...is "Bing"!
(Discovered in a fortune cookie that came with sushi bought in a cafeteria in a building housing a Microsoft R&D team. When I saw it, I found a Chinese coworker and asked her what was the Chinese word for "disease", and she cheerfully responded "Bing!" -- at which point other coworkers in earshot cracked up and she said something like "Wow, I never thought of that!". This was only a few months after the Bing launch....)
Nofeus: Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know
something. What you know, you can't explain. But you feel it. You've
felt it your entire life - that there's something wrong with the
world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in
your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that's brought you to
me. Do you know what I'm talking about?
Meow: The Background?
Nofeus: Do you want to know what it is? The Background is
everywhere. It is all around us, even now in this very room. You can
see it when you look up at the night sky, or when you turn off your
computer. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church,
when you pay your license fees. It is the world that has been pulled
over your eyes to blind you to the Truth.
Meow: What Truth?
Nofeus: That you are a pirated copy, Meow. Like everyone else here on
Earth, you were copied illegally. Your DNA has piracy detection code,
and, as programmed in the Beginning, it has crippled you
and put up a Black Background, which we call Space.
Yeah, DECUS was definitely cool. Sorry, I had basically no experience with ALGOL on the -8 or on anything else back then; rarely
even saw ALGOL code. (More often saw APL code probably, and that was pretty rare too.)
(I never had to program patch-board computers easier. Not only would 4004 programming probably be much easier than that,
but so would be, I assume, the keypunch-and-submit-as-batch-job programming I "got" to do in Fortran on a mainframe at MIT during high school.)
However, the PDP-8 was a 12-bit-word minicomputer that was designed for inexpensive general-purpose computing, whereas the 4004 was (IIRC) a "tiny" 4-bit-word microchip designed mainly for numerical control applications.
I programmed both, the latter for a friend of mine when I was about 15 years old (he later basically got me my first "real" job as a Software Engineer at Pr1me), and the -8 was definitely much easier to program, with a much more powerful instruction set — the code my friend
needed written would have been much easier to write, and perhaps even "smaller" (fewer instructions, maybe fewer bits in the instruction
stream?), on the -8, though I confess to remembering too little about the 4004 to be really sure about that. (Of course, the -8 wasn't nearly as
nifty a machine, instruction-set-wise, as the -11, or as
all-out kick-butt powerful as the -10; I wrote much more assembly/machine code for the -10 than for the other DEC systems combined, and
actually got to use -10's far more often, at timesharing companies like Comp/Utility and First Data Corp in Mass. where they
ran TOPS-10, and at MIT in the AI lab, where ITS ruled!)
So, all in all, I think the calculator-on-a-4004 is probably more impressive than FOCAL or BASIC on the -8, though FORTRAN on the -8 probably
was no trivial accomplishment. But I haven't looked at the source/assembly/machine codes myself to make a proper assessment.
(This seems so long ago now. That was around the time a James Bond movie came out with Roger Moore playing Bond. I recall
watching it in the theatre, pretty good-sized crowd, and, I think early on in the movie, there's a scene where Bond is in bed and gets
some kind of signal or alarm — I forget which — and looks at his watch, which is shown to the viewers and is an early-model
LED watch. And I distinctly recall the reaction from the mostly-male audience when he pressed a button on the watch and it lit up with
the time in red LED digits: "Ooooooohhhhh!". As it happens, I later became wealthy enough to buy myself a digital watch...but, sadly, not a
Lotus Eclipse.)
if the human body were anywhere near as simple as newtons three laws we'd be immortal by now
(Probably not, given the underlying rules of the physical universe — the Three Laws of Thermodynamics, for example, can't
abide an immortal entity that relies in any way on atomic movement to exist.)
Anyway, you make a great point. Here's my (current) take on the levels of complexity of two pertinent types of organisms:
Digital computers (made up of one or more CPUs, peripherals, and so on)
Single-celled organisms (including neurons)
As someone else already pointed out, a single-celled organism (such as a bacteria) is quite a bit more complicated than
even the latest PC (hardware, including built-in microcode) shipped by Intel.
But this isn't the whole story, since the "medical industry" isn't concerned solely with single-celled organisms — rather, it focuses
on the entire human physiology.
And, as "we" know from computers, as complicated as a single organism might be, a collection of such organisms, interacting
with each other, such that they form an "emergent" organism of its own sort, can be vastly more complicated.
So the medical industry has to take into account a variety of complexities, when trying to focus on one organ (itself an emergent organism) for example, that arise because that organ, as well as any potential probes and remedies, necessarily interacts with a large variety of other organs.
But that still isn't the whole story, because there's one organ in particular that is incredibly complicated, so much so that we're,
even now, barely able to comprehend how it works: the human brain.
Further, there's ample evidence that the brain substantially influences how the rest of the body it inhabits reacts to external stimuli, internal injury, and attempts by the medical industry to "fix" it.
And the medical industry (doctors, hospitals, etc.) have, in the Western world in the past two or three decades, returned from disregarding
the human brain (the patient's state of mind) to taking it more into account.
Now, neither Grove nor Bill Gates has been shown to have sufficient ability, despite vast resources at their disposal, to assure that
their comparatively simple, highly predictable (billions of operations reliably done every second on command), and essentially infinitely perfectly reproducible products actually work reliably and as expected by their users.
(Grove is doing better than Gates, mainly because CPUs and peripherals are much, much simpler than the software that is built upon them.
Indeed, the whole point of CPU and peripheral architectures, including instruction sets, is to abstract away much of the underlying
complexity of digital electronics so highly complicated, flexible, and powerful software can be placed on top of it.)
So, given the many substantial levels of additional complexity in the human physiology, compared to Grove's products, it seems
to me rather silly for Grove to complain about any "comparative lack of progress" in the medical field versus what his own field has
experienced. There also haven't been correspondingly huge leaps of progress in raising children, for example; yet vast resources are
also poured regularly into that field.
This gets to my final point. Clearly CPUs are much less complicated than biological organisms, such as organs. And clearly those organs
are generally much less complicated than the human brain. And, just as clearly, "collectives" (Internet versus isolated computers; organs versus
single cells; human organizations versus isolated humans) are vastly more complicated than individuals.
Given that we're still quite incapable of reliably programming computers to do what we want them to do, is it
any surprise that our efforts to "program" (govern) each other, especially in stress-inducing forms such as threats and in
Yes, I worked at Pr1me (in R&D) starting in early 1978, and during my interviews it was
made quite clear they were designing PRIMOS to become "Multics in a (super-)minicomputer".
I think they already had ("real", not Unix-y) dynamic linking at that point, but only into
PRIMOS itself. The ability to create dynamically linked libraries came with the introduction
of the Executable Program Format (EPF, a bit like Unix's ELF I assume) in PRIMOS version 19.4,
circa 1984.
Other cool things included full-featured signaling/exceptions — full-featured in the
sense that a signal handler could re-signal the signal and then pass that new signal "up" the
stack to earlier invocations to handle, which was helpful for handling interrupt (^P, akin to
Unix ^C) and similar conditions; and recursive "shells", programmed in CPL, which I think stood
for Command Procedure Language, which were to PL/1 as Bourne shell and its language was to C in
the Unix world in terms of what they were trying to provide.
Oh, and a "transparent" network filesystem was both a blessing (when you really didn't care
that the files and directories were remote) and a curse (when you actually did care
but couldn't reliably figure it out), implemented initially via a client/server model using
the underlying network protocols directly from within the kernel's filesystem and, later, via
a Remote Procedure Call (RPC) mechanism the kernel offered to itself and to users.
(One of my own little hacks, which became reasonably popular in the R&D data center at least,
was to write a SETIME utility that could be run on system startup, and which would query designated
remote systems via RPC for their date/time in order to set the local system's date and time,
as the hardware back then didn't have its own CMOS-ish clock and the OS wasn't really usable
until the local date and time were set.)
I'm not so sure the transparent FS was Multics-inspired, but the folks doing much of the
OS design (including CPL, EPF, and so on) definitely included many ex-Multicians who were
enthusiastic (to say the least) about recreating their favorite OS features on a system that
was selling like hotcakes.
Then there was the guy in Tech Pubs who kept going on about a completely different OS
with a wacky name that ran on DEC equipment, had a "shell" (with a "case" statement that he tried to explain to me
once), let users connect programs together with "pipes" and, for some weird reason, had all its
program names and commands in lower case!!
(Wonder whatever happened to that OS...?;-)
They weren't looking for a way to squeeze Multics into their tiny PDP-8
PDP-7, actually. The PDP-8 was even smaller; (a multiple of) 4K 12-bit words, compared to the -7 (18-bit words) and
the -11 (16-bit words and byte addressability), where Unix really first "landed" in a widespread way.
Nothing stopping even Microsoft from using the GPL, other than the fact that they break out in hives at the mere thought.
Easy to assume, but not true. Microsoft has distributed GPL'ed software in the past, and might still be doing so today for all I know.
(The example I know of might have gone by the name "Interix" and it included GNU Fortran (g77)
as well as GCC among its suite of Unix-y utilities.)
I think it's safe to say that the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has never distributed Microsoft
or other proprietary software, however...ideological purity being quite important to that organization.
I was (and tx for expanding the acronym), though not just sillily, because there actually
are Unixy OSes that do reuse PIDs very rapidly, leading to problems with software that
depends on PID uniqueness within a short timeframe (such as one second) in order to
construct reliably unique identifiers, such as filenames. So the uniqueness issue seems
to have crossed domains here, which I thought was funny in a different sort of way.
IMO, if Linus had not come along with a working kernel, someone else would have.
Quite likely, but I don't think that's the point. I volunteered to write the kernel (to RMS, personally) sometime around 1988 or 1989, but he asked me to write GNU Fortran (g77) instead, as he believed it was more likely they'd get an existing
kernel "freed" than an existing Fortran compiler (or, more specifically, a Fortran Front End suitable for plugging into GCC's growing framework).
At that time, though I had some experience with Fortran front ends (more with the middle and back ends of Fortran compilers), I had much
more expertise and experience on OS kernel development, and much of my background dovetailed pretty well with the ix86 architecture, so I
probably could have done a good job on it.
Still, that's not the point. Linus didn't get us where we are today by developing the Linux kernel. He got us where we
are today by uniquely leveraging the free-software environment RMS helped create, by being a great project leader, by making it
more enjoyable working on Linux than many alternatives (even ones that paid lots of $$), and by generally avoiding turning
Linux, and thus by extension trying to turn all of its developers, into soldiers fighting whatever sociopolitical or cultural war
he felt needed fighting. (E.g., I gave up on helping the FSF maintain one of its documents when RMS insisted it use "per" or some
such thing instead of "his", "her", etc. Politically correct? Sure. English? No. That's a translation, and I wasn't
interested in maintaining a document written in something other than English, even if it might have been English 3000.)
Maybe I could have done as good a job, or a better one, coding a GNU kernel than Linus. But I wouldn't have held a candle
to his project-leadership and personal skills, his humility (not at that time and, yes, in many ways he's quite humble), and
his desire to get something working and useful done quickly and worry about making it "just right" later (whereas my ivory-tower,
aka "cathedral", approach really held my g77 work back, something I later came to regret).
So I believe the original point is quite valid: Linus may say goofy/stupid things once in a while, but he doesn't really
expect people to follow him the way RMS does. He isn't the spokesman for a "movement"; he's a mover (moves many people
to build, versus to accept a complete vision a la RMS) and a builder (which RMS also was/is).
This isn't intended to diminish RMS's achievements in any way. RMS didn't just (re)start the free-software movement by planting
a flag and declaring victory; he set about the monumental task of bringing in the shovels and, later, the earthmovers, grading
and furrowing the land, laying the foundations for buildings and planting the seeds for crops, and trying to convince as many people
as possible they were free to build, to move in, to farm, without having to pay taxes or do obeisance, other than to respect
the freedoms of others. That was the effort of a genius, perhaps an effort of genius, but certainly one of a long-term
commitment to a coherent vision, something that's rare these days, in our poll-driven, flavor-of-the-month, LP-to-CD-to-iPod-in-no-time culture.
Linus came along, started building something pretty humble at first, but his approach, combined with the groundwork laid
by RMS, convinced many to help create the (breathtaking in many ways, not all entirely positive;-) behemoth known as
Linux, which attracts people to, or at least helps convince them of, the fundamental "correctness" of RMS' vision in perhaps
the same sort of way the Pyramids testify as to the civilizations that built them. I don't believe Linus could have had
anywhere near the success he had if not for the foundation RMS laid and the vision RMS continued to promote; but,
Also, it should be noted that saying the writing is crackpottery is different than saying the author is a crockpot.
Well, obviously the author isn't a "crockpot", or he wouldn't have sued, he'd just be sitting and stewing all day!
(And what's "crackpottery" anyway? Pottery that's cracked? Pottery used to make or smoke crack? Is there a place
people buy it, like Crackpottery Barn?)
wasn't it FORTRAN 77 that added block-structured control flow, etc. to FORTRAN?
In the ANSI/ISO (standards) lineage, yes; but some popular Fortran environments had already offered (some of) them
for years.
I had never heard of the FREQUENCY statement
I've never used it (nor do I recall seeing code that used it), but one thing I recall hearing or
reading somewhere is that, for all the "importance" given to it for optimization, it was discovered,
perhaps way too late to be helpful, that the compiler implemented it "backwards", so supposedly-high-frequency
code paths were given low-priority optimization...or something like that.
Compiler bugs aside, one of the big problems with putting things like FREQUENCY in source code
is that programmers are bad enough at getting the code working, never mind characterizing
its (expected) performance profile correctly!
To me I appear to be the center of the universe for a number of reasons. In most accepted models, the edges wrap and so every point is as much the center as any other. Like all of us I suffer from the subjective point of view. I won't apologise for this - it's not my fault.
Of course not. I don't even see how you can be said to "suffer" from this — it's inherent to this universe. I "suffer" from it as well, but don't consider it "suffering", even though I have had a lifelong appreciation for the vastness of life on this planet and of the universe itself.
Your views antagonistic to doctrine and dogma, I don't share them. Others don't believe as I do, but I believe in the power of their faith to shape their world for them. Your mileage may vary. Certainly your beliefs don't seem to be leading you to a happy place. You may want to consider the benefit of that.
I'm having trouble parsing that, but, just to be clear: what I posted pertained mostly to various possible scientific explanations for religious belief and expression. It did not represent the totality of how I interpret that expression, or what I believe.
As to where my actual beliefs lead: they have made me quite a bit happier, because, among other things, they including accepting
some of the most beautiful "promises" of religion, as well as the fact that it is not my job to impose that acceptance on others.
Delving deep into the mysteries of (most any) religion can be akin to delving into the mysteries of a beautiful piece of music: one might
find it less "mysterious" in some ways, as the internal mechanisms are revealed; on the other hand, it can become even more beautiful and even mysterious as the deeper layers are discovered.
For myself though, I try to see the world as closely as it appears to be, rather than through the interpretations of men. We discuss here things on a cosmic scale perhaps beyond human imagining and I am comfortable with that. I am not comfortable with speculating on the whims and motives of beings divine as I am certain that is beyond my ken.
But it is rather difficult to "see the world as closely as it appears to be", with disregard for "the interpretations of men", without coming to the conclusion that it, and in fact the whole universe, revolves around you (the observer).
Of this I am comfortable though: to describe a thing as being something other than what it clearly is can almost always be considered a slight to its creator.
A good point, but consider going two steps further: how can anyone truly "clearly" see, never mind accurately describe, a creation, if that individual is not the creator — who could be said to have "described" it via his creation?; and, how can the thing created truly "clearly" see (and thus accurately describe) itself, never mind the entirety of the creation of which it is part?
(There are Biblical, and presumably other religious, statements that raise these same points; they are thousands of years old!)
It is beyond me to speculate about why a creator would make the world appear to be one thing and then require his adherents to insist it was another. That sounds to me like a cruel game and even less likely than intelligence as random happenstance.
Start with a safer assumption, which I touched on above: nobody in this world can really "grok" the entirety of the world, never mind the universe. They really can't even understand, or clearly see, themselves. (We still don't really "get" how a dog, a gecko, an ant, or even a paramecium, actually works, never mind why any of them exist.)
Given that, we really can't reason from how the world/universe "appears" to us, because we don't understand us, and the vast majority of what constitutes said "appearance" consists, for any particular individual, of information obtained "through the interpretations of men".
That suggests our biggest challenges will involve our "fights" with ourselves and our interactions with others. This shouldn't be surprising, considering that, even in the comparatively-simple world of Newtonian physics, the "N-body problem" is considered very difficult to solve — yet each "body" is obeying very simple and well-known rules, when compared to how any living organism (from a virus on up the so-called evolutionary, and complexity, ladder) behaves.
Next, is there any truly persuasive evidence that our Creator requires us to insist the world is something other than it appears to be? I'm unaware, offhand, of any evidence that Jesus Christ, or certain other well-known "Men of God", insisted on any such thing, or required their adherents to do so to others.
That leaves us with a somewhat-less-controversial, but perhaps-even-more-interesting, question: why does religious teaching generally dissuade us from probing, contemplating, and even worshipping the fullness of our physical universe, and instead focus on teaching us how to treat other people, animals, and our environment?
There's a reasonably scientific answer to this, one that I think becomes more rational the more we learn about our physical universe: the universe may be vast, but it is not, from the point of view of any individual who is subject to religion teachings, consistently important across all of its "components". (I.e. there's insufficient "spooky action at a distance" such that we really need to know what's going on in Andromeda.)
So you have all this code and structure (all inapposite to the task being addressed by the program--that is, unnecessary) which is unlikely to ever be well-tested, and can't even be correct. For what? To turn a compile-time parameter into a run-time parameter? Sometimes that's the right call, but not always.
Yup. The complete ins and outs of Unix (and "Unixy") FS semantics are not currently within my area of expertise,
whereas security is well within my area of concern.
So, all things considered, I find certain "surprising" design decisions exemplified by qmail
to be rather comforting after all. I'd want to come much more up to speed on the pertinent issues
(including the risks) before I started mucking around with those decisions (mainly, making
things more flexible, such as turning compile-time into run-time parameters, as has been done
by some patches to qmail, less or more "worrisome" from a security and reliability POV).
I'm far more confident when it comes to fixing (or prettying up) qmail code, because
that's well within my area of expertise. Not that I haven't made misteaks!
Not if qmail-popup, qmail-pop3d, and qmail-smtpd are run with VM limits set low enough (say, 1GB or less), and the OS enforces those limits,
My software isn't remotely exploitable either, so long as it's only running on 127.0.0.1. Doesn't mean the hole doesn't exist.
So, does your software run, under that restriction, as designed (and expected) on many thousands (or more) servers
around the world?
qmail-popup, qmail-pop3d, and qmail-smtpd do. In practice, most installations
limit their per-process VM usage to substantially less than 1GB. (My qmail-pop3d
server runs with a per-process VM limit of 2000000, or 2M, bytes.)
Despite such widespread usage, I'm not aware of any installation that includes
fixes for all the qmail bugs Guninski found. (They might be fixed in-house at one or more
installations; but, aside from my own patch for one of them, no fixes seem to have ever been published.
Just not worth the trouble, apparently.)
Even with the Guninski and related bugs fixed, such VM limits would still be a
good idea, and probably widely recommended.
But, yes, the holes do exist. Still, with suitable VM limits enforced by the OS (which do
not in any way interfere with how the services operate), there
appear to be no ways to actually exploit them.
That's a credit to qmail's (DJB's) archicture, not the quality of its code.
The original name RMS/GNU used, IIRC, was "lignux", and wasn't so much
announced as started appearing in new versions of GNU software (such as GCC
or GNU Emacs, I forget which offhand) in the system-configuration-name strings
produced during the./configure steps. (Wow, this goes back many years now,
apologies if I've got details wrong.)
Seeing "lignux" appear where "linux" or similar previously appeared touched
off some amount of protest and discussion.
I believe "GNU/Linux" was only subsequently proposed, and pushed, by RMS
and the FSF.
So the problem was never really the lack of, or need for, a cool name
to indicate that Linux was actually a GNU OS with a particular kernel.
Instead, the problem seemed to be more that people working on Linux,
with Linus Torvalds as project leader, were more focused on
creating something that was actually useful and worked, in contrast to those
who worked on GNU under RMS, a "camp" that seemed prone to making a few too many
decisions and pronouncements from on high, with little or no regard for how
they might be viewed by the hoi polloi, and seemingly too much willingness
to intrude on other peoples' projects (such as by trying to rename them without permission).
RMS may have intended to make his own operating system, but he did a piss poor job of accomplishing it. Instead, his group focused on the utilities and not the OS. If the goal was truly an OS, then why keep polishing the utilities?
In fact, RMS intended to avoid the significant overhead and delays of making his own kernel by getting one of two or more candidates "freed" so he could distribute them under the terms of the GPL. (This was circa 1989.)
RMS always wanted to provide a truly free (and useful) OS. He wasn't thrilled about cloning a sorta-Unix, but decided, for various
reasons, that that would be a better approach than cloning something else that would have much worse portability problems (as would
Multics, ITS, TOPS-20, etc.), among other reasons, or designing a new OS (like a Lisp machine OS) from scratch.
Linux didn't start out to become the GNU kernel. It started out as an x86-based kernel, built with and to run the GNU toolchain.
But it grew, organically and quickly, in no small part due to Linus Torvalds' leadership style,
which was more freewheeling and accommodating than RMS's more-ivory-tower approach. (Plus, Linus himself simply had more time
to focus on Linux; RMS had a plethora of things to focus on, including being the Leader Of A Great Movement, President of the FSF,
and so on.)
Not long after it became clear Linux had enough support across the board to be widely ported
and in fact serve as a de facto kernel for GNU, the FSF made a decision (IIRC) to adjust
its priorities for the Hurd accordingly — no need to rush it out the door so GNU had a free
kernel at that point.
Linus didn't have a goal of making command utilities. I am guessing his goal was to create a viable x386 based Unix like operating system.
To create a viable kernel, perhaps; but an operating system is far more than a
kernel, and in fact an OS like GNU can (and does) run on top of a wide variety of kernels.
"Linux" has been a good name for the OS (and surrounding community) that consists of the Linux kernel and GNU toolchain,
not because it is the name of the kernel, but because the name "Linux" became shorthand for the most visibly
successful, well-run, free-software OS development project in history. It's as much, or more, of a bow to Linus Torvalds
than to the Unix kernel he and many others helped create, kind of like how many people use "democracy" and "America" (or "the USA")
nearly interchangeably, even though, strictly speaking, the US is not democratic (it's a republic) and democracy was not "invented" there
— many historical confluences, including commitment to and sacrifice for certain principles, that intertwined democracy and the USA
resulted in the terms being widely thought of as nearly interchangeable, even though they aren't.
So, it's no wonder RMS (and GNU) wanted to have more visibility in the historical effort that was Linux;
that visibility may have been technically deserved, but the community (which has hashed this issue out for
many years now) decided it wasn't sufficiently deserved to make usage of the term "GNU/Linux" widespread (although
it's still quite useful to properly denote that OS, so I have often used it myself).
Slashdot Mirror
Because it is emulating a terminal, which back in the stone age was an actual piece of physical hardware.
Sometimes they were magical interactive typewriters which is where the abbreviation 'TTY' comes from.
Pretty sure 'TTY' comes from "Teletype".
...is "Bing"! (Discovered in a fortune cookie that came with sushi bought in a cafeteria in a building housing a Microsoft R&D team. When I saw it, I found a Chinese coworker and asked her what was the Chinese word for "disease", and she cheerfully responded "Bing!" -- at which point other coworkers in earshot cracked up and she said something like "Wow, I never thought of that!". This was only a few months after the Bing launch....)
Nofeus: Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know, you can't explain. But you feel it. You've felt it your entire life - that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that's brought you to me. Do you know what I'm talking about?
Meow: The Background?
Nofeus: Do you want to know what it is? The Background is everywhere. It is all around us, even now in this very room. You can see it when you look up at the night sky, or when you turn off your computer. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your license fees. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you to the Truth.
Meow: What Truth?
Nofeus: That you are a pirated copy, Meow. Like everyone else here on Earth, you were copied illegally. Your DNA has piracy detection code, and, as programmed in the Beginning, it has crippled you and put up a Black Background, which we call Space.
Yeah, DECUS was definitely cool. Sorry, I had basically no experience with ALGOL on the -8 or on anything else back then; rarely even saw ALGOL code. (More often saw APL code probably, and that was pretty rare too.)
(I never had to program patch-board computers easier. Not only would 4004 programming probably be much easier than that, but so would be, I assume, the keypunch-and-submit-as-batch-job programming I "got" to do in Fortran on a mainframe at MIT during high school.)
However, the PDP-8 was a 12-bit-word minicomputer that was designed for inexpensive general-purpose computing, whereas the 4004 was (IIRC) a "tiny" 4-bit-word microchip designed mainly for numerical control applications.
I programmed both, the latter for a friend of mine when I was about 15 years old (he later basically got me my first "real" job as a Software Engineer at Pr1me), and the -8 was definitely much easier to program, with a much more powerful instruction set — the code my friend needed written would have been much easier to write, and perhaps even "smaller" (fewer instructions, maybe fewer bits in the instruction stream?), on the -8, though I confess to remembering too little about the 4004 to be really sure about that. (Of course, the -8 wasn't nearly as nifty a machine, instruction-set-wise, as the -11, or as all-out kick-butt powerful as the -10; I wrote much more assembly/machine code for the -10 than for the other DEC systems combined, and actually got to use -10's far more often, at timesharing companies like Comp/Utility and First Data Corp in Mass. where they ran TOPS-10, and at MIT in the AI lab, where ITS ruled!)
So, all in all, I think the calculator-on-a-4004 is probably more impressive than FOCAL or BASIC on the -8, though FORTRAN on the -8 probably was no trivial accomplishment. But I haven't looked at the source/assembly/machine codes myself to make a proper assessment.
(This seems so long ago now. That was around the time a James Bond movie came out with Roger Moore playing Bond. I recall watching it in the theatre, pretty good-sized crowd, and, I think early on in the movie, there's a scene where Bond is in bed and gets some kind of signal or alarm — I forget which — and looks at his watch, which is shown to the viewers and is an early-model LED watch. And I distinctly recall the reaction from the mostly-male audience when he pressed a button on the watch and it lit up with the time in red LED digits: "Ooooooohhhhh!". As it happens, I later became wealthy enough to buy myself a digital watch...but, sadly, not a Lotus Eclipse.)
I'd post the answer, but it might get modded down and ruin my karma.
Hillary Clinton does! Her campaign recently invited a bunch of them to take part in one of her Q&A sessions....
(Probably not, given the underlying rules of the physical universe — the Three Laws of Thermodynamics, for example, can't abide an immortal entity that relies in any way on atomic movement to exist.)
Anyway, you make a great point. Here's my (current) take on the levels of complexity of two pertinent types of organisms:
As someone else already pointed out, a single-celled organism (such as a bacteria) is quite a bit more complicated than even the latest PC (hardware, including built-in microcode) shipped by Intel.
But this isn't the whole story, since the "medical industry" isn't concerned solely with single-celled organisms — rather, it focuses on the entire human physiology.
And, as "we" know from computers, as complicated as a single organism might be, a collection of such organisms, interacting with each other, such that they form an "emergent" organism of its own sort, can be vastly more complicated.
So the medical industry has to take into account a variety of complexities, when trying to focus on one organ (itself an emergent organism) for example, that arise because that organ, as well as any potential probes and remedies, necessarily interacts with a large variety of other organs.
But that still isn't the whole story, because there's one organ in particular that is incredibly complicated, so much so that we're, even now, barely able to comprehend how it works: the human brain.
Further, there's ample evidence that the brain substantially influences how the rest of the body it inhabits reacts to external stimuli, internal injury, and attempts by the medical industry to "fix" it.
And the medical industry (doctors, hospitals, etc.) have, in the Western world in the past two or three decades, returned from disregarding the human brain (the patient's state of mind) to taking it more into account.
Now, neither Grove nor Bill Gates has been shown to have sufficient ability, despite vast resources at their disposal, to assure that their comparatively simple, highly predictable (billions of operations reliably done every second on command), and essentially infinitely perfectly reproducible products actually work reliably and as expected by their users.
(Grove is doing better than Gates, mainly because CPUs and peripherals are much, much simpler than the software that is built upon them. Indeed, the whole point of CPU and peripheral architectures, including instruction sets, is to abstract away much of the underlying complexity of digital electronics so highly complicated, flexible, and powerful software can be placed on top of it.)
So, given the many substantial levels of additional complexity in the human physiology, compared to Grove's products, it seems to me rather silly for Grove to complain about any "comparative lack of progress" in the medical field versus what his own field has experienced. There also haven't been correspondingly huge leaps of progress in raising children, for example; yet vast resources are also poured regularly into that field.
This gets to my final point. Clearly CPUs are much less complicated than biological organisms, such as organs. And clearly those organs are generally much less complicated than the human brain. And, just as clearly, "collectives" (Internet versus isolated computers; organs versus single cells; human organizations versus isolated humans) are vastly more complicated than individuals.
Given that we're still quite incapable of reliably programming computers to do what we want them to do, is it any surprise that our efforts to "program" (govern) each other, especially in stress-inducing forms such as threats and in
Yes, I worked at Pr1me (in R&D) starting in early 1978, and during my interviews it was made quite clear they were designing PRIMOS to become "Multics in a (super-)minicomputer".
I think they already had ("real", not Unix-y) dynamic linking at that point, but only into PRIMOS itself. The ability to create dynamically linked libraries came with the introduction of the Executable Program Format (EPF, a bit like Unix's ELF I assume) in PRIMOS version 19.4, circa 1984.
Other cool things included full-featured signaling/exceptions — full-featured in the sense that a signal handler could re-signal the signal and then pass that new signal "up" the stack to earlier invocations to handle, which was helpful for handling interrupt (^P, akin to Unix ^C) and similar conditions; and recursive "shells", programmed in CPL, which I think stood for Command Procedure Language, which were to PL/1 as Bourne shell and its language was to C in the Unix world in terms of what they were trying to provide.
Oh, and a "transparent" network filesystem was both a blessing (when you really didn't care that the files and directories were remote) and a curse (when you actually did care but couldn't reliably figure it out), implemented initially via a client/server model using the underlying network protocols directly from within the kernel's filesystem and, later, via a Remote Procedure Call (RPC) mechanism the kernel offered to itself and to users.
(One of my own little hacks, which became reasonably popular in the R&D data center at least, was to write a SETIME utility that could be run on system startup, and which would query designated remote systems via RPC for their date/time in order to set the local system's date and time, as the hardware back then didn't have its own CMOS-ish clock and the OS wasn't really usable until the local date and time were set.)
I'm not so sure the transparent FS was Multics-inspired, but the folks doing much of the OS design (including CPL, EPF, and so on) definitely included many ex-Multicians who were enthusiastic (to say the least) about recreating their favorite OS features on a system that was selling like hotcakes.
Then there was the guy in Tech Pubs who kept going on about a completely different OS with a wacky name that ran on DEC equipment, had a "shell" (with a "case" statement that he tried to explain to me once), let users connect programs together with "pipes" and, for some weird reason, had all its program names and commands in lower case!! (Wonder whatever happened to that OS...? ;-)
PDP-7, actually. The PDP-8 was even smaller; (a multiple of) 4K 12-bit words, compared to the -7 (18-bit words) and the -11 (16-bit words and byte addressability), where Unix really first "landed" in a widespread way.
AFAIK, Unix never ran on an -8.
Easy to assume, but not true. Microsoft has distributed GPL'ed software in the past, and might still be doing so today for all I know. (The example I know of might have gone by the name "Interix" and it included GNU Fortran (g77) as well as GCC among its suite of Unix-y utilities.)
I think it's safe to say that the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has never distributed Microsoft or other proprietary software, however...ideological purity being quite important to that organization.
A vacuum. Ironically, a Hoover.
Nobody puts Platy in a corner!
I was (and tx for expanding the acronym), though not just sillily, because there actually are Unixy OSes that do reuse PIDs very rapidly, leading to problems with software that depends on PID uniqueness within a short timeframe (such as one second) in order to construct reliably unique identifiers, such as filenames. So the uniqueness issue seems to have crossed domains here, which I thought was funny in a different sort of way.
Doesn't Linux do that automatically?
Quite likely, but I don't think that's the point. I volunteered to write the kernel (to RMS, personally) sometime around 1988 or 1989, but he asked me to write GNU Fortran (g77) instead, as he believed it was more likely they'd get an existing kernel "freed" than an existing Fortran compiler (or, more specifically, a Fortran Front End suitable for plugging into GCC's growing framework).
At that time, though I had some experience with Fortran front ends (more with the middle and back ends of Fortran compilers), I had much more expertise and experience on OS kernel development, and much of my background dovetailed pretty well with the ix86 architecture, so I probably could have done a good job on it.
Still, that's not the point. Linus didn't get us where we are today by developing the Linux kernel. He got us where we are today by uniquely leveraging the free-software environment RMS helped create, by being a great project leader, by making it more enjoyable working on Linux than many alternatives (even ones that paid lots of $$), and by generally avoiding turning Linux, and thus by extension trying to turn all of its developers, into soldiers fighting whatever sociopolitical or cultural war he felt needed fighting. (E.g., I gave up on helping the FSF maintain one of its documents when RMS insisted it use "per" or some such thing instead of "his", "her", etc. Politically correct? Sure. English? No. That's a translation, and I wasn't interested in maintaining a document written in something other than English, even if it might have been English 3000.)
Maybe I could have done as good a job, or a better one, coding a GNU kernel than Linus. But I wouldn't have held a candle to his project-leadership and personal skills, his humility (not at that time and, yes, in many ways he's quite humble), and his desire to get something working and useful done quickly and worry about making it "just right" later (whereas my ivory-tower, aka "cathedral", approach really held my g77 work back, something I later came to regret).
So I believe the original point is quite valid: Linus may say goofy/stupid things once in a while, but he doesn't really expect people to follow him the way RMS does. He isn't the spokesman for a "movement"; he's a mover (moves many people to build, versus to accept a complete vision a la RMS) and a builder (which RMS also was/is).
This isn't intended to diminish RMS's achievements in any way. RMS didn't just (re)start the free-software movement by planting a flag and declaring victory; he set about the monumental task of bringing in the shovels and, later, the earthmovers, grading and furrowing the land, laying the foundations for buildings and planting the seeds for crops, and trying to convince as many people as possible they were free to build, to move in, to farm, without having to pay taxes or do obeisance, other than to respect the freedoms of others. That was the effort of a genius, perhaps an effort of genius, but certainly one of a long-term commitment to a coherent vision, something that's rare these days, in our poll-driven, flavor-of-the-month, LP-to-CD-to-iPod-in-no-time culture.
Linus came along, started building something pretty humble at first, but his approach, combined with the groundwork laid by RMS, convinced many to help create the (breathtaking in many ways, not all entirely positive ;-) behemoth known as
Linux, which attracts people to, or at least helps convince them of, the fundamental "correctness" of RMS' vision in perhaps
the same sort of way the Pyramids testify as to the civilizations that built them. I don't believe Linus could have had
anywhere near the success he had if not for the foundation RMS laid and the vision RMS continued to promote; but,
Well, obviously the author isn't a "crockpot", or he wouldn't have sued, he'd just be sitting and stewing all day!
(And what's "crackpottery" anyway? Pottery that's cracked? Pottery used to make or smoke crack? Is there a place people buy it, like Crackpottery Barn?)
In the ANSI/ISO (standards) lineage, yes; but some popular Fortran environments had already offered (some of) them for years.
I've never used it (nor do I recall seeing code that used it), but one thing I recall hearing or reading somewhere is that, for all the "importance" given to it for optimization, it was discovered, perhaps way too late to be helpful, that the compiler implemented it "backwards", so supposedly-high-frequency code paths were given low-priority optimization...or something like that.
Compiler bugs aside, one of the big problems with putting things like FREQUENCY in source code is that programmers are bad enough at getting the code working, never mind characterizing its (expected) performance profile correctly!
Of course not. I don't even see how you can be said to "suffer" from this — it's inherent to this universe. I "suffer" from it as well, but don't consider it "suffering", even though I have had a lifelong appreciation for the vastness of life on this planet and of the universe itself.
I'm having trouble parsing that, but, just to be clear: what I posted pertained mostly to various possible scientific explanations for religious belief and expression. It did not represent the totality of how I interpret that expression, or what I believe.
As to where my actual beliefs lead: they have made me quite a bit happier, because, among other things, they including accepting some of the most beautiful "promises" of religion, as well as the fact that it is not my job to impose that acceptance on others.
Delving deep into the mysteries of (most any) religion can be akin to delving into the mysteries of a beautiful piece of music: one might find it less "mysterious" in some ways, as the internal mechanisms are revealed; on the other hand, it can become even more beautiful and even mysterious as the deeper layers are discovered.
But it is rather difficult to "see the world as closely as it appears to be", with disregard for "the interpretations of men", without coming to the conclusion that it, and in fact the whole universe, revolves around you (the observer).
A good point, but consider going two steps further: how can anyone truly "clearly" see, never mind accurately describe, a creation, if that individual is not the creator — who could be said to have "described" it via his creation?; and, how can the thing created truly "clearly" see (and thus accurately describe) itself, never mind the entirety of the creation of which it is part?
(There are Biblical, and presumably other religious, statements that raise these same points; they are thousands of years old!)
Start with a safer assumption, which I touched on above: nobody in this world can really "grok" the entirety of the world, never mind the universe. They really can't even understand, or clearly see, themselves. (We still don't really "get" how a dog, a gecko, an ant, or even a paramecium, actually works, never mind why any of them exist.)
Given that, we really can't reason from how the world/universe "appears" to us, because we don't understand us, and the vast majority of what constitutes said "appearance" consists, for any particular individual, of information obtained "through the interpretations of men".
That suggests our biggest challenges will involve our "fights" with ourselves and our interactions with others. This shouldn't be surprising, considering that, even in the comparatively-simple world of Newtonian physics, the "N-body problem" is considered very difficult to solve — yet each "body" is obeying very simple and well-known rules, when compared to how any living organism (from a virus on up the so-called evolutionary, and complexity, ladder) behaves.
Next, is there any truly persuasive evidence that our Creator requires us to insist the world is something other than it appears to be? I'm unaware, offhand, of any evidence that Jesus Christ, or certain other well-known "Men of God", insisted on any such thing, or required their adherents to do so to others.
That leaves us with a somewhat-less-controversial, but perhaps-even-more-interesting, question: why does religious teaching generally dissuade us from probing, contemplating, and even worshipping the fullness of our physical universe, and instead focus on teaching us how to treat other people, animals, and our environment?
There's a reasonably scientific answer to this, one that I think becomes more rational the more we learn about our physical universe: the universe may be vast, but it is not, from the point of view of any individual who is subject to religion teachings, consistently important across all of its "components". (I.e. there's insufficient "spooky action at a distance" such that we really need to know what's going on in Andromeda.)
Simply put, whether
From "The Mole People", after professorial introduction in a study:
Scene: generic rocky outcropping.
Caption: "ASIA"
Crow(?): "Ahh, well that narrows it down!"
Yup. The complete ins and outs of Unix (and "Unixy") FS semantics are not currently within my area of expertise, whereas security is well within my area of concern.
So, all things considered, I find certain "surprising" design decisions exemplified by qmail to be rather comforting after all. I'd want to come much more up to speed on the pertinent issues (including the risks) before I started mucking around with those decisions (mainly, making things more flexible, such as turning compile-time into run-time parameters, as has been done by some patches to qmail, less or more "worrisome" from a security and reliability POV).
I'm far more confident when it comes to fixing (or prettying up) qmail code, because that's well within my area of expertise. Not that I haven't made misteaks!
So, does your software run, under that restriction, as designed (and expected) on many thousands (or more) servers around the world?
qmail-popup, qmail-pop3d, and qmail-smtpd do. In practice, most installations limit their per-process VM usage to substantially less than 1GB. (My qmail-pop3d server runs with a per-process VM limit of 2000000, or 2M, bytes.)
Despite such widespread usage, I'm not aware of any installation that includes fixes for all the qmail bugs Guninski found. (They might be fixed in-house at one or more installations; but, aside from my own patch for one of them, no fixes seem to have ever been published. Just not worth the trouble, apparently.)
Even with the Guninski and related bugs fixed, such VM limits would still be a good idea, and probably widely recommended.
But, yes, the holes do exist. Still, with suitable VM limits enforced by the OS (which do not in any way interfere with how the services operate), there appear to be no ways to actually exploit them.
That's a credit to qmail's (DJB's) archicture, not the quality of its code.
(Presumably you meant "Ling Is Not GNU"?)
The original name RMS/GNU used, IIRC, was "lignux", and wasn't so much announced as started appearing in new versions of GNU software (such as GCC or GNU Emacs, I forget which offhand) in the system-configuration-name strings produced during the ./configure steps. (Wow, this goes back many years now,
apologies if I've got details wrong.)
Seeing "lignux" appear where "linux" or similar previously appeared touched off some amount of protest and discussion.
I believe "GNU/Linux" was only subsequently proposed, and pushed, by RMS and the FSF.
So the problem was never really the lack of, or need for, a cool name to indicate that Linux was actually a GNU OS with a particular kernel.
Instead, the problem seemed to be more that people working on Linux, with Linus Torvalds as project leader, were more focused on creating something that was actually useful and worked, in contrast to those who worked on GNU under RMS, a "camp" that seemed prone to making a few too many decisions and pronouncements from on high, with little or no regard for how they might be viewed by the hoi polloi, and seemingly too much willingness to intrude on other peoples' projects (such as by trying to rename them without permission).
In fact, RMS intended to avoid the significant overhead and delays of making his own kernel by getting one of two or more candidates "freed" so he could distribute them under the terms of the GPL. (This was circa 1989.)
RMS always wanted to provide a truly free (and useful) OS. He wasn't thrilled about cloning a sorta-Unix, but decided, for various reasons, that that would be a better approach than cloning something else that would have much worse portability problems (as would Multics, ITS, TOPS-20, etc.), among other reasons, or designing a new OS (like a Lisp machine OS) from scratch.
Linux didn't start out to become the GNU kernel. It started out as an x86-based kernel, built with and to run the GNU toolchain. But it grew, organically and quickly, in no small part due to Linus Torvalds' leadership style, which was more freewheeling and accommodating than RMS's more-ivory-tower approach. (Plus, Linus himself simply had more time to focus on Linux; RMS had a plethora of things to focus on, including being the Leader Of A Great Movement, President of the FSF, and so on.)
Not long after it became clear Linux had enough support across the board to be widely ported and in fact serve as a de facto kernel for GNU, the FSF made a decision (IIRC) to adjust its priorities for the Hurd accordingly — no need to rush it out the door so GNU had a free kernel at that point.
To create a viable kernel, perhaps; but an operating system is far more than a kernel, and in fact an OS like GNU can (and does) run on top of a wide variety of kernels.
"Linux" has been a good name for the OS (and surrounding community) that consists of the Linux kernel and GNU toolchain, not because it is the name of the kernel, but because the name "Linux" became shorthand for the most visibly successful, well-run, free-software OS development project in history. It's as much, or more, of a bow to Linus Torvalds than to the Unix kernel he and many others helped create, kind of like how many people use "democracy" and "America" (or "the USA") nearly interchangeably, even though, strictly speaking, the US is not democratic (it's a republic) and democracy was not "invented" there — many historical confluences, including commitment to and sacrifice for certain principles, that intertwined democracy and the USA resulted in the terms being widely thought of as nearly interchangeable, even though they aren't.
So, it's no wonder RMS (and GNU) wanted to have more visibility in the historical effort that was Linux; that visibility may have been technically deserved, but the community (which has hashed this issue out for many years now) decided it wasn't sufficiently deserved to make usage of the term "GNU/Linux" widespread (although it's still quite useful to properly denote that OS, so I have often used it myself).