Subject: Some more ideas

From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 7 May 2000 23:40:44 +0300

<GEEKSPEAK>
Here are some more ideas of things It would be nice to discuss :)
Of course, if you accept me into your group... I welcome any "test"! :)

1. Beyond Unix:
   <SACRILEGIOUS>
   Unix is getting old. I've been using Unix since 1984 - first on AT&T
   7th edition Unix (and later 8th, 9th and 10th addition), then AT&T System V
   release 3, release 4, Ultix, SunOS, Solaris, Digital Unix (and its various
   later names), AIX, Sgi, Linux, Xenix (would you believe it - a Unix for 286
   by Microsoft!), BSDI, and probably used some more Unix versions I don't
   remeber.
   But although Unix has increadably advanced since (7th edition Unix did
   not have job control, tty line disciplines, sockets, and a whole lot of
   stuff. Can anybody say "UUCP"?), maybe there are some merits in starting
   afresh with new ideas?
   I'd love to hear about AT&T's plan 9, and other O/S's like BeOS, PalmOS,
   Mac and perhaps even Windows2000 (!) and what fresh ideas (and not lousy
   imitations of Unix) they have to offer in operating system theory and
   practice.
   </SACRILEGIOUS>

2. Computing - the good'ol'days:
   Anybody remembers how to program in APL? Have some anecdotes about how
   in Fortran 77 one spelling mistake can bring down a ballistic missile?
   Have you ever programmed on a machine with 6-bit bytes, used EBCDIC
   or a paper-tape-punch? Do you remember cpio's command line options? Ever
   try to use the radio interference of an KHz-speed old CPU to generate music
   on an AM radio? 
   If the answer is yes to any one of those, I'd love to hear about it :)
   Seriously, there are some good lessons to be learned even from ancient
   stuff :)

3. Philosophy:
   * Will computers increase the social inequality and injustice on this planet,
     or lower it? Will control over machines in the Internet develop into
     some sort of class system, capitalism for the new millennium? Will nations
     faced with oppression from their leaders and from multinational
     conglomerates, and faced with starvation, AIDS and malaria, gain anything
     from the Internet, or is the gap between "us" and "them" already too
     large? Will the recent software freedom movement have any effect on the
     freedom of billions of oppressed people on the planet, and are we fighting
     for the wrong cause?
   * Is the Internet the ultimate meme-spreading mechanism, and is knowledge
     and communication becoming an end ("tachlit"), rather than a means to that
     end? (see, for examples, Susan Blackmore's excellent "The Meme Machine").
     If knowledge is becoming it's own "tachlit", will humans be expendable
     as knowledge-carriers in 200 years?
   * Was "The Matrix" true: will eventually "killing" you online kill you in
     reality? I.e., will a cracker wrecking your machine be able to cause to
     to starve without being able to order food via the net?
   * Will the Internet lower the world's use of fossil energy and other
     finite resources (because of less travel and commute, less paper, books,
     and other tangible products, less procreation, etc.)? Silicon,
     fortunately, is one of the most abundant resources on earth :)

4. Programming:
   Most of fights I hear whether Perl, Python, Tcl, Java, C, C++, or whatever
   is better is a matter of "religion", and not of actually important
   differences. Are there new ideas in programming, and I mean *REALLY NEW*
   ideas in programming, waiting to be discovered? After 4GL, OOP and RAD,
   what will be the next breakthrough?

5. Towards an A1 [as per NSA Orange Book] operating system
   Will there ever be a provably-secure operating system, which can provably
   defy all crack attempts? What does authentication mean - is there really
   a way to make sure the user is who he/she claims to be, and nor a cracker
   somehow stealing their identity (from private key to finger prints) or
   doing some man-in-the-middle attack? Will we ever get rid of spam? :)

I think that's enough... for now :)

</GEEKSPEAK>

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |         Sunday, May 7 2000, 3 Iyyar 5760
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |I don't live on the edge, but sometimes
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |I go there to visit.

---

From: Gaal Yahas <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 8 May 2000 00:15:57 +0300

>    imitations of Unix) they have to offer in operating system theory and

Windows has a feature called "I/O completion ports" that allegedly
does what a tight select() loop does on multi-client UNIX servers,
but more efficiently. I don't think Microsoft invented this, nor
that they were first to implement it, but apparently they do have
a good implementation.

If anyone knows this well, I'd love to hear, and I suspect I won't
be the only one.

> Ever try to use the radio interference of an KHz-speed old CPU to
> generate music on an AM radio?

Well no, but I could whistle a modem to CONNECT 2400... :-)

>    * Is the Internet the ultimate meme-spreading mechanism, and is
>      knowledge and communication becoming an end ("tachlit"), rather
>      than a means to that end? (see, for examples, Susan Blackmore's
>      excellent "The Meme Machine").  If knowledge is becoming it's own
>      "tachlit", will humans be expendable as knowledge-carriers in 200
>      years?

What evidence does Blackmore bring to support this thesis? It sounds
like fantasy to me, so far. (I haven't read her.)

>    * Was "The Matrix" true: will eventually "killing" you online kill
>      you in reality? I.e., will a cracker wrecking your machine be
>      able to cause to to starve without being able to order food via
>      the net?

Pet peeve: "The Martix" is based on philosophical ideas at least as
old as Descartes' _Meditations_ (published 1641). Situated thus, it
makes sense to learn a bit about the discourse of that time (hey!
*you* put this under the Philosophy section :-) before we run off
talking about ours.

>    * Will the Internet lower the world's use of fossil energy and
>      other finite resources (because of less travel and commute,
>      less paper, books, and other tangible products, less
>      procreation, etc.)? Silicon, fortunately, is one of the most
>      abundant resources on earth :)

Less procreation? Don't tell that to the folks at ICQ: they seem
mighty proud of their "ICQ Marriages" page! <g>

Anyway: we have to take into account the amount of damage done by
making the Internet possible, that is communication infrastructure,
power plants, and so on.

> 4. Programming:
>    Most of fights I hear whether Perl, Python, Tcl, Java, C, C++,
>    or whatever is better is a matter of "religion", and not of
>    actually important differences. Are there new ideas in
>    programming, and I mean *REALLY NEW* ideas in programming,
>    waiting to be discovered? After 4GL, OOP and RAD, what will be
>    the next breakthrough?

I'm not anywhere near grokking /any/ programming language in fullness,
but I can tell you this: I know enough of the market to tell that when
someone comes up with the new idea, it'll be well hyped-up :-)

>    doing some man-in-the-middle attack? Will we ever get rid of spam? :)

I refer you to Bruce Schneier's excellent essays on (close) subjects:

Why Cryptography is Harder Than It Looks
    http://www.counterpane.com/whycrypto.html 

Cryptography, Security and the Future [looks like the CACM essay on
which the above is based]
    http://www.counterpane.com/csf.html

More good stuff at:
    http://www.counterpane.com/publish.html

"Security is a process, not a product" -- Bruce Schneier
-- 
believing is seeing
[email-masked]
http://www.forum2.org/gaal/

---

From: Omer Zak <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 8 May 2000 00:30:26 +0300 (IDT)

> On Sun, May 07, 2000 at 11:40:44PM +0300, Nadav Har'El wrote:
[... snipped ...]

> someone comes up with the new idea, it'll be well hyped-up :-)

The New Idea, which didn't reach the hype stage yet is the concept of
patterns (as in "Design Patterns" by Gamma, Helm, Johnson and Vlissides).
There is also interesting stuff in http://www.laputan.org/.

* Any bets when the big wave of Pattern-based Software Development related 
  startups (a pattern by itself) will arrive at Wall Street?
* Will Patterns be patented (horrible idea)?
* How will vendors build their shitty tools for Pattern-based Software
  Development and what productivity multiplication factor will be claimed
  by them (to lure Pointy-Haired Bosses into spending money on those
  tools)?
* Will Pattern-based Software Development tools try to address both code
  development and testing, unlike present tools, which address only
  software development?

[obBlatantSelfPromotion:
 If you want to start something in this area and need an extra brain for
 brainstorming, in exchange for a block of shares, contact me.  :-)]

                                             --- Omer
   "MS-Word keeps thinking it knows what I'm gonna do next and tries to
   help me.  I've lived with my wife for 27 years and SHE can't do that.
   What makes MS-Word think it can?"             Bill Mullins
WARNING:
By sending me unsolicited commercial/political/religious E-mail message/s
(known also as "spam"), you irrevocably agree to pay me US$500.- (plus any
legal expenses incurred by my trying to collect the amount due) per
unsolicited commercial/political/religious E-mail message - for the service
of receiving it.

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 8 May 2000 06:54:39 +0300

> Of course, if you accept me into your group... I welcome any "test"! :)

BTW. until we have an official test we can use omer's riddles

>    <SACRILEGIOUS>

its not a sacrilege - like all software, unix sux.
Anyone knows OpenGenera?

>    Seriously, there are some good lessons to be learned even from ancient

I can tell many good old days stories - if the hour is late enough, and the
drinks were good and the crowed is willing to listen.
Is writing music for an HP scanner also good?

3. thats not philosophy - its sociology.

>    what will be the next breakthrough?

Blatantly untrue.
C is assembly for PDP7 ported to all other platforms.
Java is a high level language with GC and some abstraction.
Python is almost a language - only short of real GC and strong typing
Perl is a strong scripting language - but it makes life to hard on you when you
just need that new datastructure, languages shouldn't make new ds difficult as
most of us use them all the time. 
JavaScript has a strange object model called "prototyping" to replace
the object/instance model.

all these things make a real diffrence in the way one thinks - they are not
just syntax games.

New ideas? seems like the industry is going toward more and more abstraction,
one day scheme will be reinvented. 

--
Chen Shapira	Web Developer and Linux Activist
The algorithm for finding the longest path in a graph is NP-complete.
For you systems people, that means it's *real slow*.

---

From: Moshe Zadka <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 8 May 2000 07:51:23 +0300 (IDT)

> someone comes up with the new idea, it'll be well hyped-up :-)

There are no new ideas. Scheme had *all* the ideas years ago (yes,
including OOP). The only thing it didn't have is "visual programming", and
I don't think anybody thinks it's a good idea.

--
Moshe Zadka <[email-masked]>
http://www.oreilly.com/news/prescod_0300.html
http://www.linux.org.il -- we put the penguin in .com

---

From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 8 May 2000 10:26:15 +0300

> BTW. until we have an official test we can use omer's riddles

Ok. Bring them on!

> its not a sacrilege - like all software, unix sux.

Well, other messages talked about "official" Linux distribution, "official"
language, and even official food (I nominate Mexican food and Corona beer,
by the way) - so I was afraid that even asking about other OS's would get
me stoned (in the sense that people throw stones at me).

What ever happened to Microsoft's Xenix anyway? :)

> Is writing music for an HP scanner also good?

Hmmm.. Sounds good enough!
Do you want to organize an orchestra?

> 3. thats not philosophy - its sociology.

I beg to differ. I haven't actually studied either, so I may be wrong,
but sociology is about studying exisiting societies, not contemplating
new ones, and not about contemplating about what makes a "just" or "perfect"
society, what is "a mind" and what happens when you connect a billion of
them with the Internet, and so on.

> C is assembly for PDP7 ported to all other platforms.

*cough*
"ported" is too weak a word. C (which is just an example for a whole family
of languages) allowed you to write a single program which would work on a whole
range of machines - from Commodore 64 (that's right! I had a C compiler for it!)
through PCs, supercomputers, to the palm pilot. The VAX assembly programs I'd
once written (VAX had an interesting instruction set...) are now worthless,
yet I'm still using C programs I wrote 12 years ago.

> Java is a high level language with GC and some abstraction.

I've seen Pascal interpreters with bytecodes 15 years ago. Java is a good
language, but doesn't add much new ideas to table.

> Python is almost a language - only short of real GC and strong typing

"almost a language"? Can I hear someone shouting in anger, screaming "that's
not true, that's not true"? :)

The horror, the horror...

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |         Monday, May 8 2000, 3 Iyyar 5760
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |A conclusion is simply the place where
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |you got tired of thinking.

---

From: Ury Segal <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 08 May 2000 10:33:28 +0300

> not true, that's not true"? :)

Let me describe you a full language - a counter language:

1) Add 1 to memory location X
2) check if content of memory location X equals K , and if it is , skip the next instruction
3) Stop

This is a launguage that can do anything.

Ofcourse, it can be easier to progeam with a JMP instruction, but that not
neccery.

> The horror, the horror...

ObQuestion:

I bet 10$ that within a month we will se a posting here that sais "unsubscribe" and then a message
that will say "please unsubscribe me; how can I unsubscribe?"

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 8 May 2000 10:40:57 +0300

> This is a launguage that can do anything.

Dinner in a resturant of choice for the first person who writes "99 bottles of
beer" with this.

> that will say "please unsubscribe me; how can I unsubscribe?"

we better find him before he subscribes and stop him :-)

---

From: Moshe Zadka <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 8 May 2000 11:02:55 +0300 (IDT)

> not true, that's not true"? :)

I won't fall to language wars, but if anyone wants a "deep" Python lecture
(including Python bytecode, and how to use meta-classes to do really weird
things) I'd be happy to give one., Of course, I assume people here will
understand that a prerequisite is to take the two hours and go through the
Python tutorial, so I won't have to go over basic details.

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 8 May 2000 11:06:07 +0300

> Python tutorial, so I won't have to go over basic details.

great! next week, your house, meeting at midnight, tibetian tea and deep python
hacks till morning?

---

From: Moshe Zadka <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 8 May 2000 11:09:01 +0300 (IDT)

> great! next week, your house, meeting at midnight, tibetian tea and deep python

Thursday?

---

From: Ury Segal <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 08 May 2000 11:36:18 +0300

> Dinner in a resturant of choice for the first person who writes "99 bottles of

It is very easy to write a program that will generate that program.
It is even easy with THIS language !

> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> You have a voice mail message waiting for you at iHello.com:
> http://click.egroups.com/1/3555/9/_/_/_/957771692/
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
> [email-masked]

---

From: "Asaf Bartov" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 08 May 2000 19:33:28 -0000

> Python tutorial, so I won't have to go over basic details.

I'd be very interested to hear your take on Python.  What sort of
venue and setting do you (all) suggest for this sort of thing?

   Ijon

---

From: Moshe Zadka <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 8 May 2000 22:35:34 +0300 (IDT)

On Mon, 8 May 2000, Asaf Bartov wrote:

> I'd be very interested to hear your take on Python.

I'm glad.

> What sort of

Hmmmm....I'm sure we could find somewhere to meet. If anyone want to set
it up, I'll be glad. I think I'll be busy enough just preparing the
lecture...