Esteemed Colleagues:
This is a very active mailing list. This is partly because there is
an astonishingly large number of messages posted to it that are
neither informative, nor entertaining, to, I would estimate,
approximately 99% of its readership.
The most recent example of this phenomenon is that someone posted a
short message expressing the opinion that the default name "the devil
himself" for the "daemon" user ought to be changed. The resulted in
about 10 replies. I estimate that one, or maybe two, of those replies
contained useful information. The others were posted by people
thinking that they are clever, who are not, insulting the original
poster to a greater or lesser extent, and offering nothing useful.
One of those people stated with confidence that the original poster
had objected to something that he considered to be "politically
incorrect".
First of all, there is nothing "politically correct" about objecting
to the name "the devil himself" for the "daemon" user. The name is
dumb. Putting it into an operating system is something that people do
who are in their twenties, and high on weed (both conditions are
necessary). Grown-ups would say "the user ID of daemon programs like
cron" or words to that effect. Daemons are not demons, which Dennis
Ritchie (or maybe it was Ken Thompson. but I think it was Dennis
Ritchie) knew, which is why he called them daemons. Daemons are not
malevolent spirits. They are more like nature-spirits, neither
malevolent nor benevolent. Conflating them with demons is just dumb.
Second of all, and more to the point, publicly insulting people who
post to this mailing list is not a productive use of your time, and --
even more to the point -- reading postings to this mailing list that
publicly insult people who have made other postings to this mailing
list, and that say nothing else, is not a productive use of my time.
There are two useful things that could be (and were) said in response
to the original post:
1. There is zero likelihood that your suggestion will be accepted,
because it is unimportant, and because the thing that you want
changed has been in the system for too many years;
2. You can easily make the change that you desire on your own system,
by editing your password file.
That is all that needed to be said. A single short posting that said
those two things would have been (and was) enough. None of the other
postings to this mailing list that were made in reply to the original
posting contributed anything useful.
Please remember that other people do not think that you are as clever
as you think you are -- and this is true of everyone, even if you are
Einstein or Goethe -- and even if you are as clever as you think you
are, no one cares. Please do not post articles to this mailing list
that are neither informative, nor entertaining, nor helpful in any
other way, to 99% of the people who read it.
Jay F. Shachter
6424 North Whipple Street
Chicago IL 60645-4111
+1 773 7613784 landline
+1 410 9964737 GoogleVoice
[email protected]
http://m5.chicago.il.us
"Fed up with pretentious Parisian restaurant
critics using fancy words to describe ordinary
food, Pierre decided un oeuf was un oeuf."
