Posts by jake 26674 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
"The Doctor" is ELIZA. If you have a copy of EMACS handy, you can talk to her by typing M-x doctor.
PARRY was the name of the schizophrenic.
In 1972, ELIZA (as "The Doctor", at BBN (tenex?) ) and PARRY (at SAIL, on WAITS) had a conversation at the first ICCC ... Well, they had a conversation over the ARPANET that was followed during the ICCC. It was immortalized in RFC-439.
Not much has changed in nearly 5 decades.
Just because nobody's pointed it out yet, and all joking aside, you might be interested to know that tortoises actually have nerve endings in their shell (carapace). Some of them will display signs of being ticklish if you give 'em a good scritching.
Here's a video (PSFW):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxoI5Tf-Bk8
And a turtle, for equal billing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N83mhPMKf64
ELIZA for the Commodore PET was indeed the late 1970s ... I think the official release was in '79, but the dude who ported it made it available to some folks pre-release in mid '78 or thereabouts. I can't remember which language it was written in, but I think I have the source around here somewhere.
Judging by the end results (getting pulled from circulation due to unintended so-called "adult" content), several left pondian chat-bots may have run across right pondian slang in their training data ... and literally translated it into left pondian. For example, translating yours would loosely give "I'm behaving violently towards a gay man[0], and using a prophylactic to avoid the consequences of my actions" ... probably not at all what the chat-bot herder intended.
Cross-pond machine translation will remain difficult into the foreseeable future. Many moons ago, probably over a decade now, Sarah Bee proposed an ElReg cross-pond translator. I volunteered to be one of the editors. Nothing ever came of it.
[0] Note that I am in no way advocating violence towards gay men. Or women, for that matter.
We are not discussing general purpose coding, we're discussing kernel coding.
Of all those languages you mention, just one (plus assembler) is useful for coding kernels. Guess which one (plus assembler) kernel coders actually use?
But I agree, learning more than one language is a good thing, and learning many languages is better ... The only question is, where is the point of diminishing returns?
If you're not a kernel developer, you can ignore most of this.
If you're a software developer, you should probably have at least enough of an inkling about rust to intelligently discuss it ... like it or not, there are enough fans to keep it going for a while.
"You shouldn't have to be using unsafe allocation all the time, not even in the kernel."
You are quite correct. So I don't. Neither does any other kernel programmer worth her salt.
"They should provide safe mechanisms for that"
Should those mechanisms be hardware, firmware, software or wetware? Who gets to choose?
I'm out ... gots me some cats to herd; it's our bi-annual feral vaccine day.
"Because, somehow, one can be a systems programmer without knowing how a computer actually works."
That's what they want ... the cachet of being a systems programmer without having to put in the work to understand how it all fits together. For some unknown reason, they expect some library somewhere to do all the work of understanding the underlying hardware for them.
Sorry, kids. Crawl, then walk, then run. There are no shortcuts. Not in kernel programming.
"Linus' enthusiasm for Rust is lukewarm at best."
Lukewarm? Seems positively frigid. From TOA, Linus is "in no way 'pushing' for Rust," and he's "open to it considering the promised advantages and avoiding some safety pitfalls, but I also know that sometimes promises don't pan out."
Sounds like the kiss of death to me ... but with just enough hope to keep the fanbois off his back, so he can concentrate on what is important.
"I get the feeling that Rust is considered by Linus simply because it's the most recent and popular machine language"
I think he's throwing the yowling, baying fanbois a bone just to shut them up. We might get a few drivers & the like written in rust over the next few years, but the vast majority of the kernel will still be in C long after the next language du jour takes the place of rust in the fanboi's fancy.
Side note: Rust is not now, and never will be, machine language. It's a systems programming language.
"IBM 360 assembler is much more powerful and easier to use than "C"."
That is not only not right; it is not even wrong.
"but how do you know where you are supposed to be?"
Telephone call. Has worked since before my daddy was a young 'un, will still work after my granddaughter has grandkids. Costs nothing, takes absolutely no time, and there is very, very minimal chance of miscommunication ... what's not to like?
"I'm sure a return to paper diaries would have made work better by reducing the number of pointless meetings."
That would help. However, the single best way to get rid of pointless meetings is to ban PowerPoint. PowerPoint has wasted the more man-hours, world-wide, than any other daft exercise imposed on humanity by the Computer Revolution (except possibly Microsoft's piss-poor method of updating software leading to massive quantities of downtime ... ).
"good riddance to the schedule on the fridge door."
Our household schedule is on the door between the kitchen and the mudroom. The one in the barn is on the wall outside the tackroom. The feed schedule is on the door of the feed barn. Etc. My cow doesn't need a schedule, she knows she gets milked at 6AM. Well, 5AM as of Sunday Morning, thanks to stupid human tricks. (Ever try to convince a cow that it's time to let her milk down an hour early? Good fucking luck. Trying to milk her an hour late is worse ... ).
"there's no freaking way I'm going back to trying to synchronize different people's schedules on paper."
And THAT, my friends, describes the entire problem. Other people's schedules.
Me, I manage MY schedule. I'm the only person I have control over, so I make certain that I am in the place I'm supposed to be at any given hour. Everybody else can fend for themselves. To date I haven't missed anything important, so I guess my paper planner is working as intended.
The trilithons are just a marker that makes it easy for humans to see small movements. The actual clock is the apparent movement of the Sun or the Moon or (in some cases) one or more of the brighter stars. Moving trilithons makes as much sense as moving the clock ahead or back an hour twice per year.
Oh. Wait ...
Shirley you lot have remote ("off campus") personal file servers? Why trust other people for remote data storage when you can park an old Pentium box of arbitrary capacity and encryption of choice on your Great Aunt Ruth's DSL line in Duluth?[0] Has worked for me since DSL became available in Duluth ...
Offer to pay for her DSL (she'll probably decline), and promise to only use the bandwidth once per day in the wee hours Duluth time so you don't interrupt her viewing of cute cat videos. Offer to similarly backup her data (and cute cat pics) onto your home equipment. Automating both to happen at 3AM Duluth time should be trivial. Use the encryption method of your choice.
You can invite other friends relatives into your "circle of archive protection". Once you've got yours and the Great Aunt's automated, adding a few more archive sites is trivial, as is adding redundant backup sites. The first time it's needed, by any any one of them, for any reason, the minimal effort will have been worth it. (For example, a friend who lost everything in the Tubbs fire a couple years ago still has copies of all his important documents, email, personal pictures and home videos. Priceless, that.)
[0] Insert other favorite elderly relative+city+connection method to meet your needs. An old, low power draw, headless laptop is ideal for this kind of thing. I run a very minimalistic BSD on mine, YMMV.
"Framed *within* the cacophony"
At both Berkeley and Stanford (and SLAC) such messages were deemed "not sent properly", and thus the word not getting out was considered to be the fault of the sender. I managed to convince DEC and a couple other companies to implement the same policy.
Those who refuse to learn from history ...
"So, not the solution then."
Actually, yes. It is. After several decades of studying how users manage to bollocks up damn near everything out of sheer, unadulterated ignorance, I truly believe that user education is THE solution. No others will work.
"Any proposal in the form of "this would work, if only [...]" is not a solution until the [...] bit is sorted."
All I did was point out the solution. I in no way suggested a method to implement it.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
