Larry Wall & Cults

[Patrick Scheible]

There are stone stairs in my old school and in many college buildings
that have deep curves worn into them by feet over a century or three.

Heh. There are marble stairs with deep wear in them in the main
library at my school... only that particular building was only built
in 1925 or thereabouts.

-- Patrick

 

[Alan Balmer]

Don't you dittoheads ever get your facts right?

What's a "dittohead"? Are you trying to convey a personal insult of
some kind? Please let me know, so I can call you a name, too.

http://www.jfklibrary.org/images/jfk-lbj01.jpg

http://www.americaslibrary.gov/cgi-bin/page.cgi/jb/modern/launch_1

Johnson is no longer Vice President.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/163/1

As shown in the last reference, there is currently a *proposal* for a
new steering council to be chaired by the VP. Hasn't happened yet, and
if it does, it will be quite a stretch to say that it's "in charge" of
the space program.

True, although the first shuttle flight was in 1981, while Bush was vice-
president.

As the above references show, Bush was not head of the space council
as Reagan was not a fan. Bush was busy selling anthrax and missiles
to Iran and Iraq.


I doubt it.

Don't sell your efforts short. Mr. Kerry needs all the help he can
get.

 

[Alan Balmer]

Alright, if you insist. But is it really necessary? We can find
adequate charges without reaching very hard.

Then why are so many people reaching so hard?

 

[Charlie Gibbs]

I'd like to imagine that it's because there are fewer fuckwits using
it; BICBW....

Does this mean that XP is getting less stable?

 

[Alan Balmer]

Good read. Thanks for digging this up. However, you seem to have left
out the part about it being Orrin Hatch's fault ;-)

I did notice that the article indicated that the four bids were
"relatively similar in ... technology."

 

[Alan Balmer]

I would hope so too, but that isn't how it happened. In history as it
actually went, the Morton-Thiokol design came in a distant fourth, and
the White House ordered NASA to try again, but this time come up with
the "right" answer.

This disagrees with the scenario presented (and documented)
elsethread. Do you have supporting references?

 

[Steve O'Hara-Smith]

Since I am on a roll with timelines; just one off the top of my head :

Project start : 1964
First link : 1969
Transatlantic : 1972 (to Britain and Norway)
Congested : 1976
TCP/IP : 1983 (the effort started 1979) (sort of a 2.0 version)
First ISP : 1983 (uunet, EUnet followed next year)
Nework Separation : 1983 (milnet broke out)
Large-scale design: 1987 (NSFnet, but still only T3/T1's)
Fully commercial : 1991 (WIth the "CIX War")
Web launced : 1992
Web got momentum : 1994
Dotcom bubble : 1999 (but it provided enough bandwith for the first time)
Dotcom burst : 2001

One thing I always found amusing is the amount of science *fiction*
written in the first half of this period about what would happen if the
worlds computers became linked together.

 

[Marco S Hyman]

First ISP : 1983 (uunet, EUnet followed next year)

I thought PSINET claimed to be the first. Let's see....

http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/ claimes UUNET wasn't
founded until 1987 and doesn't mention PSINET until '91 when CIX
was created. Oh well.

Interesting charts regarding the growth from about '90 on at the
bottom of that page.

/ marc

 

[CBFalconer]

.... snip ...

The period 1978-1982 was the intense design phase of the
infrastructure of the modern Internet. It would have been on
the mind of IT engineers worldwide.

Back in those days (early 70s) we hired a consultant for some of
our software development, both because I was overloaded and
because I didn't know enough. He was Gerry Ogdin, out of the
Washington area, and active in the development of the Arpanet.

I learned a good deal from him, and managed to largely ignore his
irascibility etc. That may have been connected with the fact that
he later (so I have been told) underwent a sex change operation
and became Geraldine.

I wonder what became of him/her.

 

[Charlie Gibbs]

Heh. There are marble stairs with deep wear in them in the main
library at my school... only that particular building was only built
in 1925 or thereabouts.

Another damned contractor swapping in substandard materials...

 

[John Thingstad]

Does this mean that XP is getting less stable?

--
/~\ (e-mail address removed) (Charlie Gibbs)
\ / I'm really at ac.dekanfrus if you read it the right way.
X Top-posted messages will probably be ignored. See RFC1855.
/ \ HTML will DEFINITELY be ignored. Join the ASCII ribbon campaign!

As you may know XP is not particularly good as a server.
Exchange server (email) has always sucked,
you can disengage the windows interface,
the system still wants to warn you on the screen forcing you to have
access to the screen at all times,
so the function as a server it leaves something to be desired.
I would go for some Unix implementation (perhaps free-BSD)
As a workstation XP seems OK.
I hear a lot of complaints about XP's stability.
Since I have not administered a XP network, yet, I cant comment on that.
But in my personal experience it is a stable system.
I frequently let my computer run 24 hrs. a day for more than a month
without
a need to reboot. So for me it is adequate.

 

[Brian {Hamilton Kelly}]

I was never aware that DEC offered TCP/IP.

You'll have seen my later post about "TCP/IP Services for Vax/VMS"
(which, a niggle tells me, had a different name, either before or after).
This was written by the Unix developers at DEC, and consequently was very
kuldgy and astonishingly badly-documented (for those of us used to the
high quality of VMS documentation).

Did you never see a
UCX>
prompt?

Politics and not timing was why TCP/IP didn't get into VMS:
d|i|g|i|t|a|l backed the European horse that never ran as it fitted
better with their network hardware capabilities and DECnet plans.
It also meant they did not have to deal with those BBN guys that had
developed a competing OS and network.
They had whole suites of products layered on top of DECnet that were
sold to European governments and contractors.

Can you say "Colour Book Software"? :-(

(Mind you, unattended file transfer running overnight beats FTP hands
down.)

 

[CBFalconer]

Another damned contractor swapping in substandard materials...

I believe marble is a relatively soft stone, and not suitable for
heavy traffic. Maybe you should castigate the architect.

 

[Reynir Stefánsson]

So spake Alan J. Flavell:

Eh?

Could the 'movement' be the mass influx of muggles?

 

[Alain Picard]

One thing I always found amusing is the amount of science *fiction*
written in the first half of this period about what would happen if the
worlds computers became linked together.

Yeah, but unfortunately (fortunately?) nobody predicted that 99%
of them would be running such an incredibly stupid dumbed down
OS. Maybe that's the only reason why we're still around.

 

[Rob Warnock]

+---------------
| As you may know XP is not particularly good as a server.
....
| I would go for some Unix implementation (perhaps free-BSD)
| As a workstation XP seems OK.
| I hear a lot of complaints about XP's stability.
| Since I have not administered a XP network, yet, I cant comment on that.
| But in my personal experience it is a stable system.
| I frequently let my computer run 24 hrs. a day for more than a month
| without a need to reboot. So for me it is adequate.
+---------------

*Only* a month?!? Here's the uptime for one of my FreeBSD boxes
[an old, slow '486]:

% uptime
2:44AM up 630 days, 21:14, 1 user, load averages: 0.06, 0.02, 0.00
%

That's over *20* months!!


-Rob

p.s. I remember the time back in the early 70's (at Emory Univ.) when
we called DEC Field Service to complain that our PDP-10 had an uptime
of over a year. Why were we complaining? Well, that meant that DEC Field
Service had failed to perform scheduled preventive maintenance (which
usually involved at least one power cycle)... ;-}

 

[Morten Reistad]

+---------------
| As you may know XP is not particularly good as a server.
...
| I would go for some Unix implementation (perhaps free-BSD)
| As a workstation XP seems OK.
| I hear a lot of complaints about XP's stability.
| Since I have not administered a XP network, yet, I cant comment on that.
| But in my personal experience it is a stable system.
| I frequently let my computer run 24 hrs. a day for more than a month
| without a need to reboot. So for me it is adequate.
+---------------

There you say it all. I consider two of my FreeBSD-boxes unstable
at the moment. I've had to reboot each of them twice in 18 months.
They both run the full complement of apache, sendmail, mysql, Free/SWAN
leafnode and a score of other stuff; and they go into wedged mode.

Different expectations.

*Only* a month?!? Here's the uptime for one of my FreeBSD boxes
[an old, slow '486]:

% uptime
2:44AM up 630 days, 21:14, 1 user, load averages: 0.06, 0.02, 0.00
%

That's over *20* months!!


-Rob

p.s. I remember the time back in the early 70's (at Emory Univ.) when
we called DEC Field Service to complain that our PDP-10 had an uptime
of over a year. Why were we complaining? Well, that meant that DEC Field
Service had failed to perform scheduled preventive maintenance (which
usually involved at least one power cycle)... ;-}

I had a customer complaint at Prime framed at their tech dept; it was
about wrapped counters after ~300 days uptime.

-- mrr

 

[jmfbahciv]

I knew we had succeeded in making the Internet mainstream when
I saw that the plane I was about to board had the URL I made for
them written along the entire plane in 2 meter high letters.


And we had to do a hard sell for the Internet bit. 2 years later more
than 50% of their tickets were sold over the Internet.

I don't think we've even seen the beginning.

The period 1978-1982 was the intense design phase of the infrastructure
of the modern Internet. It would have been on the mind of IT engineers
worldwide.


Yep, but it was in version 4 there was real TCP/IP support. ISTR there
was a retrofit to a late version 3; but that was made after V4 was out.
This version more or less depended on other boxes, just like a PC does
today. "Real" TCP/IP came out in V7 (or possibly late V6. I more or
less skipped the entire V6 of Tops20).

TOPS-20 development was not known for their innovation acclerity.

/BAH

Subtract a hundred and four for e-mail.

 

[jmfbahciv]

Then why are so many people reaching so hard?

It's apparently having the desired effect. The subject of
the radio talk show last night was about the results of a poll
where 41% of the people asked (New York state residents) believed
that Bush and Co. knew that the WTC was going to be attacked and
did nothing to prevent it. The Bush-bashing is working. The
Democrats are opening the city gates to the barbarians.

/BAH

 

[jmfbahciv]

+---------------
| As you may know XP is not particularly good as a server.
....
| I would go for some Unix implementation (perhaps free-BSD)
| As a workstation XP seems OK.
| I hear a lot of complaints about XP's stability.
| Since I have not administered a XP network, yet, I cant comment on that.
| But in my personal experience it is a stable system.
| I frequently let my computer run 24 hrs. a day for more than a month
| without a need to reboot. So for me it is adequate.
+---------------

*Only* a month?!? Here's the uptime for one of my FreeBSD boxes
[an old, slow '486]:

% uptime
2:44AM up 630 days, 21:14, 1 user, load averages: 0.06, 0.02, 0.00
%

That's over *20* months!!

I bet we can measure the youngster's age by the uptimes he boasts.

-Rob

p.s. I remember the time back in the early 70's (at Emory Univ.) when
we called DEC Field Service to complain that our PDP-10 had an uptime
of over a year. Why were we complaining? Well, that meant that DEC Field
Service had failed to perform scheduled preventive maintenance (which
usually involved at least one power cycle)... ;-}

One? Had to be two. FS was supposed to use their service pack
as the system disk, not the customers!!! I believe that was
true even in 1970. The dangers of smushing bits was too great.

/BAH

Subtract a hundred and four for e-mail.