There is persistent bit of folklore in the Unix world that you shoulddo several sync commands before shutting down or rebooting a Unixmachine. Even today, you'll see a lot of people following thisfolklore, generally using ' sync; sync; sync '.

People who do this irritate me, because they are doing it wrong and ina way that makes the whole folklore ineffectual.

The sync folklore dates from the very old days when Unix was primitiveand two things were true. First, the sync()

It's recently occurred to me that one way to think about the GPLversus BSD/MIT licensing issue is that they are embodying twocompeting bits of psychology: people want to share their work and haveit widely used, and people don't like being taken advantage of.

(Although it may be surprising, there is quite a bit of evidence thatwe are in some sense wired to feel strongly about 'unfairness' and topunish it, even at a cost to our own interests. Psychologists havedone

Consider the following Python code, which is a very simplified versionof certain sorts of real code that people write:

ll = []for i in range(1,10):  ll.append(lambda z: i+z)print ll[0](0), ll[8](0)

A lot of people writing Python code like this for the first timeexpect to see it print '1 9', when in fact it prints '9 9'.

What I think