6$ / TB / month is a fool's bargain even for something as low as 10 TB. One can buy a used LTO-6 drive for a few hundred bucks and build tape libraries that span hundreds of TBs.
There's no Cloud-based backup service that's competive with tape.
The vast majority of MUDs don't even implement the full TELNET protocol, just a small subset. In typical MUD fashion, fundamental TELNET parts like option negotiation were either hacked together -badly- or altogether ignored.
For the longest time in the 90s TELNET AYT would crash tons of custom implementations.
If you want Scheme, go use Scheme because these are not arguments for Common Lisp. There is tons of value in the CL specification being this big and I'm happy I can still run code I wrote more than 25 years ago (or third party code written more than 50 years ago) without any issues.
Generally, contemporary folks that propose improvements to the CL spec tend to be misinformed / misguided and/or lacking experience to realize why their proposed improvements are bad ideas.
Great story! I also read Neuromancer for the first time in Greek translation (Αίολος), around 1995, knowing nothing about the book otherwise. It was a blind buy in a bookstore solely because I liked the cover and the short synopsis on the back. It was a book that changed my life. I remember being drenched in sweat when I finished it, and I immediately re-read it without a break. I was already at age 14 hopelessly hooked on computers, but Neuromancer completely rewired how I thought about technology (it was the first book I came across that put forth a non-anthropocentric point of view, with Technology being presented as both an addictive drug and a force in itself, bringing about its own teleology).
That book was the main impetus for me connecting to the Internet, installing Linux and getting involved with the European hacking underground of the mid to late 90s. I also periodically re-read it (now in English): the prose still seems razor-sharp and the divergent feelings are still being evoked. Plus, it's an insanely hyperstitional book: one gets the feeling that Gibson (whose non-Sprawl work pales in comparison and who has never again reached these heights) didn't just write a heist-story filled with countercultural sensibilities but channeled something greater, something that has been intricately involved with how the world we experience has evolved.
Looking back on those days, I now wish I'd read it in English for the first time. The Greek translation is not bad but it feels kind of archaic and doesn't do justice to the brilliance of Gibson's dystopian vision.
So many common things! It also inspired my love for Linux (I installed Slackware back then), for "hacking" and also pushed me into the demoscene which I much enjoyed!
A lot of the power of Forth comes from its metaprogramming capabilities and having the compiler available at runtime, all wrapped in a tiny footprint. Similarly to Lisp, it empowers one to explore a problem domain without getting in the way. These concepts are alien to C which is downright hostile to exploratory programming.
If you really want to understand the genius of Forth and its creator, I suggest reading everything that Chuck Moore put down in writing starting with "Programming a problem-oriented language".
A lot of us today, being bogged down in the sort of tedium-inducing programming that pays the bills, tend to forget that programming languages are (or should be!) primarily about expressing ideas. Forth is still one of the best languages to do that in.
Yeah. Pretty much agree with everything here. I'd rather encourage starting with the book Thinking Forth, though. It's not written by Moore but has some commentary from him included in it.
I'd even suggest learning a little Forth to people even if it didn't have its interactive nature (which again I don't actually find useful in my own limited embedded work, there's really no "explore" phase as the problems are all straightforward -- contrary to software I write in CL or even Java). I had a friend in college who for a project made his own language and got it working on an embedded system (I think via compiling to C, but I don't recall exactly), but it was just a boring Algol-like somewhat inspired by Ruby. That pattern has shown up again and again around the world though. Forth is one of the handful of languages that shows what expressive options there are that aren't just transparently Algol-like.
I see the following in code written by newcomers to CL frequently:
(optimize (speed 3) (safety 0))
but it is a very bad habit to get used to, in general, and may create the impression that it's needed for optimized code. Instead, use this where needed:
(optimize (speed 3) (safety 1))
which will result in roughly same performance for the vast majority of cases, but keep array bounds checks and (weaker) type checks.
For SBCL, there's also the excellent sb-simd [1] plus compiler macros and even hooking into some of the VM internals for custom code generation [2].
Stallman has done more to safeguard our freedoms than all the critics and corporations that are happy to exploit his work put together.
He’s also been extremely prescient and decades ahead of his time. He stood his ground against relentless attacks where so many others have sold out and betrayed whatever morals they thought they had.
It should become clear to everyone that reads his work that "management theorist" Stafford Beer
can best be characterized without any doubt whatsoever as a charlatan.
Cybernetics came out of the Macy conferences [0] and this is where one needs to go, in order to establish context. I also highly recommend Norbert Wiener's biography "Dark Hero of the Information Age" [1] as a good introduction to one of the greatest geniuses of this age, easily eclipsing Shannon and von Neumann.
Principia Cybernetica [2] is another good resource.
>It should become clear to everyone that reads his work that "management theorist" Stafford Beer can best be characterized without any doubt whatsoever as a charlatan.
Yep.
Over the years I've found a few litmus tests for that sort of thing. Unclear or incomplete explanations; intentional vagueness, weird formatting, "meta" anything, "new language", incomprehensible diagrams. One or two and you're Stephen Wolfram; three or more and you're completely full of shit. Beer's book somehow manages to hit every single one in just a single page. Incredible!
If you claim something grand but can't explain your point clearly, you are almost always full of shit. If Susskind can explain the combined work of centuries of geniuses in The Theoretical Minimum, then you can explain your bullshit in a paragraph.
There's no Cloud-based backup service that's competive with tape.