IN PRAISE AND GRIPE ABOUT RICHARD STALLMAN

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IN PRAISE AND GRIPE ABOUT RICHARD STALLMAN

Postby yew21 » Apr 12th, '21, 05:41

IN PRAISE AND GRIPE ABOUT RICHARD STALLMAN

https://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/11/busi ... tware.html

The last sentence in the above article belittled the giant that is Richard Stallman.

“He makes a living as a part-time software consultant.”

Being just about the most critical user of computer, I normally have nothing but gripes for software types like Richard Stallman, whom I knew since he moved from the hallway sofas in U.C.Berkeley to guest room in my home during his visit here.

But with Richard, I have more respect than complaints, because he was able to ignore the part of life called “making a living.” Besides of living off everyone he met, Richard one time gave two dollars for the toll before we crossing the Bay Bridge connecting Berkeley and San Francisco.

Just before I was going to use it to pay the toll attendant, I noticed that it’s counterfeit. He really didn’t care about money. No wonder he made it as the Godfather of Software.

This is his wish:
''I have decided to put together a sufficient body of free software so that I will be able to get along without any software that is not free,'' he writes.

For more than three decades, I v struggled to make his wish coming true for myself in the real world but failed. I even have unlimited access to all the latest supercomputers and the fast cash flows that coming with making the giant computers useful, but my super-software, mostly for automation in software engineering, only stopped at workstations and Windows PC’s.

And since 2007, I found the anti-free software companies have successfully sabotaged the whole GNU/Linux effort to the point that even the new comers among the Linux distributions, started to leaning toward the paths of Windows and Apple computers, acting as glorified multimedia typewriters.

But three months ago, I decided to take time off from my project of inventing a new style of playing pingpong, called Pongfu, or pingpong Kungfu, to do a thorough computer analysis of an issue of life-and-death importance – America’s refusing to address the covid-19 pandemic.

I had to use my linux-based software automation package for the nuclear supercomputing applications developed jointly by the University of California and Boeing Computer Services. Off the bat, I computed in February, 2019, that the duration of Covid will be 5 months in China and 13 months in America(Oh, I hate Trump!).

And, naturally I was totally ignored in the results I found on how much testing and tracking America needed to flatten the curve, as well as how, if using the Chinese way(traditional herb medicine and ignoring economics), how quickly we could end the pandemics like China did(they didn’t even do any scientific analysis on the computer).

Once hooked on my old hobby of automated software application and when my wife warned me that our financial was getting shaking, and looking at the way Trump is, at least, keeping the stock market afloat, I decided to do some backup work on our financial insurance by making a plunge into the stock market.

The Covid and stocks forced me to migrated completely from Windows 10 PC to Mageia Linux(the only linux that can handle my software automation package, ROBACUS).

I fulfilled Richard’s wish! All the Window10 functions now become just a small button on the upper right corner. And the ROBACUS bare-bone box is for any computing spanning computation from analysing a pingpong match, to optimizing design of not one, but two, space nuclear reactors, one of Star War(for G.E.) and another Jupiter exploration(Lockheed Martin).

Even though I retired 40 years ago, following Richard’s footstep of ignoring “making a living”, this Mageia/Robacus box is automatically making a living for me now. Just leaving to trade as programmed, it hasn’t suffered a losing session in two weeks.

In ROBACUS, we used a robotic editor, that even Richard was impressed. Also we program mostly with natural language, and the debugger is a fail-safe diagnose that promise to be a self-healer for ROBACUS some day. And 90% of the work are done by software robots, that records and playback verbatim, every keystroke and button push of the user and the responses of the computer.

Since natural-language programing language is a project that will never be done, we still need some programming, which has been made the easiest possible by reduce most program to Fortran, to be processed by f2c(fortran to c), plus all other scripts and Xwindows for automation that are called by subroutine system.

Well, the programming is still too difficult! The problem is that nobody is addressing this problem of writing application programs. You see, for a user, his brain must be 200% free from any distraction from the programming tools.

And, just the opposite, the hackers today are all into system software, which strictly speaking is hardware, not software!

We must make programming as handy as any speaking language. We need to add grammar, as well as create a flexible, disciplined, unlimited vocabulary that facilitates its writing and reading as all computer users’ “First Language”!

Going beyond Richard Stallman, we need to make more people use the free software. This is the only way to truly enter the age of computing.

By Dr.XX
yew21
 
Posts: 10
Joined: Mar 25th, '21, 06:18

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