Cheeky New Book Identifies 26 Lines of Code That Changed the World (thenewstack.io) 48
Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: A new book identifies "26 Lines of Code That Changed the World." But its cheeky title also incorporates a comment from Unix's source code — "You are Not Expected to Understand This". From a new interview with the book's editor:
With chapter titles like "Wear this code, go to jail" and "the code that launched a million cat videos," each chapter offers appreciations for programmers, gathering up stories about not just their famous lives but their sometimes infamous works. (In Chapter 10 — "The Accidental Felon" — journalist Katie Hafner reveals whatever happened to that Harvard undergraduate who went on to inadvertently create one of the first malware programs in 1988...) The book quickly jumps from milestones like the Jacquard Loom and the invention of COBOL to bitcoin and our thought-provoking present, acknowledging both the code that guided the Apollo 11 moon landing and the code behind the 1962 videogame Spacewar. The Smithsonian Institution's director for their Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation writes in Chapter 4 that the game "symbolized a shift from computing being in the hands of priest-like technicians operating massive computers to enthusiasts programming and hacking, sometimes for the sheer joy of it."
I contributed chapter 9, about a 1975 comment in some Unix code that became "an accidental icon" commemorating a "momentary glow of humanity in a world of unforgiving logic." This chapter provided the book with its title. (And I'm also responsible for the book's index entry for "Linux, expletives in source code of".) In a preface, the book's editor describes the book's 29 different authors as "technologists, historians, journalists, academics, and sometimes the coders themselves," explaining "how code works — or how, sometimes, it doesn't work — owing in no small way to the people behind it."
"I've been really interested over the past several years to watch the power of the tech activists and tech labor movements," the editor says in this interview. "I think they've shown really immense power to effect change, and power to say, 'I'm not going to work on something that doesn't align with what I want for the future.' That's really something to admire.
"But of course, people are up against really big forces...."
With chapter titles like "Wear this code, go to jail" and "the code that launched a million cat videos," each chapter offers appreciations for programmers, gathering up stories about not just their famous lives but their sometimes infamous works. (In Chapter 10 — "The Accidental Felon" — journalist Katie Hafner reveals whatever happened to that Harvard undergraduate who went on to inadvertently create one of the first malware programs in 1988...) The book quickly jumps from milestones like the Jacquard Loom and the invention of COBOL to bitcoin and our thought-provoking present, acknowledging both the code that guided the Apollo 11 moon landing and the code behind the 1962 videogame Spacewar. The Smithsonian Institution's director for their Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation writes in Chapter 4 that the game "symbolized a shift from computing being in the hands of priest-like technicians operating massive computers to enthusiasts programming and hacking, sometimes for the sheer joy of it."
I contributed chapter 9, about a 1975 comment in some Unix code that became "an accidental icon" commemorating a "momentary glow of humanity in a world of unforgiving logic." This chapter provided the book with its title. (And I'm also responsible for the book's index entry for "Linux, expletives in source code of".) In a preface, the book's editor describes the book's 29 different authors as "technologists, historians, journalists, academics, and sometimes the coders themselves," explaining "how code works — or how, sometimes, it doesn't work — owing in no small way to the people behind it."
"I've been really interested over the past several years to watch the power of the tech activists and tech labor movements," the editor says in this interview. "I think they've shown really immense power to effect change, and power to say, 'I'm not going to work on something that doesn't align with what I want for the future.' That's really something to admire.
"But of course, people are up against really big forces...."
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
I've given up on Slashdot ever being well-written - or even correctly spelt - but I am still too often disappointed with the editing in actual printed books from 'reputable' publishers.
Is Book Editing one another of those industries where they "Just can't get the staff" to do a half-competent job ?
That summary also put me off reading what at first sounds like an interesting book.
I guess we can just skip disneyland's chapter.
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Is Book Editing one another of those industries where they "Just can't get the staff" to do a half-competent job ?
Maybe.
There's an unbelievable amount of books being published these days.
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I doubt it. When print media collapsed, the first thing they did was fire all the copy editors. Now it appears the entire publishing industry sees them as wasteful overhead.
WHY IS PARENT '-1 TROLL' FFS ?! (Score:2)
How is this comment still at "-1 Troll" ?!
The editor of a book being hyped on Slashdot shows herself in her own words to be a BAD EDITOR.
A comment pointing that out is TOTALLY RELEVANT in a discussion of THAT BOOK.
It is NOT TROLLING.
Anyone who modded this should be FUCKING ASHAMED of yourselves.
You are making discussion on this site WORSE.
Re:Most books aren't worth it (Score:4, Insightful)
Seconded (Score:5, Insightful)
Much easier to shoot through a text to see if there's anything interesting in it, than to sit out an endlessly spun-out video only to find the total useful content was one or two sentences.
With the glut of, well, "content", these days, it's kinda curious to see how wilfully vapid and time-wasting most of it has become. Not that I'm against wasting time. I just want to do it myself, not have some idiot prancing around in a video waste my time for me.
Re: (Score:3)
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But at that speed you might miss the discount code for NordVPN.
Re:Seconded (Score:4, Insightful)
Much easier to shoot through a text to see if there's anything interesting in it, than to sit out an endlessly spun-out video only to find the total useful content was one or two sentences.
Agree 100%. The number of half-hour videos on youtube that answer a simple yes/no question is off the scale. Do they get paid by the minute?
I avoid Youtube "answers" like the plague these days.
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YouTube videos generally have to be above a certain length for monetization.
I can understand why they did it, but it really needs to go away.
Re:Most books aren't worth it (Score:5, Insightful)
This. Anyone who's studied knows you take in FAR more information when reading than when just passively sitting and listening.
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Indeed.
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It depends on the individual. Some people retain information better through practice, rather than just reading it. YouTube videos are a bit like practice, in that the viewer can put themselves in the position of working through a problem while watching.
Yes, books have problems to work though too, but for some reason the physical act of doing it seems to make it stick better in some people's minds. Watching someone else do it is the next best thing.
That's why the teacher does science experiences in front of
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It depends on the individual. Some people retain information better through practice, rather than just reading it. YouTube videos are a bit like practice, in that the viewer can put themselves in the position of working through a problem while watching.
I suspect most of us would call that 'demonstration' not practice. A very useful teaching tool, but practice is the learning part. And yes, you're not wrong, in that people can 'mentally' practice, imagine doing, based on a video, but it falls far short of actually 'doing'.
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It depends how the video is shot. Some of the troubleshooting ones are very good for teaching now to fix things by going through the problems methodically. A write-up after the fact tends not to convey the process very well, only the end result.
As I said, it's not as good as actually doing it yourself, but for some people it's still better than just reading about it.
Re:Most books aren't worth it (Score:5, Insightful)
Same here. I hate having to sit through an instruction video at their pace, when I could have nicely written instruction that I can read at my own pace.
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While I agree, the 'playback speed' option in YT has been a lifesaver for me. Playback at 1.5x makes things less boring.
Re:Most books aren't worth it (Score:5, Insightful)
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it's a lot easier to just to just take a video of some process than make a more legitimate written set of instructions for colleague training
I do this all the time as a time saver for me at work as I have zero incentive to make good documentation for processes where a video will suffice
further, these "creators" stand a chance of getting compensated for these videos (mine are just private links with like 20 views tops typically)
also, I've found that there isn't much good technical content in this sorts of vi
Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)
Damn, somebody went on an abusive moderation spree. My comment was +5 Informative or Insightful an hour or so ago -- now it's -1 Flamebait.
Slashdot has become a cesspool.
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as of this writing, it's at +3 flamebait, so quite an unusual score there.
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The worm used an accidental backdoor left in sendmail that allowed the user to exit the program and execute commands.It was disabled on the programmers computer but accidentally compiled into the released program.
Morris Worm sendmail Debug Mode Shell Escape [rapid7.com]
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The Morris worm also exploited a buffer overrun in the finger executable, rsh hosts.equiv (or .rhosts) files that allowed rsh connections based only on source IP address (with no password), and password guessing. It was not a one-trick pony.
United States v. Morris, 928 F.2d 504 [loundy.com]
"Wear this code, go to jail" (Score:4, Funny)
I wore that shirt on multiple plane trips and didn't go to jail.
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Nobody did ... it was done to highlight the absurdity of export laws in a digitial age
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I obviously knew the law was bad, that's why I bought and wore the shirt, duh.
The description is also bad, and intended to trick people.
comment explained by the original author (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:comment explained by the original author (Score:5, Insightful)
Ahh the old days, where the hardware designers rarely talked to the system designers and programming magic had to be performed to get PDP-11s to run anything multi-user at all.
A related story (where I was just a fly on the wall), was how to implement paging in UNIX (Series 6, I think the days before Bourne Shell, the days where /bin/sh had only one prompt (“% “, unless you were root ‘# ’), and “do-done loops” were a gleam in someone’s eye but I digress).
George Coulouris (QMC London University) employed an IT person (before the term was invented) who was a real UNIX Guru. I *really* wish I could remember his name - he taught me the basics of how to treat impatient students (of which I was one), who would nag while we waited for him to magically key-in disk i/o block-rewrites, from the 11/40 switches (before the days of microcode-handled consoles that could run fsck in single-user mode). The toggle-magic he would work in his sleep was essentially fsdb from some notes he made in machine code on paper. F***ing Brilliant!.
Back to the story This “Mr. Guru” had much more complicated things to do in his spare time. He was one of the contributors to fixing the “Instruction Backup Problem” on PDP-11/40s. The early days of trying to get paging to work reliably on PDP-11s. There was a piece of kernel assembler code that would be invoked whenever a page-fault was hit. The job of this code was to reverse out the partially executed machine code instruction that caused the fault, load (from disk, or some other cache in memory) the not-currently-available block of instructions or data, subtract the correct number of bytes from the user’s PC (program counter), and do an RTI (return from interrupt) to get the user’s program to blissfully continue from where it was rudely interrupted. It was actually a huge switch statement in assembler - a piece of code to handle each instruction, with their combination of (possibly) indirected 2-address arguments.
The major wrinkle here was that while it worked properly on an PDP-11/70 (for those who could afford that beauty), the rest of us had to make do on a PDP-11/40 (for which we grew fond and had to speak softly and kindly in its presence, in case it failed to properly write all the bits on a disk block and threw a block-checksum error and bring the whole machine down (again) and make the Mr. Guru dance over the toggle switches for an hour or so).
From time to time a user’s “a.out” would throw a core dump for no good reason. I’ve no idea how Mr. Guru figured this out, but the problem was occurring in the Page-Fault interrupt service function. There was one instruction type for which enough information was not salvageable unambiguously - to backup the instruction to a point it could be rerun on RTI. I’m sorry but I do not know what the actual instruction was. The fix was to change the assembler to not generate that particular instruction (with its ambiguous indirected arguments) on a PDP-11/40. Ever again!
Hats off to George C and Mr. Guru. Those *were* the days.
Re:comment explained by the original author (Score:4, Informative)
One of the first? (Score:2)
You are not expected to understand (Score:5, Informative)
.....as neither did the authors ... It worked on a PDP-11 but was severely not portable as it relied on the way the compiler interacted with the machine ...
Connections (Score:4, Insightful)