[TUHS] etymology of cron

[TUHS] etymology of cron

[David]

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It has been updated again:

 The origin of the name cron is from the Greek word for time, χρόνος (chronos).[2][3] (Ken Thompson, author of cron, has confirmed this in a private communication with Brian Kernighan.)

So it would appear that if enough people bang on enough keyboards on the Wikipedia site, things can change.

	David

[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Marc Rochkind]

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that 2nd ref is mine, too.

marc

On Friday, December 25, 2015, David <david at kdbarto.org> wrote:

> It has been updated again:
>
>  The origin of the name cron is from the Greek word for time, χρόνος
> (chronos).[2][3] (Ken Thompson, author of cron, has confirmed this in a
> private communication with Brian Kernighan.)
>
> So it would appear that if enough people bang on enough keyboards on the
> Wikipedia site, things can change.
>
>         David
>
>
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[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Friday, 25 December 2015 at 10:41:54 -0800, David wrote:
> It has been updated again:
>
>  The origin of the name cron is from the Greek word for time,
> ???????????? (chronos).[2][3] (Ken Thompson, author of cron, has
> confirmed this in a private communication with Brian Kernighan.)

Yes, but you've removed the reference to the incorrect expansions.  As
I noted at some length earlier in this thread, that's not appropriate.
It ignores the fact that people have made these claims, it removes the
comment that they're unsubstantiated, and it prepares the field for
somebody else to make the claim again, with possibly even more bizarre
expmanations.  I won't back it out yet, because I can see further
changes coming from other directions.  Once again this Tedickey
character has been very active.

Greg
--
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[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Marc Rochkind]

To update this thread:

The wording from my last edit to the Wikipedia article on cron is still
there, although one of the references has been removed, and the phrase
"better source needed" has been added. That part is OK with me, and I
actually agree with it--a better source *is* needed.

But at least the article at this point no longer says that cron is an
acronym.

[To Greg Lehey: As anyone can edit the article, you could could add a
paragraph about bogus claims as to what cron means if you want, but, in my
opinion, the article is better without this distracting discussion.]

On Fri, Dec 25, 2015 at 3:22 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:

> On Friday, 25 December 2015 at 10:41:54 -0800, David wrote:
> > It has been updated again:
> >
> >  The origin of the name cron is from the Greek word for time,
> > ???????????? (chronos).[2][3] (Ken Thompson, author of cron, has
> > confirmed this in a private communication with Brian Kernighan.)
>
> Yes, but you've removed the reference to the incorrect expansions.  As
> I noted at some length earlier in this thread, that's not appropriate.
> It ignores the fact that people have made these claims, it removes the
> comment that they're unsubstantiated, and it prepares the field for
> somebody else to make the claim again, with possibly even more bizarre
> expmanations.  I won't back it out yet, because I can see further
> changes coming from other directions.  Once again this Tedickey
> character has been very active.
>
> Greg
> --
> Sent from my desktop computer.
> Finger grog at FreeBSD.org for PGP public key.
> See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
> This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft MUA reports
> problems, please read http://tinyurl.com/broken-mua
>
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[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Clem Cole]

Marc - thank you for bird dogging this.  I think the email from Ken to
Brian, and the email from Doug should be enough to close the issue for ever.

This is of course how history gets rewritten - which is a sad statement.
As I a wise man said ( Ben Franklin maybe??), history is often written by
those that were never there.

On Sat, Jan 2, 2016 at 2:56 PM, Marc Rochkind <rochkind at basepath.com> wrote:

> To update this thread:
>
> The wording from my last edit to the Wikipedia article on cron is still
> there, although one of the references has been removed, and the phrase
> "better source needed" has been added. That part is OK with me, and I
> actually agree with it--a better source *is* needed.
>
> But at least the article at this point no longer says that cron is an
> acronym.
>
> [To Greg Lehey: As anyone can edit the article, you could could add a
> paragraph about bogus claims as to what cron means if you want, but, in my
> opinion, the article is better without this distracting discussion.]
>
> On Fri, Dec 25, 2015 at 3:22 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On Friday, 25 December 2015 at 10:41:54 -0800, David wrote:
>> > It has been updated again:
>> >
>> >  The origin of the name cron is from the Greek word for time,
>> > ???????????? (chronos).[2][3] (Ken Thompson, author of cron, has
>> > confirmed this in a private communication with Brian Kernighan.)
>>
>> Yes, but you've removed the reference to the incorrect expansions.  As
>> I noted at some length earlier in this thread, that's not appropriate.
>> It ignores the fact that people have made these claims, it removes the
>> comment that they're unsubstantiated, and it prepares the field for
>> somebody else to make the claim again, with possibly even more bizarre
>> expmanations.  I won't back it out yet, because I can see further
>> changes coming from other directions.  Once again this Tedickey
>> character has been very active.
>>
>> Greg
>> --
>> Sent from my desktop computer.
>> Finger grog at FreeBSD.org for PGP public key.
>> See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
>> This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft MUA reports
>> problems, please read http://tinyurl.com/broken-mua
>>
>
>
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[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Saturday,  2 January 2016 at 12:56:35 -0700, Marc Rochkind wrote:
>
> [To Greg Lehey: As anyone can edit the article, you could could add
> a paragraph about bogus claims as to what cron means if you want,
> but, in my opinion, the article is better without this distracting
> discussion.]

Yes, I have edited it already.  I'm biding my time in the hope that
TEDickey will go away.  And I still firmly believe that the incorrect
claims need to be mentioned.  I said all this before:

> On Fri, Dec 25, 2015 at 3:22 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
>>
>> Yes, but you've removed the reference to the incorrect expansions.
>> As I noted at some length earlier in this thread, that's not
>> appropriate.  It ignores the fact that people have made these
>> claims, it removes the comment that they're unsubstantiated, and it
>> prepares the field for somebody else to make the claim again, with
>> possibly even more bizarre expmanations.  I won't back it out yet,
>> because I can see further changes coming from other directions.
>> Once again this Tedickey character has been very active.

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
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[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Ronald Natalie]

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The same bullpoop exists for the PING program.     I sat next to Mike Muuss while he wrote ping.   We did it a few days before the Arpanet switched over to TCP/IP.   We had just brought up the 11/70 system we had using code backported from 4.1 BSD into our JHU version V6 kernel.     As you can probably expect the machine crashed.   We brought it back up and were working on what went wrong and then it crashed again and immediately my phone rang.   My friend Louis Mamakos who along with Mike Petry was working will Dave Mills on the “FUZZBALL” RT-11 network platform.    They admitted that they had attempted to send ICMP ECHO requests (I.e., PINGS) to our machine.     Sure enough, Mike and I traced through the ICMP code and found that the code used the same mbuf of the incoming request as the data for the outgoing but neglected to suppress freeing it at that point.   It freed it as it did with all incoming requests after processing.   It the dumped it in the send queue and that freed it as well.

Well, Mike thinks.   UNIX needs a ping program as well so we can test things.     He banged it out in about an hour.    Mike joked years later about PING being an acronym for packet inter network groper but he was NEVER serious about it.

Mike did substantial contributions to UNIX, TCP/IP, Computer Graphics, etc… but we always laughed off that it was the (UNIX) ping that he’d be know for.

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[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Jacob Goense]

On 2016-01-02 20:26, Ronald Natalie wrote:
> Well, Mike thinks.   UNIX needs a ping program as well so we can test
> things.     He banged it out in about an hour.    Mike joked years
> later about PING being an acronym for packet inter network groper but
> he was NEVER serious about it.

Well, the source code for the fuzzball version of PING[1a] calls it
"P i n g - packet inter net groper".

The fuzzball manual[1b] calls it:

	The Packet InterNet Groper (PING) is an internet measurement and
	debugging tool.

Mills's 1983 RFC889[2] calls the original PING Packet InterNet Groper.

There is his claim[3] he invented it in 1979.

Where it seems Muus preferred to keep the sonar analogy pure for ping(8)
Mills liked to play with words all the time.

[1a] 
http://web.archive.org/web/20131020063249/http://malarky.udel.edu/~dmills/data/du0/PING.MAC
[1b] 
http://web.archive.org/web/20141108042310/http://malarky.udel.edu/~dmills/data/du0/HELP.TXT
[2]  https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc889
[3]  
http://www-mice.cs.ucl.ac.uk/multimedia/misc/tcp_ip/8702.mm.www/0342.html

[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Ronald Natalie]

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Packet Internet Groper sounds definitely like something Mills would come up, but I’m pretty sure he was fitting words to make the existing word an acronym (by the way history is full of these things like news, golf, posh, etc… are all alleged to be acronyms thought here is no historical justification for any of this).    As others have pointed out that ping existed prior to Mills and the Fuzzballs for other protocols.      If Mills was promulgating that definition prior to 1982, that’s fine, but we hadn’t heard it and it was not the etymology of the UNIX ping program.   In fact, other than the fact that Louis Mamakos was working on the Fuzzballs, we didn’t know much about them.   Louis knew to call me after he crashed our machine because I was the childhood friend of his officemate and had been down to the UMCP computer center on countless occasions to visit.

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[TUHS] etymology of cron

[John Cowan]

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Ronald Natalie scripsit:

> (by the way history is full of these things like news, golf, posh,
> etc… are all alleged to be acronyms though there is no historical
> justification for any of this).

Indeed, any word older than about 1890 is not an acronym, with a few
Hebrew and Arabic exceptions like Tanakh, Rambam, _abjad_.  POTUS and
SCOTUS were codewords devised in 1879 and meant to be used on the wire
only, but occasionally leaked into print.  Initialisms like SPQR are
much older, with English-language examples like O.K. and N.G. dating to
the 1840s.  It's not clear when A.W.O.L. switched from an initialism to
an acronym proper, probably WWI; the same ambiguity applies to O.U.D.S.

The word _acronym_ itself is first recorded in 1940 (borrowed from
German), and they certainly had taken off by that time.  The oldest ones
consistently written as an ordinary word (no capitals, no periods) are
probably _radar_ and _snafu_ (both 1941), though some older ones lose
their caps at a later date, like the now-obscure MUSA (multiple unit
steerable antenna) and W/Op (wireless operator), later _musa_ and _wop_.
The later _loran_, _fubar_, _jato_ also fall into this category.

"Rip track" (1892) may be the oldest retronym in English; it's a stretch
of railroad track used to repair rolling stock, later reinterpreted as
"Repair In Place".

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
You escaped them by the will-death and the Way of the Black Wheel.
I could not.  --Great-Souled Sam

[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Jacob Goense]

On 2016-01-02 20:26, Ronald Natalie wrote:
>     As you can probably expect the machine crashed.   We brought it
> back up and were working on what went wrong and then it crashed again
> and immediately my phone rang.

Awesome to read this story from the ICMP ECHO REPLY side. Thanks!

Thread "[ih] A laugh and a question" at
http://mailman.postel.org/pipermail/internet-history/2006-March/thread.html
was what inspired me to bring fuzzballs up in simh.

(No BSDs were harmed during the emulation)

[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Ronald Natalie]

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> 
> Thread "[ih] A laugh and a question" at
> http://mailman.postel.org/pipermail/internet-history/2006-March/thread.html
> was what inspired me to bring fuzzballs up in simh.

There were some inaccuracies in that piece as well which is why history is sometimes fun.   It was definitely December 82 Not 83 because it was a few days before LINK 0 was going to be shut off on the APRANET and we were scrambling to convert our machines to TCP.    As Clem and I have discussed in a side conversation, it was Gurwitz’s contribution to 4.1a rather than 4.2a (was there a 4.2a even)?   I remember pouring over the 4.1a/4.1c/4.2 stuff doing the user mode conversions for our machines.    I really disliked the berknet host table format (alas this has persisted longer than ping) and there was not yet a program that converted the table that the NIC distributed to that format.    I rewrote rhost (and it’s related functions) to read the NIC host tables directly.    I also wrote a program to periodically retrieve the table from the NIC.

Later someone provided a program to build a BSD-style host table from NIC table.    We inadvertantly blew up this program when we added a machine, coincidentally called BRL-ZAP to the table.    It was the first ethernet-connected laser printer (an Imagen Imprint-10) we had.   I just put 68000 as the CPU type without thinking about it.   I got some irate emails from people thinking I’d crashed their program intentionally given the hostname.   Apparently the conversion program used YACC and an incorrect grammer to parse the table.   They had assumed that machine types always began with a letter.    To me the fact that they had used YACC was overkill (my direct reading program didn’t do so), the file was essentially a bunch of fields separated with COLONS (and in some fields subdivided by commas).    There was some file that every UNIX machine was already parsing continually without the need for a grammar similarly formatted (/etc/passwd anybody?).

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[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Jeremy C. Reed]

On Sun, 3 Jan 2016, Ronald Natalie wrote:

> > Thread "[ih] A laugh and a question" at
> > http://mailman.postel.org/pipermail/internet-history/2006-March/thread.html
> > was what inspired me to bring fuzzballs up in simh.
> 
> There were some inaccuracies in that piece as well which is why 
> history is sometimes fun.  It was definitely December 82 Not 83 
> because it was a few days before LINK 0 was going to be shut off on 
> the APRANET and we were scrambling to convert our machines to TCP.  
> As Clem and I have discussed in a side conversation, it was Gurwitz?s 
> contribution to 4.1a rather than 4.2a (was there a 4.2a even)?

I also looked at Muuss's own story long ago on his webpage.

And see corresponding bug entry from December 1983 and the same 
unattributed bug fix (revision 6.3)

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/net.unix-wizards/Dzh14xPrbiA/XAYJHc7VSgcJ

https://github.com/weiss/original-bsd/commit/195492fc6b05470d246fbedd4d2cf5c77d1d63b9

So his own story says impetus of his ping is a meeting in Norway in July 
1983. This year may be off.  RFC 828 of August 1982, said a planned IFIP 
technical committee meeting would be held in Norway in 1982.

His story says in December 1983 he quickly coded up his Unix ping but 
needed kernel support for it to work and required some hardware fixes 
before his "first" ping packet.

But his bug report (linked above) recorded as bugs/4.2BSD/sys/38 seems 
to suggest he already had a "ping" program that could have been in the 
4.2BSD release (which came out earlier in 1983).  I wonder what 
triggered the 20% packet loss with ping and maybe always was there since 
his year-earlier implementation (or maybe some other kernel change broke 
it or maybe he extended his ping to be able to show that).

His kernel fix was integrated at CSRG the next month (1984) and his ping 
was not added to BSD SCCS until April 1985. That ping revision had the 
comments saying it was December, 1983 and for "4.2".

The confusing thing is why notice the 20% loss even on software loopback 
driver (per bug ticket) when his story says other hardware needed to be 
fixed too before first ping. I think he may have skipped some of the 
history when he wrote his story.

(I tried to write this story up in my BSD history book but now became 
more confused :)

[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Ronald Natalie]

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Alas, Mike was a tale teller and pretty good at it.   It’s not surprising (to me) that there may be some inconsistencies to his stories (especially when recounted in informal settings).

I remember the Norway meeting.    Mike actually wanted to send me in his place.   The reason he was invited was that at the time he was maintaining an e-mail journal called the TCP-IP-DIGEST.    Even though he’d pretty much delegated the IP stuff over to me (he had a ton of irons in the fire:   high performance computing, computer graphics, etc..>), the powers that be decided that they didn’t want a substitute.   The outgrowth of that meeting was that the a new GADS (Gateway Architecture and Data Structures) under Dave Mills’s leadership would form which I attended until they morphed it into the IETF (which technically had its first meeting at the GADS meeting it was formed though I hosted the first REAL meeting at BRL shortly thereafter).

The bugs that you posted aren’t the ones I was referring to.    This may indeed be when Mike offered UCB the ping source, but I’m fairly sure my story of the original version is accurate.    We needed at least a rudimentary ping to verify the system after Louis Mamakos crashed us trying to ping us.    I do know Mike made a number of mods over time to set sizes, etc… but the basic functionality of sending a ping once a second and waiting asynchronously for the responses was there from the start.

Another program called ttcp that he wrote never got immensely popular but we used it for throughput testing as well.
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[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Kurt H Maier]

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On Sat, Jan 02, 2016 at 08:26:30PM -0500, Ronald Natalie wrote:
> Mike did substantial contributions to UNIX, TCP/IP, Computer Graphics, 
> etc… but we always laughed off that it was the (UNIX) ping that he’d 
> be know for.

If it helps, there's a really nice Lotus cruising around with BRLCAD
vanity plates...

khm

[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Ronald Natalie

    > a new GADS (Gateway Architecture and Data Structures) under Dave
    > Mills's leadership would form which I attended until they morphed it
    > into the IETF

To give a bit more detail, GADS was not producing needed stuff as fast as was
needed, so it was split into InArc and InEng, with Dave running InArc and
Corrigan (initially, Gross later) in charge.

	Noel

[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Jacob Goense <dugo at xs4all.nl>

    > Mills's 1983 RFC889[2] calls the original PING Packet InterNet Groper.

I have a strong suspicion that Packet-etc is a 'backronym' from Dave Mills.

Note that the use of the term "echo" for a packet returned dates back quite a
while before that, see e.g. IEN 104, "Minutes of the Fault Isolation
Meeting", from March 1979:

  "ability to echo packets off any gateway"

When ICMP was split from GGP (see IEN-109, RFC-777), the functionality
migrated from GGP to ICMP, and was generalized so that all hosts provided the
capability, not just routers.

	Noel

[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Norman Wilson]

Personally, I lean away from listing the nine billion debunked
names of cron.  It's like adding a disclaimer to cat(1) to
explain that cat just copies data to standard output, it doesn't
transform it or compute how long it would take to send the data
over UUCP.

But it probably shows that I have been trying to write a couple
of manual pages lately (for some personal stuff, plus some docs
for work that are not technically manual pages but deserve the
same sort of conciseness).

Maybe Wikipedia-page format should admit an optional BUGS section.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON

PS: seriously, though I wouldn't bother including the debunking
text myself, save perhaps on the Talk page to encourage editors
to delete any future attempts to revive the un-names, I have no
problem with Grog doing it.  More power to him if he has the
energy!

[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Saturday,  2 January 2016 at 18:14:09 -0500, Norman Wilson wrote:
>
> Maybe Wikipedia-page format should admit an optional BUGS section.

:-)

Greg
--
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[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Norman Wilson]

John Cowan:

  Well, of course there are conferences and there are conferences.  The
  only conference I've ever had a paper published at, Balisage, is as
  peer-reviewed as any journal.  (And it is gold open access and doesn't
  charge for pages -- the storage costs are absorbed as conference overhead.)

====

Have you actually looked up the cited reference?

The trouble is not that it's a conference paper.  The trouble is
that that the `authority' being cited is just a random assertion,
not backed up.

It's as if I mentioned your name in a paper about something else,
remarked in passing and without any citation of my own that you have
a wooden leg, and Wikipedia accepted that as proof of your prosthesis.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
(Four limbs and eight eyes, thank you very much)

[TUHS] etymology of cron

[John Cowan]

Norman Wilson scripsit:

> The trouble is not that it's a conference paper.  The trouble is
> that that the `authority' being cited is just a random assertion,
> not backed up.

Okay then.  There are fields in which conference papers have zero authority,
and those in which they have a great deal, that's all, so mentioning that
the source for the bad information was a conference paper was, as the
lawyers say, more prejudicial than probative.

> It's as if I mentioned your name in a paper about something else,
> remarked in passing and without any citation of my own that you have
> a wooden leg, and Wikipedia accepted that as proof of your prosthesis.

Got it.

> Norman Wilson
> Toronto ON
> (Four limbs and eight eyes, thank you very much)

Hexapodia is the key insight.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
Income tax, if I may be pardoned for saying so, is a tax on income.
                --Lord Macnaghten (1901)

[TUHS] etymology of cron

[SZIGETI Szabolcs]

I think we need the obligatory xkcd reference here: https://xkcd.com/978/

Szabolcs

2015-12-23 18:19 GMT+01:00 Norman Wilson <norman at oclsc.org>:

>
> Have you actually looked up the cited reference?
>


> Norman Wilson
> Toronto ON
> (Four limbs and eight eyes, thank you very much)
>
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[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2015-12-23 17:04, norman at oclsc.org  (Norman Wilson) wrote:
> John Cowan:
>
>    Wikipedia is by nature a*summary of the published literature*.  If you
>    want to get some folklore, like what "cron" stands for, into Wikipedia,
>    then publish a folklore article in a journal, book, or similar reputable
>    publication.  Random uncontrolled mailing lists simply do not count.
>
> ======
>
> That sounds fair enough on the surface.
>
> But if you follow the references cited to support the cron
> acronyms, you find that random unsupported assertions in
> conference papers do count.  That's not a lot better.

I've had similar experiences with Wikipedia in the past. At one point I 
was trying to get the PDP-11 article corrected, as it said that the 
PDP-11 was an architecture that disappeared in the 80s (paraphrasing). I 
pointed out that the last *new* PDP-11 model from DEC itself was 
released in 1990, and that others are still making new PDP-11 CPUs.

My corrections were reverted, and I was asked for citations. I went 
through a silly loop of requests for sources for my claims, while there 
seems to have been no demand for citation for the original claims, more 
than the "knowledge" of someone. It wasn't until I dug up the system 
manuals and documentation from DEC about the PDP-11/93 and PDP-11/94 
(which have actual time of original publishing date printed) that my 
claims were (somewhat) accepted.

I've also had numerous fights about the Wikipedia articles about virtual 
memory, where the original authors on the article clearly had not 
understood the difference between virtual memory and demand paged 
memory. The articles are better today, but when I last looked, they 
still had some details wrong in there. And getting anything corrected is 
hell, as any silly statement that is already in is almost regarded as 
gospel, and anything you try to correct is questioned to hell and back 
before anyone will accept it. (Hey, according to Wikipedia, a PDP-11 do 
not have virtual memory... I wonder what it has then. Fake memory? 
Although, the article might now actually accept that a PDP-11 do have 
virtual memory, although no OS I know of implements demand paging, but 
that could be done as well, if anyone wanted to.)

Nowadays, I use Wikipedia to find information, but just take everything 
in there with a large grain of salt when it comes to details. There are 
just too many ignorant people who are writing stuff, and who seem to get 
anything accepted, and too much hassle to get anything corrected when 
you actually knows the subject.

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol

[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Noel Chiappa]

    On Dec 22, 2015, at 5:44 PM, Norman Wilson <norman at oclsc.org> wrote:

    > If that's the quality of reference they accept, there is simply no
    > reason to take anything they publish as gospel.

You're mistaking Wikipedia for an information source you can rely on. It's
not. It's more akin to an attempt to prove that an infinite number of
monkeys, with an infinite number of typewriters, and an infinite amount of
time, can produce a reliable encyclopaedia.

(Yes, yes, spare me the surveys that show that Wikipedia's error rates aren't
that bad, when compared with other encyclopaedias, etc.)

Don't get me wrong, Wikipedia is quite useful as a place for an
_introduction_ to any topic, but anyone who really wants to _reliably_ know
anything about a topic needs to look at the references, not the articles.

There was an attempt to do a Wikipedia-like online encyclopaedia that one
could rely on - Citizendium - but alas it doesn't seem to have taken off (or
hadn't when I got distracted from working on it).

And I know whereof I speak; those who wish to be amused may want to read:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jnc/Astronomer_vs_Amateur

And apologies for continuing the off-topic (this group certainly can't fix
Wikipedia, people have been complaining about this problem for many years
now), but some buttons, you just have to respond when they are pushed...

	Noel

[TUHS] etymology of cron

[John Cowan]

Noel Chiappa scripsit:

> You're mistaking Wikipedia for an information source you can rely on. It's
> not. 

There are no such information sources.  People forget; researchers make
mistakes; mathematical proofs have bugs.  The only alternative to eventualism
is infallible dogmatism.

> Don't get me wrong, Wikipedia is quite useful as a place for an
> _introduction_ to any topic, but anyone who really wants to _reliably_ know
> anything about a topic needs to look at the references, not the articles.

But in the case to hand, it's precisely the references that are at fault.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
        "You need a change: try Canada"  "You need a change: try China"
                --fortune cookies opened by a couple that I know

[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Norman Wilson]

John Cowan:

  Wikipedia is by nature a *summary of the published literature*.  If you
  want to get some folklore, like what "cron" stands for, into Wikipedia,
  then publish a folklore article in a journal, book, or similar reputable
  publication.  Random uncontrolled mailing lists simply do not count.

======

That sounds fair enough on the surface.

But if you follow the references cited to support the cron
acronyms, you find that random unsupported assertions in
conference papers do count.  That's not a lot better.

I'd like to see a published, citable reference for the
true origin of `cron'.  Even better, better published
material for a lot of the charming minutiae of the early
days of UNIX.  (Anyone feel up to interviewing Doug and
Ken and Brian and whoever else is left, and writing it up
for publication in ;login:?)

But I'd be satisfied if we could somehow stamp out the
use of spurious references to support spurious claims.
If I had the time and energy I'd look into how to challenge
the cron acronyms on those grounds.  Any volunteers?

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON

[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Clem Cole]

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On Wed, Dec 23, 2015 at 8:36 AM, Norman Wilson <norman at oclsc.org> wrote:

> I'd like to see a published, citable reference for the
> true origin of `cron'.  Even better, better published
> material for a lot of the charming minutiae of the early
> days of UNIX.  (Anyone feel up to interviewing Doug and
> Ken and Brian and whoever else is left, and writing it up
> for publication in ;login:?)
>

​I just sent Rik a note and asked him to make it so.

Clem​
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[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Clem Cole]

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It seem to me to be sad statement that it takes this kind of work to get
the truth out, but it looks like my informal role as "Emeritus President"
of USENIX may pay a small dividend.

Rik Farrow, the current USENIX Board and I had a round of email yesterday.
It turns out a number of members of the USENIX Board have also has similar
or in one case worse experiences, with the Wikipedia folks -- so folks were
more than happy to see if they can help make it right.

Rik in his role as the editor of ;login is going to try work with Doug and
to get something "published" into the next edition which should satisfy the
Wikipedia folks.   There is a minor issue is that Rik is technically past
the deadline but due to the holiday, there are a few days of grace that the
workers putting the issue together have said they will thankfully try to
handle.

So maybe we can have get this fixed shortly.

Clem

On Wed, Dec 23, 2015 at 8:53 AM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

>
> On Wed, Dec 23, 2015 at 8:36 AM, Norman Wilson <norman at oclsc.org> wrote:
>
>> I'd like to see a published, citable reference for the
>> true origin of `cron'.  Even better, better published
>> material for a lot of the charming minutiae of the early
>> days of UNIX.  (Anyone feel up to interviewing Doug and
>> Ken and Brian and whoever else is left, and writing it up
>> for publication in ;login:?)
>>
>
> ​I just sent Rik a note and asked him to make it so.
>
> Clem​
>
>
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[TUHS] etymology of cron

[John Cowan]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
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Clem Cole scripsit:

> Rik in his role as the editor of ;login is going to try work with Doug and
> to get something "published" into the next edition which should satisfy the
> Wikipedia folks.   There is a minor issue is that Rik is technically past
> the deadline but due to the holiday, there are a few days of grace that the
> workers putting the issue together have said they will thankfully try to
> handle.
> 
> So maybe we can have get this fixed shortly.

I don't think so.  Is ;login: a peer-reviewed journal?  It doesn't look
like it to me.  Still, the current state says:

    The origin of the name cron is from the Greek word for
    time, χρόνος (chronos), according to its author Ken
    Thompson[2][better source needed]. Others have suggested that the
    name comes from the Greek God Chronos[3] or that it is an acronym
    for "Command Run On Notice"[4] or "Commands Run Over Night",[5]
    but the references lack substantiation.

Even if someone is still grumbling on the talk page, that doesn't
substantially misrepresent anything that I can see.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
        Is it not written, "That which is written, is written"?

[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Thursday, 24 December 2015 at 10:17:53 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
> Clem Cole scripsit:
>
>> Rik in his role as the editor of ;login is going to try work with Doug and
>> to get something "published" into the next edition which should satisfy the
>> Wikipedia folks.   There is a minor issue is that Rik is technically past
>> the deadline but due to the holiday, there are a few days of grace that the
>> workers putting the issue together have said they will thankfully try to
>> handle.
>>
>> So maybe we can have get this fixed shortly.
>
> I don't think so.  Is ;login: a peer-reviewed journal?  It doesn't
> look like it to me.

One of the original references was from the proceedings of an AUUG
conference.  From personal experience I can confirm that the level of
review for the conferences fell far short of what USENIX did.

> Still, the current state says:
>
>     The origin of the name cron is from the Greek word for
>     time, ???????????? (chronos), according to its author Ken
>     Thompson[2][better source needed]. Others have suggested that the
>     name comes from the Greek God Chronos[3] or that it is an acronym
>     for "Command Run On Notice"[4] or "Commands Run Over Night",[5]
>     but the references lack substantiation.
>
> Even if someone is still grumbling on the talk page, that doesn't
> substantially misrepresent anything that I can see.

Yes, that last sentence was my update.  As I mentioned in an earlier
message, I think that it's appropriate that it should stay, if only to
stop people making the claim again in a more forceful manner.

But it would be nice to be able to remove the [better source needed].
It seems that there's only one person objecting to the changes.  I've
asked him on the talk page what he really wants.

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog at FreeBSD.org for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft MUA reports
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[TUHS] etymology of cron

[scj]

This has been a somewhat bizarre and troubling thread, all in all.

Would anybody want to discuss the origin of 'ls'?   Or 'at'?

Steve

PS: (that was NOT a serious suggestion!)



> On Thursday, 24 December 2015 at 10:17:53 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
>> Clem Cole scripsit:
>>
>>> Rik in his role as the editor of ;login is going to try work with Doug
>>> and
>>> to get something "published" into the next edition which should satisfy
>>> the
>>> Wikipedia folks.   There is a minor issue is that Rik is technically
>>> past
>>> the deadline but due to the holiday, there are a few days of grace that
>>> the
>>> workers putting the issue together have said they will thankfully try
>>> to
>>> handle.
>>>
>>> So maybe we can have get this fixed shortly.
>>
>> I don't think so.  Is ;login: a peer-reviewed journal?  It doesn't
>> look like it to me.
>
> One of the original references was from the proceedings of an AUUG
> conference.  From personal experience I can confirm that the level of
> review for the conferences fell far short of what USENIX did.
>
>> Still, the current state says:
>>
>>     The origin of the name cron is from the Greek word for
>>     time, ???????????? (chronos), according to its author Ken
>>     Thompson[2][better source needed]. Others have suggested that the
>>     name comes from the Greek God Chronos[3] or that it is an acronym
>>     for "Command Run On Notice"[4] or "Commands Run Over Night",[5]
>>     but the references lack substantiation.
>>
>> Even if someone is still grumbling on the talk page, that doesn't
>> substantially misrepresent anything that I can see.
>
> Yes, that last sentence was my update.  As I mentioned in an earlier
> message, I think that it's appropriate that it should stay, if only to
> stop people making the claim again in a more forceful manner.
>
> But it would be nice to be able to remove the [better source needed].
> It seems that there's only one person objecting to the changes.  I've
> asked him on the talk page what he really wants.
>
> Greg
> --
> Sent from my desktop computer.
> Finger grog at FreeBSD.org for PGP public key.
> See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
> This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft MUA reports
> problems, please read http://tinyurl.com/broken-mua
>

[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Larry McVoy]

What's troubling is wikipedia, I didn't realize they were that much of a pain.

On Thu, Dec 24, 2015 at 04:52:33PM -0800, scj at yaccman.com wrote:
> This has been a somewhat bizarre and troubling thread, all in all.
> 
> Would anybody want to discuss the origin of 'ls'?   Or 'at'?
> 
> Steve
> 
> PS: (that was NOT a serious suggestion!)
> 
> 
> 
> > On Thursday, 24 December 2015 at 10:17:53 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
> >> Clem Cole scripsit:
> >>
> >>> Rik in his role as the editor of ;login is going to try work with Doug
> >>> and
> >>> to get something "published" into the next edition which should satisfy
> >>> the
> >>> Wikipedia folks.   There is a minor issue is that Rik is technically
> >>> past
> >>> the deadline but due to the holiday, there are a few days of grace that
> >>> the
> >>> workers putting the issue together have said they will thankfully try
> >>> to
> >>> handle.
> >>>
> >>> So maybe we can have get this fixed shortly.
> >>
> >> I don't think so.  Is ;login: a peer-reviewed journal?  It doesn't
> >> look like it to me.
> >
> > One of the original references was from the proceedings of an AUUG
> > conference.  From personal experience I can confirm that the level of
> > review for the conferences fell far short of what USENIX did.
> >
> >> Still, the current state says:
> >>
> >>     The origin of the name cron is from the Greek word for
> >>     time, ???????????? (chronos), according to its author Ken
> >>     Thompson[2][better source needed]. Others have suggested that the
> >>     name comes from the Greek God Chronos[3] or that it is an acronym
> >>     for "Command Run On Notice"[4] or "Commands Run Over Night",[5]
> >>     but the references lack substantiation.
> >>
> >> Even if someone is still grumbling on the talk page, that doesn't
> >> substantially misrepresent anything that I can see.
> >
> > Yes, that last sentence was my update.  As I mentioned in an earlier
> > message, I think that it's appropriate that it should stay, if only to
> > stop people making the claim again in a more forceful manner.
> >
> > But it would be nice to be able to remove the [better source needed].
> > It seems that there's only one person objecting to the changes.  I've
> > asked him on the talk page what he really wants.
> >
> > Greg
> > --
> > Sent from my desktop computer.
> > Finger grog at FreeBSD.org for PGP public key.
> > See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
> > This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft MUA reports
> > problems, please read http://tinyurl.com/broken-mua
> >
> 

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

[sequence recovered]

On Thursday, 24 December 2015 at 17:05:48 -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 24, 2015 at 04:52:33PM -0800, scj at yaccman.com wrote:
>> This has been a somewhat bizarre and troubling thread, all in all.
>>
>> Would anybody want to discuss the origin of 'ls'?   Or 'at'?
>
> What's troubling is wikipedia, I didn't realize they were that much
> of a pain.

Normally they aren't.  I think it's this one editor.  On trawling
through the pages, there's this policy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules
That seems to apply here.

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog at FreeBSD.org for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft MUA reports
problems, please read http://tinyurl.com/broken-mua
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[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Dave Horsfall]

On Fri, 25 Dec 2015, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:

> > What's troubling is wikipedia, I didn't realize they were that much of 
> > a pain.
> 
> Normally they aren't.  I think it's this one editor.  On trawling
> through the pages, there's this policy:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules
> That seems to apply here.

Suddenly, much is explained...

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Marc Rochkind]

Got into this thread very late.

Some of the posts seem to assume that Wikipedia has some sort editing
oversight. I think of it as a collection of people. Somebody said that a
better source was needed, but that's just his or her opinion. It doesn't
mean that Wikipedia as an organization has rejected or dismissed the text
in question.

Anyway, I edited the article to reflect what I always knew and what
apparently Ken has actually confirmed. The acronym is ridiculous. One might
as well say that "cat" stands for "communicate as text" or that "ls" stands
for "label status". ;-)

Someone may back out my change, true, but then I can just put it in again.
I've been involved in these back-and-forths before, and in the past they
usually settled down after a while.

We'll see what happens.

--Marc

On Thu, Dec 24, 2015 at 5:52 PM, <scj at yaccman.com> wrote:

> This has been a somewhat bizarre and troubling thread, all in all.
>
> Would anybody want to discuss the origin of 'ls'?   Or 'at'?
>
> Steve
>
> PS: (that was NOT a serious suggestion!)
>
>
>
> > On Thursday, 24 December 2015 at 10:17:53 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
> >> Clem Cole scripsit:
> >>
> >>> Rik in his role as the editor of ;login is going to try work with Doug
> >>> and
> >>> to get something "published" into the next edition which should satisfy
> >>> the
> >>> Wikipedia folks.   There is a minor issue is that Rik is technically
> >>> past
> >>> the deadline but due to the holiday, there are a few days of grace that
> >>> the
> >>> workers putting the issue together have said they will thankfully try
> >>> to
> >>> handle.
> >>>
> >>> So maybe we can have get this fixed shortly.
> >>
> >> I don't think so.  Is ;login: a peer-reviewed journal?  It doesn't
> >> look like it to me.
> >
> > One of the original references was from the proceedings of an AUUG
> > conference.  From personal experience I can confirm that the level of
> > review for the conferences fell far short of what USENIX did.
> >
> >> Still, the current state says:
> >>
> >>     The origin of the name cron is from the Greek word for
> >>     time, ???????????? (chronos), according to its author Ken
> >>     Thompson[2][better source needed]. Others have suggested that the
> >>     name comes from the Greek God Chronos[3] or that it is an acronym
> >>     for "Command Run On Notice"[4] or "Commands Run Over Night",[5]
> >>     but the references lack substantiation.
> >>
> >> Even if someone is still grumbling on the talk page, that doesn't
> >> substantially misrepresent anything that I can see.
> >
> > Yes, that last sentence was my update.  As I mentioned in an earlier
> > message, I think that it's appropriate that it should stay, if only to
> > stop people making the claim again in a more forceful manner.
> >
> > But it would be nice to be able to remove the [better source needed].
> > It seems that there's only one person objecting to the changes.  I've
> > asked him on the talk page what he really wants.
> >
> > Greg
> > --
> > Sent from my desktop computer.
> > Finger grog at FreeBSD.org for PGP public key.
> > See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
> > This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft MUA reports
> > problems, please read http://tinyurl.com/broken-mua
> >
>
>
>
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[TUHS] etymology of cron

[John Cowan]

Norman Wilson scripsit:

> But if you follow the references cited to support the cron acronyms, you
> find that random unsupported assertions in conference papers do count.
> That's not a lot better.

Well, of course there are conferences and there are conferences.  The
only conference I've ever had a paper published at, Balisage, is as
peer-reviewed as any journal.  (And it is gold open access and doesn't
charge for pages -- the storage costs are absorbed as conference overhead.)

> I'd like to see a published, citable reference for the true origin
> of `cron'.  Even better, better published material for a lot of the
> charming minutiae of the early days of UNIX.  (Anyone feel up to
> interviewing Doug and Ken and Brian and whoever else is left, and
> writing it up for publication in ;login:?)

It can't be just raw oral history, though, or it's a primary source again.
People's memories *are* fallible.  It's got to to be legitimate historical
research.

> But I'd be satisfied if we could somehow stamp out the use of spurious
> references to support spurious claims.

I suppose you could get the original author(s) to print a retraction.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
If [Tim Berners-Lee] has seen farther than others,
        it is because he is standing on a stack of dwarves.  --Mike Champion

[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Wednesday, 23 December 2015 at 11:04:36 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
> Norman Wilson scripsit:
>
>> But I'd be satisfied if we could somehow stamp out the use of spurious
>> references to support spurious claims.

It occurs to me that there's a difference between stamping out the use
and stamping out the reference.  True story (at some level of truth):

  In the late 18th century a member of a European exploratory mission
  in Australia sees a strange animal jumping around.  He turns to the
  aboriginal guard assigned to him and says "What's that animal?".
  Guard answers: "kangaroo" ("I don't understand what you're saying").

  I've always taken this one to be a joke, but the Oxford English
  Dictionary picks it up and says:

    The common assertion that it really means 'I don't understand'
    (the supposed reply of the local to his questioner) seems to be of
    recent origin and lacks confirmation. (See Morris Austral English
    s.v.)

  And maybe this is the correct way to handle those references.
  Mention them and observe that they lack any substantiation.

> I suppose you could get the original author(s) to print a retraction.

I've been trying to find Phil Diacono, of whom you wouldn't expect
many falso positives, but in fact there are two or three in Melbourne
alone, none of whom seem to be the right one.

In the meantime, help has come from an unlikely direction.  As far as
I can tell, it's nobody on this list, but there's no account behind
the commit, just the IP address 2601:647:4001:bc00:c48d:fc08:b94c:dec2

It refers to an article by Kah Seng Tay at
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-etymology-of-cron , which appears
undated (date "Wed"), but which goes into more detail and includes a
copy of a message from Brian with essentially the same content as the
one he sent to Doug.  I've updated the page to note lack of
substatiation in the alternative references.

We're not done yet.  Tedickey has once again tagged the entry with
WP:RS.  So a published document would still be a good idea.

wkt: is it time for an informal "Proceedings of TUHS"?

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog at FreeBSD.org for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
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[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Norman Wilson]

Larry McVoy:

  As a guy who has donated money to Wikipedia this whole thread makes
  me not want to donate again.  Just me being grumpy.

====

Me too.

Perhaps we should start our own online encyclopedia.
In the Ken tradition we could call it pedi.
(pdia sounds better, but pdia.org is already taken.)

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON

[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Norman Wilson]

Perhaps Wikipedia would be satisfied if we could get
Ken to write a letter to some current published journal,
saying that he's the one who named cron, he's heard
people are interested in how it got that name, here's
how.  We could then cite that as a reference.

On the other hand, this may be an example of the
degree to which one should trust Wikipedia.  The
`command run on notice' acronym claim is backed up
by an article from the AUUG (Hi Warren!) Proceedings,
1994, in which the first reference to cron gives
that explanation with no further reference.

If that's the quality of reference they accept, there
is simply no reason to take anything they publish
as gospel.  Sorry.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON

Proud that no one has yet made a spurious Wikipedia
page asserting the etymology of my personal domain
name.

[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

On Dec 22, 2015, at 5:44 PM, Norman Wilson <norman at oclsc.org> wrote:

> If that's the quality of reference they accept, there
> is simply no reason to take anything they publish
> as gospel.  Sorry.

And you are just figuring this out now ;-)  (Yes. Rhetorical. I know!)

I see they finally fixed the bits in the 'Ethernet' entry explaining the reason for the 1518 byte maximum length of an Ethernet frame.  How many Wikipedia authors even know how to *spell* 'vampire tap'?

For even more giggles, search on something like 'what is the reason for the minimum size of an Ethernet frame'.  When I'm bored, I do.  Who can't be impressed by gems like this?:

> Why is a minimum ethernet frame size necessary?
> 
> Answers
> 
>  Best Answer:  By defining the minimum ethernet frame size, you ensure that all necessary information is being transferred at each transmission. The minimum frame size breaks down like this:
> 
> Size is 64 bytes.
> Destination Address (6 bytes)
> Source Address (6 bytes)
> Frame Type (2 bytes)
> Data (46 bytes)
> CRC Checksum (4 bytes)
> 
> 46 bytes must be transmitted at a minumum, with additional pad bytes added to meet frame requirements.
> Source(s):
> 10 years in the IT industry

Who needs Dave Chapelle when you have answers.yahoo.com?!?

--lyndon

P.S.  yahoo.com - the people bringing you DMARC.  Coincidence? I think not!

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[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Milo Velimirovic]

> On Dec 22, 2015, at 8:07 PM, Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon at orthanc.ca> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Dec 22, 2015, at 5:44 PM, Norman Wilson <norman at oclsc.org> wrote:
> 
>> If that's the quality of reference they accept, there
>> is simply no reason to take anything they publish
>> as gospel.  Sorry.
> 
> And you are just figuring this out now ;-)  (Yes. Rhetorical. I know!)
> 
> I see they finally fixed the bits in the 'Ethernet' entry explaining the reason for the 1518 byte maximum length of an Ethernet frame.  How many Wikipedia authors even know how to *spell* 'vampire tap'?
> 
> For even more giggles, search on something like 'what is the reason for the minimum size of an Ethernet frame'.  When I'm bored, I do.  Who can't be impressed by gems like this?:

Entertainment for you network guys and gals:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXmv8quf_xM <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXmv8quf_xM>


 - M
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[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

On Dec 22, 2015, at 6:19 PM, Milo Velimirovic <milov at cs.uwlax.edu> wrote:

> Entertainment for you network guys and gals:
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXmv8quf_xM

Don't laugh.  These days he is the head of Intellectual Property Enforcement for Sony.

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[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

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On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 18:27:32 -0800, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
>
> On Dec 22, 2015, at 6:19 PM, Milo Velimirovic <milov at cs.uwlax.edu> wrote:
>
>> Entertainment for you network guys and gals:
>>
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXmv8quf_xM
>
> Don't laugh.  These days he is the head of Intellectual Property
> Enforcement for Sony.

Somehow that reminds me of SCO's “proof” of IBM's intellectual
property violation.

Greg
--
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[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Larry McVoy]

As a guy who has donated money to Wikipedia this whole thread makes
me not want to donate again.  Just me being grumpy.

On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 08:44:07PM -0500, Norman Wilson wrote:
> Perhaps Wikipedia would be satisfied if we could get
> Ken to write a letter to some current published journal,
> saying that he's the one who named cron, he's heard
> people are interested in how it got that name, here's
> how.  We could then cite that as a reference.
> 
> On the other hand, this may be an example of the
> degree to which one should trust Wikipedia.  The
> `command run on notice' acronym claim is backed up
> by an article from the AUUG (Hi Warren!) Proceedings,
> 1994, in which the first reference to cron gives
> that explanation with no further reference.
> 
> If that's the quality of reference they accept, there
> is simply no reason to take anything they publish
> as gospel.  Sorry.
> 
> Norman Wilson
> Toronto ON
> 
> Proud that no one has yet made a spurious Wikipedia
> page asserting the etymology of my personal domain
> name.

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Clem Cole]

ditto and +1

On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 11:53 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> As a guy who has donated money to Wikipedia this whole thread makes
> me not want to donate again.  Just me being grumpy.
>
> On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 08:44:07PM -0500, Norman Wilson wrote:
> > Perhaps Wikipedia would be satisfied if we could get
> > Ken to write a letter to some current published journal,
> > saying that he's the one who named cron, he's heard
> > people are interested in how it got that name, here's
> > how.  We could then cite that as a reference.
> >
> > On the other hand, this may be an example of the
> > degree to which one should trust Wikipedia.  The
> > `command run on notice' acronym claim is backed up
> > by an article from the AUUG (Hi Warren!) Proceedings,
> > 1994, in which the first reference to cron gives
> > that explanation with no further reference.
> >
> > If that's the quality of reference they accept, there
> > is simply no reason to take anything they publish
> > as gospel.  Sorry.
> >
> > Norman Wilson
> > Toronto ON
> >
> > Proud that no one has yet made a spurious Wikipedia
> > page asserting the etymology of my personal domain
> > name.
>
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy                  lm at mcvoy.com
> http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
>
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[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Doug McIlroy]

I had never doubted that "cron" was a contraction of "chrono-".
Wikipedia, however, offered several folk acronyms on a par
with it. Brian asked Ken, who confirmed,

"cron comes from the prefix (greek?) for time.
it should have been chron, but i never could spell."

I edited Wikipedia to expunge the nonsense. Amusingly that
makes the article less "verifiable" because there had been
literature citations for the nonsense, but there is none
for the fact.

Doug

[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 19:27:20 -0500, Doug McIlroy wrote:
> I had never doubted that "cron" was a contraction of "chrono-".
> Wikipedia, however, offered several folk acronyms on a par
> with it. Brian asked Ken, who confirmed,
>
> "cron comes from the prefix (greek?) for time.
> it should have been chron, but i never could spell."
>
> I edited Wikipedia to expunge the nonsense. Amusingly that makes the
> article less "verifiable" because there had been literature
> citations for the nonsense, but there is none for the fact.

And sadly it has been reverted because it doens't meet Wikipedia
"Reliable Sources" :-(

Can we get ken to post the information here?  Then we would have a
reference for the change.

Greg
--
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[TUHS] etymology of cron

[John Cowan]

Greg 'groggy' Lehey scripsit:

> Can we get ken to post the information here?  Then we would have a
> reference for the change.

Internet-only source and a primary source at that.  There's nothing you
can do at this point.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
   There was an old man                Said with a laugh, "I
     From Peru, whose lim'ricks all      Cut them in half, the pay is
       Look'd like haiku.  He              Much better for two."
                                             --Emmet O'Brien

[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 20:11:54 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
> Greg 'groggy' Lehey scripsit:
>
>> Can we get ken to post the information here?  Then we would have a
>> reference for the change.
>
> Internet-only source and a primary source at that.  There's nothing
> you can do at this point.

There are plenty of other examples of sources from the web.  I suspect
that if Doug had revealed his identity in the commit, it might not
have been backed out.

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
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[TUHS] etymology of cron

[David Ryskalczyk]

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An email to this list from ken, or quoting his email here, probably would help, as
that could be cited. Additionally this should be mentioned on the talk page — it
seems rather known that the acronyms may not be all that accurate.

David

> On Dec 22, 2015, at 8:59 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
> 
> On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 20:11:54 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
>> Greg 'groggy' Lehey scripsit:
>> 
>>> Can we get ken to post the information here?  Then we would have a
>>> reference for the change.
>> 
>> Internet-only source and a primary source at that.  There's nothing
>> you can do at this point.
> 
> There are plenty of other examples of sources from the web.  I suspect
> that if Doug had revealed his identity in the commit, it might not
> have been backed out.
> 
> Greg
> --
> Sent from my desktop computer.
> Finger grog at FreeBSD.org for PGP public key.
> See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
> This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft MUA reports
> problems, please read http://tinyurl.com/broken-mua

[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 21:01:24 -0500, David Ryskalczyk wrote:

> An email to this list from ken, or quoting his email here, probably
> would help, as that could be cited. Additionally this should be
> mentioned on the talk page ??? it seems rather known that the
> acronyms may not be all that accurate.

I've updated the talk page pointing out what happened.  Pending input
from Doug, I'd suggest that quoting his email alone would be
sufficient.  If the person who backed it out had known who committed
the change, he might not have been so hasty.

Greg
--
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[TUHS] etymology of cron

[jason-tuhs]

> If the person who backed it out had known who committed the change, he 
> might not have been so hasty.

Unfortunately, that's not how Wikipedia works.

See, for example, this story about an author who was told he "was not a 
credible source" regarding the basis of his own writings -- not because 
there was any doubt about his identity, but because Wikipedia "require[s] 
secondary sources."

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/an-open-letter-to-wikipedia


  -Jason

[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

On Dec 22, 2015, at 6:32 PM, jason-tuhs at shalott.net wrote:

> Unfortunately, that's not how Wikipedia works.

And that's why Wikipedia is an entertainment venue.
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[TUHS] etymology of cron

[John Cowan]

jason-tuhs at shalott.net scripsit:

> See, for example, this story about an author who was told he "was
> not a credible source" regarding the basis of his own writings --

Indeed.  John "Lisp" McCarthy definitely couldn't remember the order
and timing of his work on Lisp without reference to his documents.
Or rather he did remember, but his memories were wrong.  Primary sources
have to be used with care and caution, and while they are not outright
forbidden on Wikipedia, they are not trivial to use.

Wikipedia is by nature a *summary of the published literature*.  If you
want to get some folklore, like what "cron" stands for, into Wikipedia,
then publish a folklore article in a journal, book, or similar reputable
publication.  Random uncontrolled mailing lists simply do not count.

> http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/an-open-letter-to-wikipedia

    The poet may of course have some critical ability of his own, and
    so be able to talk about his own work. But the Dante who writes a
    commentary on the first canto of the Paradiso is merely one more
    of Dante's critics. What he says has a peculiar interest, but
    not a peculiar authority. It is generally accepted that a critic
    is a better judge of the value of a poem than its creator, but
    there is still a lingering notion that it is somehow ridiculous
    to regard the critic as the final judge of its meaning, even
    though in practice it is clear that he must be. The reason
    for this is an inability to distinguish literature from the
    descriptive or assertive writing which derives from the active
    will and the conscious mind, and which is primarily concerned to
    "say" something.

        --Northrop Frye, _Anatomy of Criticism_
-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
If I read "upcoming" in [the newspaper] once more, I will be downcoming
and somebody will be outgoing.

[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Random832]

On Tue, Dec 22, 2015, at 21:59, John Cowan wrote:
> Wikipedia is by nature a *summary of the published literature*.  If you
> want to get some folklore, like what "cron" stands for, into Wikipedia,
> then publish a folklore article in a journal, book, or similar reputable
> publication.  Random uncontrolled mailing lists simply do not count.

The problem is this backronym is the sort of nonsense that attaches to
_all_ computer commands that are not an English word (and a fair few
that are), and that should heavily weigh against the use of people's
willingness to uncritically repeat them in print as a "reliable source".

It may be reasonable, in Wikipedia's role as a "summary of the published
literature", to say something like "some people have suggested" that it
may be an acronym, and to list the sources there, but certainly _not_ to
assert that it was actually intended as one without a source actually
traceable to someone in a position to know.

[TUHS] etymology of cron

[John Cowan]

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Random832 scripsit:

> It may be reasonable, in Wikipedia's role as a "summary of the published
> literature", to say something like "some people have suggested" that it
> may be an acronym, and to list the sources there, but certainly _not_ to
> assert that it was actually intended as one without a source actually
> traceable to someone in a position to know.

Well, as of now it says:

    The origin of the name cron is unclear;[2] it has been suggested
    that it comes from the Greek word for time, χρόνος
    chronos,[3] or that it is an acronym for "Command Run On
    Notice"[4] or for "Commands Run Over Night".[2][discuss]

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
Mark Twain on Cecil Rhodes: I admire him, I freely admit it,
and when his time comes I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake.

[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Warren Toomey]

On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 07:27:20PM -0500, Doug McIlroy wrote:
> Brian asked Ken, who confirmed,
> 
> "cron comes from the prefix (greek?) for time.
> it should have been chron, but i never could spell."

Doug, perhaps you could post a sanitised version of the e-mail
here (e-mail addresses removed), so it goes into the list
archive, hence it is visible on the web, hence it can be referred
to as a link in Wikipedia?

Your original e-mail is:
http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2015-December/004741.html

Cheers, Warren

[TUHS] etymology of cron

[Dave Horsfall]

On Tue, 22 Dec 2015, Doug McIlroy wrote:

> "cron comes from the prefix (greek?) for time. it should have been 
> chron, but i never could spell."

Yep, from the Greek god of time, Chronos.

> I edited Wikipedia to expunge the nonsense. Amusingly that makes the 
> article less "verifiable" because there had been literature citations 
> for the nonsense, but there is none for the fact.

Does anyone actually believe Wikipedia these days?  Any fool can update 
it, and they do...

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."