
Twenty years after - janvdberg
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7244
======
jmcgough
As a reminder, ESR thinks that women shouldn't be allowed around software
engineers because they're part of a complex conspiracy to file false rape
claims against them
([http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/06/linus_torvalds_targe...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/06/linus_torvalds_targeted_by_honeytraps_says_eric_raymond/)).

~~~
lwhalen
Jesus, ad hominim much? I can't speak for you, but I've never met an idiot so
completely useless I couldn't learn _something_ from them.

~~~
jmcgough
It's actually the opposite of ad hominem - I'm addressing his beliefs, not him
as a person.

I recognize that he's contributed value to the OSS community, but over the
last decade or two I think he's done far more harm than good. A number of his
beliefs and writings are extremely problematic, and turning a blind eye to it
because of his contributions taints the OSS community.

Another example:

"In the U.S., blacks are 12% of the population but commit 50% of violent
crimes; can anyone honestly think this is unconnected to the fact that they
average 15 points of IQ lower than the general population? That stupid people
are more violent is a fact independent of skin color." -Eric S. Raymond

~~~
gonvaled
> I'm addressing his beliefs, not him as a person

 _That_ is ad-hominem. What is a person? His beliefs - and actions - of
course.

Well, I imagine that you could argue a person is the structural disposition of
a bunch of atoms, but it easier to summarize that as "beliefs".

Ad-hominem attack means diminishing some actions/qualities of a person because
of _other_ actions/qualities of said person, and that is what the parent was
arguing. Not that it is always inappropriate, but _it is_ ad-hominem.

------
skissane
I used to own a copy of IBM Pilot. My primary school bought a bunch of JXs
(Japan/Australia/New Zealand variant of the PCjr), and IBM had thrown in some
software which the school had no idea what to do with. So, my computing
teacher gave it to me. A copy of IBM Pilot, and a copy of the IBM EZ-VU
Runtime Facility (EZ-VU was an attempt to port the mainframe ISPF dialog
engine to DOS). I never had any practical use for IBM Pilot, but I at least
got it to run. The EZ-VU Runtime Facility was useless without the Development
Facility to go with it.

Rather stupidly, I threw both out years ago.

------
janvdberg
Here is the NEWS file: [http://www.catb.org/~esr/ieee-
pilot/NEWS](http://www.catb.org/~esr/ieee-pilot/NEWS)

------
mkoryak
can someone explain to me what is interesting about this? If his name wasn't
part of this story, would it still be?

~~~
mwfunk
I would guess the answer is "no", not that it matters. If you don't think the
story belongs here then just downvote it.

Stories are considered "interesting" or "uninteresting" based on how people
vote on it, that's pretty much all there is to it. In my entire life, I have
yet to see any good come from people who are not interested in something
complaining to people who are interested in something that they shouldn't be
interested in whatever it is that they've expressed an interest in. Which
should not be interpreted as me being interested in this story, which I most
definitely am not. But if other people are, good for them.

~~~
proksoup
I'm not sure what the threshold is for being able to downvote stories, but
it's pretty high.

Those that have that power have a great deal more control of the front page
than those of us that don't.

We're relegated to trying to exercise our power through snarky comments and
distracting meta conversations about the voting system.

~~~
Jtsummers
Articles aren't down voted. They're flagged. I'm not certain the threshold for
that.

The other way to get rid of content you don't want or want to bury, vote up
content you do want.

The final way is to hide it. The article will disappear for a day or two for
you.

------
AstroJetson
Used pilot back in the 80's when I was at a college. We used it for some
remedial math training and the drill and practice that went with it. It was
pretty simplistic, but it was easy to get the professors (actually the TA's)
to write the courseware.

------
dguido
Hacker News aught to auto-mod stories with "ESR" or "Eric S Raymond" down. His
ntpsec project is an insecure joke and half his blog posts are unintelligible
racist, sexist rants. Don't give him more air time.

~~~
AstralStorm
Just half? Then he is better than a few newspapers.

------
SEJeff
Can't wait for tptacek's take. He's always a huge ESR fan and has some
wonderful comments about him on twitter.

~~~
tptacek
This code is pretty bad, but I don't have anything more interesting to say
about it than that.

~~~
AstroJetson
I didn't think it was that bad when you discount that yacc/lex is the front
end for it. If you brute force parsing it the code is simplifier since the
verbs are the first characters in a line with a colon (:) after them. The use
of a real lexer and parser makes life harder.

~~~
tptacek
To me, it's a ragdoll stuffed with strcats, sprintfs, and strcpys, with random
integer casts and from what I can tell not a single defense against integer
overflows.

It doesn't matter, because nobody is going to use this code, but as a
reminder: this is the person ostensibly "hardening" ntpd.

~~~
SEJeff
Compared to the great openntpd from Henning Brauer of OpenBSD, which actually
does secure ntpd.

