Slashdot Mirror
Seeking Computer Science Fokelore?
Missing Bookmarks asks: "I accidentally deleted my bookmarks. I lost my 'Lore' folder, where I was collecting links to the classic folklore of the computer science subculture - things like Ken Thompson's Reflections on Trusting Trust, The Tanenbaum-Torvalds Debate, Dijkstra's Go To Statement Considered Harmful, and The Alice and Bob after-dinner speech. I don't need anything from The Jargon File (like The Story of Mel), because that stuff is obviously easy to find. I've listed all the things I could remember; please help me find the ones I've forgotten."
my 1mhz Commodore cost me $5,000!!!
Repeal the DMCA!
You may want to include some 'lore' about important files that were lost without any backups.
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
...do backups? Even the pros?
At least I am not alone.
WARNING: goatse.cx link!
I'm not kidding.
IT's a goatse.cx link.
You would think that the folks at Yahoo would have a fucking clue...
We did have a client that layed off their systems administrator without first getting the root password.
The original paper on Lisp by John McCarthy could be considered an important part of CS history: Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine (Part I)
Claude Shannon's A Mathematical Theory of Communication is good to know as well.
Richard Gabriels' Worse Is Better paper is also on the web, but I don't know if that qualifies. It's somewhat new to be folklore.I don't know if any of the original papers by Turing, Church and von Neumann have been put online so post some links if you find them.
I mean, "fokelore" ? Really ?
Try "folklore".
David.
INTERCAL
Speech: Free
Beer: $699.00
This?
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Ah, yeah, not that's a timeless fowlklorre.
By the way, what's the deal with that copyright message? Who the fuck would want to wear a goatse.cx t-shirt anyway?
IEN 137,
ON HOLY WARS AND A PLEA FOR PEACE
Danny Cohen 1 April 1980
Top Google
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/chris/sigc
Wait a minute. Didn't I say that on the other side of the record? I'd better check
Before the Jargon File there was HAKMEM
http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/hbaker/hakmem/hakmem
Wait a minute. Didn't I say that on the other side of the record? I'd better check
Devouring Fungus: Tales of the Computer Age by Karla Jennings
obviously you don't recognize humor when you see it. That nobody would want to wear a goatse t-shirt is what make it so funny, just like the disclaimer that doesn't really help you avoid seeing that gaping hole of an anus.
Here. oh yes, and Turing drank here, make a pilgrimage now.
What would Lemmy do?
I haven't looked up the the urls, but these are sure to be found somewhere:
1. IBM and God: In the beginning god said "I be", and then to correct his grammatical error added "Am"...
That was an amazing piece, and I'm very much looking forward to what this post turns up.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
This PDF file is something that deserves to be better known. It's not strictly about computing - it's about application of computer science to measurement of song writing. I'm not sure it would be computer folklore by most people's definition, but it definitely has a place in the geek folklore.
I accidentally deleted my bookmarks
First, you should establish some "Affordable and Safe Data Protection Practices"
Then, maybe, you could spend a few minutes googling up some links from
alt.folklore.computers
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
rm -i bookmarks.html
Its a pulitzer prize winning book called soul of a new machine by Tracy Kidder. It is unlikely that you can download it off the internet..but you never know....
Its really quite interesting and it describes computer culture and management and how Data General came to survive and its quest to make a computer to compete with Digital. Great mushroom engineering management quotes (keep then in the dark, feed them Sh!t, watch them grow). Really a great addition to any collection of computer lore.
Although not a computer science paper per se, The Hacker Papers was one of the first widely read articles about people who spend an excessive amount of time using computers. This article also introduced the original definition of the term hacker to a wider audience.
How Java Floating Point Hurts Everyone Everywhere
A Parable
http://www.symonds.net/~roshan/books/hackers.html
it's the who's who and the first two chapters. someone else may have it in a more readable font...in fact i used to have a link to a much better version, but now i can't find it...did you delete my bookmarks too?
Free Webmail
Csh Programming Considered Harmful, by Tom Christiansen.
The Ten Commandments for C Programmers (Annotated Edition) by Henry Spencer.
"The Annals of the History of Computing" http://www.computer.org/annals/ (For those of you who are English-challenged, no, this is not about past asshole programmers).
Personally the Bastard Operator From Hell makes the top of my list.
The Cathederal and The Bazzar by Eric S Raymond would be a close second.
When you are working on your computer and you've got something important going on, make sure you always mount a scratch monkey.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I keep a bunch of "classic" bookmarks around. Some are undisputed gems, others are, well, to my taste. Bytes being cheap here's a batch.
Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics
This was posted to our LUG mailing list today, I thought it belonged here, even though no mods will probably see it :(
Archive here
Can't find examples of evolution? No matter, neither could Dawkins