Day of week routine

[Norman Diamond]

Does anyone else get "interp buffer overflow" trying to follow-up to
a message like this:
  References: <234 at zeek.UUCP> <322 at xdos.UUCP> <FLEE.89May22191959 at shire.cs.psu.edu> <1989May29.232954.25638 at utzoo.uucp> <107107 at sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <1989May30.155016.11099 at utzoo.uucp> <534 at bnr-fos.UUCP> <1989Jun1.160913.8849 at utzoo.uucp> <1474 at uw-entropy.ms.was
Does anyone else get ".newsrc restored" and find that their .newsrc is
not restored?  Well, it's slightly better than having to skip past the
30 preceding comp.lang.c articles again.

Anyway...

Henry Spencer:
>> Dream on ... :-)  The transition from 32 to 64 is going to be long
>> and painful; I predict that there will still be plenty of 32-bit
>> machines serving in secondary roles in 2038.

Charlie Geyer in article <1474 at uw-entropy.ms.washington.edu>:
>What's more, the 64 bit hardware will all be running 32 bit software.
>Count on it.

Badri Lokanathan:
>Are you guys serious? Do you actually think that 50 years from now
>people will be doing their computing on 32/64/128/256 bit machines?
>Or even Von-Neumann machines? With Unix as the operating system?

Are you serious, Mr. Lokanathan?  Did anyone believe that a mainframe
operating system would still be in use 25 years later?  And if that's
not enough, consider this:

No one, but no one, wants to be seen using a 10-year-old piece of
hardware.  Sure, they'll use them in secondary roles, but no one wants
to be seen using them.

But a 20-year-old operating system is another story.  Everyone wants
to run a 20-year-old operating system with their 3-year-old workstation,
bitmapped screen, network, and megabytes of RAM.  No one wants to use
an operating system newer than that, even though a few of the newer ones
are better.  This kind of attitude isn't going to change in the next
50 years either.

Oh there are exceptions of course, for instance I prefer a certain
10-year-old operating system and a certain 5-year-old one, and would
be interested in watching a few others that are now under development.
But such preferences are risky to careers, and should be kept quiet.

--
Norman Diamond, Sony Computer Science Lab (diamond%csl.sony.co.jp at relay.cs.net)
  The above opinions are my own.   |  Why are programmers criticized for
  If they're also your opinions,   |  re-implementing the wheel, when car
  you're infringing my copyright.  |  manufacturers are praised for it?