For those who enjoy Gary Larson's depictions of Hell in The Far Side, or
Phil, Prince of Insufficient Lighting in Scott Adam's Dilbert, this is
precisely why Dante's "Divina Comedia" (Divine Comedy) is worth reading,
even if or especially if one uses Cliff Notes to guide them (Virgillian
jokes not intended). Whether you agree with his conceptions of the afterlife
or not (I do not), Western thought and culture have found his ideas worthy
of consideration for some centuries. Dante cleverly paired those guilty of
certain sins together in Purgatory, where, in many cases, their own
punishments added to the punishments of their counterparts within the same
rings. So spenders and tightwads, both of whom served mammon but in opposite
ways, work off their guilt, by rolling huge boulders in opposite directions,
much as they did in life.

I would not presume to judge the qualities of Wirt's self-confessed pride.
Wirt has accomplished a lot, and has that as a basis for the healthy pride
of many jobs well done. But, in this context, and based on those I have
worked with who had no reason to be so proud of their meager accomplishments
(and none of whom had earned PhDs, enjoyed professional accreditations, or
the respect and accolades of peers), I can see them, with their systems,
consigned to a ring in which they are paired with those who loathe the
formers' systems and who spend their time fruitlessly trying to persuade the
baseless proud why the formers' systems are inadequate, and to migrate to
their systems, which, like the boulders of those who served mammon, also
populate this ring of Purgatory.

So, if you've wondered if there will be training classes in the afterlife...
there will be, but not everywhere. And wait until you see the course
evaluation forms.

As for plurals, see the antepenultimate paragraph in the Overgeneralization
paragraph of the Jargon Dictionary at
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/jargon.html#Overgeneralization. The
Anglo-Saxon influences in English have left us with a class of nouns with
form their plural by ending the work in "en", thus man -> men, ox -> oxen.
Since some of these word end in x, geeks have for years pluralized systems
ending with X by suffixing "en", thus VAX -> VAXen and UNIX -> UNIXen. I am
not sure if anyone has used OS Xen, and I have never heard MPE/iXen. But
those hardly make sense.

At a lower ring of Purgatory, some of us may not be released until we have
finished reading all of USENET, using only a mouse to navigate. Perhaps we
will share our ring with lurkers, who will have the only keyboards, and who
will have to reply to all of it before meriting their release.

Greg Stigers
http://www.cgiusa.com

> -----Original Message-----
> From: John R. Wolff [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Thursday, May 16, 2002 5:23 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Unix to Unix Translators & Rosetta Stones
>
> I'm sure
> I'll have plenty of time in the next. I am now absolutely
> convinced that
> I'm
> going to spend enternity in Hell for my past sins, the most
> pronounced of
> which is pride, and I expect Hell to be populated almost
> exclusively by the
> >guys who wrote UNIX. That, and lawyers.
>
> Amen brother.  So much for the famous "standards" of UNIX.
> Aren't they all the same so you can just hop from vendor to vendor?

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