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I think that's a bit of an understatement

seems to be a cluster of alpha geeks!

I suggest you read Eric S. Raymond's "The magic cauldron" for a thoughtfull essay on that subject: http://tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/magic-cauldron/

as for email, you may want to look into fetchmail and mutt. i used to think they were pretty old and archaic, until i really gave them a chance and began using them. mutt is the best email client i've ever used, because i can use any editor i want to compose the email, move around it with the keyboard, etc. fetchmail works exceptionally well to grab the email, which is good. you can also set up mutt to work with imap. more information on that is on mutt's website.

Thrashing isn't necessarily that specific.
Thrashing might mean the head is dancing alot, doing unnecessary seeks... It could be multiple re-reads, as in the case of a pending hardware failure or poorly-tuned buffers... etc.
The Jargon File seems to agree with both of us.

It pains me to admit it, but the market for Linux on non-x86 platforms just isn't as big. (I run Linux on Alpha, PPC, ARM, and x86 at home, Alpha nd x86 at work. Oh, and I work in the Alpha microprocessor group.)

One of the classic strengths of open source and free software is code quality improvement through peer review. The trouble is, most of the people testing and debugging are on x86. So you get better coverage, more bugs found, and more bugs fixed on x86 than on any other platform. Second tier platforms don't do as well because they have a smaller user base, and thus a smaller developer base.

In other words, support for x86 is less suceptible to bit rot, because the features get exercised more often.

Just one example is the kernel source. Virgin 2.4.3 fails to build on Alpha. (How exactly did Linus et. al. miss that?) While it built and ran on my PPC machine, it ignored keyboard and mouse input. (Aparently nobody noticed the ADB support for older machines was broken.)

Compaq literally shovels money, hardware, and other resources at RedHat to keep Alpha in its line of supported platforms. It's worth more to us to have it than it is to them.

IMHO, open source project leaders shoulds actively try to get their code tested on as many different platforms as possible. It shakes out additional bugs and improves the code. (And I don't just mean CPU architectures. If it works on x86/Linux, check it on ARM/NetBSD, Sparc/Solaris, PPC/MacOSX, and every other paltform you can get your hands on.) Unfortunately, that takes time, effort, hardware, and other resources that are usually in short supply.

Everyone loves license managers! As the most critical piece of unwanted software on your network, it's important that license managers be stable and reliable. Fortunately, they always are, so desperate IT managers have never had to waste hours on the phone with tech support fixing license manager configuration errors that have brought the entire company to its knees.

Microsoft has enough trouble now, with its perpetual licenses, helping enterprise customers help themselves ensure that all Microsoft software is appropriately licensed. An innovative new software delivery technology requires innovative new software, so it's clear that integrated LicenseManagerWizard (trademark pending) technology is going to be an important part of Windows 2002 (available Q1 2004).

It's difficult to overstate the benefits. Microsoft's stamp of approval on your license manager software is Bill Gates' personal software-quality guarantee to you that your LM won't let you down. Microsoft's tech support will be happy to assist you (for a nominal fee) with your LM configuration, in the unlikely event that the comprehensive online help ("How do I use the mouse?", "Why is my printer icon greyed out?") doesn't answer your question.

What's more, Microsoft's OpenLicense API will permit (and encourage!) even the smallest Windows software developers to deliver their software on a subscription basis with only minimal testing of their licensing infrastructure, leveraging this important new technology to help simplify and streamline your organization's license management policies and procedures.

LM technology is also an important part of Microsoft's .NET initiative, in the sense that organizations will be encouraged to adopt .NET technology by the absence of any legal means to continue licensing discontinued non-.NET software.

It's good news for everyone.

The following was posted *yesterday* on the FreeDevelopers list. I am not posting it as an Anonymous Coward, because I badly need karma points :-)

A few hours ago, a friendly journalist tipped me that Craig Mundie of Microsoft is going to make a major speech in New York tomorrow attacking open-source software -- specifically, attacking the GNU General Public License. This speech is probably intended to define Microsoft's party line on open source, and to shift the terms of the debate over it to one that Microsoft thinks it can win.

I haven't seen the speech; the friendly journalist told me it was embargoed. But I'm expecting it to be a masterpiece of FUD. You watch; it's going to be a studied and ingenious attempt to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the minds of software users and the public -- and to obscure Microsoft's underlying motives by cloaking them in affected concern for the public welfare.

This is a heads-up to journalists, industry observers, and the public -- as you listen to that speech tomorrow, don't get taken in by Mundie's shell game. Keep your eye on the pea. As the perceptive gentlemen of "The Economist" observed earlier this week [1] Microsoft's real agenda will be to preserve its monopoly, whatever the cost to software developers and the public.

So I can predict with fair confidence some of the things you're going to hear -- perhaps not as explicit statements that can be refuted, but as hints and allegations, a studied and careful attempt to disinform without telling explicit lies.

First off, expect Mr. Mundie to try to blur the distinctions between open-source development, use of the GPL, wholesale copyright-law violations like Napster, and outright software piracy. These are four different phenomena; a lot of open-source software doesn't use the GPL, most open-source developers are supportive of intellectual-property rights including copyright, and the open-source community as a whole has historically taken a definite stance against software piracy. We only give away our own work, not other peoples'.

Nevertheless, expect Mr. Mundie to lump all these phenomena togetber and hint darkly that Linux is the spearhead of a conspiracy to destroy trillions of dollars in intellectual-property assets. He probably won't come right out and accuse us of being Communists; that trial balloon popped when Jim Allchin floated it a few weeks ago with his "un-American" crack and got laughed out of town. But he'll let the implication hang there and hope it sticks.

What he'll hope you don't notice is that the "assets" he's mainly interested in protecting are Microsoft's -- and not just the $26 billion it has in the bank, but the far more important asset of over 90% desktop market share and tight control of its customer base through proprietary lock-ins.

It's that lock-in, that control of customers, that is what open source threatens most. With open source, customers can have real choices; they don't need to be locked into a perpetually more expensive upgrade treadmill, they can own and inspect and modify the software they depend on, they can have real security because they can know exactly what's running on their machines.

That choice is the fundamental threat to Microsoft's business model, and it's the reason they're getting clobbered by Linux in the server market (every month, more Linux installations come up on web servers alone than in Microsoft's entire Windows 2000 customer base). So it's not just individual open-source projects like Linux and Apache Microsoft has to defeat -- it's the open-source way of thinking about software.

One way to defeat it is by making people afraid of it -- by conning potential corporate purchasers into believing that using open-source software on their machine somehow means the GPL will force them to publish all their software or business secrets. Craig Mundie will try very hard to make you believe that. It's not true, but a company that blatantly falsified videotape evidence in a Federal antitrust trial is not going to balk at lesser falsehoods.

Another way to defeat open source is to co-opt it. After Craig Mundie gets through trying to make you fear and distrust open source, he will tout Microsoft's new so-called openness. He will doubtless talk about how Microsoft is willing to share source code with large customers and universities. And he'll talk up the "open" services like SOAP that are part of Microsoft's .NET plans (about which more later).

What Mr. Mundie will hope you don't notice is that Microsoft wants all the "sharing" to be in one direction. What they're doing is what we call "source under glass" -- you can see it, but you can't modify or reuse it in other programs. They want to be able to get the huge benefit of having thousands of outside people review their code without allowing any of those people to use what they learn on other projects.

We in the open-source community see this for what it is -- a counterfeit, a trick, a scam. It's aimed at recruiting free labor for Microsoft without giving the outside contributors any stake in or control of the results of their effort. In true open source, all parties are equal. When I give you my software under an open-source license, you have exactly the same rights as I do. That's what I trade you in return for your help in testing and improving the software. That's the voluntary cooperation that built the Internet.

Mr. Mundie also doesn't want you to notice, or remember, Microsoft's long history of perverting supposedly "open" standards into customer lock-in devices, by poisoning them with proprietary extensions that only closed Microsoft software understands. A notorious recent example is the games Microsoft played with the Kerberos security protocol. It would take a really cockeyed optimist to believe that Microsoft doesn't have similar maneuvers planned for once the .NET protocols get established, if they do.

Finally, Mr. Mundie will doubtless wind up his exhortations with a paean to the glories of .NET, Microsoft's attempt to turn itself into the worlds's biggest application software provider. Stripped to its essence, under this plan you mostly would give up buying software and instead rent networked services from Microsoft by the month.

There are two things Mr. Mundie hopes you won't notice about *this*. One is that .NET is born out of fear. Microsoft's strategists aren't stupid. They can see the trend curves, that falling hardware margins are spelling the doom of any business model based on expensive packaged-software licenses. They know the revenues from their own software business have actually been declining for three quarters now, covered only by creative accounting practices for which Microsoft is under a federal fraud investigation separate from the antitrust trial.

More fundamentally, those strategists have read Clayton Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma"; they can see that open-source software in general and Linux in particular are an unstoppable technology disruption that will sooner or later reach the heart of Microsoft's business -- and that the only way for Microsoft to survive is to dodge the bullet, to be in a different business before that bullet hits home. Hence the push to become an ASP.

But the more important thing he hopes you won't notice is that in the brave new .NET world, you would lose even the meager rights you have now under Microsoft's End-User License Agreement. You would own nothing. You would instead become ever more dependent on Microsoft to provide the basic services that your computer and your business rely on to function. You would have to absolutely trust Microsoft to neither deliberately violate your privacy for business advantage nor to leave your vital data exposed to crackers like those who break into Microsoft's own servers every few weeks.

Keep your eye on the pea, gentlemen and ladies. Because that is what Microsoft is really after -- a fast exit out of the packaged-software business, a lock on your critical data and network services, and an indefinite extension of the coercive monopoly position described in Judge Jackson's findings of fact. Higher prices, fewer choices, worse lock-in, and Microsoft uber alles for ever and ever, amen.

Ob Ref to Jargon File: The problem seems to be with the implementation of the HCF instruction: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/HCF.h tml

• The story of Mel
• The Tao of programming
• if you find a link to the Zen of programming please post.

You seem to be leaving out those of us that enjoy their work and take pride in it.

I (generally) enjoy my work and take pride in it too. But I also enjoy my karate training. And time spent making music and poetry. And the company of lovely women.

I even think that time spent on one of these things often develops skills that are useful in another. Poetry works the language skills, oh so important for writing documentation for the code I write in my day job. Martial arts training fosters the sort of defensive "what-if" thinking required for robust programming.

Spending all you time and effort on one task is ultimately self-defeating, as it limits intellectual cross-pollination. That's why the stereotypical hacker has multiple competencies.

Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/

I won't reproduce it here, but I will link to it. It can be found here, in the appendix of the Jargon File.

If ever a treatise was written about Code as Art, this is it.

http://tuxedo.org/~esr/

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=15073

Eric S. Raymond has decided to include this event into The Jargon File version 4.3.0. He salutes the RFC fetishists of BLUG and calls them "wonderfully insane hackers", in addition to describing the event as "what may just be the funniest, cleverest hack of the last fifteen years" in a Linux Today article.

The Jargon entry can be found here.

Eric S. Raymond has decided to include this event into The Jargon File version 4.3.0. He salutes the RFC fetishists of BLUG and calls them "wonderfully insane hackers", in addition to describing the event as "what may just be the funniest, cleverest hack of the last fifteen years" in a Linux Today article.

The Jargon entry can be found here.

Eric S. Raymond has decided to include this event into The Jargon File version 4.3.0. He salutes the RFC fetishists of BLUG and calls them "wonderfully insane hackers", in addition to describing the event as "what may just be the funniest, cleverest hack of the last fifteen years" in a Linux Today article.

The Jargon entry can be found here.

Eric S. Raymond has decided to include this event into The Jargon File version 4.3.0. He salutes the RFC fetishists of BLUG and calls them "wonderfully insane hackers", in addition to describing the event as "what may just be the funniest, cleverest hack of the last fifteen years" in a Linux Today article.

The Jargon entry can be found here.

Anyone with half a clue has already used the Windows key as "Meta4", to complement Alt, Shift and Ctrl. So now you can get close to a Quadruple Bucky on a commercial-off-the-shelf keyboard!

But seriously, I use the Windows key for changing workspaces (Windows+1..9), cycling windows (Windows+Tab), Iconising/Restoring windows (Windows+'-'/Windows+'='), etc.

Why not get your name attached to some high-profile projects? Why not even get a menial "web page design" job through a local temp agency, and then work your way up? High-school students turn jobs like that down! Even "PC technicians" at mass-makret retail stores can find employment in a more interesting and profitable sector of IT eventually.

Honestly, it's very hard to believe that -- if you're really that good -- you're stuck gutting fish or operating a forklift all day as your "geek satyagraha" seeps out from your atrophied wrists.

sev 1: crashing bug, or data corruption
sev 2: feature broken, no workaround
sev 3: feature incomplete, or broken w/ workaround.
sev 4: cosmetic or UI flaw

This strikes me as pretty reasonable except for the "or UI" part. A bad or buggy UI can lead to user behaviors that destroy just as much data as a fandango on core does.

One of my favorite examples of this comes from the NeXT 1.0 OS release, which was a slick GUI on top of a BSD-derived Unix. As appropriate in a GUI OS, you could click on a floppy (mounted in the filesystem, of course) and choose "format" from a menu to erase the disk (after a little "are you sure you want to erase this disk" messsage.

But you would get the identical warning if you tried to format any other partition in the file system, even your root partition. And it was awfully easy to mistakenly select the directory that the floppy was mounted in rather than the floppy itself. In one sense, this is "just" a UI flaw. But it's certainly not a just cosmetic one; it should be classified as severity 1.

We could probably do this the same way the Playstation 2 does: a nice little dongle gives us all the options necessary even for older sets, without cluttering the actual device.

-sk

We could probably do this the same way the Playstation 2 does: a nice little dongle gives us all the options necessary even for older sets, without cluttering the actual device.

-sk

Would you trust a surgeon to operate on you if he didn't take medicine seriously and only thought of it as his day job? Would you really go under his knife if in talking to him he said "Well, I cut people open because it pays well. I happen to hate humanity and I just find people disgusting". I sure as hell wouldn't.

It's really the same thing with technology. If the people working with it don't love it, they're going to suck. I produce much better code when I'm working in an environment I enjoy, both in terms of workplace, as well as the actual development environment.

See ESR's The Art Of UNIX Programming. People do wonderful things with UNIX in part because it's so much fun to use. Just as doctors who enjoy working with prostates are probably good at operating on them.

To quote the Jargon Dictionary:
If you want to play in the Real World, you need to learn Real World moves.

That wouldn't be the same thing, though, as curly braces are used in a few specific places, while spaces and tabs get used all throughout a program - whitespace separates EVERYTHING. I think people who dislike the whitespace-sensitivity tend to balk because of this, the same way they might balk if spaces were replaced with curly braces: function{some_code(int{some_variable,int{some_othe r_variable){
{{{{{
{{{{{if{(some_variable>some_other_variable)
{{{{{{{{{{return{1;}
{{{{{else
{{{{{{{{{{return{0;}
{{{{}
Which braces are "separaters" and which are "block definers"? Even in this silly example, it should be relatively obvious if you LOOK at it, but it's not "intuitive".
I can understand where using whitespace, which is already used trivially throughout the code, to also represent something as significant as what constitutes a code block can be disturbing to some people...

Only in terms of how "pretty" the source code is - none of the languages I've ever worked with (not that there are that many, nor that I'm a "master" of any of them, but...) actually had any problems due to varying tab sizes when it came time to actually compile and/or run the program

In other words, I think the problem is fundamentally that people who don't feel comfortable with Python mainly dislike the way it almost fits the definition of a bondage-and-discipline language (except that I think the amount of useful stuff being written in Python easily disproves the "demonstrably inadequate for...even vanilla general-purpose programming" clause, regardless of whether I dislike the syntactical quirks of the language or not:-) ) and don't like feeling so constrained.

...another comment from Michael Tandy.

...another comment from Michael Tandy.

Xerox' GUI? it's bloody goddamn well EVERYWHERE. There's not a GUI out there today that's not descended from it. See HERE, for a bit more edification.

Exceptions are a definite win. The syntax makes good sense and the semantics do pretty much what you would want. (Well, what I would want, anyway.) try, catch, and throw just about eliminate the need for goto or longjmp, and are much prettier besides. They're easy to use right, and it would take a deliberate act to use them wrong.

Inheritance and polymorphism are good when used judiciously, but can definitely hurt you; spaghetti inheritance is one of the ugliest things around. Each class should abstract some thing or concept in the system; if that's not the case, it's time to start chopping things out of your inheritance hierarchy.

The STL (and C++ template in general) syntax gives me a headache, personally; good idea, but seems glommed onto the language. Other than the occasional container class, which is simple enough, I avoid it.

Good question for discussion, by the way!

Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/

Look, I'm doing my best. I've studied Fortran II, Fortran IV, Waterloo Fortran, Ratfor, Fortran 77, Fortran 90, Basic, Basic Plus, GW Basic, WordBasic, Visual Basic, Visual Basic for Application, Visual Basic for Scripting, various Basics targeted at the Java VM, LotusScript, 360 Assember, MIX Assembler, PDP-11 Assembler, HP-3000 assembler, x86 assembler, JCL, Algol 60, Algol 68, Algol W, Pascal, Turbo Pascal, Object Pascal, Delphi Object Pascal, Vanilla Shell, C Shell, Bourne Shell, Z Shell, Sed, Awk, C, C++, Java, PL/I, PLZ/SYS, PLZ/ASM, YACC, Lex, Lisp, Common Lisp, Scheme, Emacs Lisp, Logo, Vim macro language, BRIEF macro language, Make, Gnu Make, SGI Make, SQL, PAL, INGRES query language, Postscript, TROFF, EQN, TBL, TeX, Maker Interchange Format, Rich Text Format, HTML, SGML, XML, and a few others I can't name off the top of my head.

I'm sort of know Perl but need to brush up on some of the more arcane features. (Not my language of choice, but it's the bloody Duct Tape of the Internet. Besides, it's the only RE-capable language for which I haven't misplaced the reference manual.) I'm learning Javascript to help out a friend who wants a whiz-bang web site. I desperately need to learn to write DTDs and style sheets. Ditto for those weird little languages they use to describe CORBA and COM data.

I might learn Python, so I can play with Zope. I'm often tempted to get Lego Mindstorms, though I have no interest in building robots, so I can play with the weird visual programming language.

I'd like to learn Icon (novel expression of coroutines), Prolog and some of the more AI-ish dialects of Lisp (used in various books I bought years ago and still haven't read), TCL (I don't quite understand why it didn't just die when Sun abandoned it in favor of Java, but lots of interesting Linux software uses it), Mathematica (fascinating use of non-imperative program structures) and Intercal (pure perversity) but probably never will.

And the programmers at work are talking about doing a proprietary scripting language. Really simple and easy to use. Guess who gets to explain to the users why it's so easy to use?

So forget it! No more languages! My input queue is full .

Unless it offers something really new and different, of course!

__

Er, this instead So that's what the preview button is for.

Here's the link... A Story About Magic

This reminds me of a bit I've come across many times from The Soul of a New Machine (I've never read the book itself, just keep seeing this reference). As the Jargon File puts it:

During one period [of the design of the Data General MV-8000 Eagle], when the microcode and logic were glitching at the nanosecond level, one of the overworked engineers departed the company, leaving behind a note on his terminal as his letter of resignation: "I am going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season."

Some days, that seems awfully temping.

Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/

Super and Hyper keys? Why hasn't this obviously whupass idea caught on?!

Well, it's in the jargon file.

But not being auctioned on eBay. *sigh*... Anyone find a picture?

-grendel drago

Not bizarre. Bazaar.

No need to kneel before the altar every month and make offerings of gold. No need to present your machine to the monks when you want it upgraded. Most of all, no need to trust the Cathedral with your private data.

Indeed, you are allowed to commune with the gods of software themselves, who know little of MarketSpeak, but are honest, direct, and often very funny. Moreover, should one be so inclined, one can become one of them (what heresy!), without shaving one's head nor wearing a badge, without even leaving the comfy confines of one's own lair. But if one doesn't want to, one doesn't have to do that, either. Yea, verily, there is even now being made a version of the Penguin specifically for those seeking escape from the Cathedral.

Of course, with this freedom comes responsibility.... but even that can be made easy. But no longer do you have to be dependent on the Cathedral to get your computing fix.

It comes to mind that the last time somebody said you could talk to G-d directly without having to part with your gold at the door of the cathedral they fought several bloody wars over it...

That was my pathetic attempt at a thinly veiled ESR reference. Reference: The Cathedral and the Bazaar

If you use Intercal, all this discussion of number bases will be irrelevant. Assuming, of course, that you know Georgian and Roman Numerals.

How would Slashdot function during a war

For some reason, this makes me think ofkremvax.

If so, you may be taking dating advice from guy

That is an old back door created by Ken Thompson. He disclosed it at the 1983 Turing Award lecture at ACM. http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/back- door.html has details.

Code that has to be spread manually is not a "virus."

Code that has to be spread manually is not a "virus."

Code that has to be spread manually is not a "virus."

IANAL, but if a group of companies cooperates to create a system that reduces consumer choice, and each agrees in advance not to do anything that would break this system (even if a situation arises that would cause such an action to be to that particular company's advantage), isn't that pretty much a textbook case of an antitrust violation?

In my experience, if you want to see your lawyer fidget, just mumble something in his presence about making a deal with another company (even one that's not a competitor). Most lawyers seem to regard antitrust issues as heavy wizardry.

It should go without saying that the Jargon File should be required reading. Not only is it informative, but it is also extremely funny.
--

• It's so easy to write your Granny could do it.

• "[...] The usual intent of such designs is that they be as English-like as possible, on the theory that they will then be easier for unskilled people to program. This intention comes to grief on the reality that syntax isn't what makes programming hard; it's the mental effort and organization required to specify an algorithm precisely that costs. Thus the invariable result is that `candygrammar' languages are just as difficult to program in as terser ones, and far more painful for the experienced hacker."

• It's so easy to write your Granny could do it.

• "[...] The usual intent of such designs is that they be as English-like as possible, on the theory that they will then be easier for unskilled people to program. This intention comes to grief on the reality that syntax isn't what makes programming hard; it's the mental effort and organization required to specify an algorithm precisely that costs. Thus the invariable result is that `candygrammar' languages are just as difficult to program in as terser ones, and far more painful for the experienced hacker."

Okay, I have a hard time figuring out what you mean..

You could look up the definition of 'hacking' and go from there. A good defination is at:
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/hacke r.html

Basically, Windows XP will probably do stuff like check the processor you're using, serial or model numbers from your hard drives, what PCI or (shudder) ISA cards are installed, BIOS manufacturer and version number, etc. From this it'll make a "fingerprint", which gets sent off to Microsoft.

Microsoft then sends back an "activation code" - as long as you write this down somewhere, you'll be fine.

However, Microsoft doesn't define how much of your machine has to stay the same when you do an upgrade. Does my machine need a new activation code when I:

• Increase RAM?
• Swap from 72pin SIMM to 128 pin DIMM
• Install a new hard drive?
• Replace the existing hard drive?
• Over clock my processor?
• Replace the processor?
• Replace the sound card?
• Remove the network card?
• Add an extra network card?

According to Microsoft's Product Activation Fact Sheet:

"In some instances, if a user extensively overhauls a machine, reactivation will likely be required."

The thing that bugs me is - how much is "extensively"? Why is that sentence written to be intentionally vague? My guess is that Microsoft is hoping to keep Product Activation secure through obscurity. If you don't know how it works, you can't go breaking it, right?

The Jargon File claims that the famous B1FF was Joe Talmadge, creator of the Flamer's Bible - it doesn't say where he started out, but his current address is at HP. There might have been an original BIFF, but this guy apparently used scripts to help him along.

The Jargon File, maintained by esr, is an interesting reference - I've been through the thing, and you pick up little peices of lore. Not as good as experiencing it first hand, but you do find gems like Jeff K.