Issue 80 - The Mailbag -> Kylix - observations

From Translation c 2002 Santy

Answered By Faber Fedor, Ben Okopnik, John Karns, Mike Orr, Heather Stern

Hello!, I suppose that somebody already will have clarified this to you, but just in case...

(I am Spanish, and my English is not very good, I hope that it is sufficient to explain to me well...)


Kylix
Fri, 21 Jun 2002 14:37:51 -0400
Octavio Aguilar (oam from mail.cosett.com.bo)
translated by Mike Orr, except for one part by Heather Stern.

!ah! Un comentario demonio (daemon )siguifica Dinamic access memory, estoy equivocado?

Ah! A daemon commentary means dynamic access memory, or am I mistaken?

Octavio-- Sorry, I've never used Kylix. I just ran a demo once. I don't understand your second question. Memory is hardware; a daemon is software. And what's a "daemon commentary"?

[Santy] Here Octavio asks if daemon (demon is "demonio" in spanish) means "dynamic access memory" I believe that he thinks that daemon is an acronym ->"D-ynamic A-ccess EM-memory ON-???) or so, of course this mistaken, it cames from Day Monitor ¿yes?.

I believe that this clarifies your doubt, I hope...

Intente bajar de internet el mismo paquete pero el resultado para instalarlo es el mismo error. (Heather: oboy, my spanish is rustier than Mike's, but I'll try.) I intend to go under the internet to packets (maybe: download the package ?) but the result of installing is an error.

[Santy] I intend to download the package from internet but the result of installing is the same error.

Bye!

Santy writes:

of course this mistaken, it cames from Day Monitor ¿yes?.

[Faber] I've heard that daemon stands for Disk And Execution MONitor. Whether that's true or not is, I suspect, lost in the mists of history.

[Ben] In The Jargon File:

:daemon: /day'mn/ or /dee'mn/ /n./ [from the mythological

meaning, later rationalized as the acronym `Disk And Execution MONitor'] A program that is not invoked explicitly, but lies dormant waiting for some condition(s) to occur. ....

[John K.] According to my first edition copy of "UNIX System Administration Handbook", Nemeth, Synder & Seebass, pp 403-404,

"Many people equate the word 'daemon' with the word 'demon' implying some kind of Satanic connection between UNIX and the underworld. This is an egregious misunderstanding. 'Daemon' is actually a much older form of 'demon'; daemons have no particular bias towards good or evil, but rather serve to help define a person's character or personality.

[Mike Orr] Similar to the Russian word "chyort", which means "earth spirit", but Christian theology and writers (e.g., Tolstoy) tended to redefine as "devil".

There's an anecdote about a priest who's conducting a funeral service. As the casket is about to be buried, an earthquake erupts, pushing the casket into the earth. "Chyort voz'mi!" ("The devil take it!") mutters the priest and continues the service, not realizing the literal meaning of that common expression.

[John K.] The ancient Greeks' concept of a "personal daemon" was similar to the modern concept of a "guardian angel" -- "eudaemonia" is the state of being helped or protected by a kindly spirit. As a rule, UNIX systems seem to be infested with both daemons and demons. [ :-^) as it were, hehe! - jk]

The word daemon was first used as a computer term by Mick Bailey, a British gentleman who was working on the CTSS programming staff at MIT during the early 1960's. (footnoted: This bit of history comes from Jerry Saltzer at MIT, via Dennis Ritchie, via Kirk McKusick.) Mick quoted the Oxford Dictionary in support of both the meaning and spelling of the word. Daemons made their way from CTSS to Multics to UNIX, where they are so popular they need a superdaemon to manage them. Daemons are featured on the cover of the BSD UNIX manuals.

[Heather] I've been told that the little trident in the BSD Daemon's hands is not a weapon, simply his implementation of the fork() system call... but I couldn't find a canonical reference to say so.

[John K.] ... cyber-history class dismissed

These figures [defining the personality] also appear prominently in Tibeten (and Hindu if I'm not mistaken) drawings called mandalas. Many of the mandalas have these figures painted in a circular or horse shoe pattern surrounding a central figure. At the moment I forget the term that they use to name the entities, but they are representative of universal characteristics of the subconscious, which every person who follows "the path" must master / transcend.

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