[...] the fact that the OS never had decent stuff like an FTP/email/www client, etc, until the last minute.
You have a strange definition of "fact", it would seem.
Before WWW, there was Gopher (from Minnesota - and don't forget TurboGopher!) and WAIS. Actually WAIS development was a cooperative project between Thinking Machines, Inc, Apple, Dow Jones and KPMG Peat Marwick. The Mac WAIS client - WAIStation - was cool; so was Dorner's Eudora, Jim Matthews' and Darthmouth College's FTP client Fetch, Steve Falkenburg's XFerIt FTP Client and his NewsWatcher, which was later developed into the best newsreader ever by John Norstad (of Disinfectant fame!), NCSA Telnet, etc etc.
All of these were possible because of MacTCP, which was available in 1987 and thus predates WinSock by six years! And of course Trumpet WinSock was not a Microsoft product, was it?
(Not to mention A/UX 2.x and A/UX 3.x, wedding Unix SVR with Macintosh systems 6 and 7, respectively - had Apple not been running madly in all directions managementwise at the time, we could easily have had a MacOS X equivalent in 1995!!!)
So are you just a Clueless, Eternal September 1993, Internet newbie who thinks Bill Gates invented the Internet together with Al Gore, or are you a fucking revisionist who will also deny the atrocities of WW II without hesitation?
They aren't just sticking in UTF-16 and hoping it works. aa is aa, not a double byte character.
An elaborating comment may be required here. The scandinavian letter 'å' is phonetically related to a long or open 'a' sound. In Denmark, until 1948 or so, the sound was written 'aa', and for example the town I live in, Århus, was written 'Aarhus'. This also meant that aa came before ab alphabetically. When 'å' was adopted from swedish, it was placed _last_ in the alphabet, and since then Århus has been placed _last_ alphabetically. Of course there was much resistance to this change, and some people continued to use 'aa' instead. And in international contexts, it was often transscribed as 'aa' as well, hence the usage which was mentioned above.
The city "competing" with Århus for fame and glory, Aalborg, became Ålborg. Now, not so long ago, they decided in Ålborg that they wanted to spell it Aalborg again, among other reasons it was said that they wanted to be at the _beginning_ of the alphabet.
However - and this is the amusing part - danish lexicographic alphabetization rules require that 'aa' be alphabetized as 'å' when pronounced as 'å', and otherwise as the letters 'a' 'a'!!!
So Aalborg didn't get to be at front alphabetically after all!
Aaaah (Ååh!),and of course people who attempt to write an algorithm to sort danish words correctly tend to develop a painful and chronic headache.
This town name could even be typed with the extended ASCII set -- no non-ASCII domain name needed.
You *are* utterly clueless when it comes to character sets, yes?
ASCII is ASCII.Seven-bit US ASCII. The so-called "extended ASCII" character sets are *NOT* ASCII, although they typically happen to have overlapping definitions of at least the printable ASCII characters 32-126, and usually also the control characters 0-31 and 127.
As a matter of fact, for some reason my Mozilla 1.2.1 chose to render this page in *another* "extended ASCII" variant Cyrillic Windows-1251, which did NOT render the name "Monsterås" correctly. (Sorry, but I don't have deadkeys enabled, so I can't type o correctly.)
So *which* 8-bit character set do *you* presume out of ignorance? ISO-8859-1 or ISO-8859-15? Macintosh? Some Microsofty Windows variant?
Having an 'Ø' in my name, I am sensitive to this issue. Heck, I had to hack John Norstad's NewsWatcher to support Latin1 and even some rudimentary Quoted-Printable support (because A/UX sendmail was 7bit only) back in 1993! It really makes me sad to realize how nothing seems to have changed in matters of language support in the 10 years that have passed since then. Oh, sure, we have Unicode and ISO-10646, but we still see ISO-8859-X and proprietary socalled "extended ASCII" charsets, and even the occasional nationalized ISO-646 variant again and again. And if that wasn't enough, XML and HTML has compounded the confusion with silly character entities, so things can be encoded to the n'th degree. Who needs encryption?!?
-Lasse Hillerøe Petersen
PS. As a demonstration, let me insert a signature I used long ago: Min kæphest har fået et føl! (Probably ISO-8859-1 or -15, depending on how Mozilla and SlashCode will mangle it.) Min kfphest har feet et fxl! (ISO-8859-1 with 8th bit stripped.) Min kæphest har fået et føl! (SGML character entities. Apparantly SlashCode is broken, I had to type & to get the & character. I hope preview is identical to what will eventually get posted.) Min K{phest har f}et et f|l! (ISO-646, danish variant.) Min K=E6phest har f=E5et et f=F8l! (ISO-8859-1, Q-P encoding.)
"If you pull down (Mac) OS X you'll see a lot of copyright postings that point back to Unix Systems Laboratories, which is what we hold."
... and therein lies the rub...
I doubt they can get after Apple, I'm pretty sure Apple must have some (probably expensive) license to use the original Unix System V source code from way back when AT&T still owned it. From the FAQ: A/UX is based on AT&T Unix System V.2.2 with numerous extensions from V.3, V.4 (such as streams) and BSD 4.2/4.3 (such as networking, the Fast File System, job control, lpr, NFS with Yellow Pages, SCCS and sendmail 5.64). It also provides full POSIX compliance. A/UX provides SYSV, BSD and POSIX compatiblity switches and libraries. A/UX is fully compiant with the System V Interface Definition (SVID).
A/UX 3 came with System 7, thus A/UX 2 and earlier must predate System 7, which takes it back to 1989 or so. If SCO can go after Apple, they can probably just as well go after Sun (Solaris), IBM (AIX) and Compaq/HP (HP-UX, and the ex-DEC Unix), just to mention a few systems that as far as I know are based on original AT&T licensed Unix SVRx. I guess not!
In fact there is at least one more. Martin Richards - who BTW designed BCPL (as a derivative of Christopher Strachey's CPL language, which I believe was never really implemented, being something of a crossbreed between LISP and Algol) - has written "MCPL, a typeless language with features taken from BCPL, C, ML and Prolog."
Actually, I have an email reply from the Danish Ministry of Culture, which states that the intent of the law is not to impose any restrictions on personal use of copyrighted stuff, so for example circumventing DVD encryption to be able to watch a movie on Linux is legal. The reply however also states that, although making copies for personal use remains legal, it is not allowed to circumvent copy protection mechanisms in order to produce such a copy. Somehow this doesn't make sense to me, but all in all I think this is not as bad as it could have been.
I strongly doubt that. Even if what you mean is that of countries currently using nuclear energy, you are the only country, I suspect you are wrong.
I think the current political climate in Germany is not in favor of new nuclear power plants, and more or less the same goes for Sweden.
To me it makes sense to avoid nuclear power, given that the resulting waste products are unquestionably very dangerous, and have to be safely stored for an extremely long time.
Nobody can prevent anybody from doing whatever they deem necessary and are capable of, to achieve whatever they want. Of course this goes both ways.
So this means, for a website: If you think you've got something to tell, tell it. If you think you've got something to sell, sell it.
Some websites just have to make up their mind about which one it's going to be, and act accordingly.
Putting up popups or banner ads is stupid, but then, I guess this sort of people are also attracted to pyramid schemes etc. Most, if not all, advertising is extremely stupid IMO.
Me, I just have a DNS server which claims authority over microsoft.com, doubleclick.com, etc. From my POV, they have just ceased to exist.
I do subscribe to member-based websites if I want them badly enough: the ACM online library is a very good example.
I tend to make silly mistakes in addition as well, but if I were to post any corrections, I'd make damn sure I was right. You, on the other hand, obviously didn't.
JMJ's later stuff may be different, but still it is good. Oxygene II ties very well in with the old Oxygene (from 1975 IIRC), and his tribute to Custeau is also great. I look forward to AERO, both the concert in September and the record of the same name, which seems to be underway.
I am afraid I must disagree with your assessment of Bertrand Meyer. In fact there is a striking similarity between Perl and Eiffel on (at least) one issue.
Back when Eiffel was mainly described in BM's book _Object-Oriented Software Construction_, Eiffel had no case statement (like Perl5) and was a rather simple language, although it turned out, not flawless. And of course, like Wall, Meyer argued that the absence of the case statement was a Good Thing that Made Life Better. Enter _Eiffel, the Language_, with complicated semantics/validity rules - and! - a case statement! I have both books, but I like OOSC much better, and I will never program in Eiffel. With Perl6's introduction of the case statement, I see history repeating itself. I strongly doubt I will ever program in Perl6.
I am just reading Fred Brooks' _Mythical Man-Month_ for the first time, and I think both Wall and Meyer suffer from some kind of Second System Effect.
As for Perl, I now try to do all my sysadmin script hacking with Korn shell, sed scripts and other Unix tools. I don't feel less productive that way.
I have bought a couple of books o the 2" type. Judging by those, I have simply concluded that no book thicker than 1" (OK 1 1/2" if it's hardcover) is worth reading.
The best book I've (re)read recently is _The AWK Programming Language_, which I bought for 1 buck at a library sale of old books. I wonder why a library would sell such a classic, but now at least it has a loving home. This book is 220 pages including index and content listing, and quite a bit can be learned from it - and it is a joy to read. I look forward to the day I dig up a copy of _The UNIX Programming Environment_ in a heap of cheap books.
You are almost right, although you are one year off. Before 1993, Usenet tended to get a mass of idiot postings in September. However, September 1993 was the September that never ended. Try searching for "September 1993" AND Usenet.
Actually, I believe it was bad even earlier than that. In April 1993, Gene Spafford posted this:
http://groups.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=1rpq88 IN Njlk%40ector.cs.purdue.edu&hl=en
This is IMO one of the best - if also depressing - posts I've seen on Usenet, which I have been using since about 1991. That message for me marks the end of the "good old" Usenet. I'm glad I had the chance to see it live before it vanished.
He definitely stands a better chance at making millions in the computer industry than in the furniture industry. I could knock together a crate like that with my eyes closed and both hands tied behind my back. (Well, almost.)
Why don't you tax cassettes, and video cassettes...
We do! I'm quite sure that there is, or at least has been, a tax on plain old compact cassettes and video cassettes. If our government could find out a cheap way to meter the air we breathe, that would probably be taxed too.
Looking at www.ssh.com, I now see that F-Secure is listed as "partners", which presumably implies a permission. This is not obvious from looking at www.f-secure.com, however. And I believe it is required that TM () and (R) (®) are acknowledged explicitly somewhere, if they are used. (That is: "various trademarks belong to their respective owners" blabla is not sufficient.)
Slashdot Mirror
[...] the fact that the OS never had decent stuff like an FTP/email/www client, etc, until the last minute.
You have a strange definition of "fact", it would seem.
Before WWW, there was Gopher (from Minnesota - and don't forget TurboGopher!) and WAIS. Actually WAIS development was a cooperative project between Thinking Machines, Inc, Apple, Dow Jones and KPMG Peat Marwick. The Mac WAIS client - WAIStation - was cool; so was Dorner's Eudora, Jim Matthews' and Darthmouth College's FTP client Fetch, Steve Falkenburg's XFerIt FTP Client and his NewsWatcher, which was later developed into the best newsreader ever by John Norstad (of Disinfectant fame!), NCSA Telnet, etc etc.
All of these were possible because of MacTCP, which was available in 1987 and thus predates WinSock by six years! And of course Trumpet WinSock was not a Microsoft product, was it?
(Not to mention A/UX 2.x and A/UX 3.x, wedding Unix SVR with Macintosh systems 6 and 7, respectively - had Apple not been running madly in all directions managementwise at the time, we could easily have had a MacOS X equivalent in 1995!!!)
So are you just a Clueless, Eternal September 1993, Internet newbie who thinks Bill Gates invented the Internet together with Al Gore, or are you a fucking revisionist who will also deny the atrocities of WW II without hesitation?
Windows 95 = Macintosh 89!!!
-Lasse
They aren't just sticking in UTF-16 and hoping it works. aa is aa, not a double byte character.
An elaborating comment may be required here. The scandinavian letter 'å' is phonetically related to a long or open 'a' sound. In Denmark, until 1948 or so, the sound was written 'aa', and for example the town I live in, Århus, was written 'Aarhus'. This also meant that aa came before ab alphabetically. When 'å' was adopted from swedish, it was placed _last_ in the alphabet, and since then Århus has been placed _last_ alphabetically. Of course there was much resistance to this change, and some people continued to use 'aa' instead. And in international contexts, it was often transscribed as 'aa' as well, hence the usage which was mentioned above.
The city "competing" with Århus for fame and glory, Aalborg, became Ålborg. Now, not so long ago, they decided in Ålborg that they wanted to spell it Aalborg again, among other reasons it was said that they wanted to be at the _beginning_ of the alphabet.
However - and this is the amusing part - danish lexicographic alphabetization rules require that 'aa' be alphabetized as 'å' when pronounced as 'å', and otherwise as the letters 'a' 'a'!!!
So Aalborg didn't get to be at front alphabetically after all!
Aaaah (Ååh!),and of course people who attempt to write an algorithm to sort danish words correctly tend to develop a painful and chronic headache.
-Lasse
This town name could even be typed with the extended ASCII set -- no non-ASCII domain name needed.
You *are* utterly clueless when it comes to character sets, yes?
ASCII is ASCII.Seven-bit US ASCII. The so-called "extended ASCII" character sets are *NOT* ASCII, although they typically happen to have overlapping definitions of at least the printable ASCII characters 32-126, and usually also the control characters 0-31 and 127.
As a matter of fact, for some reason my Mozilla 1.2.1 chose to render this page in *another* "extended ASCII" variant Cyrillic Windows-1251, which did NOT render the name "Monsterås" correctly. (Sorry, but I don't have deadkeys enabled, so I can't type o correctly.)
So *which* 8-bit character set do *you* presume out of ignorance?
ISO-8859-1 or ISO-8859-15? Macintosh? Some Microsofty Windows variant?
Having an 'Ø' in my name, I am sensitive to this issue. Heck, I had to hack John Norstad's NewsWatcher to support Latin1 and even some rudimentary Quoted-Printable support (because A/UX sendmail was 7bit only) back in 1993! It really makes me sad to realize how nothing seems to have changed in matters of language support in the 10 years that have passed since then. Oh, sure, we have Unicode and ISO-10646, but we still see ISO-8859-X and proprietary socalled "extended ASCII" charsets, and even the occasional nationalized ISO-646 variant again and again. And if that wasn't enough, XML and HTML has compounded the confusion with silly character entities, so things can be encoded to the n'th degree. Who needs encryption?!?
-Lasse Hillerøe Petersen
PS. As a demonstration, let me insert a signature I used long ago:
Min kæphest har fået et føl! (Probably ISO-8859-1 or -15, depending on how Mozilla and SlashCode will mangle it.)
Min kfphest har feet et fxl! (ISO-8859-1 with 8th bit stripped.)
Min kæphest har fået et føl! (SGML character entities. Apparantly SlashCode is broken, I had to type & to get the & character. I hope preview is identical to what will eventually get posted.)
Min K{phest har f}et et f|l! (ISO-646, danish variant.)
Min K=E6phest har f=E5et et f=F8l! (ISO-8859-1, Q-P encoding.)
That may (or may not) be the case. Do Sun, SGI and IBM pay royalties to SCO for their Unix-OS'es?
-Lasse
I doubt they can get after Apple, I'm pretty sure Apple must have some (probably expensive) license to use the original Unix System V source code from way back when AT&T still owned it. From the FAQ:
A/UX is based on AT&T Unix System V.2.2 with numerous extensions from V.3, V.4
(such as streams) and BSD 4.2/4.3 (such as networking, the Fast File System,
job control, lpr, NFS with Yellow Pages, SCCS and sendmail 5.64). It also
provides full POSIX compliance. A/UX provides SYSV, BSD and POSIX compatiblity
switches and libraries. A/UX is fully compiant with the System V Interface
Definition (SVID).
A/UX 3 came with System 7, thus A/UX 2 and earlier must predate System 7, which takes it back to 1989 or so. If SCO can go after Apple, they can probably just as well go after Sun (Solaris), IBM (AIX) and Compaq/HP (HP-UX, and the ex-DEC Unix), just to mention a few systems that as far as I know are based on original AT&T licensed Unix SVRx. I guess not!
-Lasse
A UFO nut is used with UFO bolts to join UFO parts. Apparantly aliens haven't invented UFO rivets yet.
-Lasse
So (indirectly) Edison is responsible for "Hello, World"?
-Lasse
May. Or may not. There is no my.
-Lasse
"There should be no-more BCPL derivatives!"
In fact there is at least one more. Martin Richards - who BTW designed BCPL (as a derivative of Christopher Strachey's CPL language, which I believe was never really implemented, being something of a crossbreed between LISP and Algol) - has written "MCPL, a typeless language with features taken from BCPL, C, ML and Prolog."
MCPL itself is actually written in BCPL.
-Lasse
Algol68-to-C by Sian Leitch
(Source appears to be somewhat Debian-centric. I haven't managed to compile it on NetBSD yet.)
Algol-68G
(Works fine with NetBSD-i386, I suppose it would on sparc too.)
-Lasse
The other one is Greece.
Actually, I have an email reply from the Danish Ministry of Culture, which states that the intent of the law is not to impose any restrictions on personal use of copyrighted stuff, so for example circumventing DVD encryption to be able to watch a movie on Linux is legal.
The reply however also states that, although making copies for personal use remains legal, it is not allowed to circumvent copy protection mechanisms in order to produce such a copy. Somehow this doesn't make sense to me, but all in all I think this is not as bad as it could have been.
-Lasse
"We're the only country with such a policy,"
I strongly doubt that. Even if what you mean is that of countries currently using nuclear energy, you are the only country, I suspect you are wrong.
I think the current political climate in Germany is not in favor of new nuclear power plants, and more or less the same goes for Sweden.
To me it makes sense to avoid nuclear power, given that the resulting waste products are unquestionably very dangerous, and have to be safely stored for an extremely long time.
-Lasse
Why AI? A simple D-type flip-flop would do nicely.
-Lasse
Nobody can prevent anybody from doing whatever they deem necessary and are capable of, to achieve whatever they want. Of course this goes both ways.
So this means, for a website:
If you think you've got something to tell, tell it.
If you think you've got something to sell, sell it.
Some websites just have to make up their mind about which one it's going to be, and act accordingly.
Putting up popups or banner ads is stupid, but then, I guess this sort of people are also attracted to pyramid schemes etc. Most, if not all, advertising is extremely stupid IMO.
Me, I just have a DNS server which claims authority over microsoft.com, doubleclick.com, etc. From my POV, they have just ceased to exist.
I do subscribe to member-based websites if I want them badly enough: the ACM online library is a very good example.
-Lasse
I tend to make silly mistakes in addition as well, but if I were to post any corrections, I'd make damn sure I was right. You, on the other hand, obviously didn't.
Try with a calculator next time.
-Lasse
JMJ's later stuff may be different, but still it is good. Oxygene II ties very well in with the old Oxygene (from 1975 IIRC), and his tribute to Custeau is also great. I look forward to AERO, both the concert in September and the record of the same name, which seems to be underway.
-Lasse
I am afraid I must disagree with your assessment of Bertrand Meyer. In fact there is a striking similarity between Perl and Eiffel on (at least) one issue.
Back when Eiffel was mainly described in BM's book _Object-Oriented Software Construction_, Eiffel had no case statement (like Perl5) and was a rather simple language, although it turned out, not flawless. And of course, like Wall, Meyer argued that the absence of the case statement was a Good Thing that Made Life Better. Enter _Eiffel, the Language_, with complicated semantics/validity rules - and! - a case statement! I have both books, but I like OOSC much better, and I will never program in Eiffel. With Perl6's introduction of the case statement, I see history repeating itself. I strongly doubt I will ever program in Perl6.
I am just reading Fred Brooks' _Mythical Man-Month_ for the first time, and I think both Wall and Meyer suffer from some kind of Second System Effect.
As for Perl, I now try to do all my sysadmin script hacking with Korn shell, sed scripts and other Unix tools. I don't feel less productive that way.
-Lasse
I have bought a couple of books o the 2" type. Judging by those, I have simply concluded that no book thicker than 1" (OK 1 1/2" if it's hardcover) is worth reading.
The best book I've (re)read recently is _The AWK Programming Language_, which I bought for 1 buck at a library sale of old books. I wonder why a library would sell such a classic, but now at least it has a loving home. This book is 220 pages including index and content listing, and quite a bit can be learned from it - and it is a joy to read. I look forward to the day I dig up a copy of _The UNIX Programming Environment_ in a heap of cheap books.
Small is beautiful!
-Lasse
You are almost right, although you are one year off. Before 1993, Usenet tended to get a mass of idiot postings in September. However, September 1993 was the September that never ended. Try searching for "September 1993" AND Usenet.
8 IN Njlk%40ector.cs.purdue.edu&hl=en
Actually, I believe it was bad even earlier than that. In April 1993, Gene Spafford posted this:
http://groups.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=1rpq8
This is IMO one of the best - if also depressing - posts I've seen on Usenet, which I have been using since about 1991. That message for me marks the end of the "good old" Usenet. I'm glad I had the chance to see it live before it vanished.
-Lasse
He definitely stands a better chance at making millions in the computer industry than in the furniture industry. I could knock together a crate like that with my eyes closed and both hands tied behind my back. (Well, almost.)
-Lasse
We do! I'm quite sure that there is, or at least has been, a tax on plain old compact cassettes and video cassettes. If our government could find out a cheap way to meter the air we breathe, that would probably be taxed too.
Sushi? And with the blowfish as logo? That's just brilliant!
(Try searching for "blowfish sushi" on Google.)
-Lasse
Looking at www.ssh.com, I now see that F-Secure is listed as "partners", which presumably implies a permission. This is not obvious from looking at www.f-secure.com, however. And I believe it is required that TM () and (R) (®) are acknowledged explicitly somewhere, if they are used. (That is: "various trademarks belong to their respective owners" blabla is not sufficient.)
-Lasse