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Maddog's New Hampshire "Unix" Plate Turns 20
An anonymous reader writes "Local newspaper talks to Linux International's Jon 'maddog' Hall, who lives in New Hampshire, and who since 1989 has had a 'Live Free or Die' UNIX license plate — a real one, not a conference hand-out — on his Jeep. From the story:
'The day he installed the UNIX plates, he went early to work at DEC's office on Spit Brook Road in Nashua, to be sure to get the parking space right next to the door used by all the Unix engineers. He watched them come in and, one after another, do a double take at seeing the real-world version of the famous fake plate. "People would race in and yell, 'Who is it? Whose plate is it?!?'" Hall said. It was his then and it is his now. After 20 years, one suspects you will have to pry it from his cold, dead fingers.'"
It's little known in the nerd community that "unix" has also negative conotations for example in certain ghettos in california an unix is a one-legged chinese hooker.
I wonder how long it takes until someone is offended.
I saw a chick driving a car with a Connecticut LINUX plate in Danbury. I just about divorced my wife right then and there. :)
From TOFA:
Exactly how many are there?
There is a PERL-TK New Hampshire plate cruising about as well. That one registers especially high on the geek scale.
I have a friend whose last name starts with P. His parents gave him and his brother the initials TCP and IP.
All your base are belong to Wii.
I live near Spitbrook and I've seen that plate around the area for years. I've never known the story behind it though.
" Je me souviens."
Set your phasers on "funky"!
What about their sister Ulva Daphne?
Uh huh. I gather you aren't from these parts. Might I suggest you google Article 10 of the NH state constitution? Very interesting read and is occasionally brought to the attention of the Pols here.
I can never remember my license plate numbers, so I have UNIX and Linux bumper stickers right next to them.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
My late father had "RS 232" as his license plate on his PT Cruiser. It's not as cool and hard-to-get as UNIX, I suppose, but considering recent popularity of UNIX derivatives in general it's certainly more obscure in the geek crowd.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
For those that are too lazy to look it up: Article 10
I had the great opportunity many years ago to meet Maddog at a NHLUG meeting. Very awesome and knowledgeable man.
Much respect.
-cb
The summary made me do a double-take, and if you RTFA you will see the summary is wrong. The real plate isn't based on the fake plates. The fake plates were a copy of Armando's plate long ago, he made them himself. When Armando left New Hampshire, maddog apparently took over the plate.
I have one of the fake plates from Usenix, when Armando had dec make them.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Yeah, I don't remember quite having the same connection with her.
I don't believe the latter is optional.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
Man, I can't imagine living 20 years in one state.
(or GNU/Linux if it wasn't too long to fit)
The most you can have is 7 letters on NH plates.
All give, no take?
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
Free as in beer or free as in speech?
Hey, I've had HAL 9000 in Virginia for over 20 years. Nobody made a big deal over that one.
MY license plate says: /dev/car
Which makes me the device driver!
And mani interesting furry animals
Not funny. A møøse one bit my sister :(
I would like more specifics, though I'm not going to be a tool asking you.
In MA:
(1) Gun laws are ridiculous. Not worst in the nation IMO, but certainly in the bottom five. You want that Kimber .45 that is fully parts-interchangeable with the Para 1911? Sorry; those aren't approved for sale here! You want to remove that front sight from your Bushmaster and replace it with an aftermarket gas block with a flip-up front sight? Sorry; you have a pinned muzzle brake, because for some reason threaded muzzles are too dangerous! Dumbasses.
(2) Housing is way too expensive, mostly because of local zoning ordinances that restrict the density of housing. I'd love to live within a walk or a 10-15 minute T ride from where I work, for instance, but I'm not going to pay $500K for a 1400 square foot condo: it just ain't gonna happen. And there's no reason for it to be that way except for the artificial scarcity of housing within the Cambridge/Somerville/Boston/Arlington city limits.
(3) Local government is openly corrupt. Virtually every politically-connected demographicâ"the unions, the politicians, cops, large corporations, and many of the rich local property ownersâ"colludes to transfer wealth from everyone else to themselves. Taxes don't primarily go toward public goods and common services. My total tax burden is roughly 50% than it would be were I living in NH, and yet the roads in MA (for instance) are absolute shite. I've already had to replace one $500 rim from striking a huge pothole at night this year. While it's perfectly rational that things would work this way under a democracy, there's no excuse for it when there's so much waste, fraud, and pork to remove from the budget.
(4) 12% short term capital gains tax. OMFG. That alone cost me a huge amount of money over the past two years.
That's just what I can think of off the top of my head.
The downsides to NH from friends seem to be (a) the state-owned liquor stores have a generally poor selection, though they can order what you want; (b) getting zoning approval for houses outside of established neighborhoods is a PITA because they require you to upgrade the road if it isn't class V or better; (c) property taxes are generally higher than in MA. In return, they get a part-time legislature; generally more responsive local government; less local- and state-level corruption; less sprawl and more natural areas; better roads; and lower overall taxes.
[ home ]
To beat a bunch of UNIX engineers? I guess he got in at about 10.30am
I don't think that author understands the meaning of staple.
Excuse me, I believe you have my stapler...
Squirrel!
Unreliable.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
This brings back memories. I went to the Spit Brook site once for 3 weeks in the mid 90's to spend 3 weeks with the DEC MLS+ engineering team. At the time that was the B1/CMW (Compartmented Mode Workstation) high security variant of Digital Unix. There were no training courses, so I had to go learn it from the horses mouth, so to speak, so I could support it when I got back home. I remember Spit Brook well for 3 reasons:
- Great atmosphere at the place. People were excited and enthusiastic about what they were doing. And I'd never seen such a collection of raw talent in one place before. Really bowled me over.
- It was in the middle of the biggest pine forest I'd seen in my life. Walking out the hotel in the morning I would just stop or 5 minutes and breath it all in. Never experienced air like that before, or since.
- I got invited to a cook out (had never heard that expression before) and while there I got attacked by this mahoosive black fly. I thought I'd managed to avoid getting bitten, but when I got back to the UK I discovered several strange looking bites. A red spot surrounded by a large white circle and a red ring around that. Only time in my life I've ever seen a UK doctor routing through a text book to work out what I had. He eventually diagnosed it as Lyme Disease. Apparently the fly picks it up from feeding on deer. We don't get it in the UK. A course of antibiotics shifted it.
Oh, and there was a 4th reason: Diane Lebel. I should never have left, or turned around and gone straight back. Enough said ;-)
Pretty simple if you know the history.
AT&T was a government-regulated monopoly. As part of the understanding under which the U.S. Government gave it that monopoly, AT&T was not allowed to use the base granted by their monopoly to expand into other fields.
Bell Labs was AT&T's R&D division. A lot of what they did went into AT&T's products, as you might expect. However, because of the agreement with the government against expanding into other fields, anything that Bell Labs did which wasn't directly for AT&T's own equipment was generally given out to others to use. From which we get Unix, which was developed as an experiment in a portable operating system that could be ported to any machine for which you had a compiler. Also from which we got other things like the transistor.
Bell Labs was one of those rare things that can happen when you give very smart people free rein, and it was an unfortunate casualty when the whole monopoly status of AT&T was changed.
MICRO~1
the one that says BORK
Is/Was owned by George Gobel of Purdue University. He had it since the early 80's, but I had heard that it had been stolen too many times, so he gave it up.
George has the distinction of having the first website that was slashdotted, long before slashdot. He had a video on his website of the world's fastest lighting of a barbeque grill. He took it from stone cold to slagged down in a few seconds. His site was mentioned in a Dave Barry column, and the poor sparc than ran his workstation couldn't keep up. (He did win an ignoble prize for the barbeque lighting.)
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)