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Knuth: All Questions Answered
sunhou writes: "The AMS published a lecture by Donald Knuth called All Questions Answered (pdf), where Knuth simply responded to questions from the audience. Topics ranged from errors in software ('I think Microsoft should say, "You'll get a check from Bill Gates every time you find an error"') to how he gets distracted by fonts on restaurant menus, to software patents. There were some really good questions (and responses)."
wahoo!!!
...you first.
The Open Source movement, otherwise known as 'Free Software', has been a topic of considerable debate on the Internet's most controversial site. The majority of this debate has centered around the technical merits of the software, with the esteemed editors argueing against adopting Linux by employing the full depth of their considerable intellects, and the other side hurling death threats and similar invective. This has allowed many who would not otherwise receive quality information about Open Source software to be made aware of many of its ramifications, but one issue has been left alone: The overt racism that is deeply embedded in the movement.
Allow me to explain.
Alan Cox; Richard Stallman; Bruce Perens; Wichert Akkerman; Miguel DeIcaza.
What do you see in this list of names? Are there any African-Americans on it? Absolutely not, none of those names sound like one a self-respecting black person would have! No Maurice, no Luther, no Lil' Kim. There are many other lists such as this, you can see one here. Flip through each page, do you see anything other than white faces? Of course you don't, because Open Source and its adherents are ardent racists and they absolutely forbid access to the sacred 'kernel' by any person of color.
Lets look at another list, this time a compendium of the companies using Linux. Are there any black owned companies on that list? Nooooooo. How about these companies? They all have something to do with Open Source software, any of them owned by an African-American? No again. Here is an extensive collection of photographs from a LUG (Linux User Gathering) meeting, more can be viewed at that link. What is odd about these pictures, and every other photograph I have ever seen of a LUG meeting, is that there is not one single black person to be seen, and probably none for miles.
More racist overtones can be found by examining the language of Open Source. They often refer to 'white hat' hackers. These 'white hats' scurry about the Internet doing good, but illegal, acts for their fellow man. In stark contrast we find the 'black hat' hackers. They destroy the good works of others by breaking into systems, stealing data, and generally causing havoc. These two terms reflect the mindset of most Linux developers. White means good, black means bad. Anywhere there is black, there is uncontrollable destruction and lawlessness. Looking further we see black lists that inform other users of 'bad' hardware, Samba, an obvious play on the much hated Little Black Sambo book, Mandrake, which I won't explain except to say that the French are notorious racists. This type is linguistic discrimination is widespread throughout the Open Source culture, lampooned by many of its more popular sites.
It is also a fact that all Unix 'distros' contain a plethora of racist commands with not so hidden symbolism.
It can hardly be coincidence that the prime operating system of choice of the 'open source supremacists' - Linux, features commands which are poorly disguised racist acronyms. For example: 'awk' (All White Klan) , 'sed' (shoot nEgroes dead), 'ln' (lynch negroes), 'rpm' (raical purity mandatory), 'bash' (bring a slave home), 'ps' (persecute sambo), 'mount' (murder or unseat nubians today), 'fsck' (favored supreme Christian klan). I could go on and on about the latent racist symbolism in Linux, but I fear it would take weeks to enumerate every incidence.
Is there a single unix command out there that does not have some hidden racist connotation ? Suffice it to say that the racism pervades Linux like a particularly bad smell. Can you imagine the effect of running such a racist operating system on the impressionable mind ? I don't have to remind you that transmitting subliminal messages is banned in the USA, and yet here we have an operating system that appears to be one enormous submliminal ad for the Klan!
One of the few selling points of Open Source software is that it is available in many different languages. Browsing through the list I see that absolutely none are offered in Swahili, nor Ebonics. Obviously this is done to prevent black people from having access to the kernel. If it weren't for the fact that racism is so blatantly evil I would be impressed by the efforts these Open Sourcers have invested in keeping their little hobby lilly white. It even appears that they hate the Japanese, as some of these self proclaimed hackers defaced a web site with anti-Japanese slogans. Hell, these people even go all the way to Africa (South Africa mind you, better known as White Africa) and the pictures prove that they don't even get close to a black person.
Of course, presenting overwhelming evidence such as this is a bit unfair without some attempt to determine why these Open Sourcers are so racist. Much of the evidence I have collected indicates that their views are so deeply held that they are seldom questioned by the new recruits. This, coupled with the robot-like groupthink that dominates the culture allows the racist mindset to continue to permeate the ranks. Indeed, the Open Source version of a Klan rally, OSDN (known to the world as Open Source Developer's Network, known to insiders as Open Source Denies Negroes) nearly stands up and shouts its racist views on its demographics page. It doesn't mention the black man one single time. Obviously, anyone involved with Open Source doesn't need to be told that the demographic is entirely white, it is a given.
I have a sneaking suspicion as to why their beliefs are so closely held: they are all terrible athletes.
Really. Much like the tragedy at Columbine High School, where two geeks went on a rampage to get back at 'jocks', these adult geeks still bear the emotional scars inflicted upon them due to their lack of athletic ability during their teen years. As African-Americans are well known for their athletic skills, they are an obvious target for the Open Source geeks. As we all know, sports builds character, thus it follows that the lack of sports destroys character. These geeks, locked away in their rooms, munching on stale pizza and Fritos, engage in no character building activities. Further, they interact only with computers and never develop the level of social skill that allows normal people to handle relationships with persons of color.
Contrasted with the closed source, non-geeky software house Microsoft, Open Source has a long, long way to go.
a) because it's slashdotted
b) because the link is a pdf and I don't feel like switching over to my Microsoft system to read it. Since Acrobat is closed source, and the only free PDF readers are shit, I have no way to easily read his document.
Now, I've read the first three volumes of TAOCP, and I have all the respect in the world for Knuth. He's a brilliant guy.
However, I think he has an counter-productive obsession with typesetting. TeX is great for formulas, and PDF is great for sending stuff to a print shop... but most of us just need to communicate plain english characters (whether prose or code) efficiently an effectively, in a manner that work on all platforms. Plain ASCII works best for me. HTML is pushing it.
my penis hurts
will you fuck it up my ass for you?
There is something just plain wrong about seeing "All Questions Answered (pdf)".
Someone put the text of the actual interview in comment #3175581 but it got modded down to 0-redundant. It shouldn't have been modded that way since it wasn't redundant when it was initially posted.
This is far more funny than ANY post I have EVER seen moderated as "Funny".
I guess to get a funny score you have to make fun of Microsoft.
Well, some of us appreciate your work, Sir, it is one hell of a post!!
I only like white guys! die nigger die! die nigger die! die nigger die! die nigger die! die nigger die! die nigger die! die nigger die! die nigger die! die nigger die! die nigger die! die nigger die! die nigger die! die nigger die! die nigger die! die nigger die! die nigger die! die nigger die! die nigger die! die nigger die! Lameness filter: off smdfaksjdfokjasdfiasjdfioasjdfojasdfoiioasjdfioajs dniofnasofiojsdifjwqi0ur09432ujitnrweu098u0298c49- 23i4190cu904uc132904u89123un40cu12394u12903u902u-r c902ur39rui9123uirc92u39ru21c90rui42u3hct9rgiuhmr3 i10ur-381r0-8490tu94904u39tjoiprwjigfjetrwoiui0qwu 290uripouqcweour0iwqeuriuqwe90iu09q2cu4c90uq0iruip wequripoqweruqiu0923uq4592u3opruoipqwurio[uew9ru9q ur[opeurpiouqwe09u930q24roi0uqw2poir[q[ewu9v1um59u io3p4ri9w-3umwur[i5549u349v5mu4oierumqweu[q94mu590 24q5[m9q0ur9unq9v2umrqc9r9uwer90uvm3590qur90qwu9vr mq0549qvuwi[ewurijewijrvqiweuipwutvboueriontuvbrti iiiiiii;hr8y43298ry89 1y4r892y43u9y2 9384r9uihwuifhq89twy897y2wru9htgq4ury8971 yr892yhrui9y12389y891u2rui yhr89uyr892134r89 yhu9ry 89yr 8192ryiou1 4yr897ye289r y19824y 89y 89123y r9u298y 89y12389 y18932yu91 h3r9uhe28r9 y987 y89ry 89yr8923 198ry 98y 89321yr 981y239ry12398ry984 y98y3r 8912y983y21 r89p38 8
You wanna SUCK MY ASS?
You can! I'll let you!!
As my father lik@(munch munch)...
The old joke, "if builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs ..." is still frighteningly true; other engineering professions do not often have a commonplace equivalent of a blue-screen or core-dump.
;)
.NET or the common language mangler.
There are several problems with this, and I tend to get ticked when I see this quote tossed around.
Firstly, software is only as reliable as the language it is written in. That may sound trite, but the reality is that your language (at least in computer science) limits your ability. This is why Perl and Python are taking off, why Lisp is returning, why everywhere you look we're fleeing from C and C++. It is much, much, much harder to write secure code in C than Python, Perl, Ruby, Java, or even C++ given the standard template library. x = raw_input() can't overflow, blow the stack, overwrite important memory locations or in other ways fuck my program. That kind of security comes at an incredible cost in C---but you get it for free in every other language. But we aren't brought up to value security like we value efficiency in school. 2% of us move on to assembly to optimize their algorithms, 80% stay with C because it's the first language they know, and the rest hurry up and use Java or Perl. It's a depressing fact that lazy people like myself, who program in Python, Eiffel, or C++ because we are simple-minded and dislike complexity, and who are quite often the only people who understand *conceptually* the ideas in CS, are also the ones who are ignored, who persist in our laziness despite the attitudes of those around us, and who have such difficulty selling our ideas to other people! It's embarassing that I can do in 50 lines of Python what it would take someone 500 in C to do, even if they had the appropriate libraries! Now ask them to make it secure, if you want a great laugh! They cannot... But when have you ever seen anything written in a language *other* than C segfault? (matlab doesn't count) Half of Lisp's good reputation, when it had one, was because it was cured of that. Python, Java, Eiffel, and C++ all have exceptions to help the programmer cope with EXCEPTIONal situations, why doesn't C sympathize? Instead we get "errno" and hundreds or thousands of EXXXXXX error code constants. Fuck that. The new generation wants a real solution; a solution that doesn't begin with C[++|#|objective]
Secondly, quality of code doesn't matter to the users anyway. If it takes 25% more C code to make something work in the last funky 2%, well it's got to be out by yesterday so forget it. C++ would be great if we could have more flexibility with the libraries; the Be people spent serious time and effort in making their system libraries expandable. (If they hadn't, we'd wind up with the MFC instead of the highly-praised BeOS model.) When Windows crashes, no one is surprised. When IIS drops a few hundred users, it's written off. When MS-SQL mangles a couple rows, it's rare. When I can't connect my modem to my ISP, the phone lines are too old. These are all excuses, but in reality, you can fuck people 2% of the time and it won't be a problem, especially on this scale. Everyone knows that Microsoft's software is shit, but can we prove it? Our bad experiences are usually buried in the last fractions of a percentage point that they can legally ignore. If a building killed 2% of the people in it, it would be a problem. Nobody dies if eBay loses one of my bids. How do we even diagnose these problems when they are that rare? It's not often that every test reality will throw at your program is available to you to know while you are designing or implementing your program. Even if they were, the people programming in inferior languages like C don't always have the luxury of doing extensive tests. There is "make" for building, CVS for versioning; where is the analog for testing? Saying quality control in programming is lax may not be an understatement, but what if we were in the towel profession? Would it matter if 2 out of 100 towels just were no good? Don't take yourself too seriously---where it is a life-or-death situation, they aren't using the same languages. They're using Ada!
Third, the language you would want for this purpose has already come and gone. Eiffel had every feature it could to support the ideology of software engineering. It was a terrible flop in spite of the fact it was, and continues to be a great idea. Merely knowing these features exist in any language makes me unhappy that they don't exist in C++ or Python, or any other language people can actually use. ISE somehow remains profitable without any non-commercial interest. I have to wonder where they are used, because my only experience with it that wasn't purely motivated by my own interest was that Object Oriented Software Engineering was recommended to me by many people as a great book to learn about object-orientation from. I would be tempted to say government work if that weren't Ada's niche already. Perhaps it is education, but it certainly isn't popular around here. SmallEiffel hasn't been updated in how long? Instead Eiffel leaves the earth to be one with BeOS on the great hard drive of the sky. Or something.
To summarize: 1) it's C's fault, we all know it, and we're leaving it in the dust as of now, 2) you're comparing apples and oranges, and 3) learn Eiffel.
Remember, it's only as bad as it is today because people refuse to change. It doesn't have to be this way, and in fact, I believe it is changing for the better. Not everyone is drenched in their own anticipation of
--
Daniel