When I was first trying to learn my way around a timesharing Unix system, in about '82, I checked out an early Unix book from the library. As I recall, there was a chapter called "Dumps", with sections entitled "Why You Need to Take a Dump", "When to Take a Dump", and "How to Take a Dump".
I may not remember it 100% verbatim, but that was the gist of it. Honest truth. (And it was otherwise a very dense and serious book.)
Sorry, Kiniski, but when I hear "wild child" I think Truffaut (as in his film "l'Enfant sauvage"). So if Opera is the wild child of browsers, it would be incapable of parsing or rendering HTML, would periodically generate frenzied outbursts of sound and signals, and would occasionally defecate on the desktop.But with years of patient training, it might become a functional browser.
I really should have added the rest of the Blake quotation:
But the following Contraries to these are True. 1 Man has no Body distinct from his Soul, for that calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age. 2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body, and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. 3 Energy is Eternal Delight
Pullman's trilogy is as relevant to Slashdot concerns as discussions of Tolkien, Orson Scott Card, maybe even Vernor Vinge. In particular, it has a lot to say (by implication) about the relation between organized religion and Big Science.
A quick and careless reading of the books leads people to think Pullman is only attacking organized religion and particularly the Catholic Church. But the Church in his stories is actually a composite of the most authoritarian elements of both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism (notably, Calvin is basically called a terrorist). Plus the Church in the book's principal alternate world also performs the functions of the orthodox scientific establishment in our world: there's no distinction between theologians and scientists, theology is in fact experimental, but theorizing is rigidly subject to the authority of the hierarchy. Theology/science at the Oxford of the alternate world is hampered by political infighting, personality clashes, money grabbing, power trips... sound anything like university departments you've seen?
Pullman's trilogy has been called the anti-Narnia, and it's definitely that. Like William Blake, he rereads Milton to make Satan the good guy (sort of: the Satan figure in the trilogy is attractive but flawed). And the best key to what Pullman's up to is Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Namely:
All Bibles or sacred codes, have been the causes of the following Errors. 1. That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a Soul. 2. That Energy. calld Evil. is alone from the Body. & that Reason. calld Good. is alone from the Soul. 3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.
Read it with Blake in mind, and it's not just a kiddie book. That said, Pulllman's trilogy is often unsatisfying for the lack of internal consistency and coherence in its imagined world, and there are some (to my mind) howlingly bad insertions, like the obligatory descent to the realm of the dead. He wants to have his myth & his science too, and that doesn't always work.
Back in '94, Canter and Siegel proclaimed themselves to any media outlet whose attention they could grab that they had bravely opened the Internet for the business uses that rightly belonged to it. By their logic, Edward "Blackbeard" Teach helped open the West Indies to commerce. Canter and Siegel were, and always will remain, pioneers in the sole sense that they were among the first to
realize that thuggery on the Internet was both possible and without most of the dangers of real-world theft. They were the original poster children for Garret Hardin's theory of the Tragedy of the Commons as applied to the Net.
In late 1994 I wrote a prophecy about Canter and Siegel as pioneers, and everything Canter said in that interview confirms its accuracy.
I wrote a Ph.D. dissertation using vi and nroff/troff way back in the early 80s. When I got my first PC, I abandoned vi for WordStar and eventually WYSIWIG word processors, and thought I'd never go back to "mainframe editors" again. But here I am two decades later using Vim running under both Linux/Unix and Windows every working day (and most vacation days) of my life. It's just plain the most flexible and powerful tool for working with text documents there is.
Now that raises an interesting question. Every now and then you'll hear a news story about some poor fellow arrested for impersonating a doctor, or practicing medicine without a license. Doesn't matter if he has performed a dozen successful brain transplants, he's got to have the paper that says he's allowed to, or else he's "posing".
If somebody writes 100,000 lines of bug-free code and then it turns out he lied about his CS degree, does he get fired?
Okay, I've got a couple of embarrassing posts in the ancient stuff (like a query to alt.sex from 1990 involving possible side effects of pseudoephedrine...). But my gosh, it has my long-lost first attempt at computer humor, posted from UCSD in January 1983, a pseudo-Unix manual entry for litcrit, "perform standard interpretation of literary work".
I was a grad student in English at the time and had only been using Unix for a few months—I was evidently unclear about which man section this belonged in. It's not quite as funny as I remembered it being, but it stands up reasonably well. Though an updated Litcrit with lots of new buzzwords and options is obviously needed...
For all the anal-retentive geek international standards enforcers out there, a link to something I wrote way back when complaining that "MST3K" is not a legal SI abbreviation.
Actually, it's a room full of anybody in the English-speaking world except for the English. Northern Europeans are worse offenders than us Yankees. Heck, Bram Moolenaar of VIM fame has had a MPHG quote in his.sigfile since 1969!
In 1982, I was a graduate student in humanities at UC San Diego when the progressive computer support staff there decided as an experiment to provide Unix accounts to grad students and teach them to use vi and nroff/troff so that they could edit and print their dissertations on the mainframe.
They wrote some front-end stuff to make it easier for non-techies to deal with, but once I discovered manpages and the wondrous labyrinth that cd/ presented I was hooked on Unix.
It didn't take long to discover Netnews. Because I was basically a sorceror's apprentice playing around without a wizard at my side, I made some incredible newbie mistakes, like trying to figure out what inews did, sending out a newgroup control message by mistake, and getting personally flamed by Mark Horton, if I recall. I was part of a minor flame war that erupted on net.jokes over the appropriateness of posting ethnic humor, a fuss that resulted in the creation of net.jokes.d to segregate the discussion from the humor.
I didn't have the slightest clue that I was in on the beginning of something that would change the world, and so I saved almost nothing of what I contributed or enjoyed on Usenet in the early '80s. I'd love to recover it--embarrassing as some of it might be.
Doctress Neutopia for landlord
on
First Arcology?
·
· Score: 1
Gaia Religion strikes again! To quote the immor(t)al Doctress Neutopia,
My mission here is to herald in a Neu Age of love, peace, ecofeminism, communalism, solar energy, the end of poverty, and a planetary network of arcologies.
It's one of my ancestors! I always knew I was different...
Sssh! That bacteria was found in southeast New Mexico. Next thing you know, the Comanches will be petitioning for it to be reburied under the provisions of NAGPRA (the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act), and then the Asatru Folk Assembly will file a counter-suit claiming that they recognize one particular bacterium as the ancestor of Woden so it belongs to them, and then...
Analysis for AMAZON COM INC: Based on data from SEC schedule EX-27.1 for the period JAN-01-1999 to DEC-31-1999, the predicted bankrupcy date is Dec 22, 2000 which is 228 days away.
That's when they run out of cash.
Better add a couple of days. I've been casually tracking the sales ranking of Irrational Exuberance on amazon.com for the last week or two--I work at a university press, and it's always fun to see a university press get a best-seller--and it had declined from #22 to somewhere in the #50s. But today it's back up to #16.
Apparently its sales ranking got/.ed! ('Fess up: how many of you bought the book as a result of this thread?)
"There is a difference between turning pages and scrolling down," he said. "There is something about a book that should inspire a certain presumption of reverence."
From the comments of Bibliophagus Minor of the Monastery of Alexandria, circa AD 550, lamenting the introduction of bound codex Bibles:
"There is a difference between unrolling a scroll and turning pages. There is something about a scroll that should inspire a certain presumption of reverence."
In the ancient days of Usenet, circa 1995, someone bearing my name did compose the following satire upon the lawyers who do defend the sacred scriptures and cash cows of the church of Mother Hubbard.
Ah, but the SuSE chameleon is so highly evolved that it can change not only its color but its species in order to blend in with its surroundings. In a geek environment, perforce it becomes a geeko.
Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 17:56:16 +0100 From: Bram Moolenaar To: VIM Announcements Subject: Vim gets Beanie Award!
Thursday night, February 3, in a crowded party, the slashdot Beanie Awards have been presented. And guess what? Vim won!
The category "Best Open Source Text Editor" listed Emacs, Xemacs, Pico, Joe and Vim. It's great that Vim has been voted to be the winner. Thanks to all who voted!
The $2000 price will be donated to ICCF Holland, to help the orphans in Uganda. See http//www.vim.org/iccf for info on the project.
When I got my first IBM PC and a 300 baud modem, Kermit was there to help me transfer my dissertation from the university mainframe to home where I could edit it with WordStar. 18 years later, Kermit is still under active development at Columbia University.
For years, Kermit Project leaders Frank da Cruz and Jeffrey Altman have tirelessly answered questions from users on comp.protocols.kermit.misc, for free, just about every day. They sure as heck deserve some kind of award.
Slashdot Mirror
I may not remember it 100% verbatim, but that was the gist of it. Honest truth. (And it was otherwise a very dense and serious book.)
Sorry, Kiniski, but when I hear "wild child" I think Truffaut (as in his film "l'Enfant sauvage"). So if Opera is the wild child of browsers, it would be incapable of parsing or rendering HTML, would periodically generate frenzied outbursts of sound and signals, and would occasionally defecate on the desktop.But with years of patient training, it might become a functional browser.
A quick and careless reading of the books leads people to think Pullman is only attacking organized religion and particularly the Catholic Church. But the Church in his stories is actually a composite of the most authoritarian elements of both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism (notably, Calvin is basically called a terrorist). Plus the Church in the book's principal alternate world also performs the functions of the orthodox scientific establishment in our world: there's no distinction between theologians and scientists, theology is in fact experimental, but theorizing is rigidly subject to the authority of the hierarchy. Theology/science at the Oxford of the alternate world is hampered by political infighting, personality clashes, money grabbing, power trips... sound anything like university departments you've seen?
Pullman's trilogy has been called the anti-Narnia, and it's definitely that. Like William Blake, he rereads Milton to make Satan the good guy (sort of: the Satan figure in the trilogy is attractive but flawed). And the best key to what Pullman's up to is Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Namely:
Read it with Blake in mind, and it's not just a kiddie book. That said, Pulllman's trilogy is often unsatisfying for the lack of internal consistency and coherence in its imagined world, and there are some (to my mind) howlingly bad insertions, like the obligatory descent to the realm of the dead. He wants to have his myth & his science too, and that doesn't always work.In late 1994 I wrote a prophecy about Canter and Siegel as pioneers, and everything Canter said in that interview confirms its accuracy.
I wrote a Ph.D. dissertation using vi and nroff/troff way back in the early 80s. When I got my first PC, I abandoned vi for WordStar and eventually WYSIWIG word processors, and thought I'd never go back to "mainframe editors" again. But here I am two decades later using Vim running under both Linux/Unix and Windows every working day (and most vacation days) of my life. It's just plain the most flexible and powerful tool for working with text documents there is.
If somebody writes 100,000 lines of bug-free code and then it turns out he lied about his CS degree, does he get fired?
I was a grad student in English at the time and had only been using Unix for a few months—I was evidently unclear about which man section this belonged in. It's not quite as funny as I remembered it being, but it stands up reasonably well. Though an updated Litcrit with lots of new buzzwords and options is obviously needed...
For all the anal-retentive geek international standards enforcers out there, a link to something I wrote way back when complaining that "MST3K" is not a legal SI abbreviation.
Don't have any design ideas, but the name for the structure is easy: the Archimedes "Ludwig" Plutonium Memorial, to honor the Atom Totality Theory and a pioneer Usenet Kook.
It didn't take long to discover Netnews. Because I was basically a sorceror's apprentice playing around without a wizard at my side, I made some incredible newbie mistakes, like trying to figure out what inews did, sending out a newgroup control message by mistake, and getting personally flamed by Mark Horton, if I recall. I was part of a minor flame war that erupted on net.jokes over the appropriateness of posting ethnic humor, a fuss that resulted in the creation of net.jokes.d to segregate the discussion from the humor.
I didn't have the slightest clue that I was in on the beginning of something that would change the world, and so I saved almost nothing of what I contributed or enjoyed on Usenet in the early '80s. I'd love to recover it--embarrassing as some of it might be.
Someone else on eBay has an auction for "Actual Piece of the Mir"--not. Mildly amusing. Much cheaper than the actual[?] piece.
I'll take hiking the Sierra with my prospecting pan over beating the bushes in Ireland, I think.
Apparently its sales ranking got /.ed! ('Fess up: how many of you bought the book as a result of this thread?)
Could it be the revenge of the E-meter?
(I'd be more inclined to paranoia, of course, if it weren't for the fact that eBay being down is hardly a rare event...)
http://www.demon.co.uk/castle/he lena/ho_racle.html
>"Frodo of the nine fingers,
> Frodo of the nine fingers..."
>Gawd, that was awful.
Don't tell me... it was sung to the tune of "Lothar of the Hill People" from the Saturday Night Live sketch?
Ah, but the SuSE chameleon is so highly evolved that it can change not only its color but its species in order to blend in with its surroundings. In a geek environment, perforce it becomes a geeko.
Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 17:56:16 +0100
From: Bram Moolenaar
To: VIM Announcements
Subject: Vim gets Beanie Award!
Thursday night, February 3, in a crowded party,
the slashdot Beanie Awards have been presented.
And guess what? Vim won!
The category "Best Open Source Text Editor" listed
Emacs, Xemacs, Pico, Joe and Vim. It's great that
Vim has been voted to be the winner.
Thanks to all who voted!
The $2000 price will be donated to ICCF Holland,
to help the orphans in Uganda.
See http//www.vim.org/iccf for info on the project.
For years, Kermit Project leaders Frank da Cruz and Jeffrey Altman have tirelessly answered questions from users on comp.protocols.kermit.misc, for free, just about every day. They sure as heck deserve some kind of award.