Posts by JohnMashey@mstdn.social
(DIR) Post #AVb4CVPmXeMuzg6hZA by JohnMashey@mstdn.social
2023-05-13T01:28:53Z
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@lauren CNN proved untrustworthy in 2017, promoted 4 claims vs @Alfranken: 3 provable Lies, other Dubious.With no due diligence, Jake Tapper gave 30minutes for fabrications by #1 Leeann Tweeden (on rightwing radio station, longtime guest of Hannity), found false 1st day on Twitter, later proved in great depth by @janemayernyer: story&interview linked in S3.https://twitter.com/JohnMashey/status/1264701603149275136 S1-13CNN broke #2 (very dubious) & #5 (outright Lie) & gave TV interview to #8 day after article (another Lie).
(DIR) Post #AWrAsX9SnWvIbC888G by JohnMashey@mstdn.social
2023-06-19T17:45:50Z
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@kathhayhoe @andrewdessler Agreed, and recall Eugenie Scott, longtime defender of evolutionary biology vs creationism at NCSE, and leader of effort to add defense of climate science (as NCSE started getting calls from high school teachers) coined phrase “Gish Gallop” (in 1994) as one of the reasons debate format Really Bad Idea:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
(DIR) Post #AX5v6wuFdHELTat0r2 by JohnMashey@mstdn.social
2023-06-08T03:50:07Z
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@SwiftOnSecurity Some history:PATH search started via PWB/UNIX shell in 1975, was just $p (we only had single-character variables, pathanmes separated by colons).A few years later, for UNIX V7, Dennis Ritchie, Steve Bourne and I generalized PWB design into environment variables, and p became PATH. Of course, semantics somewhat different than Windows, since UNIX didn't have registry and environment variables were inherited by child processes as hidden arguments.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PWB_shell
(DIR) Post #AX5v6ymsdeWTJJS9dw by JohnMashey@mstdn.social
2023-06-08T19:58:21Z
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@SwiftOnSecurity When Steve, Dennis and I were talking about environment variables, we considered having a kernel-internal database per process tree ... but UNIX philosophy=>only put data in kernel that had to be there, especially given awkward 64KB kernel data space limit at any one time.If env vars were just in a shared file=>slow, & also worry about dangerof misusing env vars for interprocess communcations, with race conditions.Anyway, dennis suggested the mechanism that still is there.
(DIR) Post #AXHUgAZQSJB57nEarQ by JohnMashey@mstdn.social
2023-07-02T05:01:41Z
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@katestarbird Minor nit:suggest "rely on private platforms" => ""rely on unregulated private platforms".After all, for many decades, Bell System telephony was a heavily-regulated private platform monopoly ... with stringent rules about reliability and service, and a shared goal of Universal Service, even as that meant urban/suburban subsidizing rural.
(DIR) Post #AXVINGjaRDV6nOzEYK by JohnMashey@mstdn.social
2023-07-09T02:23:22Z
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@brewsterkahle Eeek, I hadn't heard he was(recently) deceased. I was lucky to meet him in 2012.He was one of the organizers for a terrific workshop:https://www.climateaccountability.org/pdf/Climate%20Accountability%20Rpt%20Oct12.pdfLew and his wife Connie kindly hosted conference dinner JUne 14 at their house in La Jolla.Even at age ~85, he was still very sharp & energetic. Sad to hear he's gone, but he led a really fruitful life.
(DIR) Post #AZsejkxpTaXFO9nDIe by JohnMashey@mstdn.social
2023-09-18T04:36:16Z
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@clive @mlanger Can I assume the book cites the classic in this turf, Don Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking?https://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking-Updated/dp/193236496X
(DIR) Post #AZsj2uDngFktQ3eLDM by JohnMashey@mstdn.social
2023-09-18T05:24:13Z
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@clive @mlanger Good! Don's been at this a long time.
(DIR) Post #AbTtIYqe41YaDO8wpU by JohnMashey@mstdn.social
2023-11-04T19:55:28Z
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@brewsterkahle (as at X):@brewster_kahle Nice talking to you yesterday at wondrous event honoring @pamelasamuelson!I was reminded that "Hardware, Wetware, Software" talk that I'd first started using in 1993, recorded via UVC, later donated to @computerhistory was now up on YouTube. "Big Data" slide was here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcDC5CoSQbc&t=2373s
(DIR) Post #AbU32fTeeFGvgQRxYG by JohnMashey@mstdn.social
2023-11-05T03:24:50Z
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@brewsterkahle Thanks! Good to know the history.Steve Lohr is still on X, I’ll alert him.https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/01/the-origins-of-big-data-an-etymological-detective-story
(DIR) Post #AsYC8ulvLiYzxOazz6 by JohnMashey@mstdn.social
2025-03-29T15:12:23Z
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@stux fir more amusement, British satirical puppets cover Billionaires’ Space Race (to Mars of course):https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MQHC85whh2A
(DIR) Post #AtGvMIu8qBj2QTxXNo by JohnMashey@mstdn.social
2023-04-20T20:25:41Z
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@jwildeboer Recall that BWK coined name Unix (and not as AT&T said, to be one where Multics was many, but as Multics without b*lls), so joking was early.Another joke: BWK was an associate editor for Prentice-Hall and once bugged me to write a book, saying you don't make money, but people think you know something. I suspect "the C Programming Language" has done $OK.Finally, here's BWK's oral history I got for #computerhistorymuseum https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102740170
(DIR) Post #AtGvMQaaGmpoG8s20e by JohnMashey@mstdn.social
2023-04-20T20:28:43Z
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@jwildeboer And as another Kernighan story, related to AWK, try short thread about a real telco application built with awk scripts, whos printout surprised Brian:https://mstdn.social/@JohnMashey/110103301307131222
(DIR) Post #AtGwBNZ3H7dDeBRuhU by JohnMashey@mstdn.social
2023-03-28T22:37:29Z
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@amoroso1 of 4/ Cable Repair Adminstrative System(CRAS) was Bell Labs software built late 1970s for telcos:https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/j.1538-7305.1982.tb04342.x (sorry paywall), From that paper:Lines of code16K PL/I (part on IBM mainframe, rest on UNIX)10K C15K Shell (mostly awk, for data transforms & reports) 6K Misc33K documentationThis was done to move fast, adapt to real needs in the field(1st Field Trial Boston, 2nd in Southwest Bell, who told us on 1st meeting they did things different than Yankees.)
(DIR) Post #AtGwBOEslb5ljv1Jtw by JohnMashey@mstdn.social
2023-03-28T22:41:58Z
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@amoroso 2 of 4/After CRAS was running in telco, I printed the shell scripts/awk code, left a copy on Brian's desk, at that time the largest collection of awk in production use. He was surprised, said "We built awk for little programs!" I Said: "It works, it was fast to write, easy to change." And later, I had someone write C functiosnthat made it easy to recode performance-sensitive cases in C.A bit later, A, W & K invited me over to give input on features for a revised implementation.
(DIR) Post #AtGwBVucEpdNXNbFQG by JohnMashey@mstdn.social
2023-03-28T22:49:35Z
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@amoroso 3 of 4 Al Aho (of course a brilliant computer scientist) asked how could Bell Labs run projects with 100s of software people, because A, W, K were 3 guys in nearby offices that had known each other for years, and a 3-person software project was hardest thing he'd ever done!I laughed, as BTL had many projects with dozens of folks, admittedly, only a few were in the 200-300 range.Here is accompanying paper on the CRAS documentation system we built:https://linguistics.berkeley.edu/glushko/glushko_files/bstj-glushkobianchi.pdf
(DIR) Post #AtGwBdhnGO8Bhvf7Y0 by JohnMashey@mstdn.social
2023-03-28T22:54:16Z
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@amoroso 4 of 4/ After we'd done this software/documentation development endironment system for CRAS, other projects in our lab wanted it, so we got funding to generalize it, as SOLID - Systems for On-Line Information Development. After they did, it started getting picked up in projects beyond our lab.. By 1982 it was used in a dozen, but I think it eventually spread to 30-40 projects around BTL.https://linguistics.berkeley.edu/glushko/glushko_files/SOLID.pdf
(DIR) Post #Aw7k71AFDToDrg5Lpw by JohnMashey@mstdn.social
2025-07-14T02:53:31Z
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@maxleibman Sadly, I don’t have any late-1960s mainframes or punchcards from then, but our pantry has an early 1990s SGI Espressigo, a Gaggia espresso machine built into an Indigo workstation case, created by our Munich office, mostly found in SGI offices, but a few of us bought them for home.
(DIR) Post #AwVxLNz4dhoEQ2kU2S by JohnMashey@mstdn.social
2025-07-26T00:11:30Z
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@SteveBellovin @angusm @jack_daniel @pluralistic Needless to say, this did not start with fibre... at Bell LAbs ~1980, I managed development of data mining software specifically for outside plant phone cables, i.e., from central office to subscribers."Man-made problems" category included backhoes, and there were plenty of them, despite pervasive efforts to avoid them.All this is part of reason it's cheap to do underground in fersh new developments, and expensive in developed ones.
(DIR) Post #AzVuHxS3oQ8KRjpJK4 by JohnMashey@mstdn.social
2025-08-15T02:34:14Z
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@nixCraft If you haven't already done so recently, visit the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.Also, peruse the Oral Histories:https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/oral-historyI'd done a few interviews, including of old colleagues: got Ken to talk about computer chess, sadly didn't catch Dennis before he died, did visit Princeton to get Brian Kernighan.