"mom-friendly"? Whose mom?
on
UNIX for Moms
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· Score: 1
Not only is Linda intelligent, she mentions "the typesetting program TeX, which I used twenty years before...". So she didn't merely give birth to a computer geek but is one herself. Gosh, a computer geek doesn't find UNIX that hard -- that's newsworthy?
Actually, this isn't the case. There were articles about the development of a freely available BSD system in Dr. Dobbs Journal in 1990. Linux wasn't available until late 1991.
Don Knuth (of TeX, MetaFont and Art of Computer Programming fame), already works in a Gates Building -- the one at Stanford. Oh well, -- in fifty years nobody will remember who Gates was -- it'll be just a name like Rockefeller
When researchers in a field make extravagant promises about breakthoughs that are about to happen "any day now" and decades go by without these breakthoughs actually coming to pass, scientific funding agencies are bound to come to the conclusion that the money would be better spent in more fruitful fields. Maybe now, with more background research, practical fusion energy really *is* just around the corner, but today's fusion researchers have to pay the price of the hype of their forerunners. Artificial intelligence is another field that is suffering from past overhype, and now in molecular biology, gene therapy may well be a future member of this club.
Genes *don't* jump around? I suppose the entire scientific literature on horizontal transfer is completely worthless, eh?
Genes *do* get passed around quite a bit. Antibiotics are becoming worthless because bacteria (even quite unrelated strains) are sharing resistence genes. But in order to *keep* the resistance genes selective pressure is needed -- and yes, the insane overusage of antibiotics is indeed a cause of such pressure.
And of course gene transfer from viruses has been known (for about twenty years) as the cause of many cancers.
"un-natural selection"? You mean like the domestication of dogs, cows, horses, etc. that humans did thousands of years ago? You mean the deliberate selection of plants for desirable properties which even the Ancient Egyptians and Sumerians did? Yeah -- we can do it faster now. But just like the ENIAC is really no different from a modern PC from the standpoint of computer science, all the fancy gene splicing is no different from what humans have always been doing from a biological level. And I might add that the distinction of natural vs artificial selection is quite fuzzy if one considers that humans are of course part of nature.
That having been said, I fully agree with many posters here that companies like Monsanto don't always work in the public interest, but that's not because of any safety theat, but because such companies dream of a future of dominated by their proprietory products which neither farmers nor academia will be allowed to modify.
While I wouldn't call Perl as nice to look at as Pascal or Smalltalk, it is certainly no worse to read than C. After all -- C's the source of most of what can be called ugly in Perl -- weird operators like !=, ++, **, %, etc.
Oh, for crying out loud! How is this any worse than chemistry sets? Culturing a dangeous pathogen with a simple set like that is about as likely as a kid creating nerve gas with a chemistry set.
Actually, back when ID was making sidescrollers like Commander Keen, "Quake" was the name of a roleplaying game that they were working on that was always about to appear Real Soon Now, but never did. I guess when they realized that the RPG was never going to be finished they recycled the name.
Actually, it's pretty surprising that Ebert likes _2001_ because Ebert was born in Urbana, IL just like HAL 9000. Seeing your fellow Urbanite go insane and get unplugged has to be pretty depressing.
Why shouldn't the guy get upset? Doesn't he have the right to leave his doors unlocked? Does that hurt anybody? The argument that someone deserves something bad to happen to them because they didn't lock their doors or were walking in a bad area of town or were wearing the wrong type of clothes is rather repulsive if you think about it. It's just shifting the blame to the victim. A society where distrust of others is not only common but encouraged is a pretty sorry excuse for a society.
Not to mention just plain sounding better than malloc or calloc. Malloc and Calloc sound like they should be villians in Dr. Who or something. Alloca has a nice Hawaii-five-o ring to it.
But seriously, how bad is alloca for portability? Man pages generally claim that it is system dependent...
A long time ago I read a science fiction story about vending robots that would look for moving objects and hawk their wares to them. A nuclear war occurs and they are the only moving objects left, so they just wander around trying to hawk their wares to each other.
Reading Foucault is rather like reading Eastern mysticism. It is so confusing that one either thinks there is something very deep there or its just nonsense. Unfortunately in both situations not enough people consider the latter, more logical, explanation.
Well, the article from 1987 reminded me again of Lucas' Willow, which I had completely forgotten. Lucas *can* make lame movies. We'll just have to wait and see on "The Phantom Menace". I think I'll let our heroic CmdrTaco go first and report back.
I notice you stress the GUI part. Yes, Tk is wonderful, and fortunately one can use it with other scripting languages such as perl, python, and stk. This is fortunate because many people (such as myself) became intringued with tcl/tk after seeing something like tkdesk but were immediately turned off by tcl, which makes the Bourne shell seem like a wonderful programming language.
Busineses springing from Open Source projects remind me an awful lot of businesses springing from university research projects (and of course TCL has both these origins). The founders always say that this is a positive move for the project and needed for its continued growth, etc. etc., but I sort of get the idea that the real reason is that these companies start is because the project heads want to live in a nicer house and drive a nicer car, and the way to get these things in our society is to start a business. I don't object to people like Ousterhout wanting nice things (they often deserve them), but I *do* wish these people would be more honest about their motives for going commercial.
It always annoyed me that the presumed Martian life forms are called "Bacteria". Assuming they are not just artifacts, all we can say is that they appear to be single celled. We don't know if they are prokaryotes much less the particular group of prokaryotes called "bacteria".
MIT birthplace of hackerdom?
on
RMS vs. ESR
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· Score: 1
Yes, MIT is *considered* the most prominent because they are the most self-promoting -- hardly surprising that it was the home of both ESR and RMS isn't it?
Can find the exact quote from ESR that says that BSD pre-dates Stallman? If he said free software predates Stallman, well that's true (And Stallman admits it -- he started the FSF to *preserve* free software traditions). If ESR said BSD predates the FSF, again a true statement.
I'm not a big ESR fan myself. Certainly the amount of code he's written is less than RMS' ut both ESR and RMS seem to be spending more time talking than working these days
MIT birthplace of hackerdom?
on
RMS vs. ESR
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· Score: 1
Oh please. Yes, there was neat stuff going on at MIT in the 60's and 70's, but there was plenty of neat things going on in lots of *other* universities as well.
Free software in no way started with MIT, Stallman or BSD, although all three certainly have contributed to it. There is no "Big Lie" -- only different perspectives. If your first exposure to UNIX was through Linux, then Stallman and the FSF seem really important. If your first exposure to UNIX was some form of BSD, then that seems really important.
BTW: Don't confuse BSD UNIX with AT&T UNIX. BSD only had a cost because it still had some AT&T code in it, and so an AT&T source license was needed.
...is the availability of source code. Because the Unices aren't binary compatible, even if they are more or less source compatible, the distribution of source has become standard for practical reasons beyond the philosophical reasons of "Free" or "Open Source" software. Consider the Windows and PalmPilot worlds -- the single target platform means that even freeware for these platforms rarely includes the source code.
It's truly a pity that Raymond Faulkner's "Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian" doesn't seem to have the transliteration of the helicopter glyph.... I don't even know what its Gardiner classification number is so I can't typeset it with HieroTeX
Well, gcc is certainly more complicated than "ls" but look at the dozens of free compilers for Linux (or UNIX in general). Granted they tend to be for more obscure languages like Modula-2 instead of C, but that's not because C is intrinsically more complicated to write compilers for -- its just that gcc is already there.
RMS and FSF did a lot of good things for Linux, no question. But RMS seems to claim that any system running GNU tools is the GNU system, even if the system is nothing like the system Stallman described in his Manifesto (Whatever happened to that LISP-based Windowing system anyhow?)
If the kernel was such a trivial thing to create, then why wasn't the Hurd finished in a timely fashion? There might be a lot of GNU code in Linux systems, but it is mostly in trivial things like "ls" and "cat". To use the biological example, the kernel isn't the heart (a simple pump), but the brain (the most complicated element of the system) And I would call a man with a transgenic pig brain a pig.
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Not only is Linda intelligent, she mentions "the typesetting program TeX, which I used twenty years before...". So she didn't merely give birth to a computer geek but is one herself. Gosh, a computer geek doesn't find UNIX that hard -- that's newsworthy?
Actually, this isn't the case. There were articles about the development of a freely available BSD system in Dr. Dobbs Journal in 1990. Linux wasn't available until late 1991.
Don Knuth (of TeX, MetaFont and Art of Computer Programming fame), already works in a Gates Building -- the one at Stanford. Oh well, -- in fifty years nobody will remember who Gates was -- it'll be just a name like Rockefeller
When researchers in a field make extravagant promises about breakthoughs that are about to happen "any day now" and decades go by without these breakthoughs actually coming to pass, scientific funding agencies are bound to come to the conclusion that the money would be better spent in more fruitful fields. Maybe now, with more background research, practical fusion energy really *is* just around the corner, but today's fusion researchers have to pay the price of the hype of their forerunners. Artificial intelligence is another field that is suffering from past overhype, and now in molecular biology, gene therapy may well be a future member of this club.
Genes *don't* jump around? I suppose the entire scientific literature on horizontal transfer is completely worthless, eh?
Genes *do* get passed around quite a bit. Antibiotics are becoming worthless because bacteria (even quite unrelated strains) are sharing resistence genes. But in order to *keep* the resistance genes selective pressure is needed -- and yes, the insane overusage of antibiotics is indeed a cause of such pressure.
And of course gene transfer from viruses has been known (for about twenty years) as the cause of many cancers.
"un-natural selection"? You mean like the domestication of dogs, cows, horses, etc. that humans did thousands of years ago? You mean the deliberate selection of plants for desirable properties which even the Ancient Egyptians and Sumerians did? Yeah -- we can do it faster now. But just like the ENIAC is really no different from a modern PC from the standpoint of computer science, all the fancy gene splicing is no different from what humans have always been doing from a biological level. And I might add that the distinction of natural vs artificial selection is quite fuzzy if one considers that humans are of course part of nature.
That having been said, I fully agree with many posters here that companies like Monsanto don't always work in the public interest, but that's not because of any safety theat, but because such companies dream of a future of dominated by their proprietory products which neither farmers nor academia will be allowed to modify.
While I wouldn't call Perl as nice to look at as Pascal or Smalltalk, it is certainly no worse to read than C. After all -- C's the source of most of what can be called ugly in Perl -- weird operators like !=, ++, **, %, etc.
Oh, for crying out loud! How is this any worse than chemistry sets? Culturing a dangeous pathogen with a simple set like that is about as likely as a kid creating nerve gas with a chemistry set.
Actually, back when ID was making sidescrollers like Commander Keen, "Quake" was the name of a roleplaying game that they were working on that was always about to appear Real Soon Now, but never did. I guess when they realized that the RPG was never going to be finished they recycled the name.
Actually, it's pretty surprising that Ebert likes _2001_ because Ebert was born in Urbana, IL just like HAL 9000. Seeing your fellow Urbanite go insane and get unplugged has to be pretty depressing.
Why shouldn't the guy get upset? Doesn't he have the right to leave his doors unlocked? Does that hurt anybody? The argument that someone deserves something bad to happen to them because they didn't lock their doors or were walking in a bad area of town or were wearing the wrong type of clothes is rather repulsive if you think about it. It's just shifting the blame to the victim. A society where distrust of others is not only common but encouraged is a pretty sorry excuse for a society.
Not to mention just plain sounding better than malloc or calloc. Malloc and Calloc sound like they should be villians in Dr. Who or something. Alloca has a nice Hawaii-five-o ring to it.
But seriously, how bad is alloca for portability? Man pages generally claim that it is system dependent...
A long time ago I read a science fiction story about vending robots that would look for moving objects and hawk their wares to them. A nuclear war occurs and they are the only moving objects left, so they just wander around trying to hawk their wares to each other.
Reading Foucault is rather like reading Eastern mysticism. It is so confusing that one either thinks there is something very deep there or its just nonsense. Unfortunately in both situations not enough people consider the latter, more logical, explanation.
Well, the article from 1987 reminded me again of Lucas' Willow, which I had completely forgotten. Lucas *can* make lame movies. We'll just have to wait and see on "The Phantom Menace". I think I'll let our heroic CmdrTaco go first and report back.
I notice you stress the GUI part. Yes, Tk is wonderful, and fortunately one can use it with other scripting languages such as perl, python, and stk. This is fortunate because many people (such as myself) became intringued with tcl/tk after seeing something like tkdesk but were immediately turned off by tcl, which makes the Bourne shell seem like a wonderful programming language.
Busineses springing from Open Source projects remind me an awful lot of businesses springing from university research projects (and of course TCL has both these origins). The founders always say that this is a positive move for the project and needed for its continued growth, etc. etc., but I sort of get the idea that the real reason is that these companies start is because the project heads want to live in a nicer house and drive a nicer car, and the way to get these things in our society is to start a business. I don't object to people like Ousterhout wanting nice things (they often deserve them), but I *do* wish these people would be more honest about their motives for going commercial.
Does anyone celebrate e day? (Feb 7, at 18:28).
e's always been *my* favorite irrational number, but pi gets all the publicity *sigh*
It always annoyed me that the presumed Martian life forms are called "Bacteria". Assuming they are not just artifacts, all we can say is that they appear to be single celled. We don't know if they are prokaryotes much less the particular group of prokaryotes called "bacteria".
Yes, MIT is *considered* the most prominent because they are the most self-promoting -- hardly surprising that it was the home of both ESR and RMS isn't it?
Can find the exact quote from ESR that says that BSD pre-dates Stallman? If he said free software predates Stallman, well that's true (And Stallman admits it -- he started the FSF to *preserve* free software traditions). If ESR said BSD predates the FSF, again a true statement.
I'm not a big ESR fan myself. Certainly the amount of code he's written is less than RMS' ut both ESR and RMS seem to be spending more time talking than working these days
Oh please. Yes, there was neat stuff going on at MIT in the 60's and 70's, but there was plenty of neat things going on in lots of *other* universities as well.
Free software in no way started with MIT, Stallman or BSD, although all three certainly have contributed to it. There is no "Big Lie" -- only different perspectives. If your first exposure to UNIX was through Linux, then Stallman and the FSF seem really important. If your first exposure to UNIX was some form of BSD, then that seems really important.
BTW: Don't confuse BSD UNIX with AT&T UNIX. BSD only had a cost because it still had some AT&T code in it, and so an AT&T source license was needed.
...is the availability of source code. Because the Unices aren't binary compatible, even if they are more or less source compatible, the distribution of source has become standard for practical reasons beyond the philosophical reasons of "Free" or "Open Source" software. Consider the Windows and PalmPilot worlds -- the single target platform means that even freeware for these platforms rarely includes the source code.
It's truly a pity that Raymond Faulkner's "Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian" doesn't seem to have the transliteration of the helicopter glyph.... I don't even know what its Gardiner classification number is so I can't typeset it with HieroTeX
Well, gcc is certainly more complicated than "ls" but look at the dozens of free compilers for Linux (or UNIX in general). Granted they tend to be for more obscure languages like Modula-2 instead of C, but that's not because C is intrinsically more complicated to write compilers for -- its just that gcc is already there.
RMS and FSF did a lot of good things for Linux, no question. But RMS seems to claim that any system running GNU tools is the GNU system, even if the system is nothing like the system Stallman described in his Manifesto (Whatever happened to that LISP-based Windowing system anyhow?)
If the kernel was such a trivial thing to create, then why wasn't the Hurd finished in a timely fashion? There might be a lot of GNU code in Linux systems, but it is mostly in trivial things like "ls" and "cat". To use the biological example, the kernel isn't the heart (a simple pump), but the brain (the most complicated element of the system)
And I would call a man with a transgenic pig brain a pig.