"Limited to the lab" is right. The title of this article is rather misleading, since it indicates that the answer had one million components, instead of one million choices. It's far less impressive for a DNA computer to pick one right answer out of a million when you consider that's the only advantage that DNA computers are really said to have.
When I first started reading the article, I thought this was a big breakthrough for security and encryption (knee-jerk reaction, I know). When I saw "million-answer" and "Adleman", I thought he'd found a way to factor an enormous composite number into a million factors. Correct me if I'm wrong, but he is the "A" in RSA, right? I was very quickly disappointed.
This article is a total letdown and, dare I say it, neither news for nerds, nor stuff that matters. The sheer theoretical limitations of this project demands that this sort of thing will never, ever make it into common and public use until every Joe on the street has at least a BS in biogenetical engineering.
There are so many constraints to this kind of work that it will only ever be useful to academics with too much free time. Is it interesting? Sure, for some. Is it useful? I don't see how. When every Linux-loving 14-year-old out there has his own little genetics lab in his bedroom next to his homebrew Apache server, maybe this article will start to stir real interest on this site. This subject is so far removed from "real" computing, by which I mean conventional transistors and whatnot, that it's virutally useless to the computing community. Bravo, Dr. Adleman.
The funniest part of Cryptonomicon is where the Brits are busy sending bombers to "see" German shipping but not bomb it. (If they just bombed the Germans, the Germans would realize that their crypto had been broken.) One of the protagonist's jobs, as an information theorist, was to figure out just how often they could get away with "just bombing them" and how often they had to make it look like they "got lucky" with a chance overflight or other observation.
I like the part where they send soldiers to spend a couple weeks at a remote listening post in German territory with the intent of making it appear as though they've been there for over a year. The soldiers don't quite understand why they're being ordered to scatter a year's worth of empty bottles and cigarette butts around the camp, and why the radioman is in such a high-visibility location, but it's all part of the ploy to keep the Germans ignorant of how else the Allies could get vital information.
I think various government organizations do the exact same thing. There's no way I can believe these directors whine about how terrible their budgets are, and how they can't keep up with overseas intelligence. For all we know, there's an enormous amount of theatrics involved in interviews and reports like those. I feel as contradicted as the soldiers in the book: if my government can't keep up with their intelligence needs, I'm discomforted. If they're just lying to me because they don't feel like letting me know the best crypto I can throw at them is like a child's plaything, well, I suppose I'd better start wearing a tinfoil hat and writing crazed, rambling letters to the OpenBSD team telling them to "quit p_ssying around with security and start making it *really* good." You know. Before the aliens take me home.
I sincerely doubt the U.S. government uses quantum computing technology for national security. One of the important parts of quantum computing is that you don't want to interrupt the process by observing the particles, and as we all know, Uncle Sam has to spy on everything, all the time. He'd never actually crack anything because he'd spoil the computation with his curiosity every time.:-)
One thing that no one hear seems to be mentioning is how they're mispronouncing so many names. I understand that there's no "real" pronunciation in a book, and that the Baron can, in earnest, be either "har-KOE-nin" or "HARK-ih-nin", but I take serious issue with the blatant mispronunciation that the director seems to hope will separate his project from Lynch's work.
To note: "EYE-trey-deez", Duke "LAY-to", and the Mentat "TOO-fur". My mind boggles. Tonight, I'm going to watch for when Paul meets "CHAIN-ee" and learns to transmute the "SPEE-say" of "LEEF".
At what point does this become absurd? "How much of your processor time is spent running code that could easily be delegated to an auxiliary chip?" We could put a bunch of stuff onto cards, and then the problem would be waiting for all these concurrent processors to talk to each other and get their data back to the main processor in time.
Companies love the kids. They're the best blend of brains and youthful stupidity, so you get geniuses who don't know any better when you pay them squat.
A lot of smart people will be willing to take a job at lower-than-normal pay at a great company so they can put it on their resume. Who profits? The company gets great work for peanuts, the kid gets to add a killer job experience to his belt.
You're worth more with experience. True. Meaning you cost more. A company won't pay one person $70,000 when they can get two for $30,000, experience be damned.
I've found that if you want to maintain a good wage, you will have to leave the programming areas and move into management. You need to work your way up the food chain, gradually leaving behind technical work and replacing it with bureaucracy.
To address your apparent stance that I speak on behalf of all readers of Slashdot, please look a little more closely at my usage of Slashdot readership. I do not claim to speak for all geeks. I speak for myself, and for the many here who are like me. Obviously, this does not, nor was intended to, include you.
It was never my intention to speak for everyone here because that is simply too daunting a task. Slashdot is composed of a blend of many different characters, from experts and legends to newbies and onlookers. However, to be a regular reader, I think it would demand you to embody to some degree the spirit of learning and the pleasure of solving a puzzle or answering a question. You do not have to be a rocket scientist to be a hacker. Quite the contrary, I would argue that the true spirit of hacking exists not in knowing a lot, but in seeking to know more than you already do. If that doesn't describe you, I must seriously begin to wonder what you're doing on Slashdot, and also this far down in a Mac/BSD commentary thread.
As for the absurdity you find in the thought that I would disassemble my household appliances, I can only confess that my daily actions would boggle the hell out of you. I do apply that standard to my things. I have taken apart my TV. Just last week as a matter of fact. And I have taken apart radios, alarm clocks, some other things you mention in your list, and a lot that you don't. I want to know how things work. Eurisko. "I discover things." I'm not the first person to find them, but I discover them nonetheless. I don't do it for money or glory. I do it for myself, to satisfy that deepest of desires. The desire to learn, to know.
This doesn't prevent me from accomplishing things. You appear to be convinced that accomplishing and investigating are mutually exclusive tasks. I disagree. Stating that I seek to "learn miniscule details about every...object in my environment," is misleading, as it paints in the mind the image of me inspecting blades of grass with a magnifying lens. Not true. At the same time, I could not live in a world that demanded blind action and resisted all attempts to be investigated. I don't think you could, either.
I may be wrong.
To handle your first statement, that you don't need to know the inner workings of software, you may have brought down more fire upon yourself than you can handle. This place is a bastion of the open source community. You will find numerous critics of your "It doesn't matter, I'm software, not hardware" attitude here, and so I will spare you my own opinion on the matter and wish you luck against those who will come after me.
I don't speak for you, true. Be sure, though, that you are in the minority, and that can be a very beneficial...or dangerous...place to be.
I agree, to an extent. Naturally, I don't think I fail to make my point, although if you think that, then I obviously failed to make it as clear as I could have, and for that, I am sorry.
On the other hand, my objection was not to illustrate the differences between having to look and not being able to do so. Rather, I sought to object to people who think that, for one reason or another, the desire to investigate something makes us snooty and elitist.
What if someone developed a car that didn't require oil changes, ran on solar power (so you never needed to get fuel), was incredibly solid, etc? By the attitudes of some here, this would be a bad thing. I'm not sure why, but I'm guessing it's a combination of job security and arrogance.
You bet it would be a bad thing, and not because of "job security" or "arrogance." I don't know who you think you are to tell us what is and isn't an acceptable amount of system maintenance. You forget that your audience here consists wholly of geeks, of hackers, and of like-minded joes who are curious enough to want to know the intimate details of their system and possess the brains to figure out how to learn them.
To suggest that we are bitter and spiteful people who demand complexity or lack of user-friendliness in order to preserve our careers is a lie and an out-and-out insult to me and everyone else here who is like me. Your analogy of the no-maintenance supercar isn't just a good one, it's a great one, and I will tell you why.
Would you be comfortable driving around in something which you didn't have the first clue about how it worked? Perhaps. A lot of people would, but not here. Not on Slashdot. We're geeks, hackers, and like-minded joes, remember? We don't only want to know how this supercar can do what it does, we have to. Not a hacker alive would be content to drive around and not wonder about what sort of mechanical magic that pulsed and purred under the hood of his vehicle.
Likewise, a computer system or car that requires attention and tuning is infinitely better, simply because we, as geeks and hackers, are capable of understanding what needs attention, what needs tuning. And we thrive upon it. To perpetuate the car analogy, it is that need to know what kind of oil the car needs, and how often it needs it, that fulfills us, emotionally and spiritually.
Perhaps you may want to invest some time into reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. You can find a copy at amazon, or possibly even your local library. It will help you to understand this, at least to some small degree. Don't worry. I recommend this book to emphasize the Zen, not the motorcycle maintenance. This entire discussion isn't about "ease of use" or "user-friendliness." It's about value. It's about the meaning of things, not the things themselves.
I wouldn't drive your supercar if it meant I couldn't look under the hood. Similarly, I wouldn't trust a computer system if I couldn't pick it apart. I agree with you on the first point of your so-called argument. The amount of service a machine needs should be variable dependent on the user. However, on your second point, you fall flat on your face.
Never forget that while you are here, reading Slashdot, you are shoulder to shoulder with thinkers, puzzle-lovers, and people who cannot leave a mystery unsolved. If you are only capable of seeing this love of knowledge as "arrogance," I can only conclude that you are the arrogant one.
First off, let me say that I am not going to attempt to actually answer the question, since so many others have already done a much better job that I ever could.
Instead, I would like to look at the nature of the question itself. "What makes a UNIX a UNIX?" Others have pointed to the absurdity of this. What makes a computer a computer? What makes an HTML file an HTML file? This question shows a harrowing trend in the quality of the Ask Slashdots. Instead of people using/. as the bona fide mix of experts and neophytes in all ranges of technology, it is being used -- and abused -- as a 1-step shortcut instead of RTFM.
Perhaps the next Ask Slashdot should be just that: "What does RTFM mean?" Please. This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that Cliff has grossly misjudged the appropriateness of a submission.
I want to generalize this condition as much as possible, so I will not suggest that ian actually think about doing some work and looking up some easily-found documents on operating system history. I will not state how dumbfoundingly easy it is to punch `+unix +history +"bell labs"` into any of a dozen popular search engines.
I don't want to do that, because then I might be accused of being shallow. Lazy, even. And that would be a terrible crime, because if there's one thing/. will not tolerate, it is obviously laziness!
Ask Slashdot is not a place for idle questions to be treated with the gravest of attitude. It is being treated with the same respect that would exist of asking Our Beloved Linus how many total lines are in the kernel source. That would be wasting his time, just as this question wastes ours. These sorts of thing can be looked up independently with no need to involve everyone in this.
There was a time when Ask Slashdot handled deep questions that did not have easy answers. That time is clearly gone. I can only conclude that this feature must be heavily overhauled and strictly maintained by someone of higher intuition than Cliff, or be retired from/. altogether.
I've heard from some people that OpenBSD is so secure it's less useable than other OSes. What sort of effect might this have?
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Re:Being poor doesn't mean being ignorant
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Open Source Africa
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I agree. However, Pakistan has come up with the money to buy nuclear weapon technology while their people starve and suffer the worst kinds of inhuman treatment imaginable. A great many Africans are starving, and not because of diverted funds. Fortunately they've made the decision to channel their resources into a free OS that will hopefully help to educate the populace as to how to play catch up with the rest of the world on a variety of levels. And to think they did it all without developing weapons of mass destruction. Do you hear me, Pakistan?
Africa is widely considered the be the poorest continent in the world. The fact that they're beginning to embrace open source indicates not only their need for low-cost modern technology, but also their need for any sort of modern technology. Welcome to the 20th century, Africa. I'm glad you made it before it ends.
I'm glad someone's starting to test the BSD waters. Far too many companies are ignoring the popular UNIX variants and just putting all their efforts into Linux. I'm all for diversity among operating systems, and so I notice there is simply too much attention given to one platform. Finally, someone's starting to notice the world doesn't revolve around either Linux or Windows.
What can he tell us that we don't already know? Is Linux going in a new direction? What does it matter that he'll be on the radio if he's not going to tell us anything new?
I could totally see getting into this. Imagine: T-shirts that say "My kung fu's the best" and "I don't take checks drawn from the Bank of Middle Earth". There's a huge geek potential for this show. Perhaps every week could end with a URL for a new downloadable StarCraft map or something. Producers could make this the Star Trek of our generation if they had the ideas to do it.
Maybe not. Maybe I just want a "My kung fu's the best" shirt.
I'd watch them in their own series. They are, after all, the best characters. The suit, the hippie, the creepy old guy. Ah, Byers, Langley, and Frohike: hang in there. We're pulling for you.
Drugs are crucial to computer development. How many projects are fueled almost entirely by caffeine? When the impossible is demanded, the smart programmer will understand that he will perform better -- or maybe just perform more -- under the influence of something, usually coffee, Mountain Dew, or Jolt. He will rely on a chemical to enhance his abilities beyond the norm, and I don't see anything wrong with that.
As for harder drugs, namely those of the narcotic variety, my opinion is split. These drugs can improve performance, but unlike caffeine, where all you lose is sleep, these drugs can have serious effects on your health, your personal life, and your financial status. A good rule of thumb may be that any drug that can cost you your life isn't worth any amount of brilliant code.
Unfounded rumor time: I heard from someone who heard from someone who heard from someone about a computer science professor at my university who tabbed LSD on an hourly basis back in the 60s/70s in order to gain inspiration for his work in artificial intelligence. I don't know if it's true or not, but I know that the professor in question is now absent-minded and socially disabled and hasn't had a promotion in at least a decade. I would not be the least bit surprised if the "rumor" is the reason why his brain is fried.
The caveat: all of his work in AI turned out to be dead ends. His contributions to the field aren't anywhere worth the damage he did to himself. Let's be careful out there.
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Not Dying, Sick. Symptoms Include:
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Is Usenet Dying?
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1. Striation of interests. You know what this is. One topic gets a newsgroup. Then another, then another. It doesn't stop until you have "alt.tv.highlander-the-series.swords.katanas.other .than.duncans" More groups get created, varying interests don't meet and mingle. Communication drifts off-topic and stays there.
2. Porn. So long as there are dirty pictures posted to the binary groups for free, there will be people who will download them.
3. Spam. This has been mentioned in some very good posts above, so I won't spend more time on it.
All in all, the system as a whole is changing. With the WWW usurping much of Usenet's capacities, and doing a better job of it, the glory days are clearly over. It has changed, but the fact that it still possesses a utility and seniority that the Internet hasn't, or possibly can't, achieve will all but guarantee that it will stick around for a long time to come.
1. I imagine most of the primo showroom models turn up their nose at any tech show that isn't COMDEX.
2. Sexism isn't isolated to BSD, and you should be ashamed of yourself for trying to single it out. Women aren't prevalent in any field of computer technology: not BSD, not Linux, not hardware, nowhere. You'll find women in all of these fields, but face it -- computers are still a boy's club, and they're going to stay that way for a long time. I can't think of any sort of initiative that attempts to put more women into the industry. I feel sorry for those daemon babes. The second they walked in they must've been overwhelmed by the testosterone-laden geek stink.
We may just as well keep on saying "smart is sexy" until it's true. I'm not holding my breath.
Blah. Unix is such a generic term now a days. Who cares if the FreeBSD is descended from Unix that came out 15 years ago.
I do. I have to disagree that UNIX is a generic term nowadays. It refers to a specific lineage of software written by people who are considered to be gods among men because of what they've done. I could, because of Open Sourcing, take a Linux distribution, make a few changes, and still call it Linux. If I tried to call it BSD, it wouldn't even get out the door, because it's not BSD. Linux was written to emulate UNIX in many ways, but it had absolutely no access to the UNIX/BSD code base from which FreeBSD 4.0 and all other BSD flavors originate. It is, to be honest, a UNIX work-alike. It's like asking someone to choose between a car made by professional auto manufacturers in Detroit or a car-like object made by a grad student with some friends from a BBS in Finland. To me, the choice is obvious. Go with the product that has the 30 year track record of excellence, not the upstart. Frankly, Linux is good, but with a new kernel release every couple of weeks, it's obvious that they're still trying to "get it right."
Anyone have ANY proof of this? I here this all the time, but I have yet to see one study that proves it right. Just saying something is true does not make it true.
It sounds to me like you have a pretty good network set up there. Others aren't so lucky, especially considering that there are a lot of malicious hackers and crackers out there looking for a big corporate fish to fry. Regardless of how problem-free Linux has been for you, there are networks out there that get attacked nearly every single day because someone wants access to information they shouldn't have. Situations like these call for a serious OS that can handle the abuse. Of course, now I need to say that OpenBSD is the most secure OS in the world. It's a hefty sword to wield, but if you know how to work it, it can keep your data far safer than NT, or even Linux. That's because it was redesigned from BSD code with security in mind as the top priority. If I ran a calm network like yours that didn't have much in the way of cracking attempts, I might go with BSD and I might go with Linux. If I had a sneaking suspicion that my security knowhow would be put to the test, I'd go with OpenBSD in a heartbeat.
Slashdot Mirror
The interviewer calls him "Mr. Bigott" and then:
Frank Bigott: "Excuse me, but it's pronounced 'Bee-GOH'."
Isn't Mandrake considered the worst distro of them all? I don't mean to start a flame war, but I've read lots of complaints about it.
"Limited to the lab" is right. The title of this article is rather misleading, since it indicates that the answer had one million components, instead of one million choices. It's far less impressive for a DNA computer to pick one right answer out of a million when you consider that's the only advantage that DNA computers are really said to have.
When I first started reading the article, I thought this was a big breakthrough for security and encryption (knee-jerk reaction, I know). When I saw "million-answer" and "Adleman", I thought he'd found a way to factor an enormous composite number into a million factors. Correct me if I'm wrong, but he is the "A" in RSA, right? I was very quickly disappointed.
This article is a total letdown and, dare I say it, neither news for nerds, nor stuff that matters. The sheer theoretical limitations of this project demands that this sort of thing will never, ever make it into common and public use until every Joe on the street has at least a BS in biogenetical engineering.
There are so many constraints to this kind of work that it will only ever be useful to academics with too much free time. Is it interesting? Sure, for some. Is it useful? I don't see how. When every Linux-loving 14-year-old out there has his own little genetics lab in his bedroom next to his homebrew Apache server, maybe this article will start to stir real interest on this site. This subject is so far removed from "real" computing, by which I mean conventional transistors and whatnot, that it's virutally useless to the computing community. Bravo, Dr. Adleman.
The funniest part of Cryptonomicon is where the Brits are busy sending bombers to "see" German shipping but not bomb it. (If they just bombed the Germans, the Germans would realize that their crypto had been broken.) One of the protagonist's jobs, as an information theorist, was to figure out just how often they could get away with "just bombing them" and how often they had to make it look like they "got lucky" with a chance overflight or other observation.
I like the part where they send soldiers to spend a couple weeks at a remote listening post in German territory with the intent of making it appear as though they've been there for over a year. The soldiers don't quite understand why they're being ordered to scatter a year's worth of empty bottles and cigarette butts around the camp, and why the radioman is in such a high-visibility location, but it's all part of the ploy to keep the Germans ignorant of how else the Allies could get vital information.
I think various government organizations do the exact same thing. There's no way I can believe these directors whine about how terrible their budgets are, and how they can't keep up with overseas intelligence. For all we know, there's an enormous amount of theatrics involved in interviews and reports like those. I feel as contradicted as the soldiers in the book: if my government can't keep up with their intelligence needs, I'm discomforted. If they're just lying to me because they don't feel like letting me know the best crypto I can throw at them is like a child's plaything, well, I suppose I'd better start wearing a tinfoil hat and writing crazed, rambling letters to the OpenBSD team telling them to "quit p_ssying around with security and start making it *really* good." You know. Before the aliens take me home.
I sincerely doubt the U.S. government uses quantum computing technology for national security. One of the important parts of quantum computing is that you don't want to interrupt the process by observing the particles, and as we all know, Uncle Sam has to spy on everything, all the time. He'd never actually crack anything because he'd spoil the computation with his curiosity every time. :-)
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One thing that no one hear seems to be mentioning is how they're mispronouncing so many names. I understand that there's no "real" pronunciation in a book, and that the Baron can, in earnest, be either "har-KOE-nin" or "HARK-ih-nin", but I take serious issue with the blatant mispronunciation that the director seems to hope will separate his project from Lynch's work.
To note: "EYE-trey-deez", Duke "LAY-to", and the Mentat "TOO-fur". My mind boggles. Tonight, I'm going to watch for when Paul meets "CHAIN-ee" and learns to transmute the "SPEE-say" of "LEEF".
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At what point does this become absurd? "How much of your processor time is spent running code that could easily be delegated to an auxiliary chip?" We could put a bunch of stuff onto cards, and then the problem would be waiting for all these concurrent processors to talk to each other and get their data back to the main processor in time.
No thanks. One chip works just fine for me.
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And here I was worried that Gattaca might be as bad as it could get. Boy, was I naive.
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That was pretty quick! When did this release first hit the FTP sites? I'm impressed someone could review it that quickly.
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My God. Have you ever held a job?
Companies love the kids. They're the best blend of brains and youthful stupidity, so you get geniuses who don't know any better when you pay them squat.
A lot of smart people will be willing to take a job at lower-than-normal pay at a great company so they can put it on their resume. Who profits? The company gets great work for peanuts, the kid gets to add a killer job experience to his belt.
You're worth more with experience. True. Meaning you cost more. A company won't pay one person $70,000 when they can get two for $30,000, experience be damned.
I've found that if you want to maintain a good wage, you will have to leave the programming areas and move into management. You need to work your way up the food chain, gradually leaving behind technical work and replacing it with bureaucracy.
Like Bill Gates. Yuck.
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It's a great book, isn't it?
To address your apparent stance that I speak on behalf of all readers of Slashdot, please look a little more closely at my usage of Slashdot readership. I do not claim to speak for all geeks. I speak for myself, and for the many here who are like me. Obviously, this does not, nor was intended to, include you.
It was never my intention to speak for everyone here because that is simply too daunting a task. Slashdot is composed of a blend of many different characters, from experts and legends to newbies and onlookers. However, to be a regular reader, I think it would demand you to embody to some degree the spirit of learning and the pleasure of solving a puzzle or answering a question. You do not have to be a rocket scientist to be a hacker. Quite the contrary, I would argue that the true spirit of hacking exists not in knowing a lot, but in seeking to know more than you already do. If that doesn't describe you, I must seriously begin to wonder what you're doing on Slashdot, and also this far down in a Mac/BSD commentary thread.
As for the absurdity you find in the thought that I would disassemble my household appliances, I can only confess that my daily actions would boggle the hell out of you. I do apply that standard to my things. I have taken apart my TV. Just last week as a matter of fact. And I have taken apart radios, alarm clocks, some other things you mention in your list, and a lot that you don't. I want to know how things work. Eurisko. "I discover things." I'm not the first person to find them, but I discover them nonetheless. I don't do it for money or glory. I do it for myself, to satisfy that deepest of desires. The desire to learn, to know.
This doesn't prevent me from accomplishing things. You appear to be convinced that accomplishing and investigating are mutually exclusive tasks. I disagree. Stating that I seek to "learn miniscule details about every...object in my environment," is misleading, as it paints in the mind the image of me inspecting blades of grass with a magnifying lens. Not true. At the same time, I could not live in a world that demanded blind action and resisted all attempts to be investigated. I don't think you could, either.
I may be wrong.
To handle your first statement, that you don't need to know the inner workings of software, you may have brought down more fire upon yourself than you can handle. This place is a bastion of the open source community. You will find numerous critics of your "It doesn't matter, I'm software, not hardware" attitude here, and so I will spare you my own opinion on the matter and wish you luck against those who will come after me.
I don't speak for you, true. Be sure, though, that you are in the minority, and that can be a very beneficial...or dangerous...place to be.
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I agree, to an extent. Naturally, I don't think I fail to make my point, although if you think that, then I obviously failed to make it as clear as I could have, and for that, I am sorry.
On the other hand, my objection was not to illustrate the differences between having to look and not being able to do so. Rather, I sought to object to people who think that, for one reason or another, the desire to investigate something makes us snooty and elitist.
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What if someone developed a car that didn't require oil changes, ran on solar power (so you never needed to get fuel), was incredibly solid, etc? By the attitudes of some here, this would be a bad thing. I'm not sure why, but I'm guessing it's a combination of job security and arrogance.
You bet it would be a bad thing, and not because of "job security" or "arrogance." I don't know who you think you are to tell us what is and isn't an acceptable amount of system maintenance. You forget that your audience here consists wholly of geeks, of hackers, and of like-minded joes who are curious enough to want to know the intimate details of their system and possess the brains to figure out how to learn them.
To suggest that we are bitter and spiteful people who demand complexity or lack of user-friendliness in order to preserve our careers is a lie and an out-and-out insult to me and everyone else here who is like me. Your analogy of the no-maintenance supercar isn't just a good one, it's a great one, and I will tell you why.
Would you be comfortable driving around in something which you didn't have the first clue about how it worked? Perhaps. A lot of people would, but not here. Not on Slashdot. We're geeks, hackers, and like-minded joes, remember? We don't only want to know how this supercar can do what it does, we have to. Not a hacker alive would be content to drive around and not wonder about what sort of mechanical magic that pulsed and purred under the hood of his vehicle.
Likewise, a computer system or car that requires attention and tuning is infinitely better, simply because we, as geeks and hackers, are capable of understanding what needs attention, what needs tuning. And we thrive upon it. To perpetuate the car analogy, it is that need to know what kind of oil the car needs, and how often it needs it, that fulfills us, emotionally and spiritually.
Perhaps you may want to invest some time into reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. You can find a copy at amazon, or possibly even your local library. It will help you to understand this, at least to some small degree. Don't worry. I recommend this book to emphasize the Zen, not the motorcycle maintenance. This entire discussion isn't about "ease of use" or "user-friendliness." It's about value. It's about the meaning of things, not the things themselves.
I wouldn't drive your supercar if it meant I couldn't look under the hood. Similarly, I wouldn't trust a computer system if I couldn't pick it apart. I agree with you on the first point of your so-called argument. The amount of service a machine needs should be variable dependent on the user. However, on your second point, you fall flat on your face.
Never forget that while you are here, reading Slashdot, you are shoulder to shoulder with thinkers, puzzle-lovers, and people who cannot leave a mystery unsolved. If you are only capable of seeing this love of knowledge as "arrogance," I can only conclude that you are the arrogant one.
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First off, let me say that I am not going to attempt to actually answer the question, since so many others have already done a much better job that I ever could.
/. as the bona fide mix of experts and neophytes in all ranges of technology, it is being used -- and abused -- as a 1-step shortcut instead of RTFM.
/. will not tolerate, it is obviously laziness!
/. altogether.
Instead, I would like to look at the nature of the question itself. "What makes a UNIX a UNIX?" Others have pointed to the absurdity of this. What makes a computer a computer? What makes an HTML file an HTML file? This question shows a harrowing trend in the quality of the Ask Slashdots. Instead of people using
Perhaps the next Ask Slashdot should be just that: "What does RTFM mean?" Please. This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that Cliff has grossly misjudged the appropriateness of a submission.
I want to generalize this condition as much as possible, so I will not suggest that ian actually think about doing some work and looking up some easily-found documents on operating system history. I will not state how dumbfoundingly easy it is to punch `+unix +history +"bell labs"` into any of a dozen popular search engines.
I don't want to do that, because then I might be accused of being shallow. Lazy, even. And that would be a terrible crime, because if there's one thing
Ask Slashdot is not a place for idle questions to be treated with the gravest of attitude. It is being treated with the same respect that would exist of asking Our Beloved Linus how many total lines are in the kernel source. That would be wasting his time, just as this question wastes ours. These sorts of thing can be looked up independently with no need to involve everyone in this.
There was a time when Ask Slashdot handled deep questions that did not have easy answers. That time is clearly gone. I can only conclude that this feature must be heavily overhauled and strictly maintained by someone of higher intuition than Cliff, or be retired from
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I've heard from some people that OpenBSD is so secure it's less useable than other OSes. What sort of effect might this have?
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I agree. However, Pakistan has come up with the money to buy nuclear weapon technology while their people starve and suffer the worst kinds of inhuman treatment imaginable. A great many Africans are starving, and not because of diverted funds. Fortunately they've made the decision to channel their resources into a free OS that will hopefully help to educate the populace as to how to play catch up with the rest of the world on a variety of levels. And to think they did it all without developing weapons of mass destruction. Do you hear me, Pakistan?
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Africa is widely considered the be the poorest continent in the world. The fact that they're beginning to embrace open source indicates not only their need for low-cost modern technology, but also their need for any sort of modern technology. Welcome to the 20th century, Africa. I'm glad you made it before it ends.
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I'm glad someone's starting to test the BSD waters. Far too many companies are ignoring the popular UNIX variants and just putting all their efforts into Linux. I'm all for diversity among operating systems, and so I notice there is simply too much attention given to one platform. Finally, someone's starting to notice the world doesn't revolve around either Linux or Windows.
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What can he tell us that we don't already know? Is Linux going in a new direction? What does it matter that he'll be on the radio if he's not going to tell us anything new?
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I could totally see getting into this. Imagine: T-shirts that say "My kung fu's the best" and "I don't take checks drawn from the Bank of Middle Earth". There's a huge geek potential for this show. Perhaps every week could end with a URL for a new downloadable StarCraft map or something. Producers could make this the Star Trek of our generation if they had the ideas to do it.
Maybe not. Maybe I just want a "My kung fu's the best" shirt.
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I'd watch them in their own series. They are, after all, the best characters. The suit, the hippie, the creepy old guy. Ah, Byers, Langley, and Frohike: hang in there. We're pulling for you.
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Drugs are crucial to computer development. How many projects are fueled almost entirely by caffeine? When the impossible is demanded, the smart programmer will understand that he will perform better -- or maybe just perform more -- under the influence of something, usually coffee, Mountain Dew, or Jolt. He will rely on a chemical to enhance his abilities beyond the norm, and I don't see anything wrong with that.
As for harder drugs, namely those of the narcotic variety, my opinion is split. These drugs can improve performance, but unlike caffeine, where all you lose is sleep, these drugs can have serious effects on your health, your personal life, and your financial status. A good rule of thumb may be that any drug that can cost you your life isn't worth any amount of brilliant code.
Unfounded rumor time: I heard from someone who heard from someone who heard from someone about a computer science professor at my university who tabbed LSD on an hourly basis back in the 60s/70s in order to gain inspiration for his work in artificial intelligence. I don't know if it's true or not, but I know that the professor in question is now absent-minded and socially disabled and hasn't had a promotion in at least a decade. I would not be the least bit surprised if the "rumor" is the reason why his brain is fried.
The caveat: all of his work in AI turned out to be dead ends. His contributions to the field aren't anywhere worth the damage he did to himself. Let's be careful out there.
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1. Striation of interests. You know what this is. One topic gets a newsgroup. Then another, then another. It doesn't stop until you have "alt.tv.highlander-the-series.swords.katanas.other .than.duncans" More groups get created, varying interests don't meet and mingle. Communication drifts off-topic and stays there.
2. Porn. So long as there are dirty pictures posted to the binary groups for free, there will be people who will download them.
3. Spam. This has been mentioned in some very good posts above, so I won't spend more time on it.
All in all, the system as a whole is changing. With the WWW usurping much of Usenet's capacities, and doing a better job of it, the glory days are clearly over. It has changed, but the fact that it still possesses a utility and seniority that the Internet hasn't, or possibly can't, achieve will all but guarantee that it will stick around for a long time to come.
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1. I imagine most of the primo showroom models turn up their nose at any tech show that isn't COMDEX.
2. Sexism isn't isolated to BSD, and you should be ashamed of yourself for trying to single it out. Women aren't prevalent in any field of computer technology: not BSD, not Linux, not hardware, nowhere. You'll find women in all of these fields, but face it -- computers are still a boy's club, and they're going to stay that way for a long time. I can't think of any sort of initiative that attempts to put more women into the industry. I feel sorry for those daemon babes. The second they walked in they must've been overwhelmed by the testosterone-laden geek stink.
We may just as well keep on saying "smart is sexy" until it's true. I'm not holding my breath.
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Blah. Unix is such a generic term now a days. Who cares if the FreeBSD is descended from Unix that came out 15 years ago.
I do. I have to disagree that UNIX is a generic term nowadays. It refers to a specific lineage of software written by people who are considered to be gods among men because of what they've done. I could, because of Open Sourcing, take a Linux distribution, make a few changes, and still call it Linux. If I tried to call it BSD, it wouldn't even get out the door, because it's not BSD. Linux was written to emulate UNIX in many ways, but it had absolutely no access to the UNIX/BSD code base from which FreeBSD 4.0 and all other BSD flavors originate. It is, to be honest, a UNIX work-alike. It's like asking someone to choose between a car made by professional auto manufacturers in Detroit or a car-like object made by a grad student with some friends from a BBS in Finland. To me, the choice is obvious. Go with the product that has the 30 year track record of excellence, not the upstart. Frankly, Linux is good, but with a new kernel release every couple of weeks, it's obvious that they're still trying to "get it right."
Anyone have ANY proof of this? I here this all the time, but I have yet to see one study that proves it right. Just saying something is true does not make it true.
Slashdot and the requisite offsite link indicate the truth about uptimes according to OS.
I have ran Linux in a production environment
It sounds to me like you have a pretty good network set up there. Others aren't so lucky, especially considering that there are a lot of malicious hackers and crackers out there looking for a big corporate fish to fry. Regardless of how problem-free Linux has been for you, there are networks out there that get attacked nearly every single day because someone wants access to information they shouldn't have. Situations like these call for a serious OS that can handle the abuse. Of course, now I need to say that OpenBSD is the most secure OS in the world. It's a hefty sword to wield, but if you know how to work it, it can keep your data far safer than NT, or even Linux. That's because it was redesigned from BSD code with security in mind as the top priority. If I ran a calm network like yours that didn't have much in the way of cracking attempts, I might go with BSD and I might go with Linux. If I had a sneaking suspicion that my security knowhow would be put to the test, I'd go with OpenBSD in a heartbeat.
And you should, too.
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