For the geeks, nerds, and other IT/Techie folks...

[boppers]

Okay, I've seen Obama @ google (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4yVlPqeZwo), lessig on his opinion (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdDzvmY1XPo), what are the other industry-specific opinions and discussions out there to help inform a BASH geek like me on our candidates?

(If you don't know what Bourne-Again SHell is, this is possibly not your thread.)

[Recursion]

1. Bah! Forget BASH. TCSH is the way to go

cp foo bar
!!:s/bar/qxt

That simply rocks

*grumble* I bet you use vi, too....

[boppers]

2. emacs, actually.

...but I humbly bow before your DU username.

Seriously, though, what other geeky references are available on the remaining candidates?

[Recursion]

3. Basically, only Obama is for net neutrality

I don't have a reference on that, that's just me having read their campaign literature. Also, Obama is the only candidate I've seen speak remotely knowledgably on tech issues.

[boppers]

5. Found this...

http://www.freepress.net/news/28260

Hm. Anybody know her "official position's" URL on Network Neutrality?

[boppers]

6. ... and this:

http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Senator_Clinton_to_cosponsor_Internet_neutrality_0518.html

[Recursion]

7. Wow, thanks!

Somehow she had absolutely avoided conveying that fact to me.

In other news, do consider trying tcsh. The previous-command-piped-through-sed thing I mentioned is beyond wonderful.

[boppers]

9. I switch around.

I confess to using ksh, tcsh, and bash, in a given workday. Sometimes csh on older SunOS boxen.

It was a bit of a shibboleth in the OP, to make sure the thread was about talking to "my people".

[Recursion]

10. Ah, roger that

I just can't get into KSH, however much I try. It's now the OpenBSD default and that still bugs me.

[lapfog_1]

53. oh yeah... I knew it could do that.

don't do enough CLI stuff anymore to remember all the fun stuff.

Used to write awk scripts and sed scripts and do all kinds of cool stuff to massage data.

[billyoc]

4. Well, well, emacs, you say. OK, you can hang out here. nt

[Recursion]

8. Bah. Emacs runs even on Windoze

I write my software in ed...

[boppers]

11. Sadly, I'm not sure whether a geek "editor war" is an amusement on GD:P....

...or an amusing, satirical, comment about GDP as a whole.

I just wanted info on IT platforms. :)


edit: smiley "converters" have issues

[Recursion]

12. Christ, it would be better than the Obama/Clinton bloodletting we've seen of late

GD-P practically makes me long for the old emacs/vi or bigendian/littleendian wars of 20 years ago.

[boppers]

13. You endian-ness mocks my platform!

You have hurt machines everywhere with your blatant endian patriarchy.

Up next: How "tweak my modem" is a veiled drug reference.

[RuleOfNah]

18. Your binary bias is offensive.

My qbit will never endianed! Log live the collapsed state!

[Recursion]

25. I use MIX, which is alternately binary and decimal

:)

[lurky]

31. Clearly, you have been reading too much Knuth...

Unless Intel has switched their architecture without telling me. :P

[lapfog_1]

16. Hey, those could get real ugly with name calling and

comments on your parentage and everything.

Which is why I never engage in a vi V. emacs war with anyone.

I can drive co-workers nuts because I don't remember every f'ing little short cut for copying text or deleting up to the next white space or whatever. But then, I used to *program* in QED, so they can all go pound sand as far as I'm concerned. I still get the job done, whether in vi or emacs or even ed.

[Recursion]

26. Emacs is a great operating system

It just needs a decent text editor

(as much as that is a joke, emacs actually does have a vi-emulation minor mode, which solves that issue)

[lapfog_1]

36. Yeah, I remember that joke!

:rofl:

[Moochy]

20. You old School Command Line Dinosaurs

I use an Integrated Development Environment, and it knows what I'm about to type. :evilgrin:

Now there's an IDEological divide for you.

[lapfog_1]

22. Netbeans for YOU!

Maybe what you use will be ECLIPSEd by something else!

(there are many multi window GUI editors for writing C, C++, Java, etc, some of which almost work, sorta.

[Moochy]

27. I had an IDEA

My old IDEA used to work, but then my productivity was Eclipsed by a company that was decidedly pro-open sores. IBM'd at that place though, and lit the bag on the Jbosses' doorstep. :D

[Recursion]

28. RadRails still sucks

It used to be awesome. Now it sucks. It really, really, really, really sucks.

Actually the extent to which RadRails has come to suck has moved me back to ModLisp as my framework for web development.

[Moochy]

30. Groovy on GRAILS!

Yes, go and light The Rails Shaped Beacon!

So The Groovy project folks have produced Groovy on Grails. :evilgrin:

[lapfog_1]

34. Oh hey, thanks... I've been downloading rails stuff and teaching

myself about it. I'll look up Groovy on Grails. I assume it's related.

[Moochy]

38. It gets better

Groovy has a 'Joint Compiler' :smoke:
It compiles Groovy to jvm-compatible bytecode with access to all existing api's. Could be the sweet spot for alot of existing apps infrastructure. Yes, IMO most attractive dynamic languages I've seen. It has mixed typing. quite nice.

[Recursion]

40. RMS was right, re: LISP

Sites that don't use LISP are doomed to re-implement it.

LISP has been doing that since about 1999.

[Moochy]

44. vi 4 life biatches!!

I tried to convert (to emacs) one summer. But the conditioning did not take. I spent 2 months and got parenthetical balance syndrome. ] making lists of lists of lists that process lists of lists of lists of lists that use lists as arrays and multidimensional lists of lists of !!!!aieee assplode squarebracket!brzxzt

[Moochy]

47. Have you met him?

RMS? He came skipping by a startup I was at back in 1999. He's got smelly bare feet. lol.

[Recursion]

50. Yes. I'm in Boston/Cambridge now doing EE

It's hard to avoid him, really.

[lapfog_1]

55. Ah yes, Mr. Stallman

knew him fairly well at one point.

Used to come over for our Friday after lunch talks (we had Richard Feynman for the very first talk, just before he passed away... he came over because we had a Connection Machine and his son Carl was working with it).

Stallman was always dirty and smelly... I remember him blowing his nose on his shirt sleeve. I wasn't all that impressed with him. We were funding the Gnu project as it was known then.

[Recursion]

59. The world gets smaller

I met Dr. Feynman in 7th grade after his bravura performance in the Challenger hearings.

I now have all of his (known to me) recorded lectures on my iPod. If there was a greater postwar genius, he or she is not known to me.

[lapfog_1]

60. not to mention all round fun guy

but still the second most impressive person I've ever met in a small room.

The first person would be Albert Gore (when he was VP).

Feynman would be the smarter of the two, but Mr. Gore was more impressive... that's not right. Impressive in a different way. And I'm not one to be bowled over by titles.

Feynman in story telling mode, talking about breaking all of the locks on the filing cabinets and desks at the Manhattan Project. hysterical!

[Recursion]

61. He taught my jr. high math class Euler's identity

7th graders. And we "got" it. e^(j*pi) + 1 = 0. He made it make sense to 13-year-olds.

That's the mark of genius, to me.

[lapfog_1]

64. Awesome.

Imagine... quite possibly one of the brightest people from the 20th century... I would only put Einstein and Niels Bohr ahead of him... teaching you math.

Well, something to tell your grandchildren about.

[lapfog_1]

62. I'll just assume that you've met Grace Murray Hopper as well.

And I wouldn't be at all surprised if you haven't met ME.

Attended any IEEE Mass Storage Symposiums?

How about "Nerds in Paradise" IETF meetings?

[Recursion]

63. Sadly, I did not meet Admiral Hopper

Though I am a great fan of hers.

And I wouldn't be at all surprised if you haven't met ME.

Nor I.

Attended any IEEE Mass Storage Symposiums?
How about "Nerds in Paradise" IETF meetings?

No and yes, in that order. My biggest societal association was and is ASEE

[lapfog_1]

65. Then you know John Lekashman

Yes?

John was my NASA civil servant counterpart.

[Recursion]

66. Ah, I know who you are then, but I doubt you remember me

So I fear I'm at your advantage. I have to sleep now, but PM me. I doubt you noticed me (we met when I was an undergrad sycophant at a conference... Pittsburgh? Somewhere like that, not NIP, at any rate), at any rate before I enlisted (which is how I met the other half of the NASA people I know). I'm doing applications of contention and game theory to systems analysis now; I always thought your generation overlooked that aspect of it...

Dmesg.

[lapfog_1]

67. Read up on Russian Chess Grandmaster Botvinnik

and also, a book I used for a course... Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems by John Holland.

Yes, been to Pittsburgh many times... I'm sure you do know me.

Oh, one more connection...

If you followed the ACM Computer Chess playing tournaments... I was co-author of C-Cube. We placed third one year (1982?), using a unique almost completely boolean vector move generator and our Cray-1.

Late one night as my partner and I were working on the code, we called Cray Research to leave a message about why they had a leading zero count instruction but not a trailing zero count... anyway, after a couple of rings someone answered the phone. It was Seymour Cray, and he was happy to chat with us about why we would need such a thing!

[Moochy]

70. Thanks for Corroborating the Stallman Funk!

My first thoughts upon seeing him, was "who is this loony git prancing about our offices with a pan flute, and barefoot." The responsibility to take RMS out to lunch fell to another engineer, thankfully.
Freedom from Shoes! Freedom from Soap! :evilgrin:

[lapfog_1]

48. And Snobol did it before LISP.

Nothing much is really new.

self modifying interpretive code.

Now if only someone would make up a whole bunch of overstrike weird symbols for operators and stuff.

[billyoc]

68. Yes, well, that's probably the nicest thing about OpenBSD.

:hide:

[backscatter712]

71. Emacs? No, vi is the One True Editor.

Emacs is short for Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping! (FSM, I remember when eight megs was a lot of memory...)

[lapfog_1]

14. I've learned and forgotten more unix text editors

than most people even know existed.

ed, sed, qed, vi, emacs...

none are my favorite and I refuse to get into religious wars over them.

ed is still useful if you get stuck in single user mode with corrupted non root file systems!

Oh... about the political thing...

Hillary is for expanding the number of H1B visas... which is why she is the darling of silicon valley CEOs. Not that there aren't hundreds or thousands of unemployed high tech workers in the US (like me) but because they can bring over someone from India or China for a *lot* less money.

[boppers]

15. mastered TECO?

OpenVMS is it's own adventure game....

but do Hillary and Obama differ on the H1B "Import cheap IT" plans?

[lapfog_1]

17. Oh yes... and PLATO before that!

VMS was a BLISSful experience!

BTW, do you know which OS still has a *lot* of VMS concepts in it? (hint: the development team that created VMS all left Dec and went to a different computer company)

[boppers]

19. Yeah...

Their Ring0 gui-ness still makes me cranky, though.

(I'm amused, but happy, to find such a thriving culture in DU.)

[lapfog_1]

21. Borrowed the concept from GECOS

who "borrowed" it from Multics.

And the people that wrote Multics went on to create... unix (unix was a play on words about Multics).

(used to teach Computer Science in my youth!)

[Recursion]

24. I think of GECOS as the 5th field in /etc/passwd

What does it stand for?

[lapfog_1]

29. Same GECOS

General Electric's Comprehensive Operating System.

As in GE625 and GE635 mainframes (with TIME SHARING!)... later Honeywell 6660s series mainframe.

MULTICS was developed for the GE635... and a couple of young engineers on the project were Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson.

One of my claims to fame was delivering a paper I wrote on RAID (one of the first RAID papers) at an ACM conference... and there was Dennis Ritchie taking copious notes in the front row. I was maybe 29 or 30 at the time and it scared the piss out of me.

[Recursion]

33. I met Ritchie and Cerf on the same day

They were looking at the datacenter I was running as a POC to move Google to. Those guys were hardcore (they went the other direction, but it was an honor to have those guys come through.)

[lapfog_1]

51. What data center was that?

I might very well have worked in the place at one time in the past.

[Recursion]

52. The "C" root server was there

And it was in northern virginia. Sadly, because "C" was (and probably still is) there, by contract that's all I can say.

[lapfog_1]

56. Nope... I know the place you are talking about

I think.. but I've never been there.

At one time Google was looking to move into NASA Ames and use a number of buildings... one of the reasons was bldg 258 (which, at one point, hosted MAE-West).

I spent 10 years in that facility.

[Recursion]

57. I've seen MAE-East

But, yeah, then you know where I'm talking about; I did a lot of the infrastructure build-up there. As I said about Rather, small world.

[Recursion]

39. I knew the word play UNIX/MULTICS bit

And that UNIX is properly written in small caps, because they were proud of troff.

I still don't get why an OS name is a field name of /etc/passwd, unless it was a compatibility thing?

[lapfog_1]

43. Bingo. That's it exactly

the GECOS field was to provide a compatible user accounts field so that unix users could access resources on the GE machines.

AT&T Bell Labs was a big GE (later Honeywell) installation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecos_field

[Recursion]

46. Learn something every day

Sweet, thanks. I'd always wondered where that came from. I tend to hack my passwd(1) and login(3)'s to use that for my own quota maintenance, and now I realize that was exactly the kind of kludge it was meant to be used for, so I don't feel as bad.

[RuleOfNah]

69. "(I'm amused, but happy, to find such a thriving culture in DU.)"

I was too. People that met significant 20th century people, lots of tech nostalgia. The Stallman bagging started to put me off. Then I read

Hillary is for expanding the number of H1B visas... which is why she is the darling of silicon valley CEOs. Not that there aren't hundreds or thousands of unemployed high tech workers in the US (like me) but because they can bring over someone from India or China for a *lot* less money.

and though it is a comfort to know I'm not alone, it is scary to think about how many wizards are in line ahead of me...

[Recursion]

23. Oooh it's like IBM to HAL

Increment each letter in VMS by 1 and what do you get?

It's why even today Windows is case-insensitive.

[lapfog_1]

32. yup... new technology indeed!

oh well... I had, as a personal computer assigned to just me, one of the first VAX 11-750s with a cool color raster graphic tube... along with a number of glass ttys. All for ME!!!

I was writing code to interface the 750 to a Cray-1... serial number 7 for those that care. In PASCAL of all things. My company sold that Cray front end software for something like $2M... I got a nice note in my personnel file!

[Recursion]

35. Pascal considered harmful

I think I'm a generation after you. By 3rd grade we all had microcomputers (as they were called then) assigned to us, and I spent 3rd grade learning Logo and Forth (both were more than worth it, and have influenced my programming every day since then, for the better).

[lapfog_1]

41. I met the authors of Forth

when I was in college. We had a PDP-11 in the front room of an old house and working on "science" projects there (why there? nobody knew). Anyway, the husband and wife team that had invented the Forth interpreter that we were using blew in to town and spent a couple of days at the house tweaking things and teaching us how to program it. I had an old HP calculator so this wasn't a big deal to me... in fact, I thought it was the only way to use a calculator.

Yeah, I started out on 026 punch card machines and Fortran.

Probably a generation before you.

Actually, when I was 12 I attended college for the summer and took a course on Algol. So I probably span TWO generations before you.

[Recursion]

42. Small world... I met Ms. Rather too

She came by my classroom in 1983 when we were all learning Forth (ported to that revolutionary new platform, the Commodore 64, which was of course destined to sweep the nation...)

All I'm saying is, I'm old enough to say "you kids get off my yard" too.

[lapfog_1]

45. I had forgotten her name...

All I remember at the time (1978) was that they were kinda hippies or something.

Small world indeed.

[Recursion]

37. Ah, Christ, how old are we all?

I'm 31 and I feel like I'm the young man here...

[lapfog_1]

49. Waaay older than that.

Been doing programming since I was 12... almost 40 years now.

Wrote my first compiler in high school (in MIXAL of course).

Yup... we are all getting older now.

[Recursion]

54. Wrote my first program at age 7 in 1983

Damn good program, too. It was a "universal logo machine" that took a text description in more-or-less English and made the turtle draw out the shape.

It was fundamentally flawed, naturally, in that I didn't understand the importance of non-brittle software. But it was a pretty damn good effort for a 7-year-old.

[lapfog_1]

58. I can't remember what all I wrote in college... much less

before that. Still, my high school was VERY progressive for 1971... we had computer science taught by someone who actually had a "computer science" degree! I took all 3 courses he offered in my sophomore year, then two years of independent study for junior and senior. When I enrolled at my university and talked with an adviser... he asked what I had actually "done" in high school computer science. I told him that I had already written my own compiler and had just completed a set of examples to accompany Jean Sammet's book on comparative programming languages. I think he choked a bit. Anyway, by the next semester I was teaching computer science there. I believe that I'm the only freshman to EVER have taught there (and you should have seen the hoops the department had to jump through to make that happen).

Oh well... long time ago.