Ha -- I read the title and said to myself, "gotta be Maxwell, right?" The jolt of pleasure I get from being right about things like this is unreasonable.
Yeah, author tries to throw us a curve ball at first with that koo-koo backronym.
Origin of 'Daemon' in Computing
31–40 of 112 posts
Re: Origin of 'Daemon' in Computing
#32Saw this on a conspiracy theory subreddit recently, thought it was absolutely hilarious: "Boy I love trapping demons in microscopic silicon megastructures to do my bidding, I sure hope nothing goes wrong"
I told my eight year old the “we taught sand how to think” joke, and he loved it, and also indulged me in a brief explanation.
It really is absolutely wild that it all works when you go to the absolute fundamentals and start working forward.
Re: Origin of 'Daemon' in Computing
#33Unrelated to the word "daemon", but related to the article, I was a bit surprised by this assertion: > Eventually, though, the theory of quantum mechanics showed why it wouldn't work. I was familiar with the information theory arguments (the same presented in Wikipedia[1]). Is that why they mean here by "quantum mechanics" or is there another counterargument to Maxwell's daemon? 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max…
I'm guessing that the daemon's ability to allow only fast molecules through the gate depends on knowing their position and velocity simultaneously?
But the daemon doesn't need to know them all that precisely.
Re: Origin of 'Daemon' in Computing
#34Do you pronounce it as demon or like Matt Damon?
I believe it officially is pronounced the same as demon. But colloquially I hear a lot of (and sometimes find myself using) “damon”.
I’m in the Matt Damon camp. Always pronounced it that way, never really gave it much thought. Just seems “right” to me.
Re: Origin of 'Daemon' in Computing
#35Saw this on a conspiracy theory subreddit recently, thought it was absolutely hilarious: "Boy I love trapping demons in microscopic silicon megastructures to do my bidding, I sure hope nothing goes wrong"
Didn't some Wharton professor post something similar too recently?
Re: Origin of 'Daemon' in Computing
#36Re: Origin of 'Daemon' in Computing
#37Do you pronounce it as demon or like Matt Damon?
It should more properly be written as dæmon. The æ ("ash") character is usually pronounced more like "ee", as in encyclopædia. I've never heard anyone say "encycloPAYdia" :-)
Re: Origin of 'Daemon' in Computing
#38The *nix world is full of dark-but-fun terminology. Daemons run the system. New files get 666 (before the umask takes away unnecessary permissions). Parents kill their children before killing themselves. And sometimes you have to kill zombies.
[dead]
Re: Origin of 'Daemon' in Computing
#39Do you pronounce it as demon or like Matt Damon?
I pedantically use day-mon (working/servant spirit) to distinguish from dee-mon (evil spirit) but I suspect I'm very much in the minority.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daimon vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon
I've never found any significance to associate the unix term with Demons and consider it a mis-association.
Re: Origin of 'Daemon' in Computing
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe it officially is pronounced the same as demon. But colloquially I hear a lot of (and sometimes find myself using) “damon”.
I’m in the Matt Damon camp. Always pronounced it that way, never really gave it much thought. Just seems “right” to me.
And now we can perhaps hash out whether the `lib` in `/usr/lib` is pronounced with a long or short 'i'. I hope I'm not the only one who pronounced it the first way with no real thought, and never noticed until I heard someone else say it with a long 'i' that that was obviously the logical pronunciation.