TOOT BOOT posted:

commit to continuing your post career elsewhere

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6881Interesting posted:

I do have an an advantage because I’m very bright and can hold more complex state in my head than most people [speaks to attitude ]

Gazpacho posted:

from raymond's partner in time crime

https://binaryredneck.net/2010/09/11/hacker-culture-not-optional/

i'm completely indifferent to everything on that list as are my co-workers, yet somehow we manage to make software?

power botton posted:

did he like never sell his stock or anything? like how is he broke. he'll be the first to tell you how modest and good with money he is.

The Management posted:

seeing esr broke and begging for money makes me happy. he's a terrible person and deserves nothing but misery.

GameCube posted:

reminder: jay maynard jacks off to The Animaniacs

eschaton posted:

esr insists he is working on vital infrastructure but voluntary contributions aren't covering the costs

either the infrastructure must not be vital or his entire economic philosophy, that only voluntary contribution is necessary and moral, is wrong

Doc Block posted:

IIRC he was given stock options that didn't mature for 6 months or a year or whatever, and va linux stock tanked before that.

eschaton posted:

esr insists he is working on vital infrastructure but voluntary contributions aren't covering the costs

either the infrastructure must not be vital or his entire economic philosophy, that only voluntary contribution is necessary and moral, is wrong

Suspicious posted:

how does an uberlibertarian even end up believing in free software? strongly compartmentalized thinking?

Suspicious posted:

how does an uberlibertarian even end up believing in free software? strongly compartmentalized thinking?

Suspicious posted:

how does an uberlibertarian even end up believing in free software? strongly compartmentalized thinking?

Smythe posted:

Cybernetic Vermin posted:

libertarianism is only one of an increasingly large number of bad political frameworks of ideas constructed by taking some primitive principles and trying to logically derive a worldview from them

much of it down to a lack of actual depth to education of today

eschaton posted:

I can't find it now, but that "Libertarianism Is Not a Ruling-Class Philosophy" article is a pro click

quote:

None of this is surprising. Libertarianism is not a ruling-class theory. It may be indulged, certainly, for the useful ideas it can throw up, and its prophets have at times influenced dominant ideologies–witness the cack-handed depredations of the “Chicago Boys” in Chile after Allende’s bloody overthrow. But untempered by the realpolitik of Reaganism and Thatcherism, the anti-statism of “pure” libertarianism is worse than useless to the ruling class.

Big capital will support tax-lowering measures, of course, but it does not need to piss and moan about taxes with the tedious relentlessness of the libertarian. Big capital, with its ranks of accountant-Houdinis, just gets on with not paying it. And why hate a state that pays so well? Big capital is big, after all, not only because of the generous contracts its state obligingly hands it, but because of the gun-ships with which its state opens up markets for it.

Libertarianism, by contrast, is a theory of those who find it hard to avoid their taxes, who are too small, incompetent or insufficiently connected to win Iraq-reconstruction contracts, or otherwise chow at the state trough. In its maundering about a mythical ideal-type capitalism, libertarianism betrays its fear of actually existing capitalism, at which it cannot quite succeed. It is a philosophy of capitalist inadequacy.

Gazpacho posted:

raymond is the leading contributor to ntpsec so you can't necessarily say he's been slacking

Raere posted:

NTP is important and he should be funded unless he's working on some useless fork because principles

Gazpacho posted:

he wrote the emacs vc driver and has contributed to it substantially over the years

WINNINGHARD posted:

i get the impression that this esr guy is a narcissist

quote:

These are dates that every hacker knew were important at the time, or shortly afterwards. I’ve tried to concentrate on milestones for which the date - or the milestone itself - seems to have later passed out of folk memory.

1961
MIT takes delivery of a PDP-1. The first recognizable ancestor of the hacker culture of today rapidly coalesces around it.

1969
Ken Thompson begins work on what will become Unix. First commercial VDT ships; it’s a glass TTY. First packets exchanged on the ARPANET, the direct ancestor of today’s Internet.

1970
DEC PDP-11 first ships; architectural descendants of this machine, including later Intel microprocessors, will come to dominate computing.

1973
Interdata 32 ships; the long 32-bit era begins [9]. Unix Edition 5 (not yet on the Interdata) escapes Bell Labs to take root at a number of educational institutions. The XEROX Alto pioneers the "workstation" - a networked personal computer with a high-resolution display and a mouse.

1975
First Altair 8800 ships. Beginning of heroic age of microcomputers. First 24x80 and 25x80 "smart" (addressable-cursor) VDTs. ARPANET declared "operational", begins to spread to major universities.

1976
"Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code" released. First look into the Unix kernel source for most hackers, and was a huge deal in those pre-open-source days.

1977
Unix ported to the Interdata. First version with a kernel written largely in C rather than machine-dependent assembler.

1978
First BBS launched - CBBS, in Chicago.

1981
First IBM PC ships. End of the heroic age of micros. TCP/IP is implemented on a VAX-11/780 under 4.1BSD Unix; ARPANET and Unix cultures begin to merge.

1982
Sun Microsystems founded. Era of commercial Unix workstations begins.

1983
PDP-10 canceled. This is effectively the end of 36-bit architectures anywhere outside of deep mainframe country, though Symbolics Lisp machines hold out a while longer. ARPANET, undergoing some significant technical changes, becomes Internet.

1984
AT&T begins a largely botched attempt to commercialize Unix, clamping down on access to source code. In the BBS world, FidoNet is invented.

1985
RMS published GNU Manifesto. This is also roughly the year the C language became the dominant lingua franca of both systems and applications programming, eventually displacing earlier compiled language so completely that they are almost forgotten.

1986
Intel 386 ships; end of the line for 8- and 16-bit PCs. Consumer-grade hardware in this class wouldn’t be generally available until around 1989, but after that would rapidly surpass earlier 32-bit minicomputers in and workstations capability.

1991
Linux and the World Wide Web are (separately) launched.

1992
Bit-mapped color displays with a dot pitch matching that of a monochrome VDT (and a matching ability to display crisp text at 80x25) ship on consumer-grade PCs. Bottom falls out of the VDT market.

1993
Linux gets TCP/IP capability, moves from hobbyist’s toy to serious OS. America OnLine offers USENET access to its uses; "September That Never Ended" begins.

1994
Mass-market Internet takes off in the U.S. USB promulgated.

1995-1996
Peak years of UUCP/USENET and the BBS culture, then collapse under pressure from mass-market Internet.

1997
I first give the "Cathedral and Bazaar" talk.

1999
Peak year of the dot-com bubble. End of workstation era: Market for Suns and other proprietary Unix workstations collapses under pressure from Linux running on PCs.

2005
Major manufacturers cease production of cathode-ray tubes in favor of flat-panel displays. Flat-panels have been ubiquitous on new hardware since about 2003. There is a brief window until about 2007 during which high-end CRTs no longer in production still exceed the resolution of flat-panel displays and are still sought after. Also in 2005, AOL drops USENET support and Endless September ends.

2007-2008
64-bit transition in mass market PCs; the 32-bit era ends. Single-processor speeds plateau at 4±0.25GHz. iPhone and Android (both with Unix-based OSes) first ship.

quote:

>“The road of life is rocky and you may stumble too; so while you point your finger, someone else is judging you.”

Yes, but that fails to concern me. Judgment is necessary.

For evil to triumph it suffices that good men do nothing. For evil ideas like totalitarian collectivism to triumph, it suffices for nobody to point out that left politics is morally imbecilic and leads to mass death whenever it is seriously applied.

When I eat an animal, it is not a sophont that suffers. (This is why I’m careful about possible borderline cases like dolphins, elephants, and cephalopods.) Jeff’s politics, on the other hand, are a royal road to the worst evils in human history, sophont suffering and death on a scale that would have been unimaginable before Marxism reached its full, hideous, and inevitable flowering.

Don’t try to tell me these things are equivalent.

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

ntpsec shouldn't exist. its main "feature" is deleting code from the mainstream ntp project.

there already exist alternative implementations of ntp. the only reason to go back to ntpd in the first place is to use unusual features the ntpsec guys are removing

it is a typical esr project: software no one wanted, poorly maintained

Gazpacho posted:

"the heroic age of micros" aka the period when you could pass yourself off as a big shot without much to show for it. much like eric raymond

Gazpacho posted:

"the heroic age of micros" aka the period when you could pass yourself off as a big shot without much to show for it. much like eric raymond

fritz posted:

in no surprise about esr's analysis, he has it ending in 1981, aka one year before the commodore 64 came out

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

he's more or less right about this

the "heroic" part is that back than any idiot could slap together parts in a garage to make some kind of halfassed microcomputer. they weren't really compatible with anything. there were no meaningful standards beyond the S-100 bus design

the commodore 64 and the apple II and the ibm pc swept the market and killed off all those dumb garage tinkerers

eschaton posted:

the S-100 bus and CP/M were the IBM PC compatible of their day, but they were extremely fiddly to get working right and had serious interoperability problems that led to serious market fragmentation; you often had to buy the OS and other software from your hardware vendor, even though it was "standard," because everyone used slightly different disk formats and so on, and even then getting all the pieces-parts to work together was often a nightmare that made DOS-era compatibility dances look sane

esr, to python-dev mailing list posted:

Some of the older Pythonistas will remember my previous time on this
list, and possibly that I faded away quietly under time pressure from
other projects and the whole being-famous nonsense.

I'm back, for now primarily to listen. I have some questions about the
future direction of Python which I'll bring up when I have time for
the vigorous discussion that will certainly ensue.
--
>>esr>>