unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep.
T E C H N O L O G I C
…
T E C H N O L O G I C
It’s almost like these commands were all made by nerd teenage boys.
One day I was at a restaurant explaining process control to one of my disciples. I was mentioning how we have to kill the children (child processes) if they become unresponsive. Or we can even set an alarm for the children to kill themselves. That the parent need to wait (wait3) and acknowledge that the child has died or else it will become a zombie.
The look of horror the woman sitting across had was unforgettable. I tried to explain it was a computer software thing but it was too late, she fled terrified, probably to call the police or something. I didn't really want to stick around too long to find out.
Not sure if it was the origin of the company name, but the domain was demon.co.uk not daemon. E.g. I had pretence.demon.co.uk with them for a few years.
I wasn’t familiar with both of these expressions but I looked it up and “a la mode” is an American culinary expression, meaning “served with ice cream”. And “au jus” is also an American culinary expression, meaning “gravy” or “broth”. Now, even though they are both derived from a French expression that is a prepositional phrase with à (meaning with), it does not matter any more when they were borrowed to English.
“A la mode” became a new adverbial expression meaning just that: “served with ice cream”. You can have pie a la mode = pie served with ice cream, but obviously not *pie with a la mode = pie with served with ice cream.
And “au jus” became a noun expression meaning “broth” or “gravy”. And you must say sandwich with au jus = sandwich with gravy and can’t say *sandwich au jus = sandwich gravy.
What is extremely interesting here is that it bothers the prescriptivist who wants language to be a certain way he feels it is supposed to be, also the author on that webpage.
Also, I think I will risk opening my eyes now.
Amazing.
Eleven-year-old me was easy to entertain. Especially if rockets, robots, or science was involved.
- [2023] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35283067 (24 comments)
- [2022] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31069163 (127 comments)
- [2018] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16299583 (46 comments)
- [2011] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2691752 (45 comments)
> Eventually, though, the theory of quantum mechanics showed why it wouldn't work.
I was familiar with the information theory arguments (the same presented in Wikipedia[1]). Is that why they mean here by "quantum mechanics" or is there another counterargument to Maxwell's daemon?
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_demon#Criticism_an...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon#Criticism_...
http://www.av8n.com/physics/thermo/entropy-more.html#sec-pha...
With 'entropy' being an obsolete term for (lack of) information, and
> “classical thermodynamics” is a contradiction in terms.
That's assuming you aren't trying to claw back more energy than you lose, I'm pretty sure that's not possible to reliably do without crazy hypothetical physics.
"Demons have the ability to cause people to see things that do not exist as if they did exist. -- Lactantius"
At the time, I thought "when an I ever going to use this stuff in real life?" Then I got into computers.
Tried to find the post again, but no dice :(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daimon vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon
I've never found any significance to associate the unix term with Demons and consider it a mis-association.
The letter æ was used in Old English to represent the vowel that's pronounced in Modern English ash, fan, happy, and last: /æ/. Mostly we now spell that vowel with the letter a, because of the Great Vowel Shift.
When æ appears in writing Modern English, it's meant to be a typographic variant of ae, and is pronounced the same as that sequence of vowel letters would be. So Encyclopaedia or Encyclopædia, no difference.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70927/how-is-%C3...Highly recommend the protracted arguments in the comments, that's a wonderfully pedantic StackExchange. Big shoutout to someone in 2012 defining "NLP" as an unusual word -- how the world has changed! It's only a matter of time before they open an AP/IB course in NLP...
Corbato confidently gives the reason but A) doesn't claim to have coined the term, and may not know what the coiner's thinking was; B) at the time may have had a different understanding than some other members of the group - it's not the sort of thing that people have a meeting about; and C) is writing about something that happened decades ago.
Corbato then cites Take Our Word's prior description - people who weren't present when the word was coined, and who openly say they have no idea: "This is so reminiscent of Maxwell's daemon watching his molecules that we can only assume that whoever dubbed these "system processes" had Maxwell's daemon in mind. Unfortunately, we have found no hard evidence to support this."
Then Take Our Word cites Corbato, creating a loop. The only evidence in that loop is Corbato's flawed (being human), prompted (by reading Take Our Word) memory of possibly limited knowledge from decades ago.
"Professor Jerome H. Saltzer, who also worked on Project MAC, confirms the Maxwell's demon explanation. He is currently working on pinpointing the origin of the erroneous acronym etymology for daemon in this sense."
"Boy I love trapping demons in microscopic silicon megastructures to do my bidding, I sure hope nothing goes wrong"
It really is absolutely wild that it all works when you go to the absolute fundamentals and start working forward.
to divide power, compute.
Alternatively, here's a readable mirror: https://ei.cs.vt.edu/%7Ehistory/Daemon.html
And another: https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/7w7914/the_origin_of...
What do you mean? I just tried it and it was fine.