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I suppose it was appropriate that they didn't include Emacs in the list of cults, since it actually has its own church.

According to the professor, it should soon make Linux obsolete.

Phillip.

A great thread to point out Torvalds hasn't changed much. He's still the same arrogant prick he was back then.

Replying like an inane troll to the professor's insightful and constructive comments. Repeatedly.

Mail after mail, Tanenbaum comes off as an intelligent gentleman, while Torvalds as a frustrated teenager.

He did get one thing right though: it was free, and that made it better.

(Posting AC after modding the parent informative. And yeah, I run Linux.)

According to the professor, it should soon make Linux obsolete.

Phillip.

*blink* Multithreaded filesystem?? What do you mean?

Just what I said. Here, further reading:

http://www.dina.kvl.dk/~abraham/Linus_vs_Tanenbaum.html

If I had to guess, I would say that a single-threaded filesystem is maybe a step up from Win98, if that. If you remember, reading from a floppy on Win98 would bring the entire system to a crawl, as any disk IO would make the rest of the OS block until it was done.

I didn't use Minix at the time, but I would guess it was like that, at least for the filesystem itself, if not for the entire OS -- in that, if the filesystem was blocked doing disk IO, all attempts to talk to the filesystem would also be blocked.

Minix is a full, Unix-like operating system, whereas Linux is a kernel.

Really? I was under the impression that it used GNU tools to fill in the rest of the system, just like Linux.

In fact, it's also credited to just one person -- Andy Tanenbaum.

I could be wrong, though. If so, that would be another point against Minix -- Linux was able to leverage existing, portable tools. Minix was not yet POSIX-compliant at the time, making portability between Minix and anything else a bit harder.

The next thing you know someone will ask for a replacement for vi.

Us, who saw the light, already use Emacs.

The whole "linguistic" discussion (free, viral, stays free, whatever) is missing the point. You shouldn't choose license from which has the best sound-bites, but from which best supports your goals. Here is a seven year old article about how to choose a free software license that should be much more useful. The specific choice of licenses may have changed, but the reasoning hasn't.

> Why did the Scientology cult get the status of a church there?

They didn't. Being a church isnt a kind of a legal status, so everybody can call himself a church. Even text editor users. To make it a legal title you first would have to define what a church is, and scientology then easily would change their business practices and methods to meet this new definition. In the end, you'd gain nothing.

I wrote this goal oriented guide for picking a free software license some years ago. It is slightly out of date (I would out suggest QPL anymore).

This tutorial is also very helpful for prospective new vi users.

Bah! Simpletons! Infidels! Heretics! Everyone knows that the one true religion, computingwise at least, is the Church of Emacs. Repent!!!

P. Sestoft and Henrik I. Hansen, C# Precisely, The MIT Press 2004; second updated printing 2006. ISBN 0-262-69317-8.

http://www.dina.kvl.dk/~sestoft/csharpprecisely/

With yet another zero-day exploit of MS-Word document files, what are fellow system admins doing to protect themselves against these threats?

> There's no "religion issue".

Gonna have to disagree with your police work there:

http://www.dina.kvl.dk/~abraham/religion/

Our Church of Emacs is very open minded, we discuss both how best to worship our Saviour among the True Believers, and also welcome preachers of false religions like The Church of Bill Gates, Discordia, and vi to our church, where we can test their silly misconceptions against out pure and strong faith . Most of the information in this page is from these discussions. Please don't misuse our sacred place to discuss joke religions like Scientology, Kibology, or BoB.

I think that you should teach using emacs.
And IMO it is wrong to say that emacs is just an editor, it is rather a full fledged editor and with JDE mode, combined with senator, cedet, it has most of the facilities which other IDE's do.
In addition, it has modes for programming in many languages, be it python, ruby, lisp or haskell.

Best of all, it is programmable, and student can hack their way to their own settings and idiosyncracies.
Introduce your students to the Church of Emacs

http://www.dina.kvl.dk/~abraham/religion/editors-1 01.html

Back when I was mostly a Windows user I put down this list of applications to remember to add to a fresh install. I believe they are all open source, free, cross platform etc. And excellent of course. It also links to similar lists. As for anti-virus, AVG is fine but so is Avast! Regarding the firewall Sygate's ruled but haven't they stopped giving it away for free? An alternative is ZoneAlarm. And don't use Windows without Ad-Aware. At the same time they worked for me as a kind of migration path. I could boot up Linux and use the same programs I was used to without much trouble. Now I use Linux almost exclusively. When Novell did the poll about which applications they should port to have more Windows users migrate, I was wondering about the strange results. Now I'm wondering what Windows needs to innovate for me to migrate back! I can't see it happening.

First of all: Most hacked "sites" were blogs with their passwords in plain files. I think few if any servers as such got hacked. The attacks against Jyllands-Posten's site was a DDOS.

Second: I agree with most of you commenters here. This whole debate/boycott/etc is really something going on between the fractions of extremists in the respective camps. Most Muslims and Danish people are quite reasonable.

Here's a collection of links to some of the most misunderstood details of the debate, the most positive stories - moderate Muslims and Danes reaching out for each other - plus a little note on some of the ghosts in the closets. PS: Don't hack that blog, he is a very nice guy :)

We forgive you on one condition: you admit publicly that emacs is the one true editor. Then you won't have to worry about anyone flaming you ever again.

Well, we already have The Church of Emacs, 'twould be easy to unite behind that. vi'ers put your feelings aside for privacy's sake!
That's s ache, not socky.
I think this is a Chicken Little story. If anybody's worried, then if folks started requiring TPM IDs some of us will just start a TPM Anonymizer service. After all, if it uses packets to talk, you can fake it.
Go in Peace, my Children.

Here is my "How to choose a free software license guide.

Thinking in a practical legal sense, it is (to put it mildly) rather impractical to think of the state intervening to verify a married couple is having regular sex, and cancelling their marriage license if they "fail". Or would you consider it okay if they only had sex once, would that be enough to mark that one off on the checklist?

And as for the "intention of having children if possible"... sheesh dude. Are you telling me that you seriously believe that a healthy male adult and female adult in a committed relationship should NOT be allowed to marry unless they promise that they intend to have children?

Seriously, you can (of course) believe what you like (no matter how stupid) about how people should behave, but trying to get your beliefs enshrined in law is a different kettle of donuts. That's where you (should) enter the realm of what's practical and reasonable.

You might have heard of "reason". It's one of the things that your religion tries to discourage.

No, I'm not going to give you a lecture on why Vi is better. But one editor rules them all.

We are all sinners, but some sins are considered especially bad during a religious flamewar.

And personally I don't want to be expelled from The Church of Emacs just because of the editor I use, in particular not after having been blessed by St. IGNUcios

True, linux is monolithic, and I agree that microkernels are nicer. With a less argumentative subject, I'd probably have agreed with most of what you said. From a theoretical (and aesthetical) standpoint linux looses. If the GNU kernel had been ready last spring, I'd not have bothered to even start my project: the fact is that it wasn't and still isn't. Linux wins heavily on points of being available now.

It takes a somewhat different approach to the issue, with the focus on what you want to accomplish, rather than the technicalities of each license.

Reality check: The project I'm working on is just over 80.000 lines of code. I have been working on it for just under 8 years. That is 10.000 lines of code per year netto growth. The brutto growth is higher, since I have deleted lots of code as well. And I'm in no way a fast coder, plus I have to write documentation, do support and even some teaching as well.

My own current project, a 75k lines of code scientific program, has 9 casts. Three are "static_cast", which does not mean "think of this data as something else", but "convert this data to something else". Two are "dynamic_cast", which is a run-time checked cast. Four are "const_cast" which are problematic. Two of them are for interfacing with an extrenal library, and two actually indicate an internal design problems. Anyway most of the other languages you mentioned doesn't even have "const", so any such design problems will be hidden.

There isn't a single "reinterp_cast", which is the kind of cast that you are talking about. They are not needed or common in "modern" C++ code.

There are no old (C) style casts, I compile with a flag that warns about them.

grep -n -e "_cast" *.C /dev/null
daisy.C:52: if (!dynamic_cast<LogSelect*> (logs[i]))
lexer_data.C:59: const double value = strtod (c_str, const_cast<char**> (&endptr));
log_all.C:278: if (LogSelect* log = dynamic_cast<LogSelect*> (logs[i]))
parser_file.C:198: const double value = strtod (c_str, const_cast<char**> (&endptr));
soil_heat.C:723: tmp[i] = static_cast<double> (impl.state[i]);
syntax.C:322: return static_cast<type> (i);
time.C:179:{ impl.year += static_cast<short> (years); }
traverse.C:131: traverse_alist (syntax, const_cast<AttributeList&> (default_alist),
traverse.C:162: traverse_alist (syntax, const_cast<AttributeList&> (default_alist),

Valgrind is a program I run if I suspect a memory error, and maybe every half year just to feel safe. It is used a lot less than the debugger, as memory errors are far less common than logical errors, at least for me. But when I need valgrind, it is godsend.

And of course, the really cool thing about valgrind is that it takes no human time to use. You just type

valgrind yourprogram -your arguments

• A list of the most famous danes according to google.
• A list of free software celebrities according to google.
• A list of Emacs contributors sorted according to google hits.
• A list of sequential artists sorted according to google hits.
• A list of OS (Kernel) Mindshare sorted according to google hits.

• A list of the most famous danes according to google.
• A list of free software celebrities according to google.
• A list of Emacs contributors sorted according to google hits.
• A list of sequential artists sorted according to google hits.
• A list of OS (Kernel) Mindshare sorted according to google hits.

• A list of the most famous danes according to google.
• A list of free software celebrities according to google.
• A list of Emacs contributors sorted according to google hits.
• A list of sequential artists sorted according to google hits.
• A list of OS (Kernel) Mindshare sorted according to google hits.

• A list of the most famous danes according to google.
• A list of free software celebrities according to google.
• A list of Emacs contributors sorted according to google hits.
• A list of sequential artists sorted according to google hits.
• A list of OS (Kernel) Mindshare sorted according to google hits.

• A list of the most famous danes according to google.
• A list of free software celebrities according to google.
• A list of Emacs contributors sorted according to google hits.
• A list of sequential artists sorted according to google hits.
• A list of OS (Kernel) Mindshare sorted according to google hits.

Perhaps more interesting if the links had come up right - I see five slashdot ones. I guess you meant this instead.

A numerical simulation, however I suspect the problem is with the iostream implementation. It makes no sense that BC++ 5.5 should be that bad for numeric code, especially as BC++ 5.0 produced almost as good code as GCC. Visual C++ 6.0 also give results in the same range as BC++ 5.0, slightly worse than GCC.

I found your How to choose a free software license to be well written, and it is probably helpful to a lot of people.

In this case, if you find it acceptable that people make changes to your code and distribute the result without sharing them, use the (new) , it is small, simple and give you the minimal legal protection against getting sued.

If not, I suggest the MPL/GPL/LGPL tripple license used by Mozilla for new code (actually the GPL part is unnecesary, but it is safest to use the text pointed to by the link, since it has been proffread by lawyers). The MPL part will make it useful for embedded and most other purposes, the (L)GPL for use in (L)GPL projects, and it still means changes to your files will be made public.

I have been using google to measure popularity for some time, the most relevant page here is my free software celebricies page. Google has some problems when used this way, the largest is that the hit count are very unstable. I have seen entries in my list go from 200 to 15.000 and back to 200 in a week, for no obvious reason. Another problem is that it is often hard to find a term that is specific enough, but not too specific. For example, Bill and Gates are both English words.

It wasn't strongly typed (is there such a lisp?)

Yes, it's called ML. See Ocaml or Standard ML (this link is to Moscow ML, an SML implementation), for example.

and the singular type of syntax (lists) make many aspects of the code difficult to unravel.

ML has algebraic datatypes, which might be regarded as a cross between unions and structures in C.

ML server pages project

ML Server Pages (MSP) is a web scripting language, a loose integration of Standard ML (SML) and HTML in the style of Sun's Java Server Pages, Microsoft's Active Server Pages, or PHP.

So far we have designed and implemented a usable proof-of-concept system, based on Moscow ML and the Apache webserver. Current goals are to obtain more experience with applications, and to improve efficiency, scalability, security, and functionality of the implementation.

The talk will present MSP script examples, details of the implementation, and ideas for future work. Feed-back on the design is most welcome.

Does there exist a good, non-judgmental (I should be so lucky) article about what really happened, focussing on the operational differences between emacs & Xemacs?