This is rather bizarre. BASIC was never intended as a development language, but rather as a sort of hybrid-simplified COBOL/Fortran to be used to introduce people to computing concepts. Yes, over the years, that ease of learning and use gave it a certain edge, not to mention that MS's version of BASIC ended up on most microcomputers in the 1970s and 1980s.
C, on the other hand, was developed specifically as a mid-level language that could be used to develop both system-level and user-level software, but in particular the former. It was designed to build kernels, drivers, and heck, even other compilers. It's strength in being much more low level are the reason it became dominant. It was always intended as a production language, and its association with Unix both in kernel and userland development gave it that edge. It was intended for things BASIC never was.
BASIC gained a good deal of its modern capabilities by introducing concepts like procedural and ultimately OOP programming, either from C/C++ or from Pascal (which, really, always was a far better learning language). I did work in QuickBASIC in the 1990s, and attached to a compiler that could import C libraries, it became a fairly powerful language, but that certainly wasn't the BASIC Pournelle was familiar in the 1980s, and I'd argue that the structured BASIC variants that arose in the late 80s and early 90s were more like weakly-typed PASCAL variants than traditional BASIC. Traditional BASIC really isn't a very good language at all, and this is coming from someone who started programming in the MS-BASIC variants found in Radio Shack and Commodore computers. Developing large complex programs in those dialects was horrible, and languages like C and Pascal was like a revelation.
Well, he loved to recount his brief period of modest influence, but he most certainly was a Libertarian, just one with fond, if inflated memories of the reach of his opinions. Pournelle, like a lot of people, became a lot more ideologically rigid as he got older, and suffered that saddest and most debilitating of conditions, pointless contrarianism.
They're a science magazine reporting on science. It's tough you don't like AGW, but it's reality and no amount of wailing from your end will stop that. Grow up, the laws of the universe are what they are and don't give a flying fuck about your tender sensibilities. we've known since the 19th century that cranking up CO2 levels in the atmosphere was bad.
Except some of the "fools" he didn't suffer weren't fools at all, and it was Pournelle who took pointlessly contrarian positions. His views on Climate Change, biology and vaccines were not the views of a thoughtful man, but rather someone who just had emotional responses to things he didn't like. As I say elsewhere, I enjoyed his writing, but he became a full on crank by the 1990s.
The whole "KKK are extremist Democrats" is an absurd statement. That was true 70 years ago before the Dixiecrats basically split from the Democrats. And where did most of the Dixiecrats ultimately end up? In the Republican Party.
When I corresponded with him, it actually began with my mild criticism of his anti-evolution stance, or rather his critique of Darwinism (I never got the feeling he was a creationist). He leaned towards some sort of panspermia (maybe that's the SF author coming out in him)j, and I just wrote him and said I thought all panspermia did was push the problem back. He went on about how no less than Fred Hoyle was a panspermia advocate. My response was simply that while Hoyle was a very good astronomer, he was speaking outside his field of expertise when critiquing abiogenesis on Earth or asserting extraterrestrial origins of life. He took some offense to that, mainly that a mere Internet dweller would question Fred Hoyle. It was a peculiar exchange that suggested to me that he had staked out his positions and had little interest in actual debate.
I still enjoyed his writing, his military SF was some of the best of that genre, though I clearly saw his beliefs and prejudices coming out in some of his stories, but that's no different than any writer.
Considering he'd been a big fan of Gingrich, why would that surprise you? I actually corresponded with him briefly about a decade ago, and he was very much a libertarian with some isolationist tendencies. I didn't think much of his politics but immensely enjoyed his writing, even some of his essays
His Codominion series was pretty awesome (Mote was in that universe as I recall). I'd heard he'd been thinking about continuing it, sadly that won't happen now.
Trump is as much the elite as any of them, the only problem being he's really a Democrat, and a bunch of moronic GOP voters somehow bought a load of bullshit that he was a Republican. Now, as he seems prepared to pivot and magically become a Democratic president (probably sensing that the Republicans are going to get badly damaged in the mid-terms, the best way to preserve himself is to cozy up to the Dems), I wonder how long the likes of you will cling to the notion that he represents even the tiniest bit of your interests.
I'm looking at the people Trump has in his White House, and having a hard time not seeing how you could say exactly the same thing about the Republicans.
There's a difference between people masquerading as Americans paying Facebook for pro-Trump or anti-Clinton advertising and Trump's son, son-in-law and then campaign manager going to a meeting with purported representatives of Putin to get the goods on Clinton.
I don't think it's about money at all. Ayyadurai had a fairly decent job at MIT, which he himself blew up when his grandiose claims about being "the inventor of email" got widely publicized. If anything, Ayyadurai's wildly hyperbolic claims have actually cost him dearly, and unless Thiel has been funding his lifestyle on top of his lawsuit, I can't imagine Ayyadurai is making better money than he did five years ago.
No, I think what we're dealing with here is the classic case of the self-aggrandizing kook who tried to spin a modest accomplishment (he did, after all, actually write an email program when he was 14, no mean feat at all) into some grand story of being the "inventor of EMAIL". Clearly there's an element of dishonesty here, as his whole claim is a clever conflation, but just about every netkook I've ever encountered was fairly bright, but also so self-deluded that they begin to believe the lies and half-truths they have to spin to create the illusion of support for their claims.
He's running for Senate now, so we'll see if the good people of Massachusetts want to give a litigious and abusive fantasist a job.
Neither did Equifax, I'm sure. They're crime is not securing their systems, which would obviously be a very attractive fruit for any hacker to try to pluck, and in a perfect world Equifax would be fined billions of dollars and its management would rot in prison cells for a very long time. As it is, I'm sure the FCC will do some shoddy little investigation that amounts to a few million dollars in fines, there will be a class action lawsuit that probably will see some small fraction of the victims get some measly payout sometime before the heat death of the Universe.
I'll tell you whose clinking their champagne glasses right now, it's the lawyers. No matter who loses, they always win.
Read the judgment. On your first question, no he didn't. Just looking at the RFCs pertaining to ARPANET message formatting and transmission prior to his program, you can see that pretty much the essentials of the email systems we use today were sketched out by the mid-70s, but in reality, there were many different mail systems dating back over a decade prior to RFC 561.
If there was an inventory of modern email, it would be Roy Tomlinson, he was the primary developer of RFC 561, but as he made clear over the years, he did not develop email at all, and it was a collective by many groups over several years. But I would credit Tomlinson as being one of the primary developers of the ARPANET network mail system, which is the direct ancestor of Internet email, the chief innovations coming after that time being UUCP and SMTP which standardized the means to of transmitting those messages between multiple servers on local and wide area networks. Ayyadurai had absolutely nothing to do with any of this work, and no one has produced even a hint that Tomlinson or any of the other developers of the ARPANET network mail system ever heard of him, or based any of their work off of anything he did.
He wrote a mail system used for a while at one institution. It was an evolutionary dead end that inspired no one, and the fact is that those features of "email" that Ayyadurai claims were his had already been designed and rolled out. He had nothing to do with the development of ARPANET/Internet email. Full stop.
The reality is that email, like so many aspects of modern computing, was developed multiple times and in multiple ways over the years, and even the mail system we know today was the collective work of multiple individuals, building on the basic mail systems found on mainframe systems in the late 60s and early 70s, with each new RFC adding, clarifying and standardizing email functionality. In a way, there was no inventory of email, no single person you can point at and say "he did it". That was the spirit of computing at the time, and indeed is the source of the open source philosophy we have today. Nobody was developing ARPANET email to gain fame and fortune, they were engineers identifying and solving problems.
I'm fairly certain if you have applied for credit of any kind, somewhere on the dizzying array of forms in the small print you did indeed consent to sharing your financial information with Equifax. In fact, I doubt there's any kind of main street lender anywhere in the US or Canada that would loan you so much as a penny without consenting to this, so about the only way you could have borrowed money without this consent if it was from a guy in a trenchcoat in a dark alley who went by the name "Vinny the Knife".
I give the guy credit for writing an email program. That's it. His claim isn't that he wrote an email program in the late 70s. His claim is that he "invented Email", conflating the copyrighting of his dead-end messaging program with the email system that we see today. He had nothing to do with ARPANET email, no one who worked on those systems ever heard of him, so he did nothing innovative, and certainly nothing that assisted in the development of Internet email. His claims are rubbish, and when cornered, he plays a bait-and-switch game between his copyrighted program used by very few people and the email systems now used by hundreds of millions of people.
Whatever credit he gets for writing a messaging system is wiped out by his lies and attacks on those who actually did develop the email system we have today.
At times it's hard to tell whether Ayyadurai is just a liar, or if he really is out of his mind. I suspect he lies somewhere in between; that he started out peddling an inflated claim, and when called out on it, started getting more and more hyperbolic, in the hopes of shouting down critics. His statements on Tomlinson were absurd and hateful, particularly in light of the fact that the RFCs are all dated, so we have a very solid chronology of how ARPANET email evolved during the 1970s.
I think he's a litigious kook, or as we would have called him back in the day; a net kook.
Slashdot Mirror
This is rather bizarre. BASIC was never intended as a development language, but rather as a sort of hybrid-simplified COBOL/Fortran to be used to introduce people to computing concepts. Yes, over the years, that ease of learning and use gave it a certain edge, not to mention that MS's version of BASIC ended up on most microcomputers in the 1970s and 1980s.
C, on the other hand, was developed specifically as a mid-level language that could be used to develop both system-level and user-level software, but in particular the former. It was designed to build kernels, drivers, and heck, even other compilers. It's strength in being much more low level are the reason it became dominant. It was always intended as a production language, and its association with Unix both in kernel and userland development gave it that edge. It was intended for things BASIC never was.
BASIC gained a good deal of its modern capabilities by introducing concepts like procedural and ultimately OOP programming, either from C/C++ or from Pascal (which, really, always was a far better learning language). I did work in QuickBASIC in the 1990s, and attached to a compiler that could import C libraries, it became a fairly powerful language, but that certainly wasn't the BASIC Pournelle was familiar in the 1980s, and I'd argue that the structured BASIC variants that arose in the late 80s and early 90s were more like weakly-typed PASCAL variants than traditional BASIC. Traditional BASIC really isn't a very good language at all, and this is coming from someone who started programming in the MS-BASIC variants found in Radio Shack and Commodore computers. Developing large complex programs in those dialects was horrible, and languages like C and Pascal was like a revelation.
I find it fascinating that I get modded offtopic, but the parent doesn't.
Well, he loved to recount his brief period of modest influence, but he most certainly was a Libertarian, just one with fond, if inflated memories of the reach of his opinions. Pournelle, like a lot of people, became a lot more ideologically rigid as he got older, and suffered that saddest and most debilitating of conditions, pointless contrarianism.
They're a science magazine reporting on science. It's tough you don't like AGW, but it's reality and no amount of wailing from your end will stop that. Grow up, the laws of the universe are what they are and don't give a flying fuck about your tender sensibilities. we've known since the 19th century that cranking up CO2 levels in the atmosphere was bad.
The first problem being we actually have no idea how likely or unlikely abiogenesis is.
Which totally explains why their spiritual grandchildren are such big Trump fans...
I always got the feeling that the Moties were more Niven's creation than Pournelle's. Could be wrong, but they definitely had that Niven feel to them.
Except some of the "fools" he didn't suffer weren't fools at all, and it was Pournelle who took pointlessly contrarian positions. His views on Climate Change, biology and vaccines were not the views of a thoughtful man, but rather someone who just had emotional responses to things he didn't like. As I say elsewhere, I enjoyed his writing, but he became a full on crank by the 1990s.
The whole "KKK are extremist Democrats" is an absurd statement. That was true 70 years ago before the Dixiecrats basically split from the Democrats. And where did most of the Dixiecrats ultimately end up? In the Republican Party.
When I corresponded with him, it actually began with my mild criticism of his anti-evolution stance, or rather his critique of Darwinism (I never got the feeling he was a creationist). He leaned towards some sort of panspermia (maybe that's the SF author coming out in him)j, and I just wrote him and said I thought all panspermia did was push the problem back. He went on about how no less than Fred Hoyle was a panspermia advocate. My response was simply that while Hoyle was a very good astronomer, he was speaking outside his field of expertise when critiquing abiogenesis on Earth or asserting extraterrestrial origins of life. He took some offense to that, mainly that a mere Internet dweller would question Fred Hoyle. It was a peculiar exchange that suggested to me that he had staked out his positions and had little interest in actual debate.
I still enjoyed his writing, his military SF was some of the best of that genre, though I clearly saw his beliefs and prejudices coming out in some of his stories, but that's no different than any writer.
Considering he'd been a big fan of Gingrich, why would that surprise you? I actually corresponded with him briefly about a decade ago, and he was very much a libertarian with some isolationist tendencies. I didn't think much of his politics but immensely enjoyed his writing, even some of his essays
His Codominion series was pretty awesome (Mote was in that universe as I recall). I'd heard he'd been thinking about continuing it, sadly that won't happen now.
You mean this LifeLock?
There isn't a cancer horrible enough for you.
It took nearly two years to bring Nixon down. You seem rather quick to want to exonerate Trump.
Trump is as much the elite as any of them, the only problem being he's really a Democrat, and a bunch of moronic GOP voters somehow bought a load of bullshit that he was a Republican. Now, as he seems prepared to pivot and magically become a Democratic president (probably sensing that the Republicans are going to get badly damaged in the mid-terms, the best way to preserve himself is to cozy up to the Dems), I wonder how long the likes of you will cling to the notion that he represents even the tiniest bit of your interests.
I'm looking at the people Trump has in his White House, and having a hard time not seeing how you could say exactly the same thing about the Republicans.
There's a difference between people masquerading as Americans paying Facebook for pro-Trump or anti-Clinton advertising and Trump's son, son-in-law and then campaign manager going to a meeting with purported representatives of Putin to get the goods on Clinton.
I don't think it's about money at all. Ayyadurai had a fairly decent job at MIT, which he himself blew up when his grandiose claims about being "the inventor of email" got widely publicized. If anything, Ayyadurai's wildly hyperbolic claims have actually cost him dearly, and unless Thiel has been funding his lifestyle on top of his lawsuit, I can't imagine Ayyadurai is making better money than he did five years ago.
No, I think what we're dealing with here is the classic case of the self-aggrandizing kook who tried to spin a modest accomplishment (he did, after all, actually write an email program when he was 14, no mean feat at all) into some grand story of being the "inventor of EMAIL". Clearly there's an element of dishonesty here, as his whole claim is a clever conflation, but just about every netkook I've ever encountered was fairly bright, but also so self-deluded that they begin to believe the lies and half-truths they have to spin to create the illusion of support for their claims.
He's running for Senate now, so we'll see if the good people of Massachusetts want to give a litigious and abusive fantasist a job.
At least APK doesn't claim he's "the Inventor of the Host File".
Neither did Equifax, I'm sure. They're crime is not securing their systems, which would obviously be a very attractive fruit for any hacker to try to pluck, and in a perfect world Equifax would be fined billions of dollars and its management would rot in prison cells for a very long time. As it is, I'm sure the FCC will do some shoddy little investigation that amounts to a few million dollars in fines, there will be a class action lawsuit that probably will see some small fraction of the victims get some measly payout sometime before the heat death of the Universe.
I'll tell you whose clinking their champagne glasses right now, it's the lawyers. No matter who loses, they always win.
Read the judgment. On your first question, no he didn't. Just looking at the RFCs pertaining to ARPANET message formatting and transmission prior to his program, you can see that pretty much the essentials of the email systems we use today were sketched out by the mid-70s, but in reality, there were many different mail systems dating back over a decade prior to RFC 561.
If there was an inventory of modern email, it would be Roy Tomlinson, he was the primary developer of RFC 561, but as he made clear over the years, he did not develop email at all, and it was a collective by many groups over several years. But I would credit Tomlinson as being one of the primary developers of the ARPANET network mail system, which is the direct ancestor of Internet email, the chief innovations coming after that time being UUCP and SMTP which standardized the means to of transmitting those messages between multiple servers on local and wide area networks. Ayyadurai had absolutely nothing to do with any of this work, and no one has produced even a hint that Tomlinson or any of the other developers of the ARPANET network mail system ever heard of him, or based any of their work off of anything he did.
He wrote a mail system used for a while at one institution. It was an evolutionary dead end that inspired no one, and the fact is that those features of "email" that Ayyadurai claims were his had already been designed and rolled out. He had nothing to do with the development of ARPANET/Internet email. Full stop.
The reality is that email, like so many aspects of modern computing, was developed multiple times and in multiple ways over the years, and even the mail system we know today was the collective work of multiple individuals, building on the basic mail systems found on mainframe systems in the late 60s and early 70s, with each new RFC adding, clarifying and standardizing email functionality. In a way, there was no inventory of email, no single person you can point at and say "he did it". That was the spirit of computing at the time, and indeed is the source of the open source philosophy we have today. Nobody was developing ARPANET email to gain fame and fortune, they were engineers identifying and solving problems.
I'm fairly certain if you have applied for credit of any kind, somewhere on the dizzying array of forms in the small print you did indeed consent to sharing your financial information with Equifax. In fact, I doubt there's any kind of main street lender anywhere in the US or Canada that would loan you so much as a penny without consenting to this, so about the only way you could have borrowed money without this consent if it was from a guy in a trenchcoat in a dark alley who went by the name "Vinny the Knife".
I give the guy credit for writing an email program. That's it. His claim isn't that he wrote an email program in the late 70s. His claim is that he "invented Email", conflating the copyrighting of his dead-end messaging program with the email system that we see today. He had nothing to do with ARPANET email, no one who worked on those systems ever heard of him, so he did nothing innovative, and certainly nothing that assisted in the development of Internet email. His claims are rubbish, and when cornered, he plays a bait-and-switch game between his copyrighted program used by very few people and the email systems now used by hundreds of millions of people.
Whatever credit he gets for writing a messaging system is wiped out by his lies and attacks on those who actually did develop the email system we have today.
At times it's hard to tell whether Ayyadurai is just a liar, or if he really is out of his mind. I suspect he lies somewhere in between; that he started out peddling an inflated claim, and when called out on it, started getting more and more hyperbolic, in the hopes of shouting down critics. His statements on Tomlinson were absurd and hateful, particularly in light of the fact that the RFCs are all dated, so we have a very solid chronology of how ARPANET email evolved during the 1970s.
I think he's a litigious kook, or as we would have called him back in the day; a net kook.