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The Author of Ping is Reported Dead 148

Posted by CmdrTaco from the may-he-rest-in-peace dept.
Wedman writes: "This is in the Nanog Archive, dated 2000-11-21: 'Mike Muuss, the author of the PING program used on networks everywhere, died last night in a traffic accident on US route 95 in Maryland. He was an alumnus of Johns Hopkins." Seems appropriate on Thanksgiving to thank a man who created something that we all rely on every day.
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The Author of Ping is Reported Dead More

The Author of Ping is Reported Dead

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  • This is a very sad event. I have read a few articles written by Mike Muuss, and, like many people on Slashdot, I use ping practically every single day. He will be sorely missed by the community.

    If you hadn't noticed, Mike received the lifetime achievement award from USENIX in 1993.

    http://ftp.arl.army.mil/~mike/ [army.mil]

    --Garthnak

  • My condolences (Score:5)

    by rice_burners_suck ( 243660 ) on Thursday November 23, 2000 @10:37AM (#604629)

    This is sad news to read, regardless of whether or not its thanksgiving. May we all remember his name each time we use ping.

    As for all of you who are cracking jokes about his death, I don't think they are funny at all.

    Kindest regards,

    Nathaniel G H

  • Re:PICTURE OF MIKE MUUSS (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You can read and see another at my website [nashnetworks.com].

    Mike was a great man, and a good friend.

    He'll be tremendously missed!

    James E. Nash [mailto]
  • ping -l 9999999999999 your-ip


    The willingness of humanity to follow without question is the fall of them.
  • This doesn't ring true. US 95 is in Idaho and other western states.

    No, I-95 runs from Maine to Florida. I drive it from Massachusetts to Maryland and vice versa whenever I visit my parents...
    --
  • Just to remember another key person in computer history:

    http://www.jsonline.com/news/state/may00/katz210 52000a.asp

    I think very few people knows this about a software that all of us have in that old 3,5" disks.

    >The Associated Press
    M I L W A U K E E, April 22 - A man who developed one of the world's most popular pieces of computer software has died at age 37. Phillip W. Katz died of complications from chronic alcoholism, according to the Milwaulkee medical examiner's records. Katz's file-compression software is used around the world. "In early days, compression was all done with software because there was no hardware to do this stuff," said computer science professor Leonard Levine at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. "So Katz put together a program called PKZip, the Phil Katz zip program." The compression software made communication between computers faster and less expensive. "His program was instrumental in inexpensive, dependable communication," Levine said. But, he added, "what I felt was most important about it is the fact that you can get it for free and not pay for it." Nearly all program files downloaded from the Internet have the suffix .zip, meaning they are compressed in the format Katz developed.
  • I'm an hour away from an exam, and listening to Moonlight Sonata, so you'll have to excuse my -deep-and-meaningful-.

    As a software engineer, I live to create systems that people will use regularly and marvell. They'll be so good that you'll not think about the story behind them much, but ocasionally you will, just for long enough to think "Wow - the preson who did this really rocks". People like Muuss are pretty important. (what is with the bloody textbox navigaion in mozilla!?!?! Driving me *insane*)

    It feels wired to real death notices on slashdot. (Last one I remember was Alec Guiness..) It doesn't matter how nicely put the death of someone you respect like these people is, it alwas feels chilling.

    When I'm out of my exam... well.. I'm going to karioke. But when I'm home and my head's in order again I think I'm going to start a website devoted to these reports, and as tributes to those people.

    Stay tuned!

  • Slashdot reports on things important to the internet. Michael Muuss was important to the internet, and therefore it's proper that his death be reported here.

    Mike would indeed be laughing at this right now. He had a wry sense of humor, and appreciated the diversity of the inhabitants of the internet, from the geniuses to the morons, the proper to the tactless.

    He had a heart of gold.
  • His family knows, they were very close. His father, Rolf Muuss, is an educator and textbook author. His mother died earlier this year of cancer. Their family has been hard hit.
  • That's good. I don't think the ping jokes are in bad taste. It's a tribute to Mr. Muuss. He created something that so many people know about and can get the jokes.
  • The funeral should be the traditional jazz funeral.
    Basically it is one huge party. Death's significance is as large as one of a wedding. So people should party. Life is celebrated, but shouldn't we celebrate his passing on to Afterlife?.
    May he find all the answers to his unanswerable questions that he has asked on earth. Maybe he can now really come back and fiddle around with those electrons flowing through these pesky networks here. But he has no reason to... in the Great unfailing Internet in the sky, he probably won't even need 'ping'.

    Muuss is dead! Long live Muuss!
  • Hello (PING) ... Without you there is no network... Hello (PING)... Without you there is no one! God speed father of hello!
  • Agh. Here I was, about to reply with that EXACT SAME MESSAGE.. I hate you.
  • I checked it out and he seems fine to me.

    unbridled 2 % ping ftp.arl.mil
    ftp.arl.army.mil is alive

    Vanguard
  • Typical of a yankee to talk like an aussie.


    The willingness of humanity to follow without question is the fall of them.
  • You will be missed

  • Re:100% Packet Loss (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I barely knew Mike, some of my friends were his friends, and I met him and talked to him several times. I didn't know he was an internet pioneer, I just knew he was a very nice guy and he always had a smile on his face. He was one of the few people in the world who you find yourself respecting by default.

  • Re:OLD! (Score:1)

    by Enahs ( 1606 )
    Glad you told me. I don't read the geek. I would have never known, blissfully unaware that slashdot had repeated something that some website I've never even fucking heard of posted it. Those fucking slashdot assholes.
  • Unlike the story at K5 [kuro5hin.org] somehow the posters don't seem to be able to bring a message of respect. Ah well, it's only Slashdot. I guess the little cross on the top right of the window should stop the melancholy...

  • Re:It is sad (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Making jokes about someone who's died is a way of coping with loss. And besides, I've got some great jokes about deaths in my own family, but you wouldn't apreciate them because you don't know my family. When we're at a funural, we always have to look out so that we don't get thrown out because of our laughter. So that leads to silently shaking and tears in our eyes, which looks like we're grieving, but we're just trying our best not to burst out in laughter. I'm sorry but it's true.

  • In his own words (Score:5)

    by tagishsimon ( 175038 ) on Thursday November 23, 2000 @10:42AM (#604648) Homepage
    I don't feel like a Pioneer, I feel fine. :-) [internet-history.org]

  • BRL CAD (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 23, 2000 @10:42AM (#604649)

    Mike Muuss was also the author of BRL CAD, one of the most useful 3D modeling programs out there. It has one of the most intense CSG systems out there. I don't know what its licensing is, but I hope someone (with a strong graphics and geometry background) picks this up.

    IIRC, he was working on real-time raytracing systems.

  • I drove on route 95 just few minutes ago. I could have been on his place.
    How sad to see one of the real creators of Internet die in an accident. How long will it take before cars will be obsoleted by ping, telnet, X11, VNC, whatever...
  • RIP: Destination host unreachable
    RIP: 100% Packet Loss
    RIP: Request timed out

    Finally,

    * * * Mike Muuss

  • MUUSS, Michael J. Tragically on November 20, 2000, MICHAEL J., loving son of Dr. Rolf E.and the late Gertrude L. Muuss; beloved brother of Gretchen E. Frensemeier; dearest nephew of Ernestine Himes. The family will receive friends in the Divinity Lutheran Church, 1220 Providence Rd., Towson, MD 410-823-8293 on Saturday from 6 to 9 P.M. and Sunday from 2 to 4 and 6 to 8 P.M. A Funeral Service will be held in church on Monday, November 27 at 11 A.M. Interment Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens. In lieu of flowers contributions may be directed in Mr. Muuss name to the American Red Cross, 4700 Mt. Hope Dr., Balto. MD 21215 or to Nature Conservancy, 5410 Grosvenor La., Suite 100, Bethesda, MD 20814. Inquiries may be directed to Lemmon Funeral Home, 410-252-6000. Originally published Nov 25 2000 Link [sunspot.net]
  • I own my own buisness little wanker, which is more than aye can say for you eh !!!
    Lets go get in some of dat derre smog ehe? How is it up der? You like breathin that shit
    don't ye?


    The willingness of humanity to follow without question is the fall of them.

  • You're right... (Score:3)

    by tswinzig ( 210999 ) on Thursday November 23, 2000 @06:55PM (#604654) Journal
    Because bad jokes are not politically correct.

    Think about the children!

    "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

  • Re:Would this be appropriate? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It seems ironic that his tool has really outlived its usefulness. I would think ICMP would be one of the first things blocked at your firewall to keep pings and traceroutes out of your network. Also, no sense in letting those ICMP echo replies back either since they're very useful to do remote controlling of trojaned machines. i.e. many firewall admins block echo requests but forget to block echo replies, unreachables, etc. which can just as easily be used to map your network and control machines (read: Loki).
  • Check out This Kuro5hin post from a couple days ago. [kuro5hin.org]

    Linux is only Free if your time is worth Nothing

  • So .... the machine that goes PING has stopped
  • ok, that would take a while to read. So instead of doing that squire, lets go have some tea!
    Yes, my yankee friend, i agree. Lets have some tea. After you. No please after you. No, i insist
    after you. Thank you very much. Your very welcome.

    My friend of misery.


    The willingness of humanity to follow without question is the fall of them.
  • I agree that there are a lot of rude and disrespectful people out there, but people should be informed about this.
  • Guys one of you is talking about a interstate route, and other is talking about a state route.
    Cheers,
    Tomas
    ===========
  • You actually think that any of those posters made the jokes to help them "cope with loss"? Get real. Do you really think they care? They're just being your typical attention starved kiddies, waving their arms and yelling, "Hey, look how offensive I can be!" You can make all the excuses you want, but I invite you to leave your phone number and address, so that when one of your relatives dies, the rest of us can give you a call to try out our new material.

    Cheers,

  • This really sucks. I didn't know who he was, but.. damn. From what I can see of him now, he was a really cool guy.

    But anyway, I found this amusing. I read /. nested, so these two comments were right on top of eachother:

    100% Packet Loss (Score:5, Insightful)

    It is sad (Score:4, Insightful)
    To see all the bad taste of some the post that are put up here...
  • Another slipped by before I was on Slashdot: Seymour Cray was killed in a traffic accident, I believe in Colorado. I wrote to Byte and Infoworld asking them to do a tribute: nothing happened. Sigh.

    --
  • All PINGS at half mast.

  • Ping... (Score:3)

    by Munelight ( 192694 ) on Thursday November 23, 2000 @10:18AM (#604665)
    Ping timed out...
    100% packet loss.

    Let his name live on as long as his program.
  • Mike was also a regular at the early LISA conferences. I recall him lamenting that RAID stood for `Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks' because BRL needed incredible capacity. He asked for `Redundant Arrays of Expensive Disks' (which at the time were the 380MB Fujitsu Eagles), and commented that `RAED' sounded kind of like `RAID' said with a bad southern US accent.

    He published quite a bit of code that went into good use around the world, tho ping is undoubtably the most long-lived.

    He'll be missed. Here's to you, Mike, wherever you are. May your roundtrips be low, your bandwidth high, and your storage farm at 100% uptime.

  • I guess if you try to send him a message now you'll get 100% packet loss. Just some grim humor, not trying to be a troll.
  • Are you really asking if a denial of service would be appropriate?
  • Not to mention Buffalo's driving ban...
    ---

  • A song (With apologies to Eric Clapton) (Score:4)

    by TrIaX ( 59440 ) on Thursday November 23, 2000 @10:48AM (#604670)

    Could you ping my hostname,
    if I routed to heaven?
    Will it be the same,
    if I routed to heaven?
    I must hack long, and echo on,
    cause I know that there are no
    Pings in Heaven.

    Would you know my addr,
    if I routed to heaven?
    Would you scan my ports,
    if I routed to heaven?
    I know I'll code my way, through night and day
    Cause I know that there are no
    Pings in Heaven.

    ECHO can show you around,
    ECHO can help you see,
    ECHO can clog your pipe,
    And have you screaming at script kiddies,
    Script kiddies...

    (flashing routing lights...)

    K, it's early, and I have no coffee in me yet, I'll probably look back on this later and shoot myself.. :)

  • Although his body died (Score:5)

    by isorox ( 205688 ) on Thursday November 23, 2000 @10:49AM (#604671) Homepage Journal
    His spirit will live on in the form of ping. There can be no greater legacy then to leave behind a tool that is used by millions every day.

  • Re:A song (With apologies to Eric Clapton) (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    *bang*

  • So what you are saying is that if Bill Gates were to die tomorrow, his death would be less meaningful to the tech. world than any of the others listed? I mean, his business practices are one thing, but you have to admit that he has had a rather significant impact on the I/T world in general.

    He should be thanked. He contributed just as Mr. Muuss did, unfortunately, he has gotten bit in the ass for his more recent "contributions".

  • You saw it at TheGeek because I posted it there and it was actually accepted. I submitted it here 2 days ago and got rejected - then suddenly it turtns up from somebody else!! Sux!!.. Anyway, best wishes to his family and friends at this time.

  • Ping (Score:1)

    by Ashran ( 107876 )
    Destination host not reachable.
  • From all of us at ghost.bofh.nf.net. [nf.net]
    We send our prayers to Mike's family. God bless old friend.
  • > you really should learn to respect the dead.

    I think the world first needs to learn to respect the living.
  • And I'll think of Mike every time I use it. His work and memory will live on for a really long time.

  • No. (Score:1)

    by TheLink ( 130905 )
    Doh. Read the article. It was a collision.

    Link.
  • and i think almost everyone that ever did packet construction code know what i'm talking about.

    jupp, in_cksum from ping.c .. probably the most widly stolen function in the history of programming :-) .. very few people give credit though, but its quite unique and easy to spot where its used.

  • I didn't know that that was from the MD/VA/DC area... I-95 is a terrible road to drive on. I make the 495 commute every morning from Fairfax to Bethesda and let me tell you that is quit easy... but for those that travel farther and longer than that... they all will agree that the drivers are just absolutely horrible... it's unforutnate that someone like Mike had to die at the hands of a freak motor accident.... :(
  • If that's a troll, it's an awfully well-crafted one.

    Pinging 127.0.0.1 will only tell you if the lo interface is up, and that isn't particularly useful in most situations.

    I find it's best to ping the address of my DNS servers. The addresses are right there in /etc/resolv.conf (assuming you're not usinga a local caching DNS, in which case you want to go for the servers it refers to). But I usually only do that if pinging yahoo.com fails.

  • I knew him (Score:4)

    by Mr. Protocol ( 73424 ) on Thursday November 23, 2000 @11:48PM (#604683)
    I knew Mike professionally for about twenty years. I visited him at BRL several times, and chatted with him at some of the early UNIX meetings. He and Doug Kingston (now at Morgan Stanley Peat Marwick or whatever they're named this week) made a teriffic team in the days when keeping a national TCP/IP net running took the cooperation of everyone involved. When the main routers were LSI-11s, you needed to know the tricks, and Mike knew them all.

    He went the extra mile to help people all over, though it was no part of his job to do so. BRL didn't treat him as a sinecure and let him have his head. He put in a full day doing BRL stuff and then helped other folks around the country on his own time.

    He was just an all-around great guy. One of the First has died.

  • More info (Score:3)

    by locutus074 ( 137331 ) on Thursday November 23, 2000 @11:01AM (#604684)
    Check out the article in his local newspaper [mdnewsnet.com] for more information.

    --

  • user@foo ~$ ping mike.muuss
    PING mike.muuss (128.63.240.80): 56 data bytes
    ^C
    --- mike.muuss ping statistics ---
    5 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss
  • The title of my new book: "'Will you take care of my website?' and other questions of life in the digital age."

    I've had the honor of caretaking a web site of a writer who died in a car accident last year. The family doesn't want the hassle of dealing with the technical issues or the thought of this information floating around forever. The reality is that you keep the site running a year or two until the domain registration expires and then you archive the files into cold storage. Your digital self isn't as permanent as you might want to think.

    FYI, Mike's web site: http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/ [arl.mil], for the moment.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • At least his memory will live on as long as the internet shall survive, in perverse way its seems appropriate that his ftp site has been slashdotted.

    Somehow all that comes to mind is the phrase 'Only the good [theregister.co.uk] die, all the evil [microsoft.com] seems to live forever' seem appropriate (maybe its just my warped sense of humour)

  • The best way to celebrate the deceased... (Score:5)

    by Gendou ( 234091 ) on Thursday November 23, 2000 @11:16AM (#604689) Homepage
    Don't mourn the deceased. That only insults them. Instead, sit around, have a few laughs, talking about what they did or accomplished. Everyone here is making jokes about Muuss because, well, they feel connected to him in someway.

    I'm sure that if Muuss was reading /. right now, he'd be laughing at these jokes as much as any of us.

    Let me tell you why humor exists... we have humor so that we can cope with the tragic events that populate our lives. It's a way of coping with loss... and a pretty damn good one too. Besides, I can barely think of any better ways to respect the dead than by calling attention to their accomplishments through humor.

    Although, I must apologize for contributing to the excessive "destination unreachable" jokes. *sob* I didn't read everyone's posts before I cracked that one.

  • Let's not strip the poor guy of his dignity by letting asocial jerks run riot.

    Do you think that his dignity depends on the sayings of Slashdot trolls?

    __
  • What happens to dead's homepage ? Do someone close them ? Or do they stand, like a simulacrum of eternity?

    For a while, Afterdeath [afterdearh.org] was formed by volonteers that would maintain pages of dead people. But it seems that the project is also dead.

    Then, given the low cost of diskspace and unused bandwidth and the high cost of webmaster attention, probably they join the number of the Ghostsites [disobey.com].
    __
  • ...or something like that.
  • His cousin Pang is looking good too, although shes having trouble with spheres at the moment.
  • Ruhe in Frieden!
  • Hey, withouth Billy boy, the world wouldn't have been such a fun place.. as the say diversity is good.. YOu don't have to like MS platform, but they sure made their mark on the OS map. Mind you, don't fancy their stuff too much either, but I think it would have been less fun withouth them. Who would you have argued with if there wasn't all those wacky MS - zealots?
  • true, starts to get tired of all these ppl who consider him purified evil.. He's probably a decent guy, shure, I don't agree with a lot of his stuff and business tactics, but I don't think he's walking around wishing us all to die, he probably thinks he's doing the right thing!

    And as you said, he donates money, for whatever reason, that's a good thing...
  • While I very much agree with your sentiment, I dicided a 21 ping salute was more appropriate (though I should have used a delay of 3 seconds, that way I could get the minute:/

    Rest in peace.

    Bill - aka taniwha
    --

  • As a tribute, we should all ping Micrsoft.com for 1 minute, starting at exactly 4:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, or exactly 15 minutes from the time of this post.
  • But sadly, ping (ipv4) will die soon too. Did he write ping for ipv6 also ?

  • Not so dim.. (OT) (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I block inbound ping on my networks, too..

    It's not because of too much traffic, it's part of a decent security policy.

    The rationale is pretty simple: Pings are used by attackers prior to portscans, so they can see if the hosts on a given network have machines connected to them. Blocking pings has one of two outcomes:

    1) the attacker thinks that there are no machines on the network, so doesn't portscan anything, and goes to bug someone else. (This means I don't get bothered by them.)

    2) If the attacker doesn't know which IP addresses have hosts and which don't, so they spend their time scanning every port on every IP address on the network, even though lots of IP addresses are unused. (This means I have much more time to do something about it.)

    Either way, I win...
  • He didn't just write ping. He was also responsible for implementing raw ICMP sockets in the 4.2b BSD source, which not only allows ping to work, but traceroute as well. Muuss also wrote TTCP, as well as invented the concept of the default gateway. He was also one of the first people advocating widespread use of TCP/IP and UNIX among government entities that were outside DARPA. Without guys like Postel, Stevens, and now Muuss, it's very likely that UNIX, TCP/IP and the modern Internet as we know it wouldn't be the same. Check here for his achievements in his own words at Internet-history.org [internet-history.org].

  • Re:Death in the digital age (Score:3)

    by uksv29 ( 167362 ) on Thursday November 23, 2000 @01:45PM (#604705) Homepage

    I had a similar experience earlier this year when Craphead (he posted a few times on Slashdot) died before the Linux Beer Hike. His site was eventually pulled by his ISP in Norway and I wish I had mirrored it first.

    Your point about sites being pulled when the domain expires is a good one. The problem is that there is no 'standard' way of archiving them into cold storage where they can later be retrieved. At least with the older media (newspapers/mags etc) someone would usually keep a copy somwhere so it could be looked at by suceeding generations but not with a website.

    This bitrot really needs addressing lest our decendants ask us what people posted and read in the exciting and dynamic days on the early Internet. Once the rm -rf has done its work nothing remains.

    I am also a little saddened by this death, I never knew who was the creator of ping but use it everyday. I guess he, like Jon Postel, has left a little of himself on everyones computer and thereby improved the world a little for all those of us who are left behind.

    Mike Muuss, thank you.

  • For those of you that haven't read the ping page on his site.

    "The best ping story I've ever heard was told to me at a USENIX conference, where a network administrator with an intermittent Ethernet had linked the ping program to his vocoder program, in essence writing:

    ping goodhost | sed -e 's/.*/ping/' | vocoder

    He wired the vocoder's output into his office stereo and turned up the volume as loud as he could stand. The computer sat there shouting "Ping, ping, ping..." once a second, and he wandered through the building wiggling Ethernet connectors until the sound stopped. And that's how he found the intermittent failure."

    Haha.. Gotta love it.

    Peace.
  • ping mike.muuss
    Pinging mike.muuss [102.11.20.11] with 64 bytes of data:

    Request timedout
    Request timedout
    Request timedout
  • I had a moment of silence and commenced a 21 ping salute in honor of his life's contributions to this world. The heavens acknowledged the pings. Its good to know Mike was there in spirit to hear our appreciation.

    May your pings always be answered.

  • Haiku (Score:2)

    by 575 ( 195442 )
    Pioneer of ping
    From mike.muuss: Destination
    Host Unreachable

  • Slashdot should not report on deaths (Score:3)

    by mwillis ( 21215 ) on Thursday November 23, 2000 @01:59PM (#604719) Homepage
    Why does slash run death stories? Does no-one remember why moderation was implemented?

    Since it is clear that Slashdot trolls cannot behave themselves, it is simply inappropriate for Slashdot to cover deaths. At the very least, ban AC's (like this I guess) from commenting on death notices. Let's not strip the poor guy of his dignity by letting asocial jerks run riot.
  • But sadly, ping (ipv4) will die soon too. Did he write ping for ipv6 also ?

    May his IPV6 children live long and have fruitful productive lives.

    May all your pings be answered.

  • You can find a more info (other than a newsgroup message :) at The Register [theregister.co.uk].

  • It is sad (Score:5)

    by jjr ( 6873 ) on Thursday November 23, 2000 @10:21AM (#604723) Homepage
    To see all the bad taste of some the post that are put up here. I wish his family well may he find peace.
  • ping -c21 jhu.edu
    A 21 Ping salute?

  • It is too bad that he has died. We all use ping regularly. I find it rather unbelievable that we get so upset about some things (plane crashes, devestating but rare diseases, etc) and we completely ignore the danger that cars pose to us everyday. Hopefully people will drive safely this thanksgiving.

    -Moondog
  • The ping is dead. Long live the ping!
  • Long live the ping!

  • 100% Packet Loss (Score:5)

    by SubtleNuance ( 184325 ) on Thursday November 23, 2000 @12:18PM (#604736) Journal
    Like most people here I use Ping daily. Like most people here I had never heard of Mike Muuss.

    But from what Ive read of his writing on his homepage (linked from above [army.mil]) and his letter to the InterNet Historical Society (linked from above [internet-history.org]) it seems Mike would have had a wry sense of humour.

    Mike seems to have been a massive influence on great area's of computing (Internet, TCPIP, UNIX) and that should be celebrated and tech people should be Thankful for his efforts, and due honour paid now that he has passed.

    But when a person dies, absolute reverence does not exclude comments of some brevity.

    I am SURE, as I would have, foreseen the 100% Packet Loss jokes coming when I was dead - and I would have found the idea very amusing and quite complementary... Ill assume Mike Muss dosnt mind*...

    *I know this sounds presumptuous but I think I you would see my point... Apologies to those who find it so nonetheless.

  • Re:Memorial (Score:5)

    by ctj2 ( 113870 ) on Thursday November 23, 2000 @02:43PM (#604741) Homepage

    His work site will remain up because it has so much information that is off interest to the world. There is no need for it to ever go off line.

    His personal server is still up and will remain up for as long as I can keep it running.

  • it happens to me also, check on thegeek the post about spock's ear to be sold at christies for example, it has been rejected here, and accepted at the geek
    --

  • Please all have one minute of ping in his honor: ping -c 60 ftp.arl.mil

    Looks like they are now filtering pings (forgive them, they probably had no choice). Also, the web page times out when I try to access it.

    Slashdotted.

  • Re:thankful? (Slightly OT) (Score:3)

    by dattaway ( 3088 ) on Thursday November 23, 2000 @02:55PM (#604744) Homepage Journal
    [Bill Gates] should be thanked...

    And the mafia should be thanked for their contributions to local communities. No thanks.

  • Re:BRL CAD (Score:3)

    by ctj2 ( 113870 ) on Thursday November 23, 2000 @03:12PM (#604745) Homepage

    Mike has a working real time raytracier. The real time raytracer is handling >5000 solids at this time, rendering at ARL and then transmitting the results via ATM to other research labs.

    The last major milestone for the BRL-CAD was raytracing a scene with over 3,000,000,000 solids. Yes, that is 3 billion.

    The license agreement is not "Free" as in beer or "Free" as in "Freedom." You need to sign a simple license and fax it to ARL. They send back the license agreement with a password. Download the program and have fun.

  • Most of the comments are in pretty poor taste. The /. editors should know by now that posting obituaries just brings out the weirdos because it happens every time. Actually to be honest the weirdos are always here. Examples can be found here [slashdot.org], here [slashdot.org] and here [slashdot.org].

    kc.
  • Seems to me that a more appropriate time to thank someone is while they are still alive to hear it.

    I agree in principle, but it'd be a bit difficult...but I'll try....
    • Thanks, Ken.
    • Thanks, DMR.
    • Thanks, BWK.
    • Thanks, Linus.
    • Thanks, Alan.
    • Thanks, RMS.
    • Thanks, Kirk.
    • Thanks, JKH.
    • Thanks, Eric, all of you :)
    • Thanks, CmdrTaco.
      [snip]
    • Thanks, Bill Joy.
    • No thanks, Bill Gates.

    Thus sprach DrQu+xum, SID=218745.

  • Reported on The Register too (Score:3)

    by James_G ( 71902 ) <jamesNO@SPAMglobalmegacorp.org> on Thursday November 23, 2000 @10:30AM (#604754)
    Saw this last night. There's a little more information in their article which can be found here [theregister.co.uk].

    From their article:

    The accident happened at 9.30pm (New York time) on route 95 as a result of a previous accident. Mike hit a car stuck in the middle of the road and was pushed into the path of an oncoming tractor.

  • R.I.P. (Score:2)

    by jd ( 1658 )
    Coded on Earth, run in Real Life mode, but made in Heaven.

    (Why does God get all the best coders?)

  • I thank you for your post and agree with you to the extent that somber reverence is certainly not the only appropriate way to respond to death. I feel the proper response is one that commemorates and investigates the life of the deceased -- and equally importantly, one that helps the memorializers to stay between the poles of denial and morbid depression. There is time for mourning and there is time for vivacious rememberance. Humor that is not directly insulting to the survivors is certainly proper if it helps us to see the goodness or importance of the person we lost. In this case, the jokes certainly help point out the ubiquity of Muuss' work, and in that sense they are very fitting.

    - Michael

    -----
    Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
  • I know, too bad it was in an accident... imagine it could happen to anyone here in the "famous" guy like linus, rms, or whoever...
    with winter coming and ice on road (well, in canada), we must be careful
    --

  • Memorial (Score:5)

    by GeZ117 ( 162744 ) on Thursday November 23, 2000 @10:34AM (#604773)

    Please all have one minute of ping in his honor:
    ping -c 60 ftp.arl.mil
    That's so strange to look at http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/ [arl.mil] and thinks this guy talking to you, and giving you a mailto: link is dead. It's like if there was a ghost speaking to you.

    What happens to dead's homepage ? Do someone close them ? Or do they stand, like a simulacrum of eternity ?

    Internet is something too young to be accustomed to death

    It's a sad news.

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