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SciFi Author (and Byte Columnist) Jerry Pournelle Has Died (jerrypournelle.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader BinBoy writes: Science fiction author and Byte magazine columnist Jerry Pournelle has died according to a statement by his son Alex posted to Jerry's web site. A well-wishing page has been set up for visitor's to post their thoughts and memories of Mr. Pournelle.
Pournelle's literary career included the 1985 science fiction novel Footfall with Larry Niven, which became a #1 New York Times best-seller -- one of several successful collaborations between the two authors. In a Slashdot interview in 2003, Larry Niven credited Jerry for the prominent role of religion in their 1974 book The Mote in God's Eye.
Wikipedia also remembers how Byte magazine announced Pournelle's legendary debut as a columnist in their June 1980 issue.
"The other day we were sitting around the BYTE offices listening to software and hardware explosions going off around us in the microcomputer world. We wondered, "Who could cover some of the latest developments for us in a funny, frank (and sometimes irascible) style?" The phone rang. It was Jerry Pournelle with an idea for a funny, frank (and sometimes irascible) series of articles to be presented in BYTE on a semi-regular (i.e.: every 2 to 3 months) basis, which would cover the wild microcomputer goings-on at the Pournelle House ("Chaos Manor") in Southern California. We said yes."
Slashdot reader tengu1sd fondly remembers Pournelle as "frequently loud, but well reasoned." He also shares a link to a new appreciation posted on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America site. And Slashdot reader Nova Express also remembers Pournelle's Chaos Manor website "later became one of the first blogs on the Internet."
Pournelle's literary career included the 1985 science fiction novel Footfall with Larry Niven, which became a #1 New York Times best-seller -- one of several successful collaborations between the two authors. In a Slashdot interview in 2003, Larry Niven credited Jerry for the prominent role of religion in their 1974 book The Mote in God's Eye.
Wikipedia also remembers how Byte magazine announced Pournelle's legendary debut as a columnist in their June 1980 issue.
"The other day we were sitting around the BYTE offices listening to software and hardware explosions going off around us in the microcomputer world. We wondered, "Who could cover some of the latest developments for us in a funny, frank (and sometimes irascible) style?" The phone rang. It was Jerry Pournelle with an idea for a funny, frank (and sometimes irascible) series of articles to be presented in BYTE on a semi-regular (i.e.: every 2 to 3 months) basis, which would cover the wild microcomputer goings-on at the Pournelle House ("Chaos Manor") in Southern California. We said yes."
Slashdot reader tengu1sd fondly remembers Pournelle as "frequently loud, but well reasoned." He also shares a link to a new appreciation posted on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America site. And Slashdot reader Nova Express also remembers Pournelle's Chaos Manor website "later became one of the first blogs on the Internet."
Too bad for you. You missed out on some great books and a magazine that helped define early PCs and programming.
Go back to your mobile device and continue ignoring the world.
I very much enjoyed the "Mote" series of novels.
Too bad for you. You missed out on some great books and a magazine that helped define early PCs and programming.
Go back to your mobile device and continue ignoring the world.
I remember Byte magazine in the early eighties. If I remember right, I quit reading it and switched to PC magazine since I had a PC, and Byte seemed to go on and on about Commodores.
I could be wrong though, since I was like 10 years old or so when I quit reading Byte.
Also, I've never heard of Jerry Pournelle.
Yes the Byte era. Eyes filled with wonder, not so jaded and cynical back then. Computers had possibilities instead of limitations.
--He was a major contributor to the "great fiction" genre. He will be missed.
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
I used to think he was intelligent and thoughtful capable of cutting through the crap, yet sadly his last "post" exemplifies all that I later found mistaken and flawed in his approach.
Maybe he isn't quite as much of a flaming ideologue as some of the die-hards here, but it still reeks of a bias, a sneering condescending disdain for the liberals that he blames for all the problems of the world.
All supported with a litany of aphorisms to recite until they are ingrained into your very soul.
Sad to lose such a man, but we lost him to his own bitterness many years ago.
Back when computers were new and exciting because it was all about the technology, not gossip or glamour. I never liked his stuff on computers or was ever into sci-fi, but I will miss his writings on NASA.
You can invent the future, but you can't predict it even as you are inventing it.
Liked the "Mote in God's Eye". Also like the different technical articles and the books.
Until Dr. Dobbs, BYTE was the technical go to computer magazine about what was happening in computers.
I credit them with almost everything I've learned about computers (despite having multiple EE degrees). When I was a little kid, I'd go to the library and spend hours a day reading all of the periodicals. BYTE was my favourite,even though I had no idea what they were talking about. I read every issue from 1975 until I got a subscription the early 90's when it took a huge dive in quality
Another one bytes the dust.
I never got tired of BYTE's amusing cover price of "32 bits". Pournelle's dispatches from Chaos Manor were always entertaining, even after he disparaged our PC utility, Automator MI.
My UID is prime!
Godwin in 9 - you guys are slipping a bit. Let's tighten it up.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Take a look in the Sci-Fi section of Amazon or a local bookstore. Mr. Pournelle made some terrific contributions to the genre. "The Mote in God's Eye" being my favourite, a collaboration between him and Larry Niven (I also really liked "Oath of Fealty") but he wrote a number of very entertaining novels as well as edited a lot of great anthologies - seeing his name on a book meant is was definitely worth reading.
In regards to Byte, I was in university at the time and I remember that other students and, more than a few professors, would go directly to his articles - he gave a different, less hyped, picture of Silicon Valley, the products, some of the people, and what was really happening and what was important. What I found most useful was his (along with family and staff) tribulations in trying out new products and setting them up - a lot of wisdom for what would be later known as "User Experience".
He hasn't written a lot in the last twenty years, but he left his mark in a very positive way.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Funny that I took BYTE's demise with a bit more sadness. But this is also sad.
If you read any of his works, you would realize he was a bit right wing.
he totally turned into a trump supporting, climate-change denying "cranky old man" as he got older
I'm imagining a beyond-the-grave interview from Heinlein. Pournelle was a pantywaist compared to RAH.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Back in '87, the tax laws were changing so that you couldn't deduct magazine subscriptions as a business expense. That didn't matter to me, but they made a special offer of a six-year subscription for $99. By the time that ran out in '93, Byte had gotten... boring. It seemed like it was nothing but reviews, and stuff that would mostly be of interest to IT department types. Except for one thing, Jerry's column. That was the only reason left for me to care about Byte, and it wasn't enough to get me to renew again.
It was good to read about the various problems he would encounter and overcome, and it was also good to know that someone else cared about keyboard layouts. Back around that time, lots of crap was being done to keyboard layouts, obviously by people who had never learned to touch-type. The worst were the broken backspace key (usually a backslash between +/= and a tiny backspace key) making the right pinky have to go too far, something between Z and left shift making the left pinky have to go too far (hey, if the Europeans do it, it must be good!), and big return keys, usually resulting in the \| key pushing something else around. But I've been a Mac guy since 1985, and Apple managed to avoid such annoyances in their keyboards. Fortunately, a sane layout won, at least in the US.
I still have a couple of old Northgate keyboards, and a stack of Model Ms that I acquired over the years, and I hope to get around to replacing their guts with a "bluepill" board running my own USB code. But it won't do me a lot of good, since most of my typing these days is done on a laptop, where there just isn't room for a good mechanical keyboard.
Anyhow, I tried to see if I could look at his most recent Chaos Manor postings, but it appears that the database behind it has overloaded. At least the page linked in TFS seems to have been made static.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Growing up with Byte, Creative Computing, 80 Micro and others...always went to Jerry's column first whenever Byte showed up in the mail. Brilliant writer, interesting perspective, loved to hear his mix of tech and non-tech. I'm sure his stuff is up on archive.org. One of the greats.
Byte was THE magazine to read for general computer news in the late 80's and early 90's. I have a bunch of them and I re-read them from time to time. This is back when nobody knew what was coming down the pipe, or what would even work. You had document-based object-oriented application paradigms being tried out, all kinds of new languages, new processor and hardware architectures being tried out. Weird storage mediums (floptical? ZIP drives? MO Drives?) By today's standards, weird OSes being tried out (BeOS, OS/2, even QNX made a bid for the desktop)
Now the big research goes into what kind of screens the next smartphones will have, or how much faster the next version of the same graphics card you own will be.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
No, his politics have always been fucked up.
He even liked Newt Gingrich!
Jerry had an interesting style of writing.
It's too bad he never wrote anything original of consequence.
His appearance in Byte marked the start of it's decline.
There were so many interesting things going on at that time.
Why would anyone be interested in the myopic view of Chaos Manor?
Not anyone with a deep interest in the evolving technology.
Kinda like what is happening to Slashdot these days.
Never heard of him. Byte magazine?
Yes, and for "Lucifer's Hammer."
Now that this old un-PC white male has died there will be less hatred and intolerance in the world. The good right thinking gender inclusive world view will take over and there will be peace and harmony in the universe.
NOT.
There will be even more hatred and contempt for your fellow human beings because they are not doing enough to combat the imaginary demons wrecking society (eg white privilege an gender binaryism). We will spend a lot less time worrying about commies though.
"a sneering condescending disdain for the liberals that he blames for all the problems of the world."
They are not the cause of all the problems in the world, just for being wrong about all the problems of the world - even when compared to the old Greatest Generation Democrats.
No, not confusion caused by his debilitating health. He was drawn into the whole devolution of the modern conservative movement for many years.
I lost a lot of respect for him when he started spouting a lot of that nonsense well before the GWB days.
Good books though.
He was always libertarian right. Guessing he'd be 'disappointed' with Trumps' level of competence at this point as he was very firmly of the "engineers can save the world" faction of the libertarian right.
I read Jerry's science fiction back when he was writing for Analog Science Fiction magazine, and later had the opportunity to work with him at Byte magazine. Byte even flew me out to Chaos Manor to get him up to speed on their new BIX system, a computer conferencing system (a pre-Web forerunner to systems like /., Ars Technica, etc.) based on software I wrote. He invited me to a party where I met the likes of Larry Niven, Bob Silverberg and Poul Anderson.
I later worked with him, Niven, Anderson and a number of other writers, scientists and astronauts as part of the Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy. We (mostly he) helped get the DC-X project started -- reusable, vertical-takeoff-and-landing rocket technology that SpaceX built on for their Falcon launcher.
He inspired me to start selling my writing, both non-fiction and later fiction. In fact, by a series of events I won't go into here (but involving the Council and an International Space Development Conference) he led to me meeting the woman I later married. When we had twin boys, we briefly (very briefly) considered naming them Jerry and Larry.
His passing isn't a complete surprise; he was getting on in years and he had had health issues in recent years, but it is still sad to see him gone. My condolences to his family, who were all very gracious when I visited his home.
Ad astra, Jerry.
-- Alastair
except anti-aging and life extension. Oh well.
Thanks for using your mod points as a "I disagree" button, I'll give you a chance to waste them some more.
The fact is, Pournelle succumbed to the worst commandment of all, not criticizing his fellow "conservatives" as declared by his Saint, the Great Reagan.
Against my better judgment, but to give the benefit of the doubt, I've read a few more pages of diaries. What do I see? The standard right-wing catechisms.
For example, the usual song-and-dance over Confederate statues, and esteem for the fabled Lee. No, it isn't history being torn down, it is a false portrayal of history being rejected. Including the traitor and oathbreaker who invaded the North, caused widespread harm, and whose real saving grace was being strategically incompetent so that slavery was nor preserved as a legal institution. I'm sure he was miseducated as a child, for which he cannot be blamed, but as an adult, well, to use his own words, he really ought to have known better.
Really, he claimed he wanted the law to be colorblind. A nice sentiment. How can you argue against it? Well, leaving aside the quibbling that say, reflecting on the importance of viewing color in this world might constitute, the observation that the most strident advocates of this purported standard often are those who express disdain and disregard towards those who are "colored" with a great leavening of falsehood and prejudice.
He should really have been more aware of the company he was keeping, the fellow travelers with which he was walking.
Failing to do so just destroyed his own credibility. As did representing the "KKK" as the militant wing of the "Democratic" party which is a phrasing widely adopted by the right lately, as they neglect to admit that they are talking about a historical association when said Democrats were more aligned with themselves in terms of political identity.
But it's the Republicans in Tennessee who are all aghast at removing Nathan Bedford Forrest's statues, the ones who fall all over themselves in defending him, ignoring his crimes and abuses. Then again, he thought that the GOP didn't sell out the free blacks of the South in 1876 either.
Oh, and he still wanted his solar power satellites and kinetic bombardment system. I really hope there is an angel teaching him the error of his ways.
I got to know Jerry personally when I started writing for BYTE back in 1984. While I had read his BYTE column as well as much of his science fiction writings to date (both solo and with Larry Niven), what I didn't appreciate until some fact time with him was how much he knew about so many subjects. "Chaos Manor" (his name for the house that he and Roberta lived in in Studio CIty) was so named because of the shelves and stacks of books everywhere, on every conceivable subject. Jerry had a BA/MA in psychology and a PhD in political science; he was also an army vet, and did a lot of consulting for the US government, both in terms of the military and the space program. He also had what was pretty much a photographic memory. When I would argue with him on subjects, he'd bring up facts and figures from a vast array of sources.
He also didn't suffer fools gladly, which is why he ticked off so many people. :-) Also, he knew too much for them to prove him wrong, which these days is an unforgivable sin. ..bruce..
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
No, we live in the closet - like gays used to in the 70s
No comments on what you think of his politics - to each his own, but how did his appearance in BYTE have anything to do w/ its decline? He just had a 1-2 page essay at the end of every magazine. If one bought it for just that, it'd be one thing, but typically, one would go there after reading the bulk of the issue - the cover story, any articles on subjects of interest, be it the latest CPU, Y2K, workstation lineups, et al. I myself didn't often read them: I mainly found a few articles of his where he described his experience w/ OS/2 Warp 3.0 when it surfaced.
BYTE declined partly due to the 'consolidation' of the industry, and also the fact that it seemed geared towards a niche readership. The print edition was doing badly, and in its last 2 years, it was considerably thinner than it used to be.
I was back home a few weeks ago cause my parents warnt I sell it. I was horrified to see my mom had tossed my dads collection of Bytes in the dumpster. One or two very specific articles had a deep and profound influence on my career. Loved the cover art too.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Well, yes and no. He had strong and not always rational views on many things. I still remember him arguing that Basic was a superior language over C. The real reason was that he just did not understand C, but the dizzying logic he used to come up with an alternative explanation for his preference was both scary and entertaining. Similar for his political views: they were a disappointment because they were argued just as poorly.
However, the main reason they were a disappointment was that on many other things he HAD a very rational and well-reasoned view. He knew what he wanted, he was very willing to spend time and money to get what he wanted, and he was very rational about it, on his own terms. That was important at the time as a counterweight to all those lofty ideas about what computers could and could not do, and all the technological geekery that went on in the rest of Byte. Arguing that Byte went downhill because of him is therefore just not reasonable. He was an important feature in Byte, and he had a unique view on the computer world that was important for that world.
The golden age of PC punditry was probably from the '90s, from the appearance of Windows 3.0 to the end of the dotcom era. Pournelle was a big part of that.
His Codominion series was pretty awesome (Mote was in that universe as I recall). I'd heard he'd been thinking about continuing it, sadly that won't happen now.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Considering he'd been a big fan of Gingrich, why would that surprise you? I actually corresponded with him briefly about a decade ago, and he was very much a libertarian with some isolationist tendencies. I didn't think much of his politics but immensely enjoyed his writing, even some of his essays
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I seem to be a bit unusual in that I didn't learn about him from reading his science fiction books, and I didn't learn about him from reading his magazine columns. A search for some computer problem led me to an entry in his day book where he had dealt with a similar problem.
Nowadays, we'd call it a blog, making it possibly one of the oldest such on the internet, but the format at the time was one page per week, with new topics added at the bottom as the week went on. There was a second one, for his correspondence. For many years, every Monday, I would load up the pages from the previous week and read bits and pieces as free time presented itself.
I didn't always agree with him, but the wisdom available (from him and his incredible readership via email) was unmatched.
In addition to current events and computers, he also included pieces on his family, his dogs, his health, opera, TV, etc. Reading it for a while, it felt like you knew him. So, one day when I was in LA, I took a wrong turn and ended up, I suspect within a few blocks from his house. I mused that if I had known I was going to be that close, I should have made arrangements to stop in to meet him and shake his hand.
When I got home a few days later, I emailed him to ask if he accepted drop-ins, should I ever find myself out that way again. He said that he'd be delighted, assuming that he was home and didn't have other plans, of course.
Sadly, I haven't been out west since then, and now I've missed the chance.
I would like to add one thing - it would be nice if people remembered his small, but meaningful, contribution to the space program, and also his role in helping win the Cold War.
See that "Preview" button?
I recently had a "whatever happened to" moment and spent an evening reading his more recent opinion posts, and it was kind of sad to see him become more hardened into an increasingly bitter-sounding, yes, even Trumpist view of the world over time. The one where civilization is always falling into disrepair from the gradual takeover of ever-expanding bureaucracy and government control.
Go back a ways and you can see all the attitudes there - the "Fallen Angels" book from 1991 isn't just about how an ice age is far more likely than this liberal global warming theory (which the liberals in the book stick to even as mile-high ice sheets wipe out Canada and are eating Wisconsin), it's about how government with liberal concerns becomes a kind of fascist dictatorship, controlling individual economic choices and oppressing honest scientists who won't toe a party line.
And then there's Mote in Gods Eye which proposes an enemy which must be inherently treated like an enemy no matter how nice and reasonable they are as individuals, because as a race, they breed like flies... and just can't help but displace us utterly from the universe if we let them out of their cage. Which are defeated by a hereditary nobility, because feudalism turned out to be the best way to bring order to our race in an age of star travel.
But you know something? It didn't work. Not on me, nor on a bunch of friends I have that all enjoy SF; we all read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress without turning libertarian, and I must have read Starship Troopers 3 times but am not militarist, and certainly Jerry and Larry didn't turn me into a feudalist who fears that the teeming hordes of populous countries will overrun us like army ants. It was all just fiction, I enjoyed it, by my core politics were not particularly affected by it.
People who get upset when authors weave their opinions into their work all need to take a deep breath: if YOU can see it, can you possibly credit the rest of us with seeing it, too? We can filter our own inputs, honest: we live in a world of advertising. [Criticized for advertising certain products to the very young, advertisers today plead back that their sneakiest approaches can't break through the suspicious natures of modern kids: by nine, they know the toy isn't really as fun as it looks on TV.]
So, yeah, I sputtered with disbelief at his column when Obamacare was enacted, raging that for the first time in his life he was now held responsible for the medical care of complete strangers - I supposed he'd never before in his life considered complete strangers over 65, despite being there himself - but I bid him farewell with sorrow. He gave me a lot of fun hours in fantasyland, and a lot of fun hours reading about the latest in WORM drives (look it up) and literally a hundred other technologies that have come, and mostly gone, all building the world's most exciting industry. I thank him for his opinions even though I shared few; testing my reasoning against his was good for me.
Jerry-haters can take some comfort, if you feel mean today: Jerry's fondest youthful dreams for The Future (i.e. now) were all cruelly disappointed. We got no moonbase, no space industries, no asteroid miners. Worse yet, while Jerry may have convinced himself that NASA bureaucracy and general liberal anti-science budget cutting were at fault, I doubt it; he was opinionated but not irrational. And the painful fact is that no private industry was ever found for space.
Jerry's stories always featured a booming space industry by 2020 because zero-gee manufacturing was going to lead to ultra-fast computer chips, amazing new drugs, and ultra-strong materials. No such private, commercial reason to build in space ever materialized, despite billions of dollars of publicly-funded experiments to find such industrial processes. That's a shame for a space dreamers, but it's nobody's fault, it's just a scientific fact about the universe: space is way harder to conquer and way less rewarding than we hoped. Some front
Of the two columns I looked forward to in each issue of Byte in the early 1980's, it was Circuit Cellar and Chaos Manor. I met Jerry Pournelle at BayCon 2006. He was on a panel to debate whether or not the Founding Fathers would support data encryption. Pournelle's believe they would even though the U.S. Constitution doesn't mention encryption, as they were using ciphers to write coded messages to avoid having their communications intercepted by the British government. I didn't start reading Pournelle's science fiction until last year.
If you have never heard of Byte magazine, then I can tell you weren't born until after 2000.
Little kids like you should not be on Slashdot.
And his ideas are refreshing in terms of US politics.
I'd love to see you naming three Trump political ideas.
Reading Chaos Manor was like meeting my hero.
And it turned out exactly as the adage predicts.
BYTE magazine was the dominant magazine for electronic and software engineers from the mid 1970's until the mid 1990's (when they went all pastel coloured and corporate IT). It was published each month and articles on everything from building your own home security system to software simulations and making your own VGA graphics card.
Early issues covered everything from cellular automata like John Conway's game of Life to fractals and networking with TCP/IP.
If you look around, you can find old scans of BYTE magazine online as PDF files.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
You can get the entire collection of BYTE magazines online as PDF articles.
Your belief that Trump is Hitler must be parody cause no one is that stupid.
Oh boy did I enjoyed reading Jerry's column in Byte magazine. Adventures in putting together PCs, troubleshooting, that was inspiring. I am still a big fan of Pournelle’s Law: Hardware problems? It's almost always a cable.. (or something like that.. see https://www.jerrypournelle.com...). I will miss you Jerry.
I believe Trump is Charles Chaplin.
I had the pleasure of reading both the science fiction he and Larry Niven wrote, as well as the Chaos Manor columns in BYTE. The latter taught me a great deal about problem solving in this new era of computing, and it was great to read about actual use cases of the new technologies that were bursting on the scene every few months. He probably ran every networking protocol invented from the early '70s to today, along with all the different wiring standards through his house. He would stick a few different mass storage devices on the network to see which ones actually came close to their marketing hype, and which ones were c**p.
His fiction was good, hard SF - no fantasy stories of witches or unicorns, but an extension of the human race into outer space. The details were clever and believable. I especially remember the scene where a crew discovers how the Moties improved a coffee machine and how it opened the characters' eyes into both the positive and horrifying possibilities of what the creatures could, and eventually did, do to all human technology they came into contact with.
I was (am) willing to overlook his politics, much as I have RAH's. Jerry Pournelle will be missed, and I am sending my condolences to his family.
Thanks, Jerry, for all your insights and creativity!
I think, therefore I am - Rene Descartes; I yam what I yam, an' that's what I yam - Popeye
Both for his SF and his Byte columns.
My obituary.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
PDF has harsher transients, whereas paper sounds warmer with a more rounded bass.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's always hilarious when people imagine that writers, actors, whatever, have saint like qualities, and are then disappointing when it turns out they are just normal people with bullshit opinions just like the rest of us.
Those are what you use when you're riding a dumb ass.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I remember Niven's paen to Heinlein, the Return of William Proxmire.
I'm kinda glad I never gave much time to Heinlein, I'd probably have turned into well,I honestly don't know what, but it would be involving rejection of said material.
Not exactly how I want to live my life. It isn't that I don't reject things, but it is like avoiding vegetables because a parent tried in a crude and brutal fashion to force them upon you.
However, that doesn't change the fact that there are some rotten potatoes that you need to avoid. Or just ones that spent too long in the sun.
But heck, maybe I can imagine their ghosts coming to a realization of what they wrought.
If I believed in the afterlife that is, so maybe I'm a little disappointed that he didn't live long enough for a chance to say that I told you so with regards to Trump, like I did with Russia, Iraq, or Reagan.
When I corresponded with him, it actually began with my mild criticism of his anti-evolution stance, or rather his critique of Darwinism (I never got the feeling he was a creationist). He leaned towards some sort of panspermia (maybe that's the SF author coming out in him)j, and I just wrote him and said I thought all panspermia did was push the problem back. He went on about how no less than Fred Hoyle was a panspermia advocate. My response was simply that while Hoyle was a very good astronomer, he was speaking outside his field of expertise when critiquing abiogenesis on Earth or asserting extraterrestrial origins of life. He took some offense to that, mainly that a mere Internet dweller would question Fred Hoyle. It was a peculiar exchange that suggested to me that he had staked out his positions and had little interest in actual debate.
I still enjoyed his writing, his military SF was some of the best of that genre, though I clearly saw his beliefs and prejudices coming out in some of his stories, but that's no different than any writer.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Don't be picky about spelling. You will upset your boss.
http://www.dailywire.com/news/5969/trumps-top-11-tweets-misspellings-aaron-bandler
The whole "KKK are extremist Democrats" is an absurd statement. That was true 70 years ago before the Dixiecrats basically split from the Democrats. And where did most of the Dixiecrats ultimately end up? In the Republican Party.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It was personal back then - owning a computer, that is. Whether you had a shining masterpiece or a pile-of-junk, it was yours and you were deeply and personally invested. People sometimes named their computers (Mr. Pournells's main computer was, "Golem") but, named- or un-named, our computers represented huge investments in time, energy and cash. Before the megacorp-driven commodity market that the computer industry has become, the PC scene was an effervescent, always-changing wonderland of new companies, new software and new products (even new product categories). In the crowded, low-rent sections of ComDex, there were hopeful and brilliant engineers hawking their latest doodads, hoping to change the world. Most failed but that didn't stop anybody from trying. What a great time it was and Byte magazine tried to pack all that into each of its issues. You definitely wouldn't want to get hit in the head with one of those issues! Jerry Pornelle's column helped to distill some of that spirit from the swirling mass of cards and code and hardware. Thanks, Jerry. You lit a path for many and entertained many more.
Does anyone here besides me remember BYTE for the incredibly clever artwork on their covers where someone would make sculptures out of electronic components? I used to love looking at that.
PDF has harsher transients, whereas paper sounds warmer with a more rounded bass.
And to get the best experience from paper, I always use my $1000 Monster reading glasses.
As you grow older, you gain clarity on a great many things - he was able to see Trump was no better or worse than any other U.S. President, which is sign you are not letting others dictate your thoughts.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
As gentlemen, we can disagree about details of his philosophy or politics, and still have respect for the man. I think no one here would dispute that we have lost a first class mind and highly capable writer. Let us then celebrate his work, let us raise a mouse (or a glass if you prefer) in his honor, for one of our own has fallen and he shall be with us no more. 8-(
Every R candidate for president back to Eisenhower has been Hitler...
Haven't you been paying attention? Swallowing bullshit takes practice, 'they' have lots and lots of practice.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I don't evaluate authors by their degree of cookie-cutter alignment with my own political views. If I did, I would have missed all the great Charles Stross that's out there now.
The grave dude. If they're still voting, you can bet it's D.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Which totally explains why their spiritual grandchildren are such big Trump fans...
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You've got nothing but pretend dude. Look at the #s of people in the KKK. It basically no longer exists. About the same number of idiots as Antifa. Lunatic fringe is lunatic, duh.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The whole "KKK are extremist Democrats" is an absurd statement.
Of course it is, but the right-wing noise brigade finds it desirable as it lets them attack today's Democrats (who were not alive during those times), since superficially they can proclaim it to be factual, even as they ignore the lack of substantial truth to it.
It's why they can swallow hook, line, and sinker, all the codswallop that Trump feeds them, it isn't like they want the real thoughtful examination that a more in-depth examination would bring.
That was true 70 years ago before the Dixiecrats basically split from the Democrats. And where did most of the Dixiecrats ultimately end up? In the Republican Party.
Well, I would say less the Dixiecrats as that lets them argue (again, they rely on superficial facts) that that never happened, and more that the GOP absorbed Southern Conservative voters and their ethos, including the deep undercurrents of racism, has been adopted into the Republican platform, even as they have lost the votes they used to get from minority voters across the country. Of course, since not a one of them know the name of Strom Thurmond, but can parrot a number of lines about Robert Byrd and his KKK connections, well, they aren't interested in the truth behind that either.
Still, no reason to hand out an easy victory that lets them storm off in pretend triumph. They're bad enough about it, no reason to frame the discussion in a way that they've already fixated their mentality upon. It is quite amusing to see it regurgitated so often.
However, one of the more amusing points I see is when they start talking about how Lincoln didn't fight the war to end slavery, but to preserve the Union. Which is true, he did say that, but the fact that the three Amendments passed were directly aimed at the issues of slavery seems to escape them. I believe that's because they don't want to recognize that fighting a war to preserve the Union against an armed insurrection is different from imposing a change to an accepted, even if vile, legal structure. That's why the Amendments were passed by legal process, not force of arms. Yes, many slaves were freed before that, but that was, at least, in areas of violent rebellion, and not exactly the preferred course of action.
After all, Lincoln, while he did want to abolish Slavery (foolish though many of his ideas about effecting that were), was not intent on pulling a John Brown. It was the Southern Secessionists who chose the course of arms, and brought the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans upon the nation.
I can make arguments that at least some forms of BASIC are superior to C. Language holy wars are something that has existed since Grace Hopper created the first compiler. With object-oriented COBOL, it is hard to suggest that any particular language is necessarily good at everything.
C just happens to have a good code base and was taught to many CS students as something to create compilers... which made a plethora of compilers available to pick from and for a whole lot of the awful compilers to disappear into oblivion from sheer Darwinian competition. BASIC was in a similar position though, which is why a certain Bill Gates happened to already know how to code a BASIC interpreter for the 8080 CPU by simply dusting off his lecture notes.
No, he was always right wing and his political points of view didn't align with my own, but they were well thought out and worth considering nonetheless.
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
The new Slashdot standard modelled after the great Sir Richard Stallman - rejoice at someone's death while playing word acrobatics in pretending not to! As Ron Burgundy would say, Stay Classy, AC!!!
My favourite story about Pournelle is the synchronicity between "Footfall" and SDI. Footfall is probably one of the very best novels of the alien invasion genre. At one point, the president of the United States calls a conference of SciFi writers to look for ideas on how to defeat the alien invaders. Shortly afterwards (in real life), Reagan calls a conference of SciFi writers to come up with ideas for the Strategic Defence Initiative. Pournelle was part of that group (and his work for NASA would certainly have leant credibility), and although SDI was a bit of a pipe-dream it did seem credible to the Soviet Union of the time, and.. well, perestroika, glasnost and the rest is history..
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
Are you done wishing cancer on people, asshole?
Panspermia has basically nothing to do with "evolution" in the Darwinist sense, all of that is the same. It only differs on the question of what got it started. Darwin didn't insist on a certain mechanism for Earth life to start, his argument is that all Earth life could evolve from a primordial form; panspermia is simply an offered primordial mechanism! Darwin talked about believing in "spontaneous generation" but also that he understood science to be not far advanced enough to handle the question. There is no reason at all to believe that panspermia is inconsistent with his views.
But the huge, gaping, unresolvable problem with the claim that panspermia is anti-Darwinist is that panspermia still supposes the exact same spontaneous generation as Darwin was considering, it simply moves it back to an earlier time in a different geographical place.
On one hand, that shows you are ignorant. On the other hand, maybe you are just too young. On the gripping hand, most likely you are an ignorant arse who is proud of his ignorance, and that's why you had to post.
The new Slashdot standard modelled after the great Sir Richard Stallman - rejoice at someone's death while playing word acrobatics in pretending not to! As Ron Burgundy would say, Stay Classy, AC!!!
Oh unixisc, your feigned outrage as you rush to the defense of yet another of your icons would be more believable if you weren't such a known hypocrite.
Sorry, but you have completely ignored, even endorsed, the hurling of vile vulgarities at the living, so your inability to tolerate the criticism of a dead person is obviously disingenuous. Much like Jerry Pournelle, as recounted already. And combined with a remarkably similar nature of effusive praise for the more repellent among us.
It'd be one thing if you had offered some real response in disagreement, but you are incapable of even that engagement, and so resort to the refuge of pretending that somebody else is not "classy" enough for you.
That said, no, I feel no rejoicing, there are people whose death would please me greatly, I can freely admit that there ar some whose pain and suffering I would relish in, but I've been left Jerry Pournelle in the dust for well over a decade, perhaps close to two, and so far, all his death has made me feel is that...I was entirely correct in my prior analysis, and you've offered no evidence to contradict it. Rather the opposite.
So thanks for your help too. Do you have a blog? I'd like to be sure I'm not associated with you, your ideas, or your newsletter.
On the gripping hand, ...
Nicely done.
Jerry is one of the few names I clearly remember from the many years I followed Byte. As a young, non-English-speaking boy, Byte is partly responsible for my interest in computers — and for my domain of English, mainly of a technical variety.
So, in the later years I didn't like so much Jerry's viewpoints, but he was a clear influence in my life, and in my choice of career.
Anyway... Thanks for all the fish.
Pournelle came from a time when United States patriotism was understood to be a good thing, and rightly so. He was brought up Roman Catholic, and that formed another base for his views. Like many with that combination of views, he did not understand the inherent conflict, and that showed up as holes in his arguments that he could not recognize.
Pournelle was extraordinarily intelligent. Many extraordinarily intelligent people learn early on that people who disagree with them are usually wrong, and for the sake of efficiency should be ignored or their arguments discarded without due consideration. However, his knowledge of many areas of history and current events was deep, wide, and insightful, resulting in his conclusions being much better than most people's.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
The left explicitly rejects logic. At least the right tries to be logical.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
My take on Jerry Pournelle was that he was an asshole that wrote like an angel. I was in the room and watched when he threatened to throw RAH out the window. I think it was Jim Baen that talked him down. It was at the Space Development Conference in San Francisco; for some reason they had an âoeauthorâ(TM)s roomâ that I crashed. Jerry spent the whole conference drunk.
One thing that panspermia does address is to maximize the likelihood of life to seed a planet that has life supporting characteristics and make the Drake equation have at least one variable that is near 100% in terms of probability.
It is unlikely that panspermia has impacted only the Earth and perhaps a couple other planets that passed through one part of the Galaxy.
It also provides a mechanism to explain how something extremely unlikely to happen in one particular spot could still be virtually universal, for the same reasons. In other words it turns the watchmaker arguments of creationism on its head as a sort of cosmological "Infinite Number of Monkeys" theorem applied to the creation of the Prokaryotes and their appearance on the geological record.
The left explicitly rejects logic. At least the right tries to be logical.
No, ChrisMaple, the left does not explicitly reject logic, despite your claims, I know you are really saying that because your faulty logic and false argumentation is so regularly rejected, but I do appreciate your demonstrating how the right prefers to behave, a self-righteous arrogant posturing that reflects your tendency to be overcome by rampant emotional hysteria and a desire to repeat the same histrionics that you claim are in others. I certainly can't deny that you consistently espouse the same mantras, flawed as they are.
Like I said, it is your greatest hubris.
Maybe an asshole who wrote like an angel that couldn't write fiction if its immortal life depended on it.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
I remember eagerly waiting every month for our local library to get the latest Byte Magazine. I loved reading Chaos Manor.
Jerry was not a Trumpist, he simply preferred Trump over Hillary Clinton.
He was a small(er) government advocate with a libertarian bent, kind of like Heinlein. He would frequently go off about how monstrously large our federal government has become, citing "Federal Bunny Inspectors" (yes there is such a thing).
My favorite issue of Byte (so much so, I've kept it all these years) is from March 1988 [https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1988-03, PDF pages 225-232] solely because of the beach ball rendering with Phong shading.
After modifying the code so it would compile in Turbo C, I'd execute the program on every PC in the office. The article states the program took 8 minutes on an 80386 with FP emulation; add in an 80387 and run time dropped to less than 30 seconds. That was my experience on our fleet of 286 and 386 office machines.
Running it on my home PC (286-12) without a floating-point co-processor took significantly longer than a 386 but when I plugged in a 287 (yes, I actually bought one so I could run AutoCAD 9), it decreased as dramatically as the 386/387 combo.
I can make arguments that at least some forms of BASIC are superior to C.
Quite possible, for some application areas. However, the arguments Mr. Pournelle gave for BASIC and against C showed that he did not understand C, and that he was not aware that he did not understand it.
Language holy wars are something that has existed since Grace Hopper created the first compiler.
Yes, but they are only interesting if the arguments are solid; coming as poorly armed as Mr. Pournelle to these wars is just tedious, and tells more about the person than the languages involved.
The first problem being we actually have no idea how likely or unlikely abiogenesis is.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Pournelle came from a time when United States patriotism was understood to be a good thing, and rightly so.
Indeed, he was a victim of his early upbringing in a period of deep and pernicious indoctrination. The history books they had back then are practically nauseating.
He was brought up Roman Catholic, and that formed another base for his views. Like many with that combination of views, he did not understand the inherent conflict, and that showed up as holes in his arguments that he could not recognize.
Actually, according to his blog, he was raised Unitarian, then converted to Roman Catholicism in High School, so I can't say he was raised Catholic, though perhaps it did influence his thoughts.
Still, his opinion on the issue of birth control was laboring under a number of misapprehensions, and perhaps it lead to his defensiveness on that issue which contributed to his failure to address the concerns brought up about it. Though how he came to the opinion that Rush Limbaugh's thoughts were organized is baffling.
Pournelle was extraordinarily intelligent. Many extraordinarily intelligent people learn early on that people who disagree with them are usually wrong, and for the sake of efficiency should be ignored or their arguments discarded without due consideration.
Yes, that is a common personal fault that is hard to transcend since for the intelligent it is so very appealing.
Of course, that has been known for thousands of years, so not exactly a new lesson.
However, his knowledge of many areas of history and current events was deep, wide, and insightful, resulting in his conclusions being much better than most people's.
Nope, it lead to his frequent inability to realize his own faulty conclusions, but then I recall reading his remarks on the famed
Harvard-Stanford urban legend. To him, it did not matter that it was a fabrication, it was the sentiment that it espoused.
An insight to his character that was more than a little revealing.
In terms of a theory like Newton's laws of motion that can give a ten digit accuracy assessment, you are correct. Still, if there is a 10^-90 probability and 10^100 "experiments" going on in a given galaxy, that is still some room to suggest a high likelihood of occurring on a galactic scale even if it is almost impossible to have happen on a given single world.
I would hope it would be more likely than that extreme level of improbability, and given how artificial eukaryotes have been created in a laboratory from a completely abiotic initial state there is at least a pathway for it to happen. Yes, creation of life from raw elements has occurred with nothing more than a couple biologists simply willing it to happen (and a whole lot of interesting chemistry with a fully functioning organic chemistry lab). Designing a minimalist DNA strand was particularly impressive.
Jerry was not a Trumpist, he simply preferred Trump over Hillary Clinton.
Nope, his level of cloying sycophantic admiration for Trump far exceeded merely choosing the lesser of two evils, mistaken though that may be.
It is quite evident in his most recent blogs, I don't think it took me more than one or two to see an example of him touting the Emperor's new clothes.
He was a small(er) government advocate with a libertarian bent, kind of like Heinlein.
Asinine, full of himself, and generally wrong-headed?
He would frequently go off about how monstrously large our federal government has become, citing "Federal Bunny Inspectors" (yes there is such a thing).
Yes, he did try to make hay over that. And that reveals something about his character, since he neglected to give consideration to animal abuse and exploitation, disease, or ecological concerns.
There are valid concerns about government, but his tendency towards such histrionics served poorly to advance that.
Actually, the election evidence shows that the GOP absorbed the Peripheral South and gained in the South primarily from the importing transplants into the region, not by converting Dixiecrats and Democratic Party KKK leaders like Robert Byrd into Republicans. The racist Democrats in the Solid South primarily stayed Democrats. The GOP got more votes from the non-racists, both among the existing population and from immigrants from other States to turn the South into their voting block, beginning with the least (not most) racist States. The details have been written up in many places, but here’s one I found with a quick Google search if you’re looking for more details.
To quote that article in relation to the myth you keep trying to spread:
"Starting in the 1950s, the South attracted millions of Midwesterners, Northeasterners, and other transplants. These "immigrants" identified themselves as Republicans at higher rates than native whites. In the 1980s, up to a quarter of self-declared Republicans in Texas appear to have been such immigrants. Furthermore, research consistently shows that identification with the GOP is stronger among the South's younger rather than older white voters, and that each cohort has also became more Republican with time. Do we really believe immigrants were more racist than native Southerners, and that younger Southerners identified more with white solidarity than did their elders, and that all cohorts did so more by the 1980s and '90s than they had earlier?
In sum, the GOP's Southern electorate was not rural, nativist, less educated, afraid of change, or concentrated in the most stagnant parts of the Deep South. It was disproportionately suburban, middle-class, educated, younger, non-native-Southern, and concentrated in the growth-points that were, so to speak, the least "Southern" parts of the South."
Or as the NY Times put it:
"In the postwar era, they note, the South transformed itself from a backward region to an engine of the national economy, giving rise to a sizable new wealthy suburban class. This class, not surprisingly, began to vote for the party that best represented its economic interests: the G.O.P. Working-class whites, however — and here’s the surprise — even those in areas with large black populations, stayed loyal to the Democrats. (This was true until the 90s, when the nation as a whole turned rightward in Congressional voting.)
The two scholars support their claim with an extensive survey of election returns and voter surveys. To give just one example: in the 50s, among Southerners in the low-income tercile, 43 percent voted for Republican Presidential candidates, while in the high-income tercile, 53 percent voted Republican; by the 80s, those figures were 51 percent and 77 percent, respectively. Wealthy Southerners shifted rightward in droves but poorer ones didn’t."
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Actually, the election evidence shows that the GOP absorbed the Peripheral South and gained in the South primarily from the importing transplants into the region, not by converting Dixiecrats and Democratic Party KKK leaders like Robert Byrd into Republicans.
See? I already said they know the name of Byrd, but not ACTUAL Dixiecrats like Strom Thurmond that were warmly embraced by the GOP. Mysterious oversight that.
Anyway, It's almost as if you are reciting a scholarly lesson that you see fit to educate us with. In fact, you sound like you borrowed somebody else's phony lecture.
The racist Democrats in the Solid South primarily stayed Democrats.
Oh? Like how numbers of them voted for Reagan? Or Goldwater? Or even Nixon of all people. That's basically because they forgot about the GOP being the party of Lincoln.
The GOP got more votes from the non-racists, both among the existing population and from immigrants from other States to turn the South into their voting block, beginning with the least (not most) racist States.
You mean the states that they gained first were the ones that were the least part of the Solid South? Gosh, who knew!
But the tide quickly turned, and by the 1980s, the Solid South was clearly trending Republican.
The details have been written up in many places, but here’s one I found with a quick Google search if you’re looking for more details.
To quote that article in relation to the myth you keep trying to spread:
Or you can read another study that comes to a different conclusion.
In sum, the GOP's Southern electorate was not rural, nativist, less educated, afraid f change, or concentrated in the most stagnant parts of the Deep South. It was disproportionately suburban, middle-class, educated, younger, non-native-Southern, and concentrated in the growth-points that were, so to speak, the least "Southern" parts of the South."
Suburban middle-class represents the most racist and bigoted groups across the country, or what I would call the "most" White and Southern parts. In reality, the GOP's Southern electoral was and is nativist, their education level is a meaningless distraction, they are afraid of change, and they are indeed not concentrated in the poorest regions of the South because that's where the minorities are, and they know that the GOP doesn't care one bit about them.
(This was true until the 90s, when the nation as a whole turned rightward in Congressional voting.)
Yes, thanks to Newt's broken Contract with America, that ended up being the Impeach Clinton show. Great job there, huh?
Only a few years later, what did we get? Interminable war in the Middle East, a massive economic collapse brought on by fraud, and the revelation of a sex abuser among the prosecution team.
Wealthy Southerners shifted rightward in droves but poorer ones didn’t."
That's because they were predominantly (though not exclusively) minorities. Which the Republicans lost in droves. Of course, others are naive enough to fall for the Republican dogma, but that's because well, the party of Reagan and Trump is blowing their dog-whistles for them.
I really don't see this at all. Pournelle was far from a libertarian. He loved the government and regularly schmoozed with the politicians.
Well, he loved to recount his brief period of modest influence, but he most certainly was a Libertarian, just one with fond, if inflated memories of the reach of his opinions. Pournelle, like a lot of people, became a lot more ideologically rigid as he got older, and suffered that saddest and most debilitating of conditions, pointless contrarianism.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
get those fucking carbs out of your diet! That shit almost killed me too in 2014.
You want a low carb High Fat diet. The food pyramid is a fucked up piece of murderous shit.
There is a great article from author Sarah Hoyt on Jerry, who by all accounts was really helpful to other writers - I liked a lot of JP stuff but it's even more impressive to think of all the other great SF the world has today he may have helped foster.
Of special note is that Jerry was truly open minded and not really part of the political spectrum as some here are trying to paint him. From the article:
In fact, that to me was Jerryâ(TM)s characteristic: in an age riven by deep political divisions, he refused to draw a political line, and associated with people on both sides of the spectrum, treating all as humans and worthy â" or not worthy â" of his attention. (Yes, I do remember a few comments of âoeweâ(TM)re done hereâ in answer to less-than-stellar arguments.) If anyone drew a political color line, it was not Jerry. In fact, he urged me more than once to be forgiving of things that colleagues on the left side of the spectrum said while in the heat of battle. Heâ(TM)d point out the good things theyâ(TM)d said â" or done, or written â" and find excuses for their more intemperate behavior.
It's worth remembering that these days, if you do not agree with some people 100% they will consider you a vile enemy, to be tarnished and dismissed. The world is better off with people like Jerry, who welcome discussion from all and treat everyone as human regardless as viewpoint. We would all do well to remember his example.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
PDF has harsher transients, whereas paper sounds warmer with a more rounded bass.
And to get the best experience from paper, I always use my $1000 Monster reading glasses.
Just try reading it with diamond. Some technophiles are trying laser but the pleasing resonances with the arm are impossible to recreate with a laser...
I met Jerry decades ago at a Soldier of Fortune convention to which my then boyfriend had dragged me. As the days progressed my attire morphed somewhat, to John's obvious delight. In those days I was pretty decent looking. Then I got sadder and wider instead of wiser. So I was dressed down somewhat extremely when John and I were sitting at one of the Sahara Hotel's (RIP) bars awaiting Jerry's presentation. We were talking about an observation I, an engineer in the RF communications field, had noticed. I asked John to back me if I went over to ask Jerry about it.
Jerry had just been approached by a trophy hunter who tried to bed the macho men at the SoF convention and write a book about it. Jerry had brushed her off. So I walked over. He expected another proposition. "May I ask a question about the people here at the convention?"
He allowed me to ask. So I asked something like this (the exact quote is lost in time), "For a collection of men who are obviously interested in the art of warfare why in heck is there no communications equipment on display along with the firearms in the huckster room?"
Jerry performed the best double-take I have ever seen. His expression went through states faster than I could register. Finally with a mildly bewildered look he allowed as how he didn't know and that it was indeed a good question. Then we went off to his presentation.
Some time later I got into my car with John and we went to the local Science Fiction and Fantasy club, LASFS. Jerry was there and recognized me. We had fun talking dirty, I mean techie both PCs and novels.
Along about 1985 when BYTE Magazine's online service BIX was being beta tested Jerry whispered to me during a LASFS meeting, "Don't leave before you talk to me." So outside we talked. He gave me the instructions for accessing BIX's beta test. I didn't know he was a damn pusher! {^_-} It infected me so badly that by the time BIX's lights were turned out I was the head moderator on the system and getting paid for my addiction.
During all this time I never once saw Jerry as anything other than an old style gentleman to those who treated him fairly and decently. If I had to grade how much I respected him on a scale of one to ten it would be something like 15. We didn't always agree. But he respected me and I respected him. (And I still think the Commodore Amiga was better than either the Macintosh or the IBM PC of the same era. {^_-})
Damn I'm going to miss him even though I've been expecting it and dreading that it would happen someday. Warranties expire. His did. Mine is in the process. Still, losing him is a serious loss. I sit here imagining his parade ground tenor happily giving God some computer advice to make his job easier or spinning yet another good yarn.
Jerry, please rest in peace. Your legacy will live on for a long time.
{^_^} Joanne Dow
Would you post your name, please? Or your user id?
Here's to mom's and their throw-away ways. From comic books to magazines, the collectors market owes you big.
His final post on Chaos Manor was the day before he died, and spot-fucking-on:
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/
I don't disagree that he had inflated memories of the reach of his opinions, that he may have become more ideologically rigid as he aged, or that he was pointlessly contrarian, but I would say he fits the criteria of Fauxbertarian instead. All his protests regarding the size of government, or its scope and nature, were merely feigned, sputterings of an affectation that he adopted because he simply could not accept his genuine sentiments so he needed to seek refuge in a self-deluded illusion.
Like many similarly arrogant and controlling people, he wanted freedom for himself, the unfettered right to behave as he pleased, but saw no problem in binding others who were not as qualified to be independent and free, but needed to be regularly chastised and subjugated.
However, in what may interest you, there is a sequel to the series by a J. (Jennifer) R. Pournelle with a description that reads like it was meant to enrage the Sad Puppies, so you might wish to try it.
There are 5000 or fewer KKK members in the entire United States - FAR fewer than Antifa.
Remember that the "Biggest White Supremacist gathering in 50 years!" in Charlottesville (which included not only KKK, but neo-Nazis and garden variety bigots) only managed to attract about 200 people... fewer than the number of rioters ARRESTED during Trump's inauguration.
FFS, the NAACP is more than 100 times larger than the KKK!
Mind blowing.
To begin with, I wouldn't bet my life that this quote originated from Twain (for that matter, I would be hard pressed to bet my life Twain ever said "Twain, Mark Twain") but let's ignore the ironic recursion.
The smarter you are, the more exposed you become to the final sliver of error.
And then, if you shut down the feedback loop of last resort in the name of efficiency then the final score is Hubris: 1, IQ: 0 for any value of IQ (which is anyway a set of measure zero, despite here and there a flirtation with numbers—180, 190, 200—that might almost boil water by sheer mental exertion).
How about we set Pournelle beside Pournelle squared?
According to Norbert Weiner:
I got that impression originally from a David Hoffman documentary (since taken down from YouTube), the above are similar sentiments recounted on Quora.
I was never a huge fan of Pournelle's fiction. Had it not been that Niven's Ringworld was somewhat thinly plotted—plot was always Niven's weak underbelly—I doubt their collaboration would have ever happened.
Niven with a thin plot was still ten times better mind food than anything Pournelle ever wrote.
For anyone mentioning that Ellison also had a prick gear, check out the documentary Dreams with Sharp Teeth (2008). He comes across as a bristly guy with a prick gear, but mostly tolerable the rest of the time.
If I had to choose one or the other to be stuck with on a destroyed island paradise, it would be prophetic Ellison over Pournelle all the way (though definitely Pournelle over oracular Ellison). At the end of the day, I did continue to read Pournelle's columns, something that can't be said for John C. Dvorak.
There are 5000 or fewer KKK members in the entire United States - FAR fewer than Antifa.
It's funny how the KKK has captured the popular imagination so much as if they were the only source of bigotry and racism in the US, and if you aren't a card-carrying member of the KKK, you aren't bigoted or racist at all.
Or something. It is odd how you only want to mention the KKK to dismiss it though.
Remember that the "Biggest White Supremacist gathering in 50 years!" in Charlottesville (which included not only KKK, but neo-Nazis and garden variety bigots) only managed to attract about 200 people...
You haven't noticed the hyperbole of the Right-wing? Everything, even Trump's inauguration, is the BIGGEST EVAH and there's no arguing with it. I even remember their "Trucker blockade" around DC, that they touted as somehow going to cause a shutdown.
But I'm pretty sure there were more than 200 racists and other bigots at the last NASCAR race, certainly more than that booing the First Lady and Doctor Biden when they were at a NASCAR race. And probably more than 200 racists and bigots at the Bundy Ranch standoff.
fewer than the number of rioters ARRESTED during Trump's inauguration.
Yeah, yeah, you keep trying to get us to get upset at these alleged rioters, but somehow it is more of a farce since it turns out that you just want reasons to shut protesters down.
FFS, the NAACP is more than 100 times larger than the KKK!
And that's TERRIBLE, isn't it? How dare they have a lobbying group!
i for one found his last post to clearly cut to the chase wrt the 'dreamers'. while your bias is clearly that the constitution is merely an inconvenient trifling document that should be ignored when it's not possible to twist it's meaning to suit your biased needs, i on the other hand do not.
it was the only possible outcome, and all is as it should be. time for the congresscritters to do some work, heaven forfend that though.
goodbye jerry, and damn that was quick from last post to the dreaded announcement
Larry Niven credited Jerry for the prominent role of religion in their 1974 book The Mote in God's Eye.
I wonder if that's all of Pournelle's contributions to that book that Niven remembers... I remember at least three other prominent aspects that were very un-Niven-like: the absolutely uncritical fawning over anything military, the embrace of authoritarianism, and disdain for civilian government.
From another book, Oath of Fealty, I think, I remember his aggressive Ozone-denial (remember when people denied the impact of CFCs on the ozone layer?), something I don't think he ever retracted or apologized for.
As another poster noted, Pournelle was a hack writer who never would have amounted to anything if the collaborations with Niven hadn't lifted his credibility. And would anyone have been interested in his Byte column if it had been by Pounelle, person you've never heard of, instead of Pournelle, famous sci-fi writer?
I think you are mistaken. He supported Pascal and Modula-2 over c because he felt they were safer languages. C++ smart pointers and other new features show that he was probably on to something. He was not a programmer and never claimed to be.
He did write some software in S-Basic for CP/M. He was very pro CP/M, Apple, and Atari but did not like Commodore at all. He had his biases like most of us. He would call the Apple bomb error message whimsical but the Amiga Guru meditation error childish. I think that it had to do with Commodore not being a West Coast company so he didn't have any personal connection to it.
He would review lots of software and hardware from a users point of view and was always fun to read.
BTW I make my living as a C++ programmer and I have used C for a long time. I like them both but they are not for the faint of heart and frankly, if you write an accounting system in it you are doing it wrong.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I remember Jerry with great warmth and respect. We chatted many times during the BBS years on many topics, and I was an avid reader of his columns He will be hugely missed!
This is rather bizarre. BASIC was never intended as a development language, but rather as a sort of hybrid-simplified COBOL/Fortran to be used to introduce people to computing concepts. Yes, over the years, that ease of learning and use gave it a certain edge, not to mention that MS's version of BASIC ended up on most microcomputers in the 1970s and 1980s.
C, on the other hand, was developed specifically as a mid-level language that could be used to develop both system-level and user-level software, but in particular the former. It was designed to build kernels, drivers, and heck, even other compilers. It's strength in being much more low level are the reason it became dominant. It was always intended as a production language, and its association with Unix both in kernel and userland development gave it that edge. It was intended for things BASIC never was.
BASIC gained a good deal of its modern capabilities by introducing concepts like procedural and ultimately OOP programming, either from C/C++ or from Pascal (which, really, always was a far better learning language). I did work in QuickBASIC in the 1990s, and attached to a compiler that could import C libraries, it became a fairly powerful language, but that certainly wasn't the BASIC Pournelle was familiar in the 1980s, and I'd argue that the structured BASIC variants that arose in the late 80s and early 90s were more like weakly-typed PASCAL variants than traditional BASIC. Traditional BASIC really isn't a very good language at all, and this is coming from someone who started programming in the MS-BASIC variants found in Radio Shack and Commodore computers. Developing large complex programs in those dialects was horrible, and languages like C and Pascal was like a revelation.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
We're talking about a guy who invented and named his own law; the Iron Rule of Bureaucracy. Whether you agree with his analysis, there's a level of conceit in naming your own law. Pournelle thought himself a very important man, and took every opportunity to remind people of the influence (as modest as it actually was) that he possessed at one time. He also had an uncomfortable habit of name dropping other SF authors, particularly the great ones, though I can't imagine that the likes of Asimov would ever have been that impressed with him.
I enjoyed his writing, and was able to wade past some of the obvious ideological slants he inserted, but he was at best in the second tier of SF authors, a good writer but not a great one.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I did quite a bit of development in Visual BASIC, and saw that you could certainly develop powerful complex pieces of software in that language that would be as efficient and powerful as any C++ development environment. While there were certainly some shitty things about the specific Microsoft implementation of the language, it worked out pretty well.
In my case I've done extensive development in multiple languages on multiple computer platforms. Over the years I've really grown to detest C development primarily because it is really good at obfuscation and if you are a mediocre developer in it the code goes from awful to hideous in a real hurry. Trying to pick up the pieces from a low quality C programmer and trying to fix stuff is a big pain in the behind that I found to be much easier in other languages. Something else that as a general rule I've found is that a typical C/C++ program that has been sitting on a back burner for awhile that I haven't been doing active development upon takes me a whole lot longer to get back into working on. Switching to something in that language that I haven't worked on actively for over a year takes me about 2-3 days to really get back into the groove of development.... something that for my Pascal code usually only takes me a couple of hours at most. BASIC is sort of in between for my experience but definitely easier than the C code to get back into the swing of development.
At the moment I still think Scratch is by far the best introductory programming language, and is definitely better than LOGO or BASIC for that job (and so far better than Java or Javascript I can't begin to say how lousy those are for new programmers). Yes, BASIC did start out as a simplified programming language intended for introducing programming concepts, but I think it is that simplicity which gives it a whole lot of advantages.... assuming that those who graft on extra features are already familiar with the flavor of the language and what makes it powerful.
Still, in spite of Jerry Pournelle perhaps not having a whole lot of experience with C, there is something to be said about how as a language... even as a compiled language (where there definitely exist some pretty decent compilers following in the tradition of the original Dartmouth variant), BASIC is a useful and powerful language that can be used to create complex and useful pieces of software and I dare say can even be used to create operating systems if anybody cared. In terms of the raw machine code produced, the language is sort of immaterial other than how you as a developer can comfortably get the ideas out of your head and into the computer in an efficient manner.
i for one found his last post to clearly cut to the chase wrt the 'dreamers'.
I find it to clearly indicate a lack of genuine argument, and resorting to a facile appeal to authority without even actually investigating the situation to demonstrate the substance of his position. It is kinda shady that he didn't cite the specific clauses of these alleged laws.
It is the kind of thing he tended to do. Given a situation that he didn't want to address, instead of recognizing the injustice of it, he turned a blind eye and started making protestations about the Constitution, or some other authority, never taking responsibility for himself.
But of course, anything he WANTED to do, he'd do, as he wanted, how he wanted, and damn the rest of us for opposing.
while your bias is clearly that the constitution is merely an inconvenient trifling document that should be ignored when it's not possible to twist it's meaning to suit your biased needs, i on the other hand do not.
And the kind of thing that you tend to do, apparently, wrapping yourself in the sacred parchment of the Constitution in order to establish a pretense of sanctimony that was actually repudiated by the Founders themselves, let alone the persons like yourself, that taint it by your own actions.
Not that either of you is the first, or the worst. You're way behind Taney and the Dred Scott decision, for example.
Of course, the greatest irony is that the state of Tennessee's own constitution repudiates the notion, expressly and without doubt.
That, and if I wanted to be pedantic, I'd point out that there's no Federal authority to cover residence in a state, merely naturalization. Thus if he (and you) truly respected it, you'd follow your own principles.
it was the only possible outcome, and all is as it should be.
Not really, no, as the documented failures of Trump's administration in regards to handling immigration show, things are not being handled as well they should be, and there's now a lawsuit against him for ending it, so ultimately, it's going to end up in the same place it was going to go before he made his choice.
Trump certainly solved nothing. He passed the buck.
time for the congresscritters to do some work, heaven forfend that though.
Which is another way Trump tends to fail, promising great destruction and cataclysm if Congress doesn't fix things in order to attempt to coerce them. A pity Jerry Pournelle never saw it as a problem.
Of course, the President does have the authority to convene Congress, and he could do that, but mysteriously, that hasn't happened.
Still, Pournelle's proposal (I will not call it a solution) reflects very poorly on him, as if he was channeling Starship Troopers. I'd have taken it with more seriousness if he'd accepted any number of forms of public service, but no, we did not get that, now did we? I suspect he was still captivated by a love of the notion of Empire.
But really, Surgical Assistant? Not surgeon? Chauvinism on display. Not that it wasn't obvious from the "combat" portion, mind you.
goodbye jerry, and damn that was quick from last post to the dreaded announcement
Still, over 20 hours, hard to say whether he passed quickly, or lingered.
Of course, if he was experiencing nausea, it's not impossible he died while vomiting.
RIP Dr. Jerry E. Pournelle As someone who has known Dr. P. for over 25 years and worked with him in several areas, here are some facts and personal opinions that may be easily overlooked, even by loyal fans of his Byte column, books and collaborations. First, he was deeply patriotic with a practical outlook based on a lifetime of real-world experience. This included creating and heading the Citizen's Advisory Council on National Space Policy (CACNSP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... as well as doing human factors work during the Apollo era. Second, in bringing together a large group of talented visionaries (and there was a time when the country was not so deeply politically divided) the Council was able to "work both sides of the isle" in Congress to move space law forward to create an environment where companies such as Blue Origin, Space X and others could exist. https://www.jerrypournelle.com... (Dr.P. did recount to me one of his meetings with Newt Gingrich in the kitchen at Chaos Manor.) Third, His running "day journal" was one of the first, if not the first, daily blogs. https://www.jerrypournelle.com... Fourth, his work on BIX, the Byte information exchange, was an early forum with thousands of daily hits. This is where I first met Dr.P. and became a co-moderator with him to help with his workload. I was later invited to assist with some column reviews and eventually membership in the CACNSP Fifth, Dr. P. did tend to be loud. Part of this was his personality and part of it was a hearing loss due rather loud artillery during his service to the country. Six, Dr. P. always called it as he saw it, which offended some and delighted most. His struggle with alcoholism he did win in time, those who call him friend forgive him, those who don't tend to crucify him. Seventh, The DC-X was a pivotal demonstration that rocket-powered vehicles can (and should) be reusable. Up until those tests at White Sands, of which I attended many times (sometimes in Jerry's place when he could not attend), were a testament to Pournelle, General Graham, MaxHunter and many others. The combination of DC-X, space law changes and Internet billionaires led to where we are now - we just wanted things to happen about 20 years sooner! Eighth, Pournelle told me that the day the strategic defense initiative was announced Roddenberry called him and said "I know what you are trying to do, you are trying to bankrupt the Soviet Union!" And Dr. P. responded, "Gene you have the equation right but the sign wrong, you are supposed to like it!" In summary, like him or not, Dr. Pournelle worked with many to help end the war with the Soviet Union, enlighten millions of people on personal computers and the Internet, create space travel that is reliable and affordable, envision a future of limitless opportunities and even do one of the screenplays for a Planet of the Apes movie :-)
bix: david42
aka: lagunastarman
I don't know when you started coding in BASIC, but I started about 1982, on a couple of dialects of MS-BASIC (one for the Radioshack Color Computer and the other the variants on the Vic-20 and Commodore 64). Developing larger applications was an unpleasant experience. With limited variable lengths, meaning often undescriptive variable names, limited memory meaning you were limited in the number of comments you could insert, developing larger applications was quite an ordeal.
If you're talking about the structured variants that began to appear in the late 1980s, well, that was an entirely different experience. You had something akin to modern IDEs, far fewer limitations on variables, structured (and later OOP) elements. I'd call languages like QuickBASIC to basically be hybrids between BASIC and Pascal, with clear inspiration taken from the TurboPascal environment. Once you get to VisualBasic 5 and 6, these are basically weakly-typed Pascal environments with BASIC-like syntax, so yes, developing large applications in those structured and object-oriented dialects with a full suite of development tools was a lot different experience than banging out BASIC programs in the 1970s and 1980s with, at best, primitive editing tools. I'm not saying it couldn't be done, and it certainly was, because on many of these microcomputers it was either BASIC or assembly. I do recall some C and Pascal environments for some of these 8 bit machines, but they weren't all that common and tended to cost $$$ as compared to the language burned into the ROMs on your computer.
The other problem with traditional BASIC is that was in a lot of ways a highly stylized and simplified form of COBOL, so it inherited some pretty bad concepts, so a lot of us folks that cut our teeth on the older pre-structured versions of BASIC learned some bad habits (in particular the infamous GOTO), and I remember taking my first Pascal course having to get used to a rather different and far more rigorous paradigm, but for me that transition left me for a permanent distaste for weakly typed languages. I know they have their advantages, and certainly make some problems a lot easier to solve, but I fell in love with Pascal's elegance and structure, and it's the way I program even now.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
We're talking about a guy who invented and named his own law; the Iron Rule of Bureaucracy. Whether you agree with his analysis, there's a level of conceit in naming your own law.
Not to mention citing it constantly. At that point, it just became tedious, not informative or even jocular.
I enjoyed his writing, and was able to wade past some of the obvious ideological slants he inserted, but he was at best in the second tier of SF authors, a good writer but not a great one.
At best, I'd place him in the "Could be alright, but tends to get lost in his own ideology" category. Which is still better than "Completely hopeless zealot who might as well be writing a political tract" group.
First, he was deeply patriotic with a practical outlook based on a lifetime of real-world experience.
The things that destroy us often seem benign, or even beneficent.
Dr. Pournelle worked with many to help end the war with the Soviet Union
Can we have it back?
At least we knew where we stood then.
Now we've got a President whose own son tries to use them to get blackmail against his opponent, and then pretends it was patriotism.
Oh, so, much like Linus Torvalds arguing that C is superior to C++!
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I'd like to point out that Dreams With Sharp Teeth was produced with a very pro-Ellison point of view. There's nothing wrong with that, to be sure, but if you're indulging in cinematic hagiography and the subject of your production still comes off as kind of an asshole...well...
I knew Jerry for over 30 years and while I can easily see how people could have trouble with him, my experience was the exact opposite. https://slashcomment.com/every... Jerry got a bit more edgy in the latter years, but so have most of the people I know as everything has become more polarizing. I can tell you that he was absolutely among the smartest people I've met and I've met a pretty good swath of smart people. The KEY distinction I found is that, as an intellectual, he had a hell of a time dealing with ..... let's be blunt, ignorant people. If you couldn't defend a position you claimed to support he'd eat you alive. If you could support that position, he'd start by trying to roll over you, but would ultimately listen and consider the viewpoint.
I can also tell you from first-hand experience that Jerry went out of his way to help others. I'm one of them.