Geek Bumper Stickers [Shameless Vanity]

1395555531 (UTC) | Self->This

[MCH]

Back in the late 80’s when Artificial Intelligence (AI) was all the new rage in CS, Lisp was one of the AI languages of choice. I had to use it to write class projects for a couple of AI related graduate classes in natural language processing & robotics. I was seeing endless parentheses in my sleep.

[Peet]

BSD is the One True Code

Berkeley gave us BSD and LSD
This is not a coincidence

[Peet]

Mycroft Holmes wrote:

Seriously! I used to work for this bunch of fsck-wits who decided to let students pick their own usernames. With no sanity-check.

The DBA (a species maybe a step above suck-fish) spent a few days trying out to figure out why username "null" couldn't be deleted.

Peet (former BOFH, NOS admin, NOS/VE admin, and UN*X admin)

[Mycroft Holmes]

More explanation of CAR and CDR than you want, courtesy Wikipedia on LISP:

Chow for paragraph eater.

Lisp was first implemented by Steve Russell on an IBM 704 computer. Russell had read McCarthy's paper, and realized (to McCarthy's surprise) that the Lisp eval function could be implemented in machine code.[5] The result was a working Lisp interpreter which could be used to run Lisp programs, or more properly, 'evaluate Lisp expressions.'

Two assembly language macros for the IBM 704 became the primitive operations for decomposing lists: car (Contents of the Address part of Register number) and cdr (Contents of the Decrement part of Register number).[6] From the context, it is clear that the term "Register" is used here to mean "Memory Register", nowadays called "Memory Location". Lisp dialects still use car and cdr (/ˈkɑr/ and /ˈkʊdər/) for the operations that return the first item in a list and the rest of the list respectively... End Wikipedia

First I have seen of the origin of those terms.

Fight the Free Sh☭t Nation

[Allen In Texas Hill Country]

Thanks. Just don’t recall Lisp. I used SOAP on the IBM 650. Used my hands to plug 407 boards, sorter and punch/copier. Those were the days. Still have a handful of punch cards within reach.

Actually I think I do recall Lisp but never came in contact in my 44 years of progamming.

[Mycroft Holmes]

LISP was big in the AI community when true AI was “only 20 years away”. It’s all much harder than we thought.

[zeugma]

There's no place like ::1

0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1

... Lazy :)

Hell yeah. I'll cop to that. Any good systems administrator is lazy.

Also paranoid. :-)

Depending upon what your default font is, the following might or might not look a lot like what you entered, but is somewhat broken.

O:O:O:O:O:O:O:1

 

[zeugma]

rm -rf / home/zeugma/trash/*

The above is double plus ungood.

[zeugma]

VNS TECHNOLOGY WATCH:                           [Mike Taylor, VNS Correspondent]
=====================                           [Littleton, MA, USA            ]

COMPUTERWORLD 1 April

                     CREATORS ADMIT Unix, C HOAX

    In an announcement that has stunned the computer industry, Ken Thompson,
    Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan admitted that the Unix operating
    system and C programming language created by them is an elaborate April
    Fools prank kept alive for over 20 years.  Speaking at the recent
    UnixWorld Software Development Forum, Thompson revealed the following:

    "In 1969, AT&&T had just terminated their work with the 
    GE/Honeywell/AT&&T Multics project. Brian and I had just started 
    working with an early release of Pascal from Professor Nichlaus Wirth's ETH 
    labs in Switzerland and we were impressed with its elegant simplicity and
    power. Dennis had just finished reading 'Bored of the Rings', a
    hilarious National Lampoon parody of the great Tolkien 'Lord of the
    Rings' trilogy. As a lark, we decided to do parodies of the Multics
    environment and Pascal. Dennis and I were responsible for the operating
    environment. We looked at Multics and designed the new system to be as
    complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual users' frustration
    levels, calling it Unix as a parody of Multics, as well as other more
    risque allusions. Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped
    version of Pascal, called 'A'. When we found others were actually
    trying to create real programs with A, we quickly added additional
    cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL and finally C. We stopped
    when we got a clean compile on the following syntax:

    for(;P("\n"),R--;P("|"))for(e=C;e--;P("_"+(*u++/8)%2))P("| "+(*u/4)%2);

    To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that
    allowed such a statement was beyond our comprehension!  We actually
    thought of selling this to the Soviets to set their computer science
    progress back 20 or more years. Imagine our surprise when AT&&T and
    other US corporations actually began trying to use Unix and C!  It has
    taken them 20 years to develop enough expertise to generate even
    marginally useful applications using this 1960's technological parody,
    but we are impressed with the tenacity (if not common sense) of the
    general Unix and C programmer.  In any event, Brian, Dennis and I have
    been working exclusively in Pascal on the Apple Macintosh for the past
    few years and feel really guilty about the chaos, confusion and truly
    bad programming that have resulted from our silly prank so long ago."

    Major Unix and C vendors and customers, including AT&&T, Microsoft,
    Hewlett-Packard, GTE, NCR, and DEC have refused comment at this time. 
    Borland International, a leading vendor of Pascal and C tools,
    including the popular Turbo Pascal, Turbo C and Turbo C++, stated they
    had suspected this for a number of years and would continue to enhance
    their Pascal products and halt further efforts to develop C.  An IBM
    spokesman broke into uncontrolled laughter and had to postpone a
    hastily convened news conference concerning the fate of the RS-6000,
    merely stating 'VM will be available Real Soon Now'.  In a cryptic
    statement, Professor Wirth of the ETH institute and father of the
    Pascal, Modula 2 and Oberon structured languages, merely stated that P.
    T. Barnum was correct.

    In a related late-breaking story, usually reliable sources are stating
    that a similar confession may be forthcoming from William Gates
    concerning the MS-DOS and Windows operating environments.  And IBM
    spokesman have begun denying that the Virtual Machine (VM) product is
    an internal prank gone awry.
    {COMPUTERWORLD 1 April}
    {contributed by Bernard L. Hayes}

[re_nortex]

rm -rf / home/zeugma/trash/*

There's a whole section devoted to such errors due to inadvertent whitespace creeping into commands in The Unix Haters Handbook. One that's caught me far too often than I care to admit is hitting a space before the dot:

rm * .~

The handbook states that such botches are "rites of passage" in the Unix world. In a sense that's true because I've become an absolute fanatic about backups since my last real disaster of that sort in 1993. Sure the GUIs help protect against such things, but I'm just quicker when working at the shell.

---

Shadow Ace and rdb3: I really should've pinged both of you at the outset of this thread. So this makes up for lost time. :)

[re_nortex]

In my prior post about the Unix Haters Handbook, be sure to read the Anti-Foreword composed by the late Dennis Ritchie (well known to many as dmr), who died on 2011-10-12. With no disrespect intended at all for Steve Jobs, I submit the following graphic as a way of remembering the contributions of dmr:

I'll add that I've had the pleasure of communicating on occasion via e-mail with Dennis. Without fail, he always responded, even to my oft-stupid questions and was far more courteous to me than I deserved with my bothersome messages.

[zeugma]

The handbook states that such botches are "rites of passage" in the Unix world.

It is. One of the questions I ask in job interviews is for the most spectacular example of when they completely trashed a system. More than anything else, it's a character question. Anyone who's been a unix admin for long enough will have at least one really good one. If they can't come up with anything, I question how hands-on they actually are.

[ShadowAce]

[ShadowAce]

[ShadowAce]

I can honestly say I've never trashed a system. I read enough horror stories about it that whenever I type in a del or rm command I'll sit back at look at it two to three times very carefully before I hit Enter.

I've come close, but thanks to my lack of hurry with these commands, I've caught myself.

[Mycroft Holmes]

                           T H E   W O R D
                           ===============

    In the beginning was the Plan, and the Specification;
    And the Plan was without form, and the Specification was void;
    And darkness was upon the faces of the Programmers;
    And they spake unto the Project Supervisor, saying:

              "It is a crock of shit, and It stinketh."

    And the Project Supervisor went to the Project Manager;
    And he spake unto him, saying:

  "It is a crock of excrement, and none may abide the odor thereof."

    And the Project Manager went to the Vice President;
    And he spake unto him, saying:

  "It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong, such that
                      none may abide before it."

    And the Vice President went to the Senior Vice President;
    And he spake unto him, saying:

 "It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide by Its strength."

    And the Senior Vice President went to the Executive Vice President;
    And he spake unto him, saying:

  "It contains that which aids plant growth, and It is very strong."

    And the Executive Vice President went to the President;
    And he spake unto him, saying:

           "It promoteth growth, and It is very powerful."

    And the President went to the Board of Directors;
    And he spake unto them, saying:

 "This powerful new product will promote the growth of the company."

    And the Board of Directors looked upon the Product, and saw that
    It was Good.

[ShadowAce]

Know Your SysAdmin!!

[Mycroft Holmes]

--SITUATION: Balky printer daemons. --

TECHNICAL THUG: Rewrites lpd in FORTH.

I worked with this guy. It did solve the problem.

[expat_panama]

or--
 

[KosmicKitty]

Over 20 years since I wrote a program in LISP. But it’s all coming back to me now.