Re: about logo (The Beasdie question)
On Sat, 31 Jan 2004, Mark Terribile wrote: Bubble Gum [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I just want to ask (i'm sorry if it's a silly question),why freebsd logo use devil character? Answered by Paul A. Hoadley and Peter Ulrich Kruppa: It's not a devil. It's a daemon. === 1) It isn't a devil but a small daemon, ... programs called daemons, ... 2) [It's] name is beastie, ... a quasihomophone to BSD ... 3) On http://www.freebsdmall.com you can buy Tee-shirts, ... As a recent member of OOOF (The Organization of Obsolete Old Fogies) I was there (well, nearby) when it happened. [...] Backstory on `demon/daemon': In pre-Christian (ie. Greek) thinking, a daemon was a spirit, neither angelic nor diabolical, which took care of something, someone, or someplace. (This was education by osmosis, so feel free to correct me.) In Plato's _The Death of Socrates_ (or _Last Days of Socrates_, or ...) Apologia you can read Socrates speculation on the hereafter, and of a guide spirit that he expects will be there to greet him. Dualism was Plato's fundamental or general view of the world. The idea to reduce this view to the dualism of good and evil seems to come from Zarathustra (Zoroaster) who lived sometime between 1000 and 500 a.C. . This thought was picked up by another Persian called Mani (around 250 p.C.) and integrated into the christian religion to prevent a schisma ... and this is all a terrible simplification. As to the name: it's my speculation that, when Christianity came along, the world got divided into the divine and angelic .vs. the diabolical, with us in the middle, and anything that was neither divine nor angelic nor human had to be diabolical. So over time, and probably through forgetting and rediscovery of the word, the helpful or friendly or simply neutral daemon became the demon. I am afraid it was always a principle of religious mission to make all kinds of local gods and daemons personifications of the evil (-- Baal, Lucifer, Pan). I don't know if Ritchie or Thompson were the first to use the name for a computer service. It seems likely that at least one of them was overeducated. So no, there is nothing diabolical about FreeBSD, unlike a certain `32 bit extension to a 16 bit kluge on an eight-bit operating system for a four-bit microprocessor written by a two-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition.' May we never forget the ``story'' in History. My favourite literaric extension of this theme is found in Marcel Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu . Uli. P.S.: Please ignore this OT. I am just hanging around at home with some kind of Influenza. Mark Terribile +---+ |Peter Ulrich Kruppa| | Wuppertal | | Germany | +---+ ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: about logo (The Beasdie question)
Bubble Gum [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I just want to ask (i'm sorry if it's a silly question),why freebsd logo use devil character? Answered by Paul A. Hoadley and Peter Ulrich Kruppa: It's not a devil. It's a daemon. === 1) It isn't a devil but a small daemon, ... programs called daemons, ... 2) [It's] name is beastie, ... a quasihomophone to BSD ... 3) On http://www.freebsdmall.com you can buy Tee-shirts, ... As a recent member of OOOF (The Organization of Obsolete Old Fogies) I was there (well, nearby) when it happened. Back in the early days of UNIX (as then it was typset), when the mists of the Big Iron Age were yet to clear, and v5 and v6 were new and Lions had not yet written, there was called a moot or assembly, and the practice of distributing tee shirts to commemorate a moot was also young. And someone commissioned a tee shirt, and someone drew it (and their names may be found elsewhere), and it showed a PDP-11 to which heavy galvanized plumbing was added. Beneath one leaky pipe fitting was a large wooden barrel named `/dev/null', and on the plumbing there sat some number of small horn'd figures, red, with arrow-pointed tails and tridents (which the uneducated describe as pitchforks), and one of these daemons has just prodded another to leap from his perch, who might be said to be forking off. Backstory on `demon/daemon': In pre-Christian (ie. Greek) thinking, a daemon was a spirit, neither angelic nor diabolical, which took care of something, someone, or someplace. (This was education by osmosis, so feel free to correct me.) In Plato's _The Death of Socrates_ (or _Last Days of Socrates_, or ...) you can read Socrates speculation on the hereafter, and of a guide spirit that he expects will be there to greet him. As to the name: it's my speculation that, when Christianity came along, the world got divided into the divine and angelic .vs. the diabolical, with us in the middle, and anything that was neither divine nor angelic nor human had to be diabolical. So over time, and probably through forgetting and rediscovery of the word, the helpful or friendly or simply neutral daemon became the demon. I don't know if Ritchie or Thompson were the first to use the name for a computer service. It seems likely that at least one of them was overeducated. So no, there is nothing diabolical about FreeBSD, unlike a certain `32 bit extension to a 16 bit kluge on an eight-bit operating system for a four-bit microprocessor written by a two-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition.' May we never forget the ``story'' in History. Mark Terribile __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it! http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/ ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
