Maddog's New Hampshire "Unix" Plate Turns 20 212
An anonymous reader writes "Local newspaper talks to Linux International's Jon 'maddog' Hall, who lives in New Hampshire, and who since 1989 has had a 'Live Free or Die' UNIX license plate — a real one, not a conference hand-out — on his Jeep. From the story:
'The day he installed the UNIX plates, he went early to work at DEC's office on Spit Brook Road in Nashua, to be sure to get the parking space right next to the door used by all the Unix engineers. He watched them come in and, one after another, do a double take at seeing the real-world version of the famous fake plate. "People would race in and yell, 'Who is it? Whose plate is it?!?'" Hall said. It was his then and it is his now. After 20 years, one suspects you will have to pry it from his cold, dead fingers.'"
Say it with me.... (Score:2)
Live Free ....or DIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!
So much better than "Famous Potatos"
RIP Carlin.
Re:Say it with me.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Free as in beer or free as in speech?
Hey, I've had HAL 9000 in Virginia for over 20 years. Nobody made a big deal over that one.
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Let's see how long he can keep it. (Score:3, Funny)
It's little known in the nerd community that "unix" has also negative conotations for example in certain ghettos in california an unix is a one-legged chinese hooker.
I wonder how long it takes until someone is offended.
Re:Let's see how long he can keep it. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's little known in the nerd community that "unix" has also negative conotations for example in certain ghettos in california an unix is a one-legged chinese hooker.
Call me sceptical, but this is remiscent of the bullshit entries near the bottom of the list on Urban Dictionary (3 thumbs up from the submitter and friends, 10 thumbs down from everyone else who stumbled across that piece of nonsense).
Shame they claim to reject insider jokes (Score:2)
So tempting...
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Yeah, but because of that entry, we can *make* it true. ^^
Re:Let's see how long he can keep it. (Score:5, Funny)
a one-legged chinese hooker.
... named Irene?
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a one-legged chinese hooker.
... named Irene?
No... named Eileen!
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ROR
K.
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Please call her I-Lin
Re:Let's see how long he can keep it. (Score:5, Funny)
I've seen a LINUX plate in Danbury, CT (Score:5, Funny)
I saw a chick driving a car with a Connecticut LINUX plate in Danbury. I just about divorced my wife right then and there. :)
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husband's car?
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"husband's car?"
Not necessarily a problem!
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You almost left your wife for a hard-core cleaning lady [samanathon.com]???
Damn, dude, time for some marital counseling.
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That's obviously fake.
Also, I would know, if there were that product in Germany.
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Maybe it's in Austria, Switzerland, or Luxembourg.
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Also?
https://www.unixboard.de/vb3/showthread.php?t=34722
K.
Exactly how many are there...? (Score:4, Funny)
From TOFA:
Exactly how many are there?
Re:Exactly how many are there...? (Score:5, Funny)
We here in Sweden celebrate New Hampshire license plates all the time. And this one is certainly the most celebrated here, without a doubt. I mean.. Why wouldn't we celebrate a license plate from New Hampshire? It would be silly not to really.
Re:Exactly how many are there...? (Score:5, Funny)
Ah yes, the famous Swedish Hampplattrsdag! I understand you even have a crispbread shaped like the plate.
Here in the UK we named a county 'Hampshire' in honour. I have the misfortune to live 'next door' in West Sussex, but I am considering moving.
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And there is a breed of pig that's called Hampshire, probably because it originated there!
But anyway - I agree that having the real deal license plate scores a lot higher on the list than the conference handout plates.
Re:Exactly how many are there...? (Score:5, Funny)
Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yer?
See the løveli lakes
The wonderful telephøne system
And mani interesting furry animals
Mød parent døwn (Score:4, Funny)
And mani interesting furry animals
Not funny. A møøse one bit my sister :(
Another NH plate celbrated in Sweden (Score:3, Funny)
the one that says BORK
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In N.H., there are two seasons. Winter and tourist. Thanks to skiing, they now overlap considerably.
Re:Exactly how many are there...? (Score:5, Funny)
Live, Freeze, and Die.
Re:Exactly how many are there...? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Exactly how many are there...? (Score:4, Insightful)
Considering that it for tax reasons isn't feasible to do farming in NH there has to be some kind of income.
One thing that's attractive with NH is that the sales tax is extremely low. That has a tendency to attract visitors.
Re:Exactly how many are there...? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Exactly how many are there...? (Score:4, Interesting)
RT3 isn't that bad, that's one of the major routes to/from NH (just select direction after preference! :-) )
The worst thing I can think of when it comes to NH is the lousy GSM coverage when you get outside the main routes. New Boston lacks coverage, even though that's a really nice place otherwise. (At least it did last summer...)
And yes - I'm one of those lousy tourists pestering NH sometimes... Visiting from Sweden.
As for vanity plates - that's the headache of the owner if he's willing to pay for it. And from what I have found out the people in NH has a certain attitude that makes them willing to make a statement - like using vanity plates. Maybe the "Free" in the slogan is taken much as freedom of speech.
Re:Exactly how many are there...? (Score:5, Informative)
FWIW I live in NH and all of my cars have vanity plates. Though only one of them is nerdy [solid-orange.com].
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Three. ECF-986 and XDT-677 aren't so well known.
I've seen that plate (Score:5, Interesting)
BeOS on Quebec Plate (Score:5, Funny)
Re:BeOS on Quebec Plate (Score:5, Funny)
Re:BeOS on Quebec Plate (Score:5, Funny)
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Pass the soup, poor voice?
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That's funny, given the way that the Quebec drivers whip their cars around when I see them in traffic here in the US, I thought that the translation was "Drive like a dickhead."
But I never was very good at foreign languages.
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I remember/That born under the lily/I grow under the rose.
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Impressive, but... (Score:2)
UNIX ain't nothin' (Score:5, Interesting)
My late father had "RS 232" as his license plate on his PT Cruiser. It's not as cool and hard-to-get as UNIX, I suppose, but considering recent popularity of UNIX derivatives in general it's certainly more obscure in the geek crowd.
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At one telco-hotel that I worked at (Westin Bld, Seattle) someone in the parking garage had the plate of UID 0.
Got root?
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In one of the parking lots behind the Davis Centre at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, I often used to see a car with a licence plate reading XYZZY. I always wondered who had that one.
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Saw this on in my local shopping center. It's a *double* pun, combining the plate and the plate holder:
Plate: MVEM JSU
Plate Holder: This license plate is NP-Complete.
Hint: I spoke to the guy and he works at JPL.
NHLUG (Score:3, Informative)
Much respect.
-cb
It was Armando's plate (Score:5, Informative)
The summary made me do a double-take, and if you RTFA you will see the summary is wrong. The real plate isn't based on the fake plates. The fake plates were a copy of Armando's plate long ago, he made them himself. When Armando left New Hampshire, maddog apparently took over the plate.
I have one of the fake plates from Usenix, when Armando had dec make them.
"Live Free or Die" (Score:3, Funny)
Re:"Live Free or Die" (Score:4, Informative)
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Some people put too much emphasis on the dying part.
You can live on and fight another day or die without accomplishing anything.
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Maybe not, but like I tell my friends, "I'm going to live forever, or die trying."
I will, too.
20 years? (Score:3, Insightful)
Man, I can't imagine living 20 years in one state.
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Man, I can't imagine living 20 years in one state.
Not even the state of Inebriation?
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Man, I can't imagine living 20 years in one state.
maybe he's not a gipsy.
What a wuss! (Score:3, Funny)
MY license plate says: /dev/car
Which makes me the device driver!
My own favorite NH plate... (Score:2)
... in fact, one of my favorites ever, said:
+ZEUS-
While it's not 100% clear, I've always read this as "powered by Zeus" (as if Zeus were a battery).
staple? (Score:2)
... fake New Hampshire license plates naming Unix or its various flavors, including Linux, are a staple of the computing industry.
I don't think that author understands the meaning of staple.
Re:staple? (Score:5, Funny)
I don't think that author understands the meaning of staple.
Excuse me, I believe you have my stapler...
Went to work early? (Score:5, Funny)
To beat a bunch of UNIX engineers? I guess he got in at about 10.30am
Oh the memories (Score:4, Interesting)
This brings back memories. I went to the Spit Brook site once for 3 weeks in the mid 90's to spend 3 weeks with the DEC MLS+ engineering team. At the time that was the B1/CMW (Compartmented Mode Workstation) high security variant of Digital Unix. There were no training courses, so I had to go learn it from the horses mouth, so to speak, so I could support it when I got back home. I remember Spit Brook well for 3 reasons:
- Great atmosphere at the place. People were excited and enthusiastic about what they were doing. And I'd never seen such a collection of raw talent in one place before. Really bowled me over.
- It was in the middle of the biggest pine forest I'd seen in my life. Walking out the hotel in the morning I would just stop or 5 minutes and breath it all in. Never experienced air like that before, or since.
- I got invited to a cook out (had never heard that expression before) and while there I got attacked by this mahoosive black fly. I thought I'd managed to avoid getting bitten, but when I got back to the UK I discovered several strange looking bites. A red spot surrounded by a large white circle and a red ring around that. Only time in my life I've ever seen a UK doctor routing through a text book to work out what I had. He eventually diagnosed it as Lyme Disease. Apparently the fly picks it up from feeding on deer. We don't get it in the UK. A course of antibiotics shifted it.
Oh, and there was a 4th reason: Diane Lebel. I should never have left, or turned around and gone straight back. Enough said ;-)
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Duplicate plates? (Score:2)
Can plates from other states also use UNIX? When I was in school, one of my professors also had a plate that says UNIX. Maybe he sold it to Maddog?
Who has this one? (Score:2)
DEV AUTO (Score:2)
I had DEV AUTO on my car back in '92 or so. After a few years, the car died, and I went for a while w/out (sharing only my wife's car). Some years later, I put the plate up on my office wall, at which point a co-worker promptly registered the tag for his own car. He's still got it (probably about 10 years for him, now). Bastard.
Recently, I saw "NICE -20" on a car (a 'Vette or similar fast muscle car). Laughed out loud when I saw that one....
Indiana UNIX plate (Score:3, Interesting)
George has the distinction of having the first website that was slashdotted, long before slashdot. He had a video on his website of the world's fastest lighting of a barbeque grill. He took it from stone cold to slagged down in a few seconds. His site was mentioned in a Dave Barry column, and the poor sparc than ran his workstation couldn't keep up. (He did win an ignoble prize for the barbeque lighting.)
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There is a PERL-TK New Hampshire plate cruising about as well. That one registers especially high on the geek scale.
Re:Very cool... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Very cool... (Score:5, Funny)
What about their sister Ulva Daphne?
Re:Very cool... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Very cool... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Very cool... (Score:5, Funny)
Unreliable.
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A few years ago, I was out getting some lunch and saw a car with the California plate 31337. I didn't have time to stick around and find out who it was, unfortunately. I really wish I had now.
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From TFA:
It's been internationally famous since before the Berlin Wall fell
World famous among the readers of the Nashua Telegraph, maybe...
I've been reading Hall's articles and articles about him and his projects since... oh, around 1993 or 1994, and this is the first time I think I've read anything about his damned car!
It's an insignificant anecdote, trotted out by some backwater rag on a slow news day.
Move along! Nothing to see here!
K.
Re:Most don't understand the license plate motto (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Most don't understand the license plate motto (Score:5, Informative)
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They wouldn't have gotten this far
Yes I did, you insensitive clod!
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As a long time MA resident, I find it's still better than MA... do you not agree? If you disagree, I'm honestly curious to know why.
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I notice you stop short of telling us what rights you don't have in those states and what it was you wanted to do in your own life that was restricted.
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And you dodge the chance again.
It's no special power of observation -- anyone can notice you seem to like pissing and moaning about the terrible police state, yet don't show any indication it's actually hurt you.
But then again, if it's that bad, in both states, neither one seems to be keeping you from leaving them or the country and moving to almost any place on Earth that can do better.
At least both places let you whine about how nasty they are. You seem to enjoy that.
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Sorry, I have a life, read through parts, but I guess I just don't get into /. rant fests as seriously as you do.
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I would like more specifics, though I'm not going to be a tool asking you.
In MA:
(1) Gun laws are ridiculous. Not worst in the nation IMO, but certainly in the bottom five. You want that Kimber .45 that is fully parts-interchangeable with the Para 1911? Sorry; those aren't approved for sale here! You want to remove that front sight from your Bushmaster and replace it with an aftermarket gas block with a flip-up front sight? Sorry; you have a pinned muzzle brake, because for some reason threaded muzzles
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That is a freedom you value, that I don't care very much about, though I tend to agree.
As I said, it depends where you live in each state to some degree. There is plenty of Cheap housing in Mass, but not in a safe neighborhood close to Boston, etc.
Again, it depends on what part of the state you live in. In some towns the corruption is open, but in others it is done covertly like everyone e
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I think NH is much more likely to decriminalize marijuana sometime in the near future than MA is to *ever* decriminalize legal gun possession (snark), or lower its taxes, or repeal the zoning laws that make it so expensive to live near the wealthy people who elect the zoning boards.
Besides, I am willing
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Actually, tens of thousands is a gross under-estimate, but the fact that many people are "getting away with it" doesn't come as any comfort to those who are in jail because they did get persecuted and are currently behind bars.
Re:Most don't understand the license plate motto (Score:5, Informative)
(or GNU/Linux if it wasn't too long to fit)
The most you can have is 7 letters on NH plates.
That explains Steve Ballmer's NH license plate (Score:5, Funny)
MICRO~1
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I can never remember my license plate numbers, so I have UNIX and Linux bumper stickers right next to them.
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You still can, if you choose a similarly small distro.
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Pretty simple if you know the history.
AT&T was a government-regulated monopoly. As part of the understanding under which the U.S. Government gave it that monopoly, AT&T was not allowed to use the base granted by their monopoly to expand into other fields.
Bell Labs was AT&T's R&D division. A lot of what they did went into AT&T's products, as you might expect. However, because of the agreement with the government against expanding into other fields, anything that Bell Labs did which was