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but it's my understanding of English that when a G is followed by an N, the G is silent, as in "gnat," or "gnarled."

In the sane, normal world, you are correct, but check out this entry in the Jargon File.

And while I'm on the subject, even the great Knuth is not immune. TeX == "Tekh". I mean, why be so damn deliberately difficult? Why not "tecks"?

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In the 1940s, Zuse also designed "Plankakül", which is widely considered to have been the first algorithmic language. It has some of the features characteristic of today's high-level languages.

The paper The "Plankalkül" of Konrad Zuse: A Forerunner of Today's Programming Languages [Bauer and Wössner, Mathematisches Institut der Technischen Universität München] is available in HTML form at Eric Raymond's Retrocomputing Museum. It describes Plankakül in excruciating detail... it's a very fun read (if you're into ancient and bizarre programming languages, that is).

In the 1940s, Zuse also designed "Plankakül", which is widely considered to have been the first algorithmic language. It has some of the features characteristic of today's high-level languages.

The paper The "Plankalkül" of Konrad Zuse: A Forerunner of Today's Programming Languages [Bauer and Wössner, Mathematisches Institut der Technischen Universität München] is available in HTML form at Eric Raymond's Retrocomputing Museum. It describes Plankakül in excruciating detail... it's a very fun read (if you're into ancient and bizarre programming languages, that is).

After reading through the Scientific American article, I suddenly found I wanted to re-read The Story of Mel again, the tale of a programmer's programmer from an era gone by. Our old-timers often lament the extinction of code laboriously hand-tuned to run tight and fast on elegant machines from days gone by -- and those days have been gone only a few decades. The gear makers worked their craft a century or more ago.

Today, sometimes I wonder, what was the point? Why not just shovel in and ship out the first thing that works? A year and a half from now, the hardware will be twice as fast, and probably cost half as much. The software we wrote will be obsolete, as will be the hardware it ran on.

But maybe it does matter. It would be a terrible thing if our decendants did not surpass us. But even as they gaze back upon us from those lofty, distant heights, maybe we can give them a reason to listen to how it was done in the Good Old Days.

"Lest a whole new generation of programmers
grow up in ignorance of this glorious past,
I feel duty-bound to describe,
as best I can through the generation gap,
how a Real Programmer wrote code..."

The so-called "release it early, release it often" model of open source development is quite simply a load of nonsense, and not one that anybody engaged in a project which they want to ever complete should bother with

The "relase early, release often" model is the very soul of Open Source Software. Eric Raymond, in his landmark Cathedra l and the Bazaar , which lead directly to the start of the Open Source Revolution, wrote so much, and am I to believe that you are more knowldgeable than the inventor of Open Source?

If you have some ivory tower ideal in which bug are found as soon as possible, then you end up spending all of your time fixing these bugs (because all open source does is let more people complain about bugs)

As Mr. Raymond said, "Many eyes make all bugs shallow", once again proving he is right. Open Source Software rarely has bugs do to it's very nature. OSS programmers make fewer, if any, mistakes than their commerical counterparts, and scientific studies have backed this up.

Let's face it, how many open source projects ever get anywhere? Apache and Linux are the only two that I can think of

Fetchmail is a very sucessful Open Source Projects which from Eric S. Raymond. I use it all the time.

On the other hand we have vapourware like ext3,
wishware like the GIMP and crapware like Mozilla to try and keep us going.

Well, I heard that ESR will be working with the Gimp's Scheme code (since he helped to write Scheme), but I haven't heard anything about his involvement in the Mozilla project since the early days of it. He hasn't even mentioned ext3, so I can't comment on it.

All I can say is thank God for Borland, leading the way in allowing corporate interests to migrate to Linux.

I'm just hoping they'll become interested in NetBSD!

The so-called "release it early, release it often" model of open source development is quite simply a load of nonsense, and not one that anybody engaged in a project which they want to ever complete should bother with

The "relase early, release often" model is the very soul of Open Source Software. Eric Raymond, in his landmark Cathedra l and the Bazaar , which lead directly to the start of the Open Source Revolution, wrote so much, and am I to believe that you are more knowldgeable than the inventor of Open Source?

If you have some ivory tower ideal in which bug are found as soon as possible, then you end up spending all of your time fixing these bugs (because all open source does is let more people complain about bugs)

As Mr. Raymond said, "Many eyes make all bugs shallow", once again proving he is right. Open Source Software rarely has bugs do to it's very nature. OSS programmers make fewer, if any, mistakes than their commerical counterparts, and scientific studies have backed this up.

Let's face it, how many open source projects ever get anywhere? Apache and Linux are the only two that I can think of

Fetchmail is a very sucessful Open Source Projects which from Eric S. Raymond. I use it all the time.

On the other hand we have vapourware like ext3,
wishware like the GIMP and crapware like Mozilla to try and keep us going.

Well, I heard that ESR will be working with the Gimp's Scheme code (since he helped to write Scheme), but I haven't heard anything about his involvement in the Mozilla project since the early days of it. He hasn't even mentioned ext3, so I can't comment on it.

All I can say is thank God for Borland, leading the way in allowing corporate interests to migrate to Linux.

I'm just hoping they'll become interested in NetBSD!

(Links to the Jargon File provided for you kids who don't remember what it was like in the old days, when we had to carve email messages on clay tablets and haul them to the server room, two miles away in the snow, uphill both ways....)
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(Links to the Jargon File provided for you kids who don't remember what it was like in the old days, when we had to carve email messages on clay tablets and haul them to the server room, two miles away in the snow, uphill both ways....)
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In many adventures, xyzzy is a magic word: one that's essential to solve the game or just one to make your life a lot easier. In AOS/VS "xyzzy" IS an easter egg, have a look at: Xyzzy in the Jargon file

In many adventures, xyzzy is a magic word: one that's essential to solve the game or just one to make your life a lot easier. In AOS/VS "xyzzy" IS an easter egg, have a look at: Xyzzy in the Jargon file

Ah, yes, of course. And we will never get any useful amount of energy from atoms, and space travel is utter bunk, and there's a world market for maybe five computers. And an operating system written by unpaid amateurs could never compete with MS-Windows.

There's a jargon file entry that mentions "a paper from the late 1970s that computed a purported ultimate limit on areal density for ICs that was in fact less than the routine densities of 5 years later."

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There Is No Cabal!

:)

The inspiration for the "random sort" that you talk about _must_ be the "bogo-sort" entry in The Jargon File: http://www.tuxedo.org/~es r/jargon/html/entry/bogo-sort.html

Sing a happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy song.
Sing a happy, happy... oh, wait. Wasn't it ESR who said he wanted to see M$ defeated by consumer choice and not by the government?
I have to say I agree. Even though M$ is split into two, they're still the same company (in two pieces) with the same ethos and the same terrible software. All that will happen now is that anyone who ate out of M$-Monolithic's hand before will now have to buy their software from two different companies - and it will be the same software!
What we really need is more public revelations of what M$ is really up to - even more so now with the possibility of inter-corporate plotting - such as the Halloween Memos.
So really, nothing's changed. Sorry to disappoint you.

If you read the Jargon file, and specifically this link you will see that under physical activity and sports martial arts is mentioned, so I would have to agree that many slashdotters have Martial Arts experience. Myself I have 9 years experience (started martial arts because of some Jon Katz "hellmouth" experiences, but that is another story.)

What I think would be really cool is to have DUAL weapons. I would much rather wield two swords than one. to differenciate I would guess that they would have to be different colors, but I wonder how you would model them so that they did not collide on the screen?

A hack is not only a quick fix; it also refers to an elegant solution or idea, like this one.

it's sad that even geeks have such a tremendous need to feed their ego's.

Well, if you've read the stuff ESR has written (CaB and HtN especially), you'll see that his theory is that most free software/OSS development is done precisely to satifsy that persons ego ("see, I'm a really good programmer, here's what I did"). Too bad, maybe we should send all those people a copy of K&R and they can start being productive. <g>

As for the format, I'd suggest LaTeX. You can then use that to create Postscript, PDF, HTML, text, and whatever else you desire.

Not that I imagine for a moment that there haven't been problems with Athlon motherboards and systems. But there's no mention of "i820", "Cape Cod", "MTH" or "Rambus" anywhere, even though the Compatibility List as a whole was updated just last Friday. Moreover, the "Tier 1", "Tier 2" business is straight out of Intel's and Microsoft's playbooks for the power games they play with their resellers, big customers, "partners" and the like. (Remember the story of Microsoft's "Tier 1 OEMs" and the Windows 95 desktop from the trial?) Funny to see it turning up in a Linux distribution's HCL...

In this light, passages like "Non-Intel clone CPUs. These CPUs may not be any more "buggy" than pure Intel CPUs, but since the market size of these chips is smaller, what problems do occur seem to be harder to get around." look like subtle but classic IBM-school FUD. Paranoia is not my drug, and Red Hat is not my Great Satan, but I think I smell something fishy here.

Not that I've ever fired a REAL gun, I'm a computer nerd for Christ's sake.

virtual beer n. Praise or thanks. Used universally in the Linux community. Originally this term signified cash, after a famous incident in which some some Britishers who wanted to buy Linus a beer and sent him money to Finland to do so.

Quickbasic (a Microsoft product with which I never really had any problems) is a nice setup. It's the ease of learning BASIC, but line numbers are optional, and the language supports structure, subroutines, and functions. Thus one can learn a high-level language without picking up the bad habbits of a spaghetti language.

If you want a well known opinion on the subject I suggest that you start with How to become a hacker.

As for my own opinion.... I am not sure that starting off with something as high level as Mindstorm is such a good idea. This may create a level of expectation that might be unreasonable. They may get the idea that that is the way that programming is.

I have to admit that this is an uninformed opion as to Mindstorm, I have only read about it. But my impression is that this is something that is easy to use and simple to see results. Although this can sometimes be true of general programming, it is more often a painstaking process that requires patience and careful planning. And the results are not always readily seen.

The instant gratification that a tool like this might bring is the same idea that promotes Visual Basic and similiar products (Before you flame me know that I am currently a professional VB programmer). Rapid is the watchword with these environments. These products have their place, but it is not what I recommend to a beginner and it is not what I learned with. I was fluent in (vanilla) BASIC, Pascal and C before I got indepth with VB. I cannot tell you how much knowing those languages help me in my career and in my learning VB. I do not use them on a daily basis in my professional career, but the concepts and knowledge of the underlying structure are of immeasurable value.

One thing that you can point out to these kids is that 90% of games that are written are written in C. If they truly want to follow in your footsteps and be a *nix guru then C is almost a prerequisite.

If you do use something like Mindstorm to teach only use it to teach the basic concepts. The one thing that I don't think you would want to happen is for them to become trapped in a single language or platform. I know programmers that have no knowledge of C. While this does not currently hurt their professional careers, I can clearly see a difference in the quality of their programming with those who do understand the underlying structure of the systems that they work on, the knowledge that intimate knowledge of C brings.

Whatever you do, teach them well. Teach them to write quality code. And for the sake of all that is good and just teach them to think outside of the box! These are the programmers that are going to shape the technological world in the coming decades.

Eric Raymond has hacked up a new kernel configuration scheme that is supposed to be considerably better than the one used today. Too bad it seems to late for it to be used in 2.4, but hey, it looks great! :)
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I think the best advice is general. If you want something more concrete, a bio, here's Richard Stevens'.

My advice would be to treat programming as anything else; it is really a simple thing that will be not be considered terribly impressive in the future. If you want the full, head-on experience, pick up a copy of Godel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter, look at Knuth's Art of Computer Programming. Think about trying out Corewars. (Don't forget to read the old article in Scientific American.)

If you want to know what the metal is thinking (good to finally understand 'why'), find an accessible book on logic/boolean design. I'll be monitoring this message to see if anyone cares about recommendations.

Perhaps most importantly, have a life outside of programming, interests outside of it. Programming is just an example of one system; think on other systems and you will do well in this special case. And for some reason, you should look at this.

In particular, most discussions of programming are BS (especially when the words 'good' and 'bad' are used; is it really bad or just a failure of imagination?), but there is generally a kernel of truth somewhere in them.

Yours,
Tj

I'm surprised by how many posters discount LC's basic business model. The fact is we are in the very early stages of the adoption curve for Open Source technologies (and that's probably even true of Apache, whose 62% market share could easily climb to >90% in the next five years.) In the future there are going to be tons of companies who want (need) some legal entity to stand behind their systems. The fact that the source is open and HOWTOs are plentiful only means that the support will be easier to provide than for proprietary apps, so customer satisfaction should slowly rise. Unfortunately, LC has bungled the whole thing.

I hate to quote scrip-cha but I think Eric Raymond and Tim O'Reilly are right on regarding the viability of the business model. (Granted, TOR is arguing for a much more expanded services offering, but it's still a services offering.)

ESR gun rants are a shame for both the free software movement and the US.

Interesting perspective. As for me, reading the ESR essay Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun was what finally convinced me to take a gun safety & use class and take up target shooting. It's a fun hobby, and once I've tried enough varieties of gun to know what I like or don't like shooting, I'll probably end up buying one. I also plan on getting a Concealed Carry Permit since in California that's the best way to reduce your chance of accidentally violating much of the vast thicket of obscure and contradictory gun laws.

Eric is inflammatory, but he's also right. John Lott is right too.

About your big-endian question...

The most complete explanation I've seen to date can be found in the Jargon Lexicon entry for big-endian. It describes the derivation, and mentions the main processors which use this byte order. There are also links from that page for related terms.

About your big-endian question...

The most complete explanation I've seen to date can be found in the Jargon Lexicon entry for big-endian. It describes the derivation, and mentions the main processors which use this byte order. There are also links from that page for related terms.

Only when someone accuses his opponent of being a Nazi. Simple mentioning 'nazi' does not count.
Actually... to quote the Jargon File's entry: "[Usenet] 'As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.' There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. Godwin's Law thus practically guarantees the existence of an upper bound on thread length in those groups."

You haven't been around long enough to tell the difference, it seems.
I'll just let the quote above respond to this one...

Yes, there is a solution. It's called fetchmail, and I was amazed at how easy it was to get it set up properly.

We seem to have a pattern of semi-luminaries speaking out against OSS in a very public manner, starting somewhere around a year ago. One every few months, IIRC.

It makes me wonder. Has OSS just come over these great thinkers' horizons, so that they feel the sudden inclination to express their views on it? Has the rising tide started to threaten the beachfront property of random members of the elite? Or is this just the highbrow variant of astroturfing?

Inquiring minds want to know.

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Or Raymond, a pansy nutcase who couldn't code a VB virus

Half-wrong. Eric S. Raymond maintains all this open-source software. But he "couldn't code a VB virus" because his OS of choice, Linux, doesn't have a working VB implementation, and the VB-compatible scripting language in development at the GNOME project is sandboxed, which means it can't modify files outside a safe area.

This is different from mostly-passive traps like teergrube (FAQ; jargon) or Deception Toolkit or spider traps which sit around waiting for Bad Guys to attack them and react unexpectedly when attacked (e.g. ...res.p...o...n...d....v...e...r...y....s..l..o.. o...ooo...w...l...y.... while logging stuff or sending back odd replies). ("mostly passive" doesn't exclude leaving lots of inviting copies of your address around for harvesters or script kiddies to find.)

The Duron will use Socket A. AMD have also anounced Socket A version of the Athlon too, iirc.

You mean the Thunderbird, right? Which'll probably be called an Athlon but will be of the same family as the Duron. Or something.

But either way, you'll need a motherboard. By the way, Socket 7? What where you thinking man?!

I really hope Socket A lasts as long as Socket 7 did. I'm fed up of all the processor packaging changes that have made upgrading the processor needs a new montherboard over the last few years. Screw Slot1|2|A/Socket8|370 or whatever - with this much change you might as well solder the bloody CPU onto the mainboard and be done with it. Enough of the cache-related cycles of reincarnation.

If Socket A can hang around a bit, a Duron system looks pretty attractive for what I want... but when are the DDR mobos likely to come out?

Well, unstructured code has always been compared to spaghetti; that must be a complement for a hypertext corpus (since hypertext is, after all, supposed to be unstructured). :)

... has obviously been to HTML Hell and back.
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This post made from 100% post-consumer recycled magnetic

here

A geek is running for president! Al Gore ... he is a geek in every traditional sense of the word.

[boggles]

[gulp]

[boggles again]

[looks at the poster and carefully backs away]

Dude! Do you have any clue, any at all, about what a geek is?

[sighs and goes away sadly shaking his head]

Kaa

Developing commercial software for Linux is pretty much the same as developing commercial software for Windoze. Does Word Perfect work any better on Linux than it does on Windoze? Not that I've seen.

The strength of Open Source is in things that are outside of the core business area. If your company needs a program to frob wampuses, and frobbing wampuses is not part of your core business, they'll put a couple of programmers on it. The way these things work, they'll come up with a clunky, limited program that does the job strictly as specified.

Fine. Now what do you do with it? In the "conventional" business model, the suits clutch it to their collective breasts and cackle "Mine!! All Mine!!!" like a miser in a bad movie. The software sits there and festers. It can't be sold (it's outside of the core business, remember) and the programmers move on to other things. Bit rot sets in.

However, suppose the company releases it as open source. Now, anybody else that wants to frob wampuses can grab a copy and hack on it. One guy needs a better user interface. Another needs to handle other types of wampuses. Yet another wants an interface in Turkish. Now, you've got a classic Open Source project, a la tC&tB , and all you have to do is ride it. Your programmers get recognition in the Open Source community and you get a better program, all for less than you'd probably spend on maintenence of the original.

Trying this in a core business area is a recipe for disaster. Mozilla is *how* late now? Why should Joe Programmer spend his spare time hacking your software just so that *you* can make money off of it?

ESR wants the tengwar in Unicode so he can use them to write the Lojban language.

If you're in an emailing mood, send one off to Xircom, too. They still won't release their old technology because of the same misguided fears about competition. They managed to turn my CEM2 PCMCIA card into a piece of unsupported junk and lost a customer in the process. Did they really think that by making the CEM2 impossible to use I would really rush out and buy one of *their* new products?

I've bitten my tongue so far, instead of responding to all the people ranting about how the ILOVEYOU "virus" is evidence of "security holes" in Outlook. (Inicidentally, ILOVEYOU is neither a virus nor a worm, but rather a trojan horse.)

You've got it right... there is a reason why attacks like these happen to Windows and not other OSs, but it's not security holes, it's just population. Linux viruses don't spread, because Linux machines are far less likely to communicate with other Linux machines than Windows machines are.

I hope you realize, though, that "inbreeding" of code is a much more difficult problem to solve than a simple security hole. In fact, multiple platforms might just cause more problems than they solve; I think it would be more effective to spend time educating users, and the media, and politicians, (and, hell, most Slashdot readers,) so they don't allow incidents like this to happen in the future.

I've bitten my tongue so far, instead of responding to all the people ranting about how the ILOVEYOU "virus" is evidence of "security holes" in Outlook. (Inicidentally, ILOVEYOU is neither a virus nor a worm, but rather a trojan horse.)

You've got it right... there is a reason why attacks like these happen to Windows and not other OSs, but it's not security holes, it's just population. Linux viruses don't spread, because Linux machines are far less likely to communicate with other Linux machines than Windows machines are.

I hope you realize, though, that "inbreeding" of code is a much more difficult problem to solve than a simple security hole. In fact, multiple platforms might just cause more problems than they solve; I think it would be more effective to spend time educating users, and the media, and politicians, (and, hell, most Slashdot readers,) so they don't allow incidents like this to happen in the future.

I've bitten my tongue so far, instead of responding to all the people ranting about how the ILOVEYOU "virus" is evidence of "security holes" in Outlook. (Inicidentally, ILOVEYOU is neither a virus nor a worm, but rather a trojan horse.)

You've got it right... there is a reason why attacks like these happen to Windows and not other OSs, but it's not security holes, it's just population. Linux viruses don't spread, because Linux machines are far less likely to communicate with other Linux machines than Windows machines are.

I hope you realize, though, that "inbreeding" of code is a much more difficult problem to solve than a simple security hole. In fact, multiple platforms might just cause more problems than they solve; I think it would be more effective to spend time educating users, and the media, and politicians, (and, hell, most Slashdot readers,) so they don't allow incidents like this to happen in the future.

• Hacker Anti-Defamation League
• How To Become A Hacker FAQ
• Jargon File entries for Hacker and Cracker

• Hacker Anti-Defamation League
• How To Become A Hacker FAQ
• Jargon File entries for Hacker and Cracker

• Hacker Anti-Defamation League
• How To Become A Hacker FAQ
• Jargon File entries for Hacker and Cracker

Correction: not all Libertarians are corporate 'greed is good' types. What you're describing is Objectivism, a 'me me me me me' school of thought pioneered by Ayn Rand. Objectivism could be considered a subset of Libertarianism. There are many, many Libertarians, myself included, who believe that Microsoft has defintely acted in an unacceptable way and needs to be reined in.

And if you still have any doubt, you can read this article by Eric Raymond about Why Libertarians Should Not Love Bill Gates.

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