I'm pretty sure that's not in the New Testament, but would be interested if you find a reference.

"L" was the game that first got me hooked with computers. I played that game through to completion on one of our school's BBC micros, even though it involved doing so during break times, lunch and after school. I was very fortunate to have a maths teacher that was really into the BBC and knew what could be done with computers. We had an Econet network, fileserver and a computer room that we could spend our breaks in.

The OS and built in BASIC in the BBC are extremely elegant: functions, procedures, a VDU driver that treated the screen as 1280x1024 logical units, so graphics plotting worked, regardless of the physical screen resolution, multiple filesystems, support for additional languages, the ability to peek and poke from with BASIC as well as the amazing built-in assembler. The hardware could be upgraded beyond anything the other 8bit micros of the day could due to a huge number of I/O ports. I remember being very confused when I got my first PC and QBASIC was the only bundled language. It all felt so primitive compared with the elegance of Acorn's 8bit range.

I've still got a mint condition BBC Master with an internal second processor (offload the program to the co-pro and use the base machine for I/O duties only). Very tempted to add a Retroclinic Datacentre so I can plug in USB sticks and run software from there.

The BBC micro, in the hands of a good teacher, was a machine that shaped lives. I'm in IT because my maths teacher "got it" and passed on his enthusiasm.

The BBC news report on Dennis Ritchie's death: here.

Would be good to see this hit the Most Read section of the site.

It's no exaggeration that without Dennis Ritchie's contributions, many of us would have very different careers. I've been fortunate to spend the first 12 years of my IT career working on multiple Unix and Linux systems, and although I'm not much of a coder, I've compiled a fair amount of C and recognise that if it hadn't been invented, neither would C++ or C#, which constitutes a lot of the code in use today.

Without Unix, what would the Internet been built on? Perhaps something like VMS? Would tools like Sendmail or BIND been developed in those environments? The influence of Unix can be seen everywhere in IT.

Actually, without Unix, we wouldn't have had NeXTstep, which became MacOS X, which became iOS. We wouldn't have had Minix or Linux, so no Android. So the mobile landscape would have been different as well.

I don't think it's too much of an exaggeration to say that Dennis Ritchie's legacy is the IT industry we have today. Most of us stand on this giant's shoulders.

RIP Dennis Ritchie.

I don't know where you're posting from, but in the UK, the protests in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen and Libya were/are running as lead items on the main TV news. It's major news and being treated in the same way the Orange and Velvet revolutions were.

I was going to point out the danger of quoting a couple of verses from the Bible without establishing context, but even taken on its own, Mark 10:29-30 isn't advocating the sort of disconnect being discussed.

Try reading it in its context: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark%2010:17-31&version=MSG

(using a modern paraphrase, The Message, because it gets the point across in everyday language. If that bothers you and you want a more literal translation, try this: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark%2010:17-31&version=NIV)

Dear Slashdot Readers

This article (and subsequent posts) have demonstrated that the once trusted car analogy is no longer in favour and from now on, complicated subjects should be explained using balloons instead.

Thank you for your co-operation in welcoming our new balloon overloads. Or something.

You might not be racist, but using the BNP website (the UK's far right - and generally loathed - political party) as supporting evidence doesn't do your argument any favours...

I'll try and answer but bear in mind this is the perspective of a single European...

While you are mystified about the European attitude towards guns, many (most?) Europeans are equally mystified by the American attraction towards guns.

Guns are rarely encountered in everyday life over here and many people would become concerned if that changed. For us, the lack of guns reduces the amount of gun violence (check the per capita. The US isn't the top, but it's just below places like South Africa, Colombia, Zimbabwe and others (source: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_wit_fir_percap-crime-murders-firearms-per-capita)).

In the UK, when gun crime does happen, the police armed response units appear to adopt a tactic of shoot to kill. The last two instances where there was a stand-off, the gun wielding individual ended up dead. Whether this is a deterrent or not is arguable, but gun crime is pretty rare (although regrettably, knife crime is on the increase because more young people are carrying knives).

Hope that makes sense.

It never ceases to make me smile that any discussion about BASIC invariably brings BBC BASIC fans out of the woodwork, and I'll add myself to that list.

To be honest, BBC BASIC spoilt me. I was familiar with the concepts of using procedures and functions, but never progressed to the built in assembler. The thing is that BBC BASIC and the sheer power (for the time) of the MOS (operating system) was so far advanced of the other 8bit machines available at the time. I then moved to the 32bit Acorn Archimedes range which also features BBC BASIC. So, when I got my first PC it was a complete shock - there was QBASIC, but it didn't work the same way and seemed far more limited. It didn't integrate so elegantly with the operating system.

For me, BBC BASIC and the MOS is a truly amazing piece of work and went with a truly revolutionary piece of the hardware. As an example, the BBC B hardware (the most common computer to run BBC BASIC in the early 80s) has a built in floppy disk drive port, parallel and serial, a programmable ADC port, a digital "User" port for controlling mice etc, a 1Mhz(!) bus for controlling other devices such as sound synthesisers, the ability to add an Econet module to create a local network and the "Tube", an interface/protocol for interfacing with a second processor (the first ARM processor was designed using the Tube interface). How many other 8bit machines in the early 80s could do any of that? The operating system also supported paged RAM/ROM and a very sophisticated display driver (called "VDU") where screen co-ordinates mapped to a virtual screen resolution, effectively allowing your routines to be resolution independent.

If you have an interest in old computers, or elegant design, but have never played with a BBC or even a BBC Emulator, you owe it to yourself to track one down.

Wish I had some mod points today...

Someone please mod the parent up as insightful!

Whenever mobile phones are mentioned on Slashdot, something akin to the following comment will inevitably appear:

'All I want is a phone that makes calls.'

I've never quite got my head around a tech site like Slashdot, where the demographic is almost certainly interested in new technology having such a negative response to technological advances in what our phones can do. You rarely [never?] hear this with other technology on this site:

'I wish Windows 7 had less features. All I want is the ability to write a letter'
'This 4Ghz Core 2 Due Hyperfighting Special Edition is too fast for me. I want a 68030 at 25Mhz'... instead we get 'Imagine a Beowulf cluster of...'

Is it because the non-techie crowd have embraced mobile tech, in some instances more than us (given that some teenagers seem to text more than they speak) and we've been out done? Are the non-techies better at mobile tech than us?

(Yes, I know that Slashdot doesn't speak with one voice, but I bet the comment appears somewhere in this article).