CREATORS ADMIT UNIX, C HOAX UNIXWORLDWEEKLY 4/1 p.1
In an announcement that has stunned the computer industry, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan admitted that the Unix operating system and C programming language created by them is an elaborate April Fools prank kept alive for over 20 years. Speaking at the recent UnixWorld Software Development Forum, Thompson revealed the following:
"In 1969, AT&T had just terminated their (Bell Labs) work with the GE/Honeywell/AT&T Multics project. Brian and I had just started working with an early release of Pascal from Professor Nichlaus Wirth's ETH labs in Switzerland and we were impressed with its elegant simplicity and power. Dennis had just finished reading Bored of the Rings, a hilarious Harvard Lampoon parody of the great Tolkein Lord of the Rings trilogy. As a lark, we decided to do parodies of the Multics environment and Pascal. Dennis and I were responsible for the operating environment. We looked at Multics and designed the new system to be as complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual users' frustration levels, calling it Unix as a parody of Multics, as well as other more risque allusions. Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped version of Pascal, called 'A'. When we found others were actually trying to create real programs with A, we quickly added additional cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL and finally C, becoming the first programming language named after a Sesame Street character. We stopped when we got a clean compile on the following syntax:
To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that allowed such a statement was beyond our comprehension! We actually thought of selling this to the Soviets to set their computer science progress back 20 or more years. Imagine our surprise when AT&T and other US corporations actually began trying to use Unix and C! It has taken them 20 years to develop enough expertise to generate even marginally useful applications using this 1960's technological parody, but we are impressed with the tenacity (if not common sense) of the general Unix and C programmer. In any event, Brian, Dennis and I have been working exclusively in Object Pascal on the Apple Macintosh for the past few years and feel really guilty about the chaos, confusion and truly bad programming that have resulted from our silly prank so long ago."
Major Unix and C vendors and customers, including AT&T, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, GTE, NCR, Bull (formerly Honewell), and DEC have refused comment at this time. Borland International, a leading vendor of Pascal and C tools, including the popular Turbo Pascal, Turbo C and Turbo C++, stated they had suspected this for a number of years and would continue to enhance their Pascal products and halt further efforts to develop C. An IBM spokesman broke into uncontrolled laughter and had to postpone a hastily convened news conference concerning the fate of the RS-6000, stating 'a stable VM will be available Real Soon Now'. In a cryptic statement, Professor Wirth of the ETH institute and father of the Pascal, Modula 2 and Oberon structured languages, merely stated that P. T. Barnum was correct.
In a related late-breaking story, usually reliable sources are stating that a similar confession may be forthcoming from William Gates concerning the MS-DOS and Windows operating environments. And IBM spokesmen have begun denying once again that the Virtual Machine (VM) product is an internal prank gone awry.
The Genesis of Unix is already included in the Unix Bible!
The Bible According to Unix
Genesis
Chapter 0
0. In the Beginning Ritchie created the PDP-11 and the UNIX. 1. And the UNIX was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the system programmers. 2. And Ritchie said, "Let there be portability!" And nothing happened, so Ritchie realized that he had his work cut out for him. . 25. And Ritchie said to Kernighan, "Let us make C in the image of B, after our own whims: and let it have dominion over the I and the O and all that runneth upon the UNIX," and it was almost, but not quite so... so he realized that he had his work cut out for him again. .
Chapter 1
0. Thus the PDP-11 and the UNIX were finished, and all the programs in them. 1. And on the seventh shift Ritchie ended his work which he had made; and he would have rested on the seventh shift from all the work which he had made, if it weren't for the system crash. .
Chapter 2
0. 0 Now the COBOL was more verbose than any language of the PDP-11, and he said unto the programmer, "Yea, hath the Manual said, 'Ye shalt not read of every device of the network?'" 1 And the programmer said unto the COBOL, "We may read of every device of the network: 2 But of the registers of the printer in the midst of the network, the Manual hath said, 'Ye shall not read of it, neither shall ye write to it without proper protocol, lest ye cause a system crash.'" 3 And the COBOL said unto the programmer, "Ye shalt not surely crash the system: 4 For Ritchie doth know that in the time slice ye read thereof, then your I/O shall be opened, and ye shalt be as system operators, accessing locked accounts with unlimited privileges." 5 And then when the programmer saw that the printer was good for interfacing, and that it was pleasant to the I (and to the O),... 6 And they realized they were unstructured, so they patched RATFOR subroutines... .
The Gospel
0. And the Messiah shalt come, born a mere B but to grow up into the Saviour C, 1. Wherein true structured programming may be achieved, yea, verily, yet while being able to do bit shifting. 2. For although the Law (Pascal) hath been given, the Law cannot
i:= 0; while (i <= length(str1)) do begin if str1[i] in ['A'..'Z'] then str2[i]:= chr( ord(str1[i]) + 32)) else str1[i]:= str2[i]; i:= i + 1; end;
The Revelation
0. Yea, in those last days, the Saviour shalt come again, but enhanced, in the rainment of C++ 1. And then shalt the Beast, FORTRAN, and the AntiC, COBOL, be thrown into the trash HEAP where there is weeping and byting of pins. 2. And all the faithful programmers shalt be led into CRAY where billions of MIPS are at each one's fingertips
The MythTV project would probably love to have any documentation you might be willing to contribute related to MythGame (or anything else for that matter).
After all, look what happened to somebody else who crossed Microsoft!
Microsoft manager died from drinking antifreeze
By The Seattle times staff
SEATTLE -- Daniel Feussner, a former Microsoft manager who died suddenly two months ago while facing federal charges for allegedly stealing $9 million in company software, had ingested ethylene glycol, the main ingredient in automobile antifreeze, the King County medical examiner has determined.
But the Medical Examiner's Office said it cannot say whether the 32-year-old, German-born computer expert committed suicide or accidentally ingested the poison.
Feussner died Feb. 7 after being rushed to a Bellevue hospital. He had been free on bail while awaiting trial on 15 counts of wire, mail and computer fraud in U.S. District Court. Prosecutors alleged Feussner financed a lavish lifestyle by obtaining software from the company and selling it. If convicted, he could have faced up to 20 years in prison.
"An object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force."
Gee, an out-of-touch professor protected from the real world by tenure flake like Stallman posting anti-Republican propaganda. Academia far-left never-have-to-get-a-real-job elitist pseudo-intellectual arrogant pompous ignorant professors are a dime a dozen.
I feel much safer because of the PATRIOT ACT and am grateful we have intelligent Republicans (redundant) looking out for our country. They're much smarter than some know-it-all slashdotter who thinks they're clever putting political messages in their sigs.
If you have keratoconis, the usual corrective eye surgery isn't an option. However, "intacts" are pretty new and are an option (plastic rings are inserted around the cornea).
Geek (n): A person with a devotion to something in a way that places him or her outside the mainstream. This could be due to the intensity, depth, or subject of their interest.
Nah, it's just that so many geeks are immature and juvenile, intellectually and emotionally. Ergo, their interest in comic books which are only also read by grade-schoolers.
Why does anybody here care about Linux's market share? Do you directly profit from Linux's market share? Or is it merely just like rooting for your favorite sports team?
Slashdot Mirror
These toaster-sized systems
Great, now you'll have people putting bread in their systems expecting it to get toasted.
http://rinkworks.com/stupid/cs_cdroms.shtml
Google has also been unsuccessful in getting booble.com taken down.
http://booble.com/legal.html
Unfortunately, no one is available to cast for any of the heroes
Certainly nobody in the Democrat camp.
CREATORS ADMIT UNIX, C HOAX
) %2 ))P("| "+(*u/4)%2);
UNIXWORLDWEEKLY 4/1 p.1
In an announcement that has stunned the computer industry, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan admitted that the Unix operating system and C programming language created by them is an elaborate April Fools prank kept alive for over 20 years. Speaking at the recent UnixWorld Software Development Forum, Thompson revealed the following:
"In 1969, AT&T had just terminated their (Bell Labs) work with the GE/Honeywell/AT&T Multics project. Brian and I had just started working with an early release of Pascal from Professor Nichlaus Wirth's ETH labs in Switzerland and we were impressed with its elegant simplicity and power. Dennis had just finished reading Bored of the Rings, a hilarious Harvard Lampoon parody of the great Tolkein Lord of the Rings trilogy. As a lark, we decided to do parodies of the Multics environment and Pascal. Dennis and I were responsible for the operating environment. We looked at Multics and designed the new system to be as complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual users' frustration levels, calling it Unix as a parody of Multics, as well as other more risque allusions. Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped version of Pascal, called 'A'. When we found others were actually trying to create real programs with A, we quickly added additional cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL and finally C, becoming the first programming language named after a Sesame Street character. We stopped when we got a clean compile on the following syntax:
for(;P("\n"),R-;P("|"))for(e=C;e-;P("_"+(*u++/8
To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that allowed such a statement was beyond our comprehension! We actually thought of selling this to the Soviets to set their computer science progress back 20 or more years. Imagine our surprise when AT&T and other US corporations actually began trying to use Unix and C! It has taken them 20 years to develop enough expertise to generate even marginally useful applications using this 1960's technological parody, but we are impressed with the tenacity (if not common sense) of the general Unix and C programmer. In any event, Brian, Dennis and I have been working exclusively in Object Pascal on the Apple Macintosh for the past few years and feel really guilty about the chaos, confusion and truly bad programming that have resulted from our silly prank so long ago."
Major Unix and C vendors and customers, including AT&T, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, GTE, NCR, Bull (formerly Honewell), and DEC have refused comment at this time. Borland International, a leading vendor of Pascal and C tools, including the popular Turbo Pascal, Turbo C and Turbo C++, stated they had suspected this for a number of years and would continue to enhance their Pascal products and halt further efforts to develop C. An IBM spokesman broke into uncontrolled laughter and had to postpone a hastily convened news conference concerning the fate of the RS-6000, stating 'a stable VM will be available Real Soon Now'. In a cryptic statement, Professor Wirth of the ETH institute and father of the Pascal, Modula 2 and Oberon structured languages, merely stated that P. T. Barnum was correct.
In a related late-breaking story, usually reliable sources are stating that a similar confession may be forthcoming from William Gates concerning the MS-DOS and Windows operating environments. And IBM spokesmen have begun denying once again that the Virtual Machine (VM) product is an internal prank gone awry.
...playing with neurotransmitters may be another. What do /.'ers foresee coming in this field?
The obvious:
- pr0n
- brain overclocking
Yep, I'm thinking about setting up a MythTV box.
The MythTV project would probably love to have any documentation you might be willing to contribute related to MythGame (or anything else for that matter).
Couldn't you have the same sort of thing, plus a whole lot more, with MythTV? Doesn't MythTV have emulators for all those platforms?
After all, look what happened to somebody else who crossed Microsoft!
Microsoft manager died from drinking antifreeze
By The Seattle times staff
SEATTLE -- Daniel Feussner, a former Microsoft manager who died suddenly two months ago while facing federal charges for allegedly stealing $9 million in company software, had ingested ethylene glycol, the main ingredient in automobile antifreeze, the King County medical examiner has determined.
But the Medical Examiner's Office said it cannot say whether the 32-year-old, German-born computer expert committed suicide or accidentally ingested the poison.
Feussner died Feb. 7 after being rushed to a Bellevue hospital. He had been free on bail while awaiting trial on 15 counts of wire, mail and computer fraud in U.S. District Court. Prosecutors alleged Feussner financed a lavish lifestyle by obtaining software from the company and selling it. If convicted, he could have faced up to 20 years in prison.
http://www.joegrossberg.com/archives/000573.html
Sounds like Newton has an inertia of its own!
"An object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force."
More info on "Moon Bounce"
http://www.zetatalk.com/info/tinfo14e.htm
http://www.af9y.com/
How to be a good Democrat
Gee, an out-of-touch professor protected from the real world by tenure flake like Stallman posting anti-Republican propaganda. Academia far-left never-have-to-get-a-real-job elitist pseudo-intellectual arrogant pompous ignorant professors are a dime a dozen.
Much better list:
Things Democrats Believe
Should I call you while I'm driving?
They just ignore red lights.
I feel much safer because of the PATRIOT ACT and am grateful we have intelligent Republicans (redundant) looking out for our country. They're much smarter than some know-it-all slashdotter who thinks they're clever putting political messages in their sigs.
A. RK, PRK, Lasik, etc.
B. Castration (removes the ROOT cause of bad eyesight, right?).
If you have keratoconis, the usual corrective eye surgery isn't an option. However, "intacts" are pretty new and are an option (plastic rings are inserted around the cornea).
http://www.keratoconusinserts.com/
I've always wondered what was with the name "Golden Stream". Must've been how the military tested it an unsuspecting public!
http://www.goldenstream.com/
No way, Broken is better than Fixed.
Geek (n): A person with a devotion to something in a way that places him or her outside the mainstream. This could be due to the intensity, depth, or subject of their interest.
Nah, it's just that so many geeks are immature and juvenile, intellectually and emotionally. Ergo, their interest in comic books which are only also read by grade-schoolers.
Why is it that geeks are the only "grown" men (well, other than those with an elementary school education) that still read comics?
What does that mean? I never had any problems using Imagemagick on GIFs. They always appeared to be compressed (before and after operations).
Why does anybody here care about Linux's market share? Do you directly profit from Linux's market share? Or is it merely just like rooting for your favorite sports team?
Haha, looks like you just wrote a song for that lameass poser no-talent band Limp Dicksquick.