161–170 of 229 posts
This is sad. Stallman is one of my favorite people (among people I've never met), and everyone deserves a family of some sort. Not necessarily kids, but simply a small group of people who he loves, who love him back, and who would spend his free time with him.
If you're curious to know more about RMS for some reason this is fun to browse through: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/pipermail/developer... "I do not eat breakfast. Please do not ask me any questions about what I will do breakfast. Please just do not bring it up." I really want to know what horrific experience RMS had with breakfast in the past such that you can't even mention it to him!!
RMS is legendary for not getting up before the crack of noon. "Breakfast" is for "mornings". he has neither.
Also the type of food. If you sleep in on a Saturday until noon, you'll probably tend to want breakfast food when you first wake up.
The time of day is far behind those two factors for what constitutes breakfast in popular usage.
Stallman's honors and awards for just some of the great work he's done (like launching the GNU Project, founding the Free Software Foundation, developing the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs): 1986: Honorary lifetime membership of the Chalmers University of Technology Computer Society 1990: Exceptional merit award MacArthur Fellowship ("genius grant") 1990: The Association for Computing Machinery's Grace Murray…
Copy pasta much? > But here on Hacker News (of all places), let's instead criticize his personal preferences on fucking ties. So someone writes about their personal life, and then people discuss it. What the heck does a whole bunch of honorary doctorates from Latin America have to do with this? Obviously the people in Latin America like him. As far as I'm concerned, a single actual doctorate is worth more than all of…
Guy Steele provided the start of the first (in that there were 3 or so visual TECO systems, each with its own key bindings etc., and he got enough people to agree on one), and RMS took off with it and made it into much of what makes EMACS good (minus normal users writing code, since that version was in TECO). I'm sure he contributed to the the Lisp Machine's EMACS, but Dan Weinreb was the major author of its two initial versions (EINE Is Not EMACS, ZWEI Was Eine Initially).
The current EMACS we use was written by an obscure guy at CMI who included a bytecode compiler in it, you might have heard of him, James Gosling ^_^. RMS illicitly started with a copy of this, the rights holders, UniPress, which ran as much as possible then on the "gated community open source" business model, including EMACS, were savvy enough not to try to do anything about this (heck, even in the face of some pretty vicious stuff from RMS, up to and including an face to face accusation that they set his house on fire (it was a couple of kids with matches and ... kerosene as I recall); we did name our Laserprinter "Software Hoarder" :-).
Don't know about gdb, but he does to my knowledge get full credit for starting gcc, the GNU project and of course the GPL, essentially the modern FOSS movement, and it's hard to overstate the value of that.
Disclaimers: acquaintance/sort of friends for a while ... until I went to work for UniPress, I worked for Lisp Machines Inc. (LMI) at a time when he was pretty much the only guy working on the MIT/LMI fork and keeping it fairly close to feature complete with Symbolics, and we were roommates for a few months in the latter part of 1983, starting a bit before the launch of the GNU Project, in that (half of a) house that later was torched.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_listening_device . Most phones can be remotely updated with software by the carrier, and the GSM protocol allows for remote update of the firmware.
What if you have a stock Android, like a Nexus or a rooted phone?
As an aside, when I was porting Linux to the Motorola Q I realized I could easily turn off the display and key backlight and turn on the microphone and camera though the sysfs,this would appear to anyone as if the phone was off but I could remotely control it (SSH tunnel) and capture audio and video. The only problem would be the heat, but someone would likely assume it was used for a while before powering it off. This without any low-level firmware change, just booting GNU/linux ;) from HaRET.
I see a lot of shock at the negative comments about RMS here. Those who are appalled at the lack of respect here need to understand that there are a lot of people within the tech world that have developed very complicated feelings about RMS over the course of the past 20-30 years. I mean, sure, a lot of people who don't know a whole lot about him or haven't had to deal with him over the course of decades might have s…
I'd add a few more things, at least from the 70s/80s (I left the relevant social circle in the 90s when I left the Boston area):
A near complete lack of personal security and safety awareness and savvy, which wouldn't matter so much to others except:
No respect for others' relationships with SOs; the ham-handed way he'd hit on your girlfriend was mostly a bit annoying, best avoided by having your girlfriend's other SO on the other side of her and you both going into "alpha male don't fsck with us" physical projection mode ^_^ ... BUT: it put him and some fellow diners in jeopardy when he hit on a gangster's moll in the late night Boston Chinatown restaurant the circle frequented (as related to me by a reliable 1st hand witness).
It was said, albeit denied, that RMS took a technical disagreement with Dan Weinreb to the point of purging MIT-AI backup tapes, and this was why Dan left for LLL and the S-1 project. Now, as I note Dan denied this, but the very fact it was credible during the period Dan was absent tells you how abrasive he can be in technical matters.
Somewhat troubled, yes (it doesn't make my deeply troubled threshold, at worst we're talking the personality disorder level of mental illness and to my knowledge and observation it didn't rise to that level though the '80s), and note most of these observations are from before he became really famous.
(See my disclaimers here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5804156)
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I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modif…
Just FYI: the text of the parent's post is taken verbatim from a comment RMS once made but this text is probably best known as the most popular "copypasta" (reposted text) on 4chan's technology board (called "/g/" from the Japanese word for "technology"). You shouldn't reply to the poster in earnest. Interestingly enough, /g/ is obsessed with RMS and the regulars' attitude towards him is the epitome of a love-hate re…
"...However, I absolutely refuse to take Amtrak trains because they check passengers ID (sometimes, not all the time)."
Are these two statements contradictory, or is there something special about what Amtrak do that threatens privacy more than the disclosure of identity to an airline? This is a genuine question, I have never visited the US.
(In the UK, you can still walk into a railway station and buy a ticket for cash without showing ID anywhere within the mainland. You will not be asked for anything other than the ticket on the train unless you are using a Student or Senior Citizen's railcard to claim the discount.)
The more I think about the nature of software, the more I find Stallman's views about software freedom compelling.
While his eccentricities mirror those of a mad scientist (or really just an institutionalized person, depending on whom you ask), you cannot deny that RMS is a genius. His work in free software has enabled much recursive work in the computer science fields that wouldn't be possible without his contributions. gcc is without a doubt still the most advanced compiler available today. The GNU coreutils are nowhere near th…
After all, he's going to go down in history first and foremost as the founder of the modern open source movement, that's not a technical thing per se.
"If I had a family..." This is sad. Stallman is one of my favorite people (among people I've never met), and everyone deserves a family of some sort. Not necessarily kids, but simply a small group of people who he loves, who love him back, and who would spend his free time with him.
Without going into the personal details, based on my interactions with him in the '80s I'd say that's not going to happen, especially since he's old enough it's unlikely he'll "mellow out" until possibly when he gets a lot older.
Maybe, someday, but that's not the way to bet.