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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 10/21/22 5:02 PM, Frank Wimberly
wrote:<br>
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<div dir="auto">As for "NeXT machine's software RIP", Rick Rashid,
who was central in the development of that software, was my
office neighbor. He left to take a position at Microsoft as VP
of Research. I wonder if the software is RIPing.<br>
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<p><br>
</p>
<p>So many (technical) careers seem to have been "ended" (lost) by
getting "promoted" into the big boys' management pastures
(Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc) over the decades. I can't list
all the promising tech people I have known who ended up lost in
the upper echelons of those companies. I wonder if the work
coming out of those behemoth/leviathans is *because of* this or
*in spite of this*?<br>
</p>
<p>While it was not central to my core mission (it was to peripheral
ones around developing distributed user interfaces) of RIPing, the
promise of PS as a full featured (if ideosyncratic) language in
NeWS and NextStep was awe-some at the time. Watching all that
defer/failover to Java and then (painfully) JavaScript was like
watching a long slow 1000 car accident on a black-iced 8 lane
freeway. <br>
</p>
<p>By some measure, "nobody got hurt" however... and the kinds of
tools *living* on/within the Web these days vindicates any idea
that these are not viable solutions (as awkward and misbegotten as
they may seem up against their more ?elegant? predecessors).</p>
<p>I don't have the focus (I've tried) to take up Owen's AgentScript
or the larger RedFish Acequia Architecture which addresses (once
again) the same issues (and more)...</p>
<p>My copy of Glenn Reid's 1990 <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://w3-o.cs.hm.edu/users/ruckert/public_html/compiler/ThinkingInPostScript.pdf">Thinking
in PostScript</a> sat on my shelf for two decades singing a
siren song that wasn't ever quite strong enough for me to give it
my full attention for the few weeks/months I believe it deserved.</p>
<p>Someday (if humanity survives another century, or interstellar
visitors bother to crack our rusty harddrives) this will all be as
much fun as the vestigal (aka "junk") DNA we started finding when
we started ubiquitous DNA/RNA sequencing. It must all be "good
for something"? Right? Clearly was at one time!<br>
</p>
<p>Fascinating that anyone (besides me) is even discussing such
things 30 years later: <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28115946"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28115946</a></p>
<p>As glen has put it before "old man's stories... <sigh>"</p>
<p>Speaking of "old men", <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Kalashnikov">Mikhail
Kalishnakov</a> was probably reminiscing on like this right up
until his death in 2013 when he moved on to the giant soviet
wheatfield pasture in the sky-steppe. I'm pretty sure plenty of
kids in schools and shopping malls are still being mowed down by
his innovations as well as rival warlord gangs (and starving
refugees) in the third world, no matter how much the likes of
Western Monopolistic companies like Browning (Official weapon of
Utah btw) or Armalite (nod to Vietnam Vets itchy trigger fingers
cum insurrectionists) try to out-compete them in that market.
You just can't beat "free" and "ubiquitous"?<br>
</p>
<p>An interesting article on Open Source design and Path Dependent
Lockin: <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.wired.com/2007/06/open-source-ak4/"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://www.wired.com/2007/06/open-source-ak4/</a>
and a more technical paper on the global market for Assault
Rifles: <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/266561468141574815/pdf/wps4202.pdf">https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/266561468141574815/pdf/wps4202.pdf<br>
</a></p>
<p>Meanwhile, trivial Internet Research discovered that Glenn Reid
has put *himself* into a rich (but mundane?) pasture
designing/marketing <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://glennreid.com/">Marathon</a>, an IoT washer-dryer
appliance! I wonder if it has a PostScript interpreter embedded
in it and is building a globe-spanning distributed AI written in
PS and spying on humans from the laundry room?</p>
<p></careening tangents><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CAA5dAfqqL-2KR=odjXTs=QMmBycZ_CNHXB7rSOUMCKZBfpfAWQ@mail.gmail.com">
<div dir="auto"><br>
<div data-smartmail="gmail_signature">---<br>
Frank C. Wimberly<br>
140 Calle Ojo Feliz, <br>
Santa Fe, NM 87505<br>
<br>
505 670-9918<br>
Santa Fe, NM</div>
</div>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">
<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Fri, Oct 21, 2022, 3:08 PM
Steve Smith <<a href="mailto:sasmyth@swcp.com"
moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">sasmyth@swcp.com</a>>
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">FWIW, I
dipped into the higher levels of real-time-systems development
<br>
several times in my career. The earliest being a control
system (circa <br>
1981) for the LANL Proton Storage Ring where one naturally
can't afford <br>
anything *but* failsafe implementations, etc. The stakes are
just too <br>
'ffing high and the coupling to electrooptomechanical systems
quite <br>
intimate.<br>
<br>
The "digital" components of such systems might have had the
opportunity <br>
to ignore timing issues and simply "execute the same steps"
regardless <br>
of timing. But in fact many software-driven (sub)systems
represented <br>
time-critical processes and sometimes were up agains the
timing limits <br>
of the analog components which had no leeway in their
"execution".<br>
<br>
There are all kinds of analogies in federated (distributed)
simulation <br>
environments which Glen (and others here) probably know much
better than <br>
I, where different "clocks" matter, and different levels of <br>
synchronization and reproducibility are in play. The
Postscript <br>
interpreters, printers, and film recorders were also pseudo
real-time <br>
systems since some of the timing components were in fact
software <br>
controlled (for example, the film recorders were "stroke"
devices with <br>
software driving D-A converters to "sweep" out vectors and
"clip" the <br>
on/off of the beam with appropriate analog component
delays/biases/gains <br>
needing to be calibrated for. Fortunately failures in this
step did <br>
not (usually) damage anyone or risk anyone's health and safety
(like the <br>
beam in the PSR did).<br>
<br>
Regarding identity and equivalence, I prefer the phrase:
"close enough <br>
for who it's for"...<br>
<br>
<br>
On 10/21/22 11:18 AM, glen wrote:<br>
> Ha! If we're going to argue about words, then let's stick
with the <br>
> word "identity" and skip the "metaphor" nonsense. You and
Frank seem <br>
> to be using the word in a weird way. Identity means "the
exact same <br>
> particular thing over any differencing available" or
somesuch. I mean, <br>
> it's used that way in phrases like "identity theft" as
well as <br>
> mathematical identity. It's equivalence sets all the way
down. I just <br>
> can't imagine any working computationalist would ever say
anything <br>
> like "executed identically" unless ... well ... the exact
same <br>
> process, with the exact same steps, happened.<br>
><br>
> I suppose there are deep philosophical intuitions pried
at by the <br>
> words "emulation" versus "simulation". And one can argue
(again with <br>
> help from Christian List) about whether there exist fully
closed <br>
> ontological walls like we try to create with things like
Jails, <br>
> HyperV, Docker, VM's like Java's, etc. But "execute
identically" is a <br>
> phrase that would only be used by someone who worked
*way* above such <br>
> levels (assuming levels even exist at all). It's a bit
like talking to <br>
> the kids programming websites these days, with access to
infinite disk <br>
> space, infinite memory, steeped in continuous delivery,
etc. [⛧]<br>
><br>
> Layers of abstraction are fine. Use 'em when you need
'em. But we <br>
> shouldn't posture by invoking things like "instruction
sets" and <br>
> "execute identically" in the same breath. (Not that you
did that ... <br>
> just sayin'.)<br>
><br>
><br>
> [⛧] Rant: This is a good talk <br>
> <<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ab3ArE8W3s"
rel="noreferrer noreferrer" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ab3ArE8W3s</a>>.
But I get super <br>
> irritated when people use *toy* code in their rhetoric
and leave large <br>
> scale deployment as an exercise for the reader. Yeah,
fine. The REPL <br>
> is cool and all. But when my simulation takes a fvcking
WEEK to <br>
> execute, it's difficult to sympathize. I've recently been
playing <br>
> around with VSCodium, which is pretty cool. But whatever,
man. I still <br>
> have to upload the code somewhere and execute it. Get off
my lawn!<br>
><br>
> On 10/21/22 09:24, Steve Smith wrote:<br>
>><br>
>> As a counter-example, we ran film recorders whose
"guts" were built <br>
>> by Ed Fredkin's Information International company and
were built to <br>
>> the spec of Dec PDP-11 (I think 11?) and it was
anecdotally agreed <br>
>> among the user community (of a few thousand delivered
units in the <br>
>> world?) that these PDP-clones *never* failed to
execute the code <br>
>> identically to the machines they were patterned
after. I don't <br>
>> remember the details of implementation of these 70's
era hardware <br>
>> designs, but I understood that they III designed
their own PCBs but <br>
>> (obviously?) used the same CPU chips... I don't know
about all the <br>
>> other support components... A likely answer to this
pondering is that <br>
>> these machines did not run a general purpose OS and
the III <br>
>> software/system people probably made up for any
differences in <br>
>> Software/Timing/Error Handling?<br>
>><br>
>> If Owen is listening in here, I think he was there
for more than a <br>
>> little of this from inside Apple/Sun?<br>
>><br>
>> - Steve<br>
>><br>
>> PS. To concede/confront glen's sentiment that: "
'Metaphor' is an <br>
>> evil word, used only by manipulators and
gaslighters", I would <br>
>> offer that the use of *conceptual metaphor* is to
thinking as noise <br>
>> is to simulated annealing, and his point about
"tighter or looser <br>
>> equivalence" might well be the best argument *for*
the use of <br>
>> metaphorical thinking? I can't believe I'm
stirring/kicking this can <br>
>> of worm-hornets down the street again...<br>
>><br>
><br>
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