Bill Joy
Bill Joy
William Nelson "Bill" Joyis an American computer scientist. Joy co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy and Andreas von Bechtolsheim, and served as chief scientist at the company until 2003. He played an integral role in the early development of BSD UNIX while a graduate student at Berkeley, and he is the original author of the vi text editor. He also wrote the 2000 essay "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us", in which he expressed deep...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth8 November 1954
CountryUnited States of America
Bitmap display is media compatible with dot matrix or laser printers.
You can drive a car by looking in the rear view mirror as long as nothing is ahead of you. Not enough software professionals are engaged in forward thinking.
The standard definition of AI is that which we don't understand.
If you stay up late and you have another hour of work to do, you can just stay up another hour later without running into a wall and having to stop. Whereas it might take three or four hours if you start over, you might finish if you just work that extra hour. If you're a morning person, the day always intrudes a fixed amount of time in the future. So it's much less efficient. Which is why I think computer people tend to be night people - because a machine doesn't get sleepy.
I got tired of people complaining that it was too hard to use UNIX because the editor was too complicated.
Document preparation systems will also require large screen displays.
The Open Source theorem says that if you give away source code, innovation will occur. Certainly, Unix was done this way... However, the corollary states that the innovation will occur elsewhere. No matter how many people you hire. So the only way to get close to the state of the art is to give the people who are going to be doing the innovative things the means to do it. That's why we had built-in source code with Unix. Open source is tapping the energy that's out there.
That lack of programmability is probably what ultimately will doom vi. It can't extend its domain.
The next step after cheap is free, and after free is disposable.
Take responsibility for the things you build and invent.
You can't solve a problem with the management of technology with more technology.
I think one of the interesting things is that vi is really a mode-based editor.
Although humankind inherently "desires to know", if open access to, and unlimited development of, knowledge henceforth puts us all in clear danger of extinction, then common sense demands that we re-examine our reverence for knowledge.
Given the incredible power of these new technologies, shouldn't we be asking how we can best coexist with them? And if our own extinction is a likely, or even possible, outcome of our technological development, shouldn't we proceed with great caution?