Andrew S. Tanenbaum's FAQ | Hacker News Reader

Andrew S. Tanenbaum's FAQ

cs.vu.nl

57 pointsMatthiasP40 comments

I met Prof. Tanenbaum in 2008, when I pitched AWS (Amazon Web Services) to the university staff. (I was Tech Evangelist for AWS in EMEA at the time).

I only knew about him because of his "fights" with Linus Torvalds, and because I've studied on a couple of his books (which I found excellent).

Meeting him was a big surprise: extremely funny, friendly, provocative, very smart, and in general someone you could instantly like. I loved when he would think about something and just close one eye, raise the other one to the ceiling, and make one of the funniest faces ever.

I felt so happy afterwards, for the honor of meeting him, and for the joy that derived from that attitude of his.

I wish every professor was as enjoyable (and competent) as him.

I strongly recommend reading all of his books. They are very clear and non boring and the knowledge you get from understanding them is really the basics of what any programer should know I believe (well except maybe for the distributed systems book).

After reading this faq, I'm very curious about the travel book.

I love his Operating Systems book [0] which explains OS Concepts using Minix code

[0] - http://www.amazon.com/dp/0131429388

I recommend buying your computer books in India. US Price for this book is $150 USD. India price is around Rs. 427 which is around $7 USD. Textbook prices, like everything related to education and healthcare are excessively high in the US. A reasonable price would be around $50, which is what this book would cost if it wasn't a textbook.

The same book in Amazon India: http://www.amazon.in/Operating-Systems-Implementation-Tanenb...

Update: Cheaper books bought in India may not be commercially exported out of India

Yeah, do they ship to Europe?

Not to Spain, at least: "Sorry, this item can't be shipped to your selected address."

And not to México either... :(

I sourced it in the UK as an (IIRC) "International Edition"

I was eager to take your advice. Problem is it can't be shipped to the US.

See LeonRobrotsky's suggestion with AbeBooks.

Another suggestion is Barnes & Noble. (Yes, really.)

I myself had borrowed a copy through interlibrary loan back in November after checking Amazon for <$50 dollar copies, only to be blown away that they were more like $160-$190. If you've used ILL, though, you probably know how tedious it can be.

A couple of weeks ago, I had to kill some time, so I meandered into a Barnes & Noble for the first time in years and on a whim tried to look up Operating Systems: Design and Implementation on bn.com. Turns out, bn.com operates not just to sell B&N wares, but also apparently as a sort of hub for third-party sellers, (just?) like Amazon. I was surprised to see the market rate for used copies was $34.50, so I snagged one.

Meanwhile, the AbeBooks link above has a shrink-wrapped copy for $16.52.

Takeaway: don't assume that Amazon is the end-all-be-all, even for books.

Just look on AbeBooks:

http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?isbn=978812032...

Irony of ironies: if you look at the bottom of Amazon's front page, you'll see they own Abe.

BTW how different is the 3rd edition from the 1st? I had it for my OS course (along with the Silberschatz book), but it was >25 years ago. Still have the Minix disks somewhere, I think. It was awesome to get a # prompt on a 8086, but in the end, what mattered was to have GNU utils, gcc, emacs and X11 on a 386, which meant Linux.

Completely different. MINIX was 100% overhauled.

Loved the distributed systems book. It is just sad that field has not left academia yet. We should be in a world where every programmer should know the contents of that book, instead of reinventing the wheel as we are doing now.

Right at this moment I'm reading Computer Networks (4th Edition) and loving it! I enjoy his writing style, mainly because he makes jokes all the time! Funny guy :)

> Will somebody please explain to me why 'ezel' (donkey) is masculine, 'paard' (horse) is neuter and 'antilope' (antelope) is feminine?

Don't worry, Dutch people don't know this either. Unfortunately that means for each word you'll have to learn whether it's a "de" or a "het" word. Something that slowly happens over time as your vocabulary expands. This is one of the main reasons why Dutch has a reputation of being difficult to master.

You must be joking about Dutch being difficult to master. Dutch grammar is in every aspect simpler than German. The orthography is a bit awkward though.

Also, it is weird that Tannenbaum makes a difference between masculine and feminine at all, since in standard Netherlandic Dutch they have since long ago merged into the common gender ("de" word). I guess he just got that knowledge from some old grammar book...

Also, it is weird that Tannenbaum makes a difference between masculine and feminine at all, since in standard Netherlandic Dutch they have since long ago merged into the common gender ("de" word).

Yes, but it is still relevant for pronouns:

  Dit is een ezel, [hij/zij/het] staat in de wei.

Whether most speakers actually know the correct gender and thus pronoun is another question ;).

Actually, in modern Dutch the actual sex of the animal determines the gender to use, not the grammatical gender. If unknown, use the male form. (This may be different in Flanders.)

The difference between "het" and "de" is actually also eroding at the moment.

Actually, in modern Dutch the actual sex of the animal determines the gender to use, not the grammatical gender. If unknown, use the male form. (This may be different in Flanders.)

...if you know the sex of the animal. Also see here (the 'Toelichting'):

http://taaladvies.net/taal/advies/vraag/1631/zijn_haar_de_mu...

Of course, these annoyances only exist because the distinction is going away, but hasn't gone completely.

Yes, the masculine/feminine distinction is not completely lost (yet) in modern Dutch. But

> Whether most speakers actually know the correct gender and thus pronoun is another question ;).

There is no "correct" grammar from a descriptive point of view. When most people don't distinguish masculine nouns from feminine ones any more, linguists tend to say "the m/f distinction is disappearing" instead of "there is a m/f distinction but most people don't know the correct gender".

I didn't say it's difficult to master (I can't know, I grew up speaking it natively), but it certainly has that reputation. Looking at it as objectively as I can, it does not look any more complex or inconsistent than English, but obviously it's much easier to get exposure to that language through movies, music and the Internet than it is to Dutch.

Unfortunately that means for each word you'll have to learn whether it's a "de" or a "het" word.

It's a good thing, since masculine/feminine doesn't matter much in the end (compared to e.g. German). Of course, it does matter for pronouns, but we get them wrong all the time anyway.

My wife is an excellent non-native speaker of Dutch. She has most problems with finding the right prepositions and the usual phoneme differences (especially diphthongs).

I can imagine that for a speakers of a non-Germanic languages V2 word order can also be strange (the finite verb is in the final position, however moves to the second position in declarative main clauses), and as a consequence what goes into the vor/mittel/nachfeld.

(Note: I am not an expert in language acquisition at all, just extrapolating from a sample of 1 :)).

I've always wondered when someone names or creates a new device or object, who decides what gender it should be.

At least in Bulgaria, people go for whatever the word sounds like. Rough rule of thumb is, words that end in -a tend to sound feminine, words with -o tend to sound neuter.

So I'd say едно Ардуино or one neuter Arduino.

There are two types of "new" names: "native" neologisms and loanwords. Gender assignment of the former usually works by analogy with existing words; the latter is a more interesting topic - go search "gender assignment loanword".

Many languages have more difficult gender systems than Dutch. Dutch grammar is easier than German; our orthography is a little less regular than German, but still orders of magnitude more regular than French, Danish or English.

The main difficulty is that you cannot practice speaking Dutch until you are already quite advanced, because if you speak broken Dutch, you will in all cases get an answer in pretty good English (heck; our broken German or French is probably still better than a learner's broken Dutch).

> The main difficulty is that you cannot practice speaking Dutch until you are already quite advanced, because if you speak broken Dutch, you will in all cases get an answer in pretty good English.

I can confirm this as a foreigner who has lived in the Netherlands for the past six months :)

> It was so strange to be in an environment with people having I.Q.'s below 150 and where it wasn't necessary to study 12, 13, 14 hours a day, seven days a week just to keep up.

Is this true? Seems crazy, how do you stand doing this for ~5 years?

Slight exaggeration on the IQ, less so on the amount of work.

Source: 2nd year undergrad sitting in MIT lecture now, running on 3 hours of sleep.

> Source: 2nd year undergrad sitting in MIT lecture now, running on 3 hours of sleep.

Sorry to interrupt you, but if you are reading HN while sitting on your lectures, why not just go home and get some sleep?

Sometimes the only reason you go to lecture is to be sure to catch important announcements. You can to that with little sleep, and in the meantime, you need something low-effort to keep you awake. So there's one theory.

Or you can buy a beer once a week to someone that will send you "important announcements" by email, and having a good solid sleep in own bed ;)

Because Mr. Brainiac isn't skilled at managing his time.

> I spent a lot of time working for the Sierra Club and lobbying in Sacramento for a bill to protect San Francisco Bay from developers.

I imagine he meant a different kind of developers than those who are taking (or have taken) over the area.

I have listened to as many of his lectures as I can find, and I am very interested in the work he is doing on Minix 3. 10k lines of code in the kernel makes for an easily approachable learning environment in my opinion.

Q: What inspired you to produce a personal FAQ?

A: See Computer Networks, 3rd edition, page 663.

Did you just tell me to go fuck myself?

I believe I did, Bob. I believe I did.

Mr. Tanenbaum has retired from the Vrije Universiteit recently, see here: http://www.few.vu.nl/~ast/afscheid

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