FYI. UNESCO call for a study on the future institutional structure for
Software Heritage.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Dear all,
I do hope you are all safe, and could take some time off to recharge the
batteries that these hectic times have drained quite a bit.
Some of you know already Software Heritage (https://www.softwareheritage.org)
it is a nonprofit initiative, started by Inria and supported by UNESCO, whose
mission is to ensure that software source code, as part of the common heritage
of humankind, is preserved over time and made available to all, building,
maintaining and developing a universal source code archive, providing
persistent identifiers for all software artifacts, and creating the largest
shared knowledge base about software artifacts ever built.
This is a long term undertaking, and UNESCO has just published a call for
advice, via a small feasibility study providing options for establishing the
future independent, non profit, multi-stakeholder organization that will host
Software Heritage for the long run.
As Software Heritage is a shared infrastructure that will support use cases of
interest to the members of this list, I take the liberty to bring this call to
your attention, and I'd be very grateful if you could also forward it to
whomever you believe could be interested in answering.
Detailed information on the expected advice and procedures to answer the call
is online at:
https://careers.unesco.org/job/Paris-Consultant-on-Software-Heritage-CIMID/…
The deadline for the answer is September 26th.
Thank you for your help
Roberto Di Cosmo (roberto(a)dicosmo.org)
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> From: Paul Guertin
> I teach math in college ... Sometimes, during an exam, a student who
> forgot to bring their calculator will ask if they can borrow mine I
> always say "sure, but you'll regret it" and hand them the calculator
> After wasting one or two minutes, they give it back
Maybe I'm being clueless/over-asking, but to me it's appalling that any
college student (at least all who have _any_ math requirement at all; not sure
how many that is) doesn't know how an RPN calculator works. It's not exactly
rocket science, and any reasonably intelligent high-schooler should get it
extremely quickly; just tell them it's just a representational thing, number
number operator instead of number operator number. I know it's not a key
intellectual skill, but it does seem to me to be part of comon intellectual
heritage that everyone should know, like musical scales or poetry
rhyming. Have you ever considered taking two minutes (literally!) to cover it
briefly, just 'someone tried to borrow my RPN calculator, here's the basic
idea of how they work'?
Noel
Dennis Ritchie's ACM Turing Award lecture paper in Communications of
the ACM 27(8) 758--760 (August 1984), doi:10.1145/358198.358207 was
reprinted in UNIX Review 3(1) 28, 118--120, 122, (January 1985) [no
DOI or URL yet found], and more recently, in Resonance 17(8) 810--816
(August 2012) doi:10.1007/s12045-012-0091-y.
There are two other UNIX-related papers in that issue of Resonance:
Pramod Chandra P. Bhatt
UNIX: Genesis and design features
Resonance 17(8) 727--747 (August 2012)
doi:10.1007/s12045-012-0084-x
K. Bhaskar
C --- Past, present, and future --- A perspective
Resonance 17(8) 748--758 (August 2012)
doi:10.1007/s12045-012-0085-9
I do not have access to that journal's archives from my campus
library, so I have not seen the articles.
In his paper, Dennis Ritchie referred to another UNIX article that I
did manage to track down and record in unix.bib:
Donald Arthur Norman
The Truth about UNIX
Datamation 27(12) 139--150 (November 1981)
https://tinyurl.com/yyselmxq
The original URL is 200+ characters long, and is a freely-downloadable
PDF of a reprint in AUUGN volume IV number I. The PDF file has
searchable text.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 -
- University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For yonks I've been seeing "XXX" as a flag to mean "needs more work" or
"look at this carefully, just in case" etc, and I use it myself.
Whence did it come about? I think I saw it as early as PWB, but can't be
sure.
-- Dave, wondering how many nanny-filters he triggered with "XXX"
Score! I'm not planning to scan all of these in unless someone really cares
and has a better scanner than I do. I'm going to prioritize the following:
516-10, -11, -18 Ring Formats
516-12 Specifications for the Node Modem Interface
516-22 A Repeater for the Node Modem
516-28 I/O Ring Device Codes
516-36 Node Modem Interface for Computer Terminals
516-72 Node Test
516-73 Node I/O Software
516-57 Format for the 516 Node - TIU Spider Interface
516-67 Node Format for PDP-11
Jon
In my humble-but-correct opinion*, Linux and its
origins fit into the general topic of UNIX history
just as well as those of Research UNIX or BSD or
SVr4.2.2.2.2.2.2.2 or SunOS or IRIX or Ultrix or
Tru64-compaqted-HPSauce or whatever. It all stems
from the same roots, despite the protestations of
purists from all sides.
Warren gets final say, of course, but to encourage
him I will say: Ploooogie!
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
* One of Peter Weinberger's sayings that I still
enjoy overusing.
Honestly, I'm not quite sure if this is a TUHS, COFF, or IH question. But
since my background with respect to such things is largely Unix centric, I
thought I'd ask in that context, hence asking on TUHS.
I assume some of the regulars on this list have authored RFCs (of the IETF
etc variety). The RFC format seems fairly well fixed: table of contents,
fixed number of lines per page, page numbers and dates in the footer, and
so forth. The format is sufficiently complex that it seems like some
tooling could be usefully employed to aid in producing these documents.
So I'm curious: what tools did people use to produce those documents?
Perhaps `nroff` with custom macros or something?
- Dan C.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww60o940kEk
You may be surprised :)
Warner
P.S. Hope this is relevant enough to share here. Also, if I botched
anything I've not yet mentioned in the comments, please let me know...
A modestly corrected and improved version of my bare-m4
program, which quickly builds from nothing to arithmetic on
binary numbers using no builtins other than `define'. is
posted at www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/barem4.txt. (.txt
because browsers balk at .m4)
Doug