Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!clyde.concordia.ca!mcgill-vision!snorkelwacker!usc!rutgers!cbnewsh.att.com!wcs
From: wcs@cbnewsh.att.COM (Bill Stewart 201-949-0705 erebus.att.com!wcs)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Re: i don't wanna be a hacker anymore...
Message-ID: <1990Oct10.023420.20583@cbnewsh.att.com>
Date: 10 Oct 90 02:34:20 GMT
References: <10035@ccncsu.ColoState.EDU> <921@noe.UUCP> <1521@huxley.cs.nps.navy.mil>
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In article <1521@huxley.cs.nps.navy.mil>, jxxl@huxley.cs.nps.navy.mil (John Locke) writes:
> In article <> marc@noe.UUCP (Marc de Groot) writes:
> >     The media has been abusing the term "hacker" for so long now that it's
> > been very tempting to change the name of this conference.
> I prefer "Hacker-Americans."

Ahem!  Sailor:-), there are a lot of hackers here who *aren't* Americans,
and have no plan to be.  (Yeah, it _was_ a good line, though.)
You Government guys are supposed to be sensitive about internationalization
and non-parochialism and open-mindedness and such.
The mere fact that my ancestors have been hacking here for 350+ years
(furniture-with-axes, newspapers, chemicals, algorithms, whatever)
doesn't make me any better or worse than somebody who's never been here
and likes where he or she is living.

Ob.Hacking:  What I've been hacking recently has been bitmap viewers
for my 630 terminal; I started by asking if anyone else had done so,
(a couple people had done viewers for PBM)
so I've mainly been contributing to feeping creaturism rather than
new ideas, but it's been a good way to learn the machine's innards.
Some of the interesting results have been that the 630 documentation is
occasionally wrong, pnmcat needs some care on 3B2s, and that
compression is less of a win than I'd expected on the graphics I've
snarfed from expo.lcs.mit.edu.  (Part of this is a name-too-long-for-.Z
problem, but overall compression has been not high, given P4 to start.)
It may be worth doing a simple RLE for the simple pictures rather than 
build full uncompress or un-Huffman into the terminal program?

			Bill
-- 
					Thanks; Bill
# Bill Stewart 908-949-0705 erebus.att.com!wcs AT&T Bell Labs 4M-312 Holmdel NJ
Government is like an elephant on drugs: It's very confused, makes lots of noise,
can't do anything well, stomps on anyone in its way, and it sure eats a lot.