> From: Random832
> "a stream consisting of a serialized sequence of all of whatever
> information would have been supplied to/by the calls to the special
> function" seems like a universal solution at the high level.
Yes, and when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything look like
a nail.
Noel
> From: Nick Downing
> Programming is actually an addiction.
_Can be_ an addition. A lot of people are immune... :-)
> What makes it addictive to a certain type of personality is that little
> rush of satisfaction when you try your code and it *works*... ... It was
> not just the convenience and productivity improvements but that the
> 'hit' was coming harder and faster.
Joe Weizenbaum wrote about the addiction of programming in his famous book
"…
[View More]Computer Power and Human Reason" (Chapter 4, "Science and the Compulsive
Programmer"). He attributes it to the sense of power one gets, working in a
'world' where things do exactly what you tell them. There might be something
to that, but I suspect your supposition is more likely.
> This theory is well known to those who design slot machines and other
> forms of gambling
Oddly enough, he also analogizes to gamblers!
Noel
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> From: "Ron Natalie"
> I was thinking about Star Wars this morning and various parodies of it
> (like Ernie Foss's Hardware Wars)
The best one ever, I thought, was Mark Crispin's "Software Wars". (I have an
actual original HAKMEM!)
> I rememberd the old DEC WARS.
I seem to vaguely recall a multi-page samizdat comic book of this name? Or am
I mis-remembering its name? Does this ring any bells for anyone?
Noel
I realized after writing that I was being slightly unfair since one valid
use case that DOES work correctly is something like:
ssh -X <some host> <command that uses X>
This is occasionally handy, although the best use case I can think of is
running a browser on some internet-facing machine so as to temporarily
change your IP address, and this use case isn't exactly bulletproof since
at least google chrome will look for a running instance and hand over to it
(despite that instance …
[View More]having a different DISPLAY= setting). Nevertheless
my point stands which is that IMO a programmatic API (either through .so or
.dll linkage, or through ioctls or dedicated syscalls) should be the first
resort and anything else fancy such as remoting, domain specific languages,
/proc or fuse type interfaces, whatever, should be done through extra
layers as appropriate. You shouldn't HAVE to use them.
cheers, Nick
On Mar 15, 2017 9:15 PM, "Tim Bradshaw" <tfb(a)tfeb.org> wrote:
On 15 Mar 2017, at 01:13, Nick Downing <downing.nick(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> But the difficulty with X Windows is that the remoting layer is always
there, even though it is almost completely redundant today.
It's redundant if you don't ever use machines which you aren't physically
sitting next to and want to run any kind of graphical tool run on them. I
do that all the time.
--tim
[View Less]
> From: Tim Bradshaw
> I don't know about other people, but I think the whole dope thing is why
> computer people tend *not* to be hippies in the 'dope smoking' sense. I
> need to be *really awake* to write reasonably good code ... our drugs
> of choice are stimulants not depressants.
Speak for yourself! :-)
(Then again, I have wierd neuro-chemistry - I have modes where I have a large
over-sppply of natural stimulant... :-)
My group (which included Prof. …
[View More]Jerry Salzter, who's about as straight an arrow
as they make) was remarkably tolerant of my, ah, quirks... I recall at one
point having a giant tank of nitrous under the desk in my office - which they
boggled at, but didn't say anything about! ;-)
Noel
[View Less]
"Two Bacco, here, my Bookie.”
Awesome.
David
> Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2017 21:26:16 -0400
> From: "Ron Natalie" <ron(a)ronnatalie.com>
> To: <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org>
> Subject: [TUHS] DEC Wars
> Message-ID: <001d01d2a374$77e02dc0$67a08940$(a)ronnatalie.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> I was thinking about Star Wars this morning and various parodies of it (like
> Ernie Foss's Hardware Wars) and I rememberd the old DEC WARS. Alas …
[View More]when I
> tried to post it, it was too big for the listserv. So here's a link for
> your nostalgic purposes. I had to find one that was still in its
> fixed-pitch glory complete with the ASCII-art title.
>
>
>
> http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/decwars.txt
>
[View Less]
> From: Steffen Nurpmeso
> This "We owe it all to the Hippies"
Well, yes and no. Read "Hackers". There wasn't a tremendous overlap between
the set of 'nerds' (specifically, computer nerds) and 'hippies', especially in
the early days. Not that the two groups were ideologically opposed, or
incompatible, or anything like that. Just totally different.
Later on, of course, there were quite a few hackers who were also 'hippies',
to some greater or lesser degree - more from hackers taking …
[View More]on the hippie
vibe, than the other way around, I reckon. (I think that to be a true computer
nerd, you have to start down that road pretty early on, and with a pretty
severe commitment - so I don't think a _lot_ of hippied turned into hackers.
Although I guess the same thing, about starting early, is true of really
serious musicians.)
> "The real legacy of the 60s generation is the Computer Revolution"
Well, there is something to that (and I think others have made this
observation). The hippie mentality had a lot of influence on everyone in that
generation - including the computer nerds/hackers. Now, the hackers may have
had a larger, impact, long-term, than the hippies did - but in some sense a
lot of hippie ideals are reflected in the stuff a lot of hackers built:
today's computer revolution can be seen as hippie idealism filtered through
computer nerds...
But remember things like this, from the dust-jacket of the biography of
Prof. Licklider:
"More than a decade will pass before personal computers emerge from the
garages of Silicon Valley, and a full thirty years before the Internet
explosion of the 1990s. The word computer still has an ominous tone,
conjuring up the image of a huge, intimidating device hidden away in an
over-lit, air-conditioned basement, relentlessly processing punch cards for
some large institution: _them_. Yet, sitting in a nondescript office in
McNamara's Pentagon, a quiet ... civilian is already planning the revolution
that will change forever the way computers are perceived. Somehow, the
occupant of that office ... has seen a future in which computers will empower
individuals, instead of forcing them into rigid conformity. He is almost
alone in his conviction that computers can become not just super-fast
calculating machines, but joyful machines: tools that will serve as new media
of expression, inspirations to creativity, and gateways to a vast world of
online information.
Now, technically Lick wasn't a hippie (he was, after all, 40 years old in
1965), and he sure didn't have a lot of hippie-like attributes - but he was,
in some ways, an ideological close relative of some hippies.
Noel
[View Less]
Some pointers. Warren, worth grabbing these IMHO.
I will ask him if he's willing to donate whatever troff
he has.
Arnold
> Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2017 16:47:42 -0400 (EDT)
> From: Brian Kernighan <bwk(a)CS.Princeton.EDU>
> To: arnold(a)skeeve.com
> Subject: Re: CSTRs?
>
> There are a few things here:
> http://www.netlib.org/cgi-bin/search.pl
> but it seems to be mostly the numerical analysis ones.
>
> But Google reveals this one:
> http://www.theobi.…
[View More]com/Bell.Labs/cstr/
> which seems to be all postscript.
>
> I have some odds and ends, like the troff manual and tutorial,
> but otherwise only PDF.
>
> Sorry -- not much help.
>
> Brian
>
> On Wed, 22 Mar 2017, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
>
> > Hi.
> >
> > Do you by chance happen to have copies of the CSTRs that used to be
> > available at the Bell Labs web site?
> >
> > And/or troff source for any? The TUHS people would like to archive
> > at least the Unix-related ones...
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Arnold
[View Less]
I was thinking about Star Wars this morning and various parodies of it (like
Ernie Foss's Hardware Wars) and I rememberd the old DEC WARS. Alas when I
tried to post it, it was too big for the listserv. So here's a link for
your nostalgic purposes. I had to find one that was still in its
fixed-pitch glory complete with the ASCII-art title.
http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/decwars.txt
Early on when I was consulting for what would become my company, I got stuck
on a weekend to fix something with the coffee pot and a box of Entenmann's
chocolate donuts. These have a coating that's kind of like wax you have to
soften up in the hot coffee to be digestable. As a result of that weekend
any crunch time was referred to as waxy chocolate donut time. Another
crunch weekend I was working on the firmware for an esoteric digital data
tape player. I would test it. Find the …
[View More]fault. Go to one machine
running Xenix on a 286 which had the editor and the assembler. I'd then
floppy it over to a DOS machine that had the EPROM burner. I then would
take the eprom and stick it into the controller. The president of the
company had two jobs. He was to follow behind me and refill my coffee cup
and scarf up the used EPROMS and dump them into the eraser so we wouldn't
run out of ones to program.
For years, we were a six person company of which only me and the president
drank coffee. When the one pot we made in the morning was gone, that was
it for coffee. As the company got larger and there were more coffee
drinkers, people would just make a new pot. This coincided with me having
my office moved adjacent to the coffee maker. Every time I had a long
compile or something I'd look down and see my cup was empty and I'd pop
outside and get a new cup. Not surprisingly, I started to get heart
palpitations. The doctor asks how much coffee I drank, and I tell her
something like thirty cups a day. She tells me I may want to cut back on
that.
My best job was working for a friend whose company operates out of his home.
He'd make espresso for me and we'd drink that (and eat his wife's excellent
leftover food) until about six and then being another wine judge, we'd
switch to wine.
-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Bradshaw [mailto:tfb@tfeb.org]
Sent: Wednesday, March 22, 2017 8:51 AM
To: Ron Natalie
Cc: Dave Horsfall; The Eunuchs Hysterical Society
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Were all of you.. Hippies?
I don't know about other people, but I think the whole dope thing is why
computer people tend *not* to be hippies in the 'dope smoking' sense. I
need to be *really awake* to write reasonably good code (if ever I do write
reasonably good code) in the same way I need to be really awake to do maths
or physics. So I live on a diet of coffee and sugar and walk around
twitching as a result (this is an exaggeration, but you get the idea). I
have the strength of will to not use stronger stimulants (coffee is mostly
self-limiting, speed not so much).
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