Yeah, you are probably right. Not long after posting it, I started wondering myself whether I had mixed up Atari and Amiga. I never owned or even used one myself and the names are similar. And I claim lack of sleep. Yes, that's it, lack of sleep.
It seems to be a collection of very old stuff, that has been floating the net for many years. The only part that's making me smile are the bang style email paths, bringing up memories from times when getting 2 emails a day was a lot of email.
I wonder what the connection is between this old stuff and GNU. None of what I've seen seems to use a GPL.
Games are (sadly) one of the major blocks for people from moving to Linux.
Eh, who cares? Who wants to have people whose main interest is playing games? All you would be getting is tons of people not able to install Red Hat. That wouldn't help the Linux community at all. "A nice platform to play games on" wouldn't help Linux at all. Look what that did to the Atari.
I guess my real question would be why would IBM want to port Linux for the mainframe when they already have AIX running smoothly there?? Can anyone tell me what you gain from running Linux instead of Unix????
IBM is a big company. A very big company. A very big company in the computer business. Very big companies tend to have quite a lot of smart people working for them (just being big enough makes that happen - they also have lots of dumb people working for them). And because they are in the computer business, they have smart people with all kinds of computer related interests working for them.
I wouldn't be surprised this started off by some IBM engineers trying to port Linux to the mainframe, just for the heck of it. And from there, it trickled upwards.
And what IBM gets out of it. Publicity. The ability to run applications without needing to port it - not even to AIX. An extra sales point. The investment in porting Linux might have been low, so IBM doesn't need gain much to make it worthwhile. And perhaps they are just thinking We offer Linux for the mainframe, just because we can.
If I have to press shift + a number more than twice in one line of code, it's a bad line of code!
I guess your C code either has lots of lines of bad code, or rather unusual formatting. After all, the use of parenthesis is quite common in C. And on most keyboards, that's shift+9 and shift+0. && would be out as well, and a single *p fills up the quota of shift+number characters before it turns into a "bad line of code".
Good thing you use Perl. You can omit parens in many function calls.
On large projects with several programmers, make sure you change global header files that cause everybody else's code to break but yours. Do this late in the afternoon, so all hell breaks loose breaks right before people are going home, or late at night, so that everybody comes in fresh the next morning and wonders what the hell happened to the code that compiled perfectly when they left the day before. Either way, make sure you are not around when they find out! Otherwise you spare them the joy of figuring out what you changed, and why.
Ah, but then you have to depend on other people compiling their stuff, and you won't break anything that's already submitted to the QC department. It's much better to take one of the major dynamic libraries, change the interface to a commonly used function (say, a routine that inserts rows in a database), and then recompile and submit the library, without changing its major number. Then at least you can break everything that's already working.
Also, comment all your code. Make lots of comments. And then PGP encrypt the comments.
Put lots of warnings in the code. As in: /* If you aren't 100% certain what this does, DO NOT CHANGE IT */
I can go back to something I wrote 15 years ago and fix problems without generating new ones. My code is robust enought that I can shovel out a few thousand lines and jam in another 10,000 lines, test it for a day or two and release it... and get no bug reports for another 5 years. I consider this to be maintainable code!
Yeah, I used to do that as well. Untill I realized that "no bug reports for another 5 years" meant that noone was using my programs.
(Why does an obvious troll get 5 moderation points?)
Everything and the kitchen sink applications usually suck heartily, no doubt because they're so hard to develop and maintain - I can't think of one that doesn't.
Lots of people would think that Emacs doesn't suck. Tanenbaum believes in microkernels with modules or user processes taking care of a lot of things. Torvalds believes in monolithic kernels, that do everything.
But beside some examples, your argument doesn't hold. It isn't any harder to develop N applications, each calling each other, than one application doing N things. The fact there are N files in/usr/bin instead of 1 doesn't magically make better programs. Nor is communication over pipes, sockets or other form of IPC restricted to different processes. A program doing N things can be modularized, loading only the modules needed, just like a set of N programs only call each other when needed.
Good design is modular. It doesn't have to be visible to the user. In fact, sometimes it's better than not to. I use different programs to read mail and news. All in the spirit of Unix. But I find it frigging annoying that in one program going back a page is `b', while in the other it's `-'. I bet that if they were designed as an integral package, they would be the same. (Of course, if it's badly designed, it wouldn't). (And yes, I know, there are configuration files to remap the keystrokes. I don't see any benefits from having to make a seperate configuration file for each program, doing some of the same tasks over and over).
The argument of `Unix philosophy' would make more sense if not every program had its own ideas about a user interface. I'm all for a personal, configurable interface, I just don't want to spend a day writing a config file for each and every application; all of them using their own little language. That was interesting the first 5 years; after 15 years, it does get tiresome.
I remember anon.petet.fi pretty fondly. That was the first example I remember on the net of somebody doing something that had integrity on the net, he wouldn't give up his lists of users for anything for a long time until the CoS bullied him into it.
CoS bullying "him" (too bad I can't remember this name) doesn't do him justice. He never gave in to CoS. He had to give in to the Finnish justice - and he did, kicking and screaming.
Shutting down his service was the least of the two evils he was facing.
That'll be a little harder to do if the US court system ever joins the modern era and puts documents online en mass.
Been there, done that, *did* get a t-shirt [1]. That has has happened several years ago. Scientology sued. "Secret documents" became court documents. Scientology people checked out the documents everyday at 9, returning them at 5. However, they didn't realize the documents were also available online. Documents got copied to several websites. Including to a personal site of a Dutch provider. Scientology decided to raid the provider, trying to shut down the machine. Provider said "well, what the customer puts on their site is their business - if you have a court order, we shut down the machine; we will not yank the customers pages. Customer yanked to pages himself. However, the story quickly came out and within days said documents were copied more than 100 times, to allmost all Dutch ISPs. The action was organized by someone who had the pages at an ISP which was owned by the Dutch telco. Scientology decided to sue all Dutch ISPs involved, except for the one owned by the Dutch telco. Which the Dutch telco didn't really appreciate, and they made sure they got sued as well. Which was good, so all the small ISPs didn't have to pay big lawyers - the Dutch telco took care of that. Of course, Scientology stalled, withdrew most of their claims shortly before the court case, and didn't win any point in court.
[1] The shirt makes for interesting conversation pieces....
Correct me if I am wrong, but I think the last prime number day was 7/31/1999 and the next one is 1/1/2003.
Wrong, on both accounts. The last prime day before today was only two days ago, 17-11-1999. And since 1 isn't a prime number, the next one will be 2-2-2003. Just like today, 17-11-1999 was a Special Prime Day, as 17 + 11 + 1999 == 2027, which is prime. The next Special Prime Day will be 5-3-2003.
-- Abigail
Re:digits, or whole year?
on
Happy Odd Day!
·
· Score: 1
since 0 is not odd nor even.
Eh? 0 is neither odd, nor even? Why would there be an exception to the rule, if there's no need for an exception? Odd numbers are numbers that with have rest 1 with integer division by 2, even numbers have rest 0. That definition holds perfectly well for 0 - it's even.
It is indeed a Prime Day. The next Prime Day will be a few years from now: 2/2/2003.
Ah, yes, but this is a Special Prime Day. Because 11 + 19 + 1999 == 2029, and 2029 is prime. However, 2 + 2 + 2003 == 2007, which isn't prime.
$ perl -wle 'print "Prime" if (1 x shift) !~/^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/' 2029 Prime
-- Abigail
Re:I don't know about you...
on
Happy Odd Day!
·
· Score: 2
Can we get a list of odd days in the 3rd millenium? Bet there's plenty.
In the third millennium, from 2001 - 3000, there are exactly 0 "odd" days. There will be 5000 "even" days though. In the fourth, from 3001 till 4000, there will be 8000 "odd" days. And 40 "even" days; all in the last year (4000). Note that we also have 40 "even" days left in this millennium.
Ah but the magic here is THEY can use a killfile too.
You capitalized the wrong word. The important word is can. It's not will. It's can. It's not in your hands. If they don't, for one reason of the other, it will hurt you.
Show me where in the HTML standard it says that each implementation SHOULD be different.
It's right there, just above where it says it should be the same.
Of course, the question whether implementations should be the same or not, are totally beyond the scope of the HTML specification. Now, ask yourself, why would you have a specification, if you only want one implementation?
But for visual browsers, I'm all for having a consistant rendering engine.
With my or your preferences? With the preferences of someone with limited real estate, or the preferences of a visual impaired person? The entire point of having HTML and a describing structure and not layout is to allow different renderings. Otherwise, we could just stick to PDF.
I couldn't code without it, debug without it, or even read e-mail without it. But I can browse the web without it, and I think building an emacs-based browser is just way over the edge.
So, an editor that acts as a mail reader and a debugger is fine, but it acting as a web browser is way over the edge? Sounds like a pretty arbitrary line to me. Or is this an example of what I do is ok, and what someone else does is wacko?
So wouldn't it make sense to use the Mozilla layout engine inside of Konqueror, and also to use that layout engine as a standard html widget for all of the different programs that display html to some extent?
Because that would be entirely against the idea of HTML? Giving users a choice is a good thing; having everything based on the same thing is bad.
I would consider the bare bones of a browser to fit well within the unix paradigm: they implement a single standard, HTML, as defined by the W3C.
Unix philosophy, or not, who cares? The "web" was designed to not needing a myriad of applications/platforms to view documents. That was considered undesirable. Hence the invention - and later success - of the web. If you really want to apply your Unix philosophy, you wouldn't use a browser at all. You'd use ftp to get an image, then use xv to view it, instead of using a product that talks both HTTP, FTP, Gopher, NNTP and SMTP, and renders HTML and images. For some reason though, I seldomly see an application that would fit in the Unix philosophy: it would read HTML from standard input, and write formatted text to standard output. Why isn't that there?
Oh, wait, forget about xv. xv knows how to display several image types. Can't have that with a Unix philosophy! Must have a gif viewer, and a separate jpg viewer. Good heavens, you might end up with something that's convenient for the users. Next thing that happens is that someone now using Windows might actually try Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
-- Abigail
I wonder what the connection is between this old stuff and GNU. None of what I've seen seems to use a GPL.
-- Abigail
Eh, who cares? Who wants to have people whose main interest is playing games? All you would be getting is tons of people not able to install Red Hat. That wouldn't help the Linux community at all. "A nice platform to play games on" wouldn't help Linux at all. Look what that did to the Atari.
-- Abigail
IBM is a big company. A very big company. A very big company in the computer business. Very big companies tend to have quite a lot of smart people working for them (just being big enough makes that happen - they also have lots of dumb people working for them). And because they are in the computer business, they have smart people with all kinds of computer related interests working for them.
I wouldn't be surprised this started off by some IBM engineers trying to port Linux to the mainframe, just for the heck of it. And from there, it trickled upwards.
And what IBM gets out of it. Publicity. The ability to run applications without needing to port it - not even to AIX. An extra sales point. The investment in porting Linux might have been low, so IBM doesn't need gain much to make it worthwhile. And perhaps they are just thinking We offer Linux for the mainframe, just because we can.
-- Abigail
Usually, the Christian God (and many other gods) is assumed the be omnipresent. I don't think that omnipresent being are bothered with repeatedness.
"Is it true that God answers all prayers?"
"Yes, but sometimes the answer is no."
Sidney Freedman and Jesus Christ in Quo Vadis, Captain Chandler?
-- Abigail
I guess your C code either has lots of lines of bad code, or rather unusual formatting. After all, the use of parenthesis is quite common in C. And on most keyboards, that's shift+9 and shift+0. && would be out as well, and a single *p fills up the quota of shift+number characters before it turns into a "bad line of code".
Good thing you use Perl. You can omit parens in many function calls.
Let's just assume you are trolling.
-- Abigail
There are a few case where goto remains useful.
And of course, things like 'break', 'continue', 'last', 'next', 'redo', are nothing more than glorified gotos.
-- Abigail
Ah, but then you have to depend on other people compiling their stuff, and you won't break anything that's already submitted to the QC department. It's much better to take one of the major dynamic libraries, change the interface to a commonly used function (say, a routine that inserts rows in a database), and then recompile and submit the library, without changing its major number. Then at least you can break everything that's already working.
Also, comment all your code. Make lots of comments. And then PGP encrypt the comments.
Put lots of warnings in the code. As in:
/* If you aren't 100% certain what this does, DO NOT CHANGE IT */
And one of my favourites: /* Magic */
-- Abigail
Perl lets you use that trick in combination with computed GOTO, and bare blocks that are really loops.
#!/opt/perl/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my $count = shift;
my $weeks = int (($count + 6) / 7);
goto "DAY${\($count % 7)}";
{
DAY0: print "Sunday\n";
DAY6: print "Monday\n";
DAY5: print "Tuesday\n";
DAY4: print "Wednesday\n";
DAY3: print "Thursday\n";
DAY2: print "Friday\n";
DAY1: print "Saturday\n";
redo if -- $weeks > 0;
}
-- Abigail
You mean you did what the Autoloader and Selfloader do as well?
-- Abigail
Yeah, I used to do that as well. Untill I realized that "no bug reports for another 5 years" meant that noone was using my programs.
(Why does an obvious troll get 5 moderation points?)
-- Abigail
Lots of people would think that Emacs doesn't suck. Tanenbaum believes in microkernels with modules or user processes taking care of a lot of things. Torvalds believes in monolithic kernels, that do everything.
But beside some examples, your argument doesn't hold. It isn't any harder to develop N applications, each calling each other, than one application doing N things. The fact there are N files in /usr/bin instead of 1 doesn't magically make better programs. Nor is communication over pipes, sockets or other form of IPC restricted to different processes. A program doing N things can be modularized, loading only the modules needed, just like a set of N programs only call each other when needed.
Good design is modular. It doesn't have to be visible to the user. In fact, sometimes it's better than not to. I use different programs to read mail and news. All in the spirit of Unix. But I find it frigging annoying that in one program going back a page is `b', while in the other it's `-'. I bet that if they were designed as an integral package, they would be the same. (Of course, if it's badly designed, it wouldn't). (And yes, I know, there are configuration files to remap the keystrokes. I don't see any benefits from having to make a seperate configuration file for each program, doing some of the same tasks over and over).
The argument of `Unix philosophy' would make more sense if not every program had its own ideas about a user interface. I'm all for a personal, configurable interface, I just don't want to spend a day writing a config file for each and every application; all of them using their own little language. That was interesting the first 5 years; after 15 years, it does get tiresome.
-- Abigail
You're giving them FAR too much credit.
You got that wrong. The people of Scientology are smart. Very smart. Smarter than the average person.
And that's what makes them so dangerous.
-- Abigail
CoS bullying "him" (too bad I can't remember this name) doesn't do him justice. He never gave in to CoS. He had to give in to the Finnish justice - and he did, kicking and screaming.
Shutting down his service was the least of the two evils he was facing.
-- Abigail
Been there, done that, *did* get a t-shirt [1]. That has has happened several years ago. Scientology sued. "Secret documents" became court documents. Scientology people checked out the documents everyday at 9, returning them at 5. However, they didn't realize the documents were also available online. Documents got copied to several websites. Including to a personal site of a Dutch provider. Scientology decided to raid the provider, trying to shut down the machine. Provider said "well, what the customer puts on their site is their business - if you have a court order, we shut down the machine; we will not yank the customers pages. Customer yanked to pages himself. However, the story quickly came out and within days said documents were copied more than 100 times, to allmost all Dutch ISPs. The action was organized by someone who had the pages at an ISP which was owned by the Dutch telco. Scientology decided to sue all Dutch ISPs involved, except for the one owned by the Dutch telco. Which the Dutch telco didn't really appreciate, and they made sure they got sued as well. Which was good, so all the small ISPs didn't have to pay big lawyers - the Dutch telco took care of that. Of course, Scientology stalled, withdrew most of their claims shortly before the court case, and didn't win any point in court.
[1] The shirt makes for interesting conversation pieces....
-- Abigail
Wrong, on both accounts. The last prime day before today was only two days ago, 17-11-1999. And since 1 isn't a prime number, the next one will be 2-2-2003. Just like today, 17-11-1999 was a Special Prime Day, as 17 + 11 + 1999 == 2027, which is prime. The next Special Prime Day will be 5-3-2003.
-- Abigail
Eh? 0 is neither odd, nor even? Why would there be an exception to the rule, if there's no need for an exception? Odd numbers are numbers that with have rest 1 with integer division by 2, even numbers have rest 0. That definition holds perfectly well for 0 - it's even.
-- Abigail
Ah, yes, but this is a Special Prime Day. Because 11 + 19 + 1999 == 2029, and 2029 is prime. However, 2 + 2 + 2003 == 2007, which isn't prime.
$ perl -wle 'print "Prime" if (1 x shift) !~ /^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/' 2029
Prime
-- Abigail
In the third millennium, from 2001 - 3000, there are exactly 0 "odd" days. There will be 5000 "even" days though. In the fourth, from 3001 till 4000, there will be 8000 "odd" days. And 40 "even" days; all in the last year (4000). Note that we also have 40 "even" days left in this millennium.
-- Abigail
But authentication, in the sense of "who submitted this" isn't the problem. The problem is trusting the results. Quite a different problem.
-- Abigail
You capitalized the wrong word. The important word is can. It's not will. It's can. It's not in your hands. If they don't, for one reason of the other, it will hurt you.
-- Abigail
It's right there, just above where it says it should be the same.
Of course, the question whether implementations should be the same or not, are totally beyond the scope of the HTML specification. Now, ask yourself, why would you have a specification, if you only want one implementation?
But for visual browsers, I'm all for having a consistant rendering engine.
With my or your preferences? With the preferences of someone with limited real estate, or the preferences of a visual impaired person? The entire point of having HTML and a describing structure and not layout is to allow different renderings. Otherwise, we could just stick to PDF.
It makes my job ever so much more easier.
What job? As a browser author?
-- Abigail
So, an editor that acts as a mail reader and a debugger is fine, but it acting as a web browser is way over the edge? Sounds like a pretty arbitrary line to me. Or is this an example of what I do is ok, and what someone else does is wacko?
-- Abigail
Because that would be entirely against the idea of HTML? Giving users a choice is a good thing; having everything based on the same thing is bad.
-- Abigail
Unix philosophy, or not, who cares? The "web" was designed to not needing a myriad of applications/platforms to view documents. That was considered undesirable. Hence the invention - and later success - of the web. If you really want to apply your Unix philosophy, you wouldn't use a browser at all. You'd use ftp to get an image, then use xv to view it, instead of using a product that talks both HTTP, FTP, Gopher, NNTP and SMTP, and renders HTML and images. For some reason though, I seldomly see an application that would fit in the Unix philosophy: it would read HTML from standard input, and write formatted text to standard output. Why isn't that there?
Oh, wait, forget about xv. xv knows how to display several image types. Can't have that with a Unix philosophy! Must have a gif viewer, and a separate jpg viewer. Good heavens, you might end up with something that's convenient for the users. Next thing that happens is that someone now using Windows might actually try Linux.
-- Abigail