Software Archaeology

Plug1 writes "Salon (day pass needed) has an article about preserving software for historical purposes. It discusses source code archiving, and the effect the DMCA is having on attempts to catalog and analyze legacy code. It will be a shame if in the future a wealth of information is locked away because knoweldge of the underlying technology is lost."

Comments

My first program

[danormsby]

10 print "Hello World" 20 goto 10 Those were the days....

Just a thought you guys....

[zapp]

Unless I am mistaken Salon, like most websites trying to make some money, is having financial problems.

They changed to a registration/fee based model, but allowed 1 day passes for whatever reason.

Nothing can hurt them more than being slashdotted by a bunch of people using a day pass.

someone has already copied the contents of the article into a comment which is good because it saves them bandwidth, but ... without their permission isn't that plagiarism?

This is why things like the DMCA and DRM come about - people thoughtlessly violating other people's copyrights/etc, and/or taking their services for granted.

I'm no better than anyone else, I do the same thing.

I guess my point is: either support the people who provide services you enjoy (music, video, news, web content, porn, whatever), or quit complaining when they finally start defending themselves.

Dear Wendy's

[Letter]

Dear Wendy's,

Did someone say Dave Thomas?

I'd like a Big Bacon Classic, please.

Thanks and keep the change,
Consumer

Re:full article text, no pass required

[daviddennis]

I tried it on both Mozilla on a Linux system and Internet Explorer under Windows, and in neither case did it work.

Perhaps you need to restrict ads to Flash instead of Real?

D

Doesn't matter if no one looks at it

[Junks Jerzey]

I'm routinely surprised at how poorly rounded, even in the programming field, many coders are. So many don't know any languages other than C++, Perl, and Python. So many don't know what continuations or closures are. So many don't know what a threaded interpreter is. So many understand garbage collection on more than a polarized, superficial level. So many don't understand how a 60fps video game could be made to work on a 1 MHz home computer. So many think that a compiler is a magical thing that's impossible to implement. So many don't understand how to write software that isn't heavily object-oriented, even when it doesn't need to be. All of this information is out there, but you have to be willing to learn and have an open mind.

Re:I'm doing my part

[Qacker]

Mod parent up to Funny.