When I took geology in college (~1987) they were predicting that oil was going to run out by early 2000. I guess fifteen years in the future is farther ahead than they expect most people will remember.
Peak oil is a myth and there is very strong evidence of abiotic oil. See http://www.viewzone.com/abioticoilx.html for example.
I sure miss the days when everything was an 80 column glass tty, or a software equivalent. The joke message isn't going to look right unless you have an absurdly wide browser window. Sigh.
I wrote this in 1992 for rec.humor.funny. I've long lost my "original" digital copy, but as Linus says, real men don't make backups, they let the internet archive their work for them. Or, something like that.
How easy would it be to prepend ~/bin to $PATH and stick it in there?
Irrelevant.
But, you could set the system login scripts to forbid ~/bin,
Do you have any idea of what the system administrators will do with your log?
Oh yes, I do. They won't touch it. Their job is only to keep the server(s) running. If it's an application problem, the hammer comes down on me.
The admins only keep the machines running. Application support isn't in their job description.
Of course, we don't leave our logs in system directories. We have our disk where we keep those.
We're talking "Enterprise computing". It's a very different environment.
Meh. Think of it another way. Every element other than Hydrogen and Helium was created in the bowels of a star. So, another supernova projectile vomited just in time for one of its chunks to reach our solar system as it was being formed.
Hmmm. Kind of cool coincidence actually.
Ya know, I actually DID walk to classes, barefoot, in the snow. Yes, I was weird. (I growed up as a hillbilly. My mamma never could learn me to wear shoes much.)
The paper tape and punch cards part I wrote was real.
Seeing how you have similar experience I don't whether to invite you inside to talk about the old days, order you off my lawn, or quietly step off of your lawn.
I remember -- RMS *did* bitch about the copyright assignment thing.
Correct. It wasn't enough that we were GPL (v2), but we had to get copyright assignments to the FSF from an organization that didn't exist and people who were unwilling to do that.
My only personal contact with Stallman was a phone call just a bit after I took over from Chuck and he promised to "go to war against me" (his words) if I didn't get all the copyright assignments. I couldn't and he did.
In an interesting twist, my successor has managed to get the code base to GPL v3. Sigh.
No. I haven't lived in the LA area in a decade and a half.
That was a truly a forgettable book. I had a copy and even tried to read it through several times. I cannot recall anything about it other than the title.
That makes me sad in a way, because I usually can read something end to end.
Regarding the quote: It's not that COBOL was such a bad language for its time. It wasn't. Of the three languages COBOL, FORTRAN and Lisp, only Lisp survives (in new code) in anything resembling its ancestor. COBOL survives in legacy code that will probably never be retired. FORTRAN has mutated into something unrecognizable and arguably didn't last.
We can be grateful for FORTRAN because it buried the notion that compilers could never beat hand coded assembly.
We can be grateful for Lisp because it later spawned The One True Editor.
We can be grateful for COBOL because it made so mistakes that were so glaringly obvious, no one ever made them again.
There's no substitute for a few solid courses in theory and design.
You must be new here. When I started programming, there were only a handful of colleges that had computer programming departments.
You came along late enough that you might have had decent instructors.
And I walked to and from college both ways, uphill, in the snow, barefooted, my first programming class used paper tape, my second programming class used punch cards, yadda yadda yadda.
Now, get off my lawn!
I recently replaced a SMTP protocol implementation with a pipe to
It depends. Did you get all the quoting correct when starting sendmail? How did you handle error returns?
For any kind of enterprise code, I'd lean towards an SMTP implementation exactly because when something fails (and pagers are going off everywhere at 3am) you can make a log of exactly what went wrong.
Put enough comments in your code so that five years from now you (and others) can remember what you indented the code to do.
/* This is hairy. We need to compute where the XEmacs binary was invoked
from because temacs initialization requires it to find the lisp
directories. The code that recomputes the path is guarded by the
restarted flag. There are three possible paths I've found so far
through this:temacs -- When running temacs for basic build stuff, the first main_1
will be the only one invoked. It must compute the path else there
will be a very ugly bomb in startup.el (can't find obvious location
for doc-directory data-directory, etc.).temacs w/ run-temacs on the command line -- This is run to bytecompile
all the out of date dumped lisp. It will execute both of the main_1
calls and the second one must not touch the first computation because
argc/argv are hosed the second time through.xemacs -- Only the second main_1 is executed. The invocation path must
computed but this only matters when running in place or when running
as a login shell.As a bonus for straightening this out, XEmacs can now be run in place
as a login shell. This never used to work.As another bonus, we can now guarantee that
(concat invocation-directory invocation-name) contains the filename
of the XEmacs binary we are running. This can now be used in a
definite test for out of date dumped files. -slb */
OK. So now everyone knows how Lisp programs written with a core in C initialize themselves, right?
And as much as people may joke about it, XEmacs was tested to ensure that it worked as a login shell prior to release.
Don't do image processing work with PIL unless you have proven that command-line ImageMagick won't do the job.
I think the worst mistake I made as Mr. XEmacs was attempting to unify our graphics support to call ImageMagick libraries instead of the custom stuff we were using (and later restored when ImageMagick was backed out).
Does it work any better now? The last time I looked at display(1) a couple of years ago, it still wasn't close to long lost and patent challenged xv(1) that got shut down by the GIF patent war.
While not related to TOS you reminded me of the first and last Star Trek Convention I went to, which had Frakes and that chick who played Dax at it
Terry Farrell.
The only Star Trek cast member I've ever met was James Doohan at a book signing.
But about the old series, the only criteria that women on the cast had to meet was to sleep with Roddenberry (he was married to Nurse Chapel. Uhura, Janice Rand, etc. were mistresses). How did the men get casted?
An authority is a person who can tell you more about something than you really care to know.
