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Here are a couple of links to Bill Joy interview content which explains some things about the origins of vi. Basically it came from the fact that ed was bloody unusable and if you had a glass terminal with cursor control, which was most of them (though some needed a ROM revision - that's not mentioned, though ROMs for uppercase are) then clearly it made more sense to have a screen editor, not a line editor.

It's amazing to think that vi is actually easier to use than something else, though I used edlin before I ever discovered Unix, it was probably the second or third editor I ever used. I'd used ed on the amiga, both in the classic ed mode and the visual mode, and much better editors on that platform as well. I had to read the ms-dos manual in order to figure out how to use edlin, but I was a kid at the time so I have an excuse. I fixed some problem with the neighbor's dos pc, they were amazed :)

I did a short research paper on Hanford, so I think I might be able to answer this a bit.

The problems at Hanford are mainly due to one of two things: age (some of the reactors and processing plants date back to WWII, when the effects of radioactivity was still not well understood) and purpose (Hanford was designed to extract Plutonium (Pu); only one of its reactors ever produced electrical power, and that was a secondary purpose)

First off, age. Hanford was built in WWII with exceedingly great haste, and disposal of wastes was put on the back-burner as something that can wait until after the war. Then the cold-war began, and while procedures improved somewhat, proper disposal was still a secondary concern. With the reactors themselves, all except one of the reactors there are "single-pass" reactors, meaning that instead of recycling its coolant, it just pumped it in from the Columbia River, sent it through the reactor, then (after letting it cool for a little bit) sent it back to the river.

The other problem is the Plutonium processing. This generated a lot of highly radioactive and toxic chemical wastes, which were (depending on how radioactive it was) stored in leak-prone tanks (although they have since moved most of the waste to better double-shelled tanks) or dumped directly to the ground.

So, to answer your question, I would presume that a modern nuclear power plant would be much less of a problem to deal with, since it would be built to use recycled coolant. There is still the problem of the spent feul rods, however (and here I'm not so sure, because I didn't study about modern practices so much) if handled properly from the outset, they could be stored safely enough to avoid environmental contamination. Perhaps someone with knowledge on modern nuclear power plants could better answer that part, though.

Here's a great paper (written just a couple of days back) that describes the current state and future plans of this effort. Highly recommended reading. If you read it your "warm feelings of loveliness" will be doubled :)

I've tried nearly every sniffer (open-source or commercial) that has been available for the past 10 or so years.
Having the right tools for the right job is so important. Here's my list of good vs. bad in the packet capture world:

Good:
1) Running 'tcpdump -vvens0 -w file.cap' will basically give anyone anything they need, period
2) arpwatch, just to have a nice list of MAC2IP's
3) argus (already mentioned here)
4) snort (although I suggest the commercial Sourcefire instead). However, `unified logging' in snort (e.g. mudpit or barnyard), along with cerebus and logtopcap can scale snort to large-installations
5) ourmon is the best pcap visualization tool out there. it's BPF+RRDTool, so it basically rules
6) After you gzip the pcap file, scp it to your Windows/Linux desktop and run Ethereal to analyze in-depth
7) NAI SnifferPro "Expert" mode is sometimes useful instead of Ethereal. However, it's not worth the money even if you have money to burn
8) tcptrace is VERY useful to run on your saved tcpdump pcap files
9) Bro, ngrep, and dsniff are well-written, albeit somewhat security-specific
10) iftop and tcpdstat ala ddittrich's preso's

Bad:
1) SnifferPro, Network Observer, Fluke, et al
2) ntop (although their website is very cool for info on packet capture)
3) ntop look-a-likes like darkstat
4) pastmon doesn't really work yet, but looks promising
5) Cisco Netflow and SPAN ports. I highly recommend Internap FCP, argus, or Bro instead of Netflow. I also highly recommend NetOptics port aggregator taps over SPAN ports, however SPAN is better than nothing

A lot of people were confusing packet creation with packet capture. For more information on packet creation, see packetfoo [PDF]

I recommend picking up a copy of Write Now: A Complete Self Teaching Program for Better Handwriting. It's available from Amazon (affiliate link) or the publisher.

Write Now is a handwriting guide developed for adults. It doesn't have stupid little animals or other kid things, although it does have handwriting trivia all over the place. If your handwriting is so bad you've long since given up and your printing is almost as bad, this is the book for you. It starts off teaching an italic form of printing, which then leads easily into italic cursive. It even has some pages on calligraphy at the end, but the main focus of the book is on developing a quick and legible handwriting. The authors periodically hold seminars for doctors, so it's got to be practical.

I bought it because I haven't actually done cursive in over ten years. Even I had trouble reading my printing. I needed to forget everything I knew and start from scratch. This book is helping, but it's hard to sit down and practice, so my cursive still isn't very usable, but my printing is better.

Give it a try!

How do you know your training set is correct?

Good question! We're working on this problem, among other things, at the PSAM project. We have a project to produce high-quality benchmark corpora for spam filter testing. Watch that space for ongoing work, or e-mail us an offer to pitch in and help---we could use it!

Hee hee. Check out our Ricochet Robot site. Carl did all the SVG graphics you'll find there in a text editor...

Maybe it's BECAUSE he is in this position he doesn't want/have to do this. Have you heard of vi? he shure has

I've been waiting for a vi v's emacs thread for this one. Stuff both of them OpenBsd uses Ed.

For those more interested in technology (than flames) read this article with Bill Joy about Ed.

Time to start up the Alferd Packer memorial cafeteria.

Yes, at PSAS we're using 802.11b for telemetry, so 2.4GHz video would be bad. Besides, good cheap off-the-shelf gear is available for the 1.277GHz amateur TV band and it propagates well. That's what we went with this time around. We have used the audio channel with a modem as a telemetry channel in the past: this time we have an overlay board.

Here's a page with some onboard video from our April 1999 launch. Be gentle to our server :-).

Yes, at PSAS we're using 802.11b for telemetry, so 2.4GHz video would be bad. Besides, good cheap off-the-shelf gear is available for the 1.277GHz amateur TV band and it propagates well. That's what we went with this time around. We have used the audio channel with a modem as a telemetry channel in the past: this time we have an overlay board.

Here's a page with some onboard video from our April 1999 launch. Be gentle to our server :-).

The fundamental problem with vi is that it doesn't have a mouse and therefore you've got all these commands. In some sense, its backwards from the kind of thing you'd get from a mouse-oriented thing.

Hi Bill. It's 2003, and we're still using Vi (or Vim) precisely for the reason that it doesn't require a mouse. Look up carpal tunnel syndrome. I love not having to move my hands off the "home row".

I actually use vi for editing programs. James Gosling did a really nice editor as part of a project at Carnegie Mellon University which is AWYSIWYG: Almost What You See Is What You Get. It's also a program editor built into the window system he's working on. I think that will ultimately replace vi.

Sorry, no kind of WYSIWYG has replaced Vi.

One of the good things about EMACS, though, is its programmability and the modelessness.

[...]

I tried to use EMACS and I liked it.

[...]

That lack of programmability is probably what ultimately will doom vi. It can't extend its domain.

What are you doing, Bill?! You're killing the VI vs. Emacs debate. Zealots, take that web page off! DoS it, now!!!

On a serious note, perhaps he's talking about the Vi program of 1984, and not of Vi in general (Vi, like UNIX, is a common term for any Vi-like editors).

I think the Macintosh proves that everyone can have a bitmapped display. The fundamental tension in UNIX that I think AT&T doesn't understand is that everyone is going to have a bitmap.

Bill!!! You're killing the CLUE vs. GUI debate! Command line interfaces rock! Go away, Bill!!!

Systems are going to get a lot more sophisticated. Things will tend to get lost unless the interfaces are done in the Macintosh style. People who use these machines may run applications but won't necessarily be skilled at putting applications together. A lot of these people won't even have access to the underlying UNIX system.

(Emphasis is mine.) It's interesting that he predicted OS X ;-)

Best quote:
The program worked, but it was almost 200 lines long - almost too big for the Pascal system.

BTW... Hyperlink to the interview

Most of the examples of code generation I've seen around are basically kludges around insufficiently powerful high-level programming languages. Datatypes and representations should be able to be generic in the programming language; this enables directly coding at the desired level of abstraction. Check out ML or Haskell for one cut on these ideas.

That said, I've been doing CG for a long time :-). The M4 macro preprocessor is a fine tool for this task. See e.g. my student's M4 CG for XCB: a classic example, as we were stuck with C as the implementation language (indeed that was the whole point).

See our PSAM project site for a refereed paper evaluating several machine learning spam filtering techniques (although not specific filters). This site also contains large standardized corpora for evaluation. The paper contains a number of tips on evaluating ML spam filters.

The /.-referenced article has some good ideas about evaluation. I particularly liked the explicit discussion of the false positives. The recommendations at the end are excellent. On the other hand, the evaluation isn't across a broad or obviously representative corpus, many of the tests are a bit odd, the ROC tradeoffs are not discussed. In particular, the evaluation set for the tests did not include enough ham to be able to accurately estimate the false positive rate: consider what would happen to the precision estimates if 0.5 were added to each of the numbers in the false positive table.

Overall, though, this was an interesting evaluation, and I'm glad that the author published it.

Many learning filters are Bayesian in character, but by no means all. Indeed, it is arguable that other approaches have advantages. For a good discussion and comparison of approaches, see the paper at my spam-filtering site

Certainly many (in fact, most) OSS-savvy IT industry workers I have come across think Apple is merely using open source for a free ride. Certainly Bruce Perens thought so, and Richard Stallman very pubicly rejected Apple's licensing efforts and questioned their intentions. The Free Software Foundation even boycotted the company. These comments have reinforced IT scepticism of Apple Computer and acceptance of Apple technologies in this field remains close to nil. ZDnet's Evan Leibovitch points out many problems with Apple's (lack of) efforts in Open Source's Black Hole, problems which still remain more than 2 years later.

Your question is good because it would be interesting to see if Bruce's opinions on Apple are still the same, and does he now think the company is genuine? Has it given back a sufficient amount or is it paying lip service only?

Also PSU activities and some local high school events....

Actually, you can do away with XLib. The XCB and XCL projects are an attempt to replace XLib (XCB) and provide backwards compatibility (XCL), and are being taken pretty seriously by many in the X programming community. Rasterman (of Enlightenment fame) talks of his desire to move Enlightenment to XCB (an X C Binding) here

I found a copy of the final draft online: Learning Spam: Simple techniques for freely-available software. The paper covers several machine learning techniques. The particular one I'm talking about here is the information-theoretic clustering and neural network approach.

I finished a class recently that concentrated on using Z for formal modeling. The two professors published a reasonably interesting paper (for Z) on a thread safe X Windows C library binding to the X protocol.

X meets Z: Verifying correctness in the presence of POSIX Threads

I'd like to take you up on that. IF you happen to live near Portland, OR, then you can walk in on either the general or specialty meetings of PSAS (groups currently Avionics and Airframe). I did that a few months ago myself.

If you live further away (eg, in Belgium), then you probably ought to check out the local groups. They're everywhere. PSAS is a little unusual in that we have a strong emphasis on onboard alectronics (ie, avionics) especially telemetry. Feel free to ask questions. You can send me email to my namesake at the hotmail of com and PSAS has its own contacts on the website.

I'd like to take you up on that. IF you happen to live near Portland, OR, then you can walk in on either the general or specialty meetings of PSAS (groups currently Avionics and Airframe). I did that a few months ago myself.

If you live further away (eg, in Belgium), then you probably ought to check out the local groups. They're everywhere. PSAS is a little unusual in that we have a strong emphasis on onboard alectronics (ie, avionics) especially telemetry. Feel free to ask questions. You can send me email to my namesake at the hotmail of com and PSAS has its own contacts on the website.

http://cvs.psas.pdx.edu - Have fun!

There's an explanation of how they intend to achieve this on the site, along with a link to a news release that cites the Swedish Space Corporation's success transmitting data over 310 kilometers using 802.11b.

I was wondering about that, too. But the site states that they're allowed to boost the power legally if it's operated by a licensed Ham radio operator (under FCC Part 97 rules).

Cringely got something like 10Km with a Pringles can, so I expect someone with more of a clue can push that to 55,000'.

k.

The Getty-Dubay method of handwriting has gotten a lot of good press lately, because it's easy to learn, looks similar to printed text while being faster to write, and looks good.

What's wrong with the X protocol? XLib isn't ideal as an API, but that's why we have things like XCB.

Old != Bad

Oh, and have you heard about the oil companies covering up the invention of water-powered cars?

The truth about the GM transit conspiracy is boring and has nothing to do with cars. What GM actually did was conspire to have GM transit companies buy only GM-made buses. It's an antitrust issue, but not at all what the myth makes it out to be.

For those of you who have a problem with Xlib, take a look at XCB which is a better API for the X protocol and is is smaller and nicer to code for.

When I get the time, I'm going to port WindowLab to it.

Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) from Enlightenment project started to work on XCB !
XCB seems to be the super fast replacement of Xlib keeping X protocol ...

More infos

Vi was somewhat influenced by Bravo, an editor that was developed on the Alto, according to this interview with Bill Joy:

REVIEW: Didn't Bruce Englar implement the count fields feature?

JOY: Bruce suggested that. At one point there was an acknowledgment section in the documentation for the editor that mentioned all the people who had helped - I don't know if it's still there in Volume 2.

A lot of the ideas for the screen editing mode were stolen from a Bravo manual I surreptitiously looked at and copied. Dot is really the double-escape from Bravo, the redo command. Most of the stuff was stolen. There were some things stolen from ed - we got a manual page for the Toronto version of ed, which I think Rob Pike had something to do with. We took some of the regular expression extensions out of that.

The best have been mentioned. A couple not mentioned include:

• GMT (Generic Mapping Tools) Which is a command line driven set of plotting tools that excell in plotting data on a map. There are some GUI's based upon this. The best I have seen for mapping.
• M Map (for Matlab) Also does mapping plots, but from Matlab.
• Guppi (gnome based)
• SciGraphica
• Peakster Simple real time plotting.
• RTP Also very simple real time plotter.
• Biggles Python based plotter.
• GRI Python based plotter.
• GRE Perl based plotter.

I don't know if some of these are MacOS compatible or not. They are Unix compatible though.

It's a wonder, however, that VHDL is the preferred HDL of the US government and its contractors. It was patterned after Ada--another US government fave.

This ought to fit into a conspiracy theory or two.

Also, Delta here represents standard deviation. It can be calculated exactly from the Schroedinger equation.

I'm sorry, perhaps I'm missing something. Are you excited about the fact that ksycoca notifies applications about configuration changes while the application is running? That may be impressive if you come from Windows, but the X11 resource system has had that for a long time.

Have you ever even seen how X resources work? Have you seen tools like "editres" in action? With a compliant toolkit, you can click on an application, get its widget tree, change properties or event bindings on the fly, and save your changes. Of course, it doesn't work with Gnome or KDE, and there is nothing equivalent.

dcop is also not high bandwidth

Well, then standard X11 IPC mechanisms should be sufficient and DCOP is not needed, which is kind of my point.

I am pretty sure, that they gave a lot of thought to these issues

Yes, but that doesn't mean that they made the right decisions. KDE and Gnome were really written with a Windows-like frame of mind: a single, local display under full control of a single environment. I think the people who started working on it didn't even appreciate the hard problems that X11 and X11 toolkits were already addressing when those projects started. And while the KDE and Gnome codebases are a lot cleaner than Xaw and Motif, functionally, they have thrown us way back.

In fact, neither Gtk+ nor Qt are really X11 toolkits--they are Windows-like toolkits that happen to run on X11. Someone should probably take a new stab at creating a modern X11 toolkit from the ground up. See here for some related work: XCB, Gettys, Sharp.

They havnt made it to space yet, but at least their rockets dont explode. Check out this amatuer rocket effort. They have some great videos from outside of their LV1 rocket. PSAS

Perhaps most of the people either:

(A) Simply deleted the spam, or, (B) had the spam filtered and never saw it or, (C) got suckered into it. This leaves little room for reporting the spammers.

For what it's worth, I used to manually report spam to Yahoo and the like. This closed a dozen or so accounts. Next I stepped up to SpamCop, which went further: they actually help to close open relays. Right now, I'm using Spam Assassin to filter my inbox. It became too time-consuming to forward each message to SpamCop.

I used to be against filtering. I maintained that the best way to fight spam is to report it to administrators, who can then tighten relays, etc. But there's just so much of it: thousands of vulnerable mail servers, many of them offshore.

The best policy I've found is to get a fresh email address and either never post it in a public place online, or spam-armor your address when you post. This worked well for awhile. But then a mailing list I have to be on for work (I'm a computer technician at a university) started receiving spam and forwarding it to me. For a number of reasons, I can't easily change addresses right now.

If anyone wants to discuss anti-spam tactics, I'd love to hear new ideas. I hate spam as much as the next guy, but I guess I got discouraged lately at the sheer size of the problem.

Email me here: ashaver .AT. pdx .DOT. edu (change .AT. and .DOT. to their respective characters)

Oh, and check out my spam traps. Especially if you're a spam bot harvesting from this page. Heh heh.

http://web.pdx.edu/~ashaver/large.html

(I wrote a simple mIRC script to generate the HTML for that page.

So far I've read a poem that, while interesting, a quick search on google shows that the person who presented it is also the translator. Right. Can someone please find the original so we can verify this for ourselves? Thank you.

I've seen police, fire fighters, and medical personnel compared with researchers in the social science and humanities. I've seen proposals for information to be on a "need to know" basis, with the only people who "need to know" being the government and (of course) researchers. I love it when someone welcomes a loss of freedom provided it doesn't include them.

If you want some good music to listen to this to, I reccomend Love Me, I'm a Liberal by Phil Ochs unless you're too young, in which case you might as well listen to the Jello Biafra version

The US constitution was heavily affected by Iroquois Confederacy and it's democratic style of government. Unfortunately, it was also influenced by the historical European style of aristocratic sstyle of governence. Instead of creating a truly democratic nation the founding fathers tried to create what is, in effect, and elected aristocracy. This is what we inherited, and what we refer to as a 'democracy' today.

On the west coast, the Salish people had what I would describe as a hereditary democracy. Although the men wielded the leadership, they were chosen by a council of women elders, and power passed through the female line. Leadership was seen as a responsibility, not a right. Leaders were taught to consult with the people first. They spoke for their people, as opposed to deciding for them. If a leader was seen as not acting for his people, he could be removed by a simple majority vote.

Leaders who spoke for a tribe or village in area councils were chosen on an ad-hoc basis. The person who was seen as most capable of speaking (and listening) for the will of the people on that specific issue was sent to speak. It was not a permanent assignment.

These native methods of government seem to have evolved over centuries (or even millenia) as a way to be responsible for the possibility of human greed. The European/American method of democracy, on the other hand, was designed based on the aristocratic concept of divine right and the pseudo-religious belief that a leader would always act in the interests of his constituents. I would assign a big 'oops' to the latter proposition.

Corporations do use 802.11b, but because of the free access in Portland WEP is enabled when it should be. Oxley Airport, HealthPlans, HeRzOgMeIeR, randallgroup2001 are private, encrypted networks. In my experience about 58% (30 of 51) of all Portland networks have encryption off. Not a bad ratio I'd say, the public's awareness of secure wireless networks was no doubt raised by open networks such as PDXNet and Personaltelco.

"...the role of the lone inventor is over"
Tell that to Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, Bram Moolenaar, etc etc...

"...the role of the lone inventor is over"
Tell that to Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, Bram Moolenaar, etc etc...

try here, or here.

As many of the responses to your post illustrate, folks just don't get the idea that XFree86 is a highly modular system. They don't get the idea that the fastest path to a high-quality GUI desktop for their favorite OS is to start with the existing XFree86 server, extend it as necessary, and layer atop it with a decent client side. Yes, Xlib's time has come and gone, and Xt has always been pretty hopeless. So use something like XCB as a base, and design the GUI API of your dreams atop it.

Also note that many of the XFree86 features you mention are either brand-new or not-quite-there-yet. For example, decent font support has only been solid for about a year now, and is still evolving a bit. Server-side affine transformations have been specified but not yet implemented. The spec for proper anti-aliasing of polygons was just finalized last week: it was implemented this week. (That's how fast XFree86 is moving these days with Keith Packard working on it full time. Keith has repeatedly demonstrated that it's pretty easy to add the "missing" functionality you want as an X extension.) As folks get used to the Render and FontConfig APIs, I expect to see correspondingly less interest in building window systems from scratch.

IMHO, the "visceral dislike" comes from several factors, including outdated ideas about what X is and how well it works (the performance claims I see around here sometimes crack me up), insufficient appreciation of the difficulty of what X does, and NIH syndrome.

The good news is that all the carping isn't slowing down the clueful folks any. KDE 3 is nice enough that for the first time since the mid-80s I'm not running twm as my window manager any more. I expect things to only get better from here.

The core X Protocol is a wonderful way for application and display server to talk. XLib is painful, but you can abstract it and still live with it reasonably.

For an Xlib alternative in its early stages, check out XCB, a lightweight, transparent X protocol C Binding. One of the beauties of the X protocol is that sticking a new (and hopefully "better") API on top of it is relatively straightforward.

That was the funniest damn thing I've read in weeks. And to think Jon Katz provoked it, what an irony...

For your listening pleasure, I recommend the inimitable Phil Ochs' "We are the Cops of the World"

And when we've butchered your sons, boys
When we've butchered your sons
Have a stick of our gum, boys
Have a stick of our bubble-gum
We own half the world, oh say can you see
The name for our profit is democracy
So, like it or not, you will have to be free
'Cause we're the Cops of the World, boys
We're the Cops of the World

Buwahahahahaha they don't really hate us buwhahahahah cause we're really nice BUWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

volume of ice lost: ~720 cubic kilometers

handy scales of reference: one year of water for less than 7% of America's golf courses

RFN had links to other research sites, some of which have pics every week or two for the past two months.