Flag from RFC 3514 while we're at it.

This is good - great reading, highly recommended. For the uninitiated, every year on April 1, an RFC like this is released. This is the best one yet. Also, Bellovin (the author) is well-respected in the security community.

It was something like the 10th on-topic post (out of about 400, mind you) and should definitely be modded as Score:5, Funny. The only problem was the subtleness of the humor, for which let me apologize.

I got this fabulous Slashdot Message:

Comment Moderation sent by Slashdot Message System on 1:05 Thursday 06 November 2003

That will solve the problem , posted to FCC Adopts Broadcast Flag Scheme , has been moderated Funny (+1). It is currently scored Funny (2).

That will solve the problem , posted to FCC Adopts Broadcast Flag Scheme , has been moderated Funny (+1). It is currently scored Funny (3).

That will solve the problem , posted to FCC Adopts Broadcast Flag Scheme , has been moderated Overrated (-1). It is currently scored Funny (2).

That will solve the problem , posted to FCC Adopts Broadcast Flag Scheme , has been moderated Funny (+1). It is currently scored Funny (3).

That will solve the problem , posted to FCC Adopts Broadcast Flag Scheme , has been moderated Overrated (-1). It is currently scored Funny (2).

That will solve the problem , posted to FCC Adopts Broadcast Flag Scheme , has been moderated Overrated (-1). It is currently scored Funny (1).

That will solve the problem , posted to FCC Adopts Broadcast Flag Scheme , has been moderated Funny (+1). It is currently scored Funny (2).

That will solve the problem , posted to FCC Adopts Broadcast Flag Scheme , has been moderated Overrated (-1). It is currently scored Funny (1).

That will solve the problem , posted to FCC Adopts Broadcast Flag Scheme , has been moderated Funny (+1). It is currently scored Funny (2).

That will solve the problem , posted to FCC Adopts Broadcast Flag Scheme

Ah, but this is where the open source model falls flat. Open source software doesn't have the kind of funding it takes to put a $250,000 bounty on finding whoever did this!

P.S. HHOS

You're probably better off using RFC1149.

(And yes, UUNet/MCI/Worldscam reseller contracts require that port 25 on all dial-up IPs be blocked for all IPs except the carriers own SMTP servers)

Let us also not forget about implementing the Security Flag from RFC 3514 while we're at it.

This is good - great reading, highly recommended.

For the uninitiated, every year on April 1, an RFC like this is released. This is the best one yet. Also, Bellovin (the author) is well-respected in the security community.

It was something like the 10th on-topic post (out of about 400, mind you) and should definitely be modded as Score:5, Funny. The only problem was the subtleness of the humor, for which let me apologize.

There is no Universal Open Source Intranet Site. In fact, it's more like: **every** single site is unique, which means that a website being Open Source will not mean it will miraculously appear out of sourceforge (until sourceforge starts employing an infinite number of monkeys yadi yada...)

And going with the Open Standards/Open Source thread, do you think that we will see on Sourceforge an open source implentation of RFC 2795? Maybe then we could get an infinite array of open source software :)