I have to keep up with the scientific literature as part of my job but increasingly I found myself reading things that weren't really relevant to my academic work but were relevant to gardening.
I still have a full-time day job which is why it took me five years to write An Ear to the Ground and why I won't have another book finished by next week.
I wanted to avoid special IO for terminals.
The average gardener probably knows little about what is going on in his or her garden.
So maybe I can go back to being a Gardeners' World addict again.
I am a programmer.
No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code.
In college before video games we would amuse ourselves by posing programming exercises.
If you want to go somewhere goto is the best way to get there.
I also have an idea for a book on biodiversity and why and how we should be conserving it.
A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect.
When in doubt use brute force.
I am a very bottom-up thinker.
I view Linux as something that's not Microsoft-a backlash against Microsoft no more and no less.
One of my most productive days was throwing away 1 000 lines of code.
Unauthorized access to computer systems is already a serious crime in a few states and is currently being addressed in many more state legislatures as well as Congress.
That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been a thing of beauty.
We have persistant objects they're called files.
We have persistent objects they're called files.
There are no projects per se in the Computing Sciences Research Center.
On the one hand the press television and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids.
SCCS the source motel! Programs check in and never check out!
You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself.
It is only the inadequacy of the criminal code that saves the hackers from very serious prosecution.
I also enjoy writing my regular column for Organic Gardening magazine so I may do more of that sort of thing in the future if anybody wants it!
I wanted to have virtual memory at least as it's coupled with file systems.
One is that the perfect garden can be created overnight which it can't.
I wanted to separate data from programs because data and instructions are very different.
There's a lot of power in executing data - generating data and executing data.
In fact we started off with two or three different shells and the shell had life of its own.
It's always good to take an orthogonal view of something. It develops ideas.
The steady state of disks is full.
I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open close read and write.
For most of that time I've also been a keen gardener but for many years I failed to make the connection between gardening and science.
Just think IBM and DEC in the same room and we did it.
FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular.
The X server has to be the biggest program I've ever seen that doesn't do anything for you.
I don't think there are many people up in research who have strong ideas about things that they haven't really had experience with.
We tried to avoid you know records. We were told over and over that was probably the most serious mistake and the reason was the system would never catch on because we didn't have records.