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posted by LaminatorX on Wednesday March 18 2015, @08:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the HUMANS-NEED-FANTASY-TO-BE-HUMAN dept.

Pratchett’s 33rd Discworld novel, Going Postal, tells of the creation of an internet-like system of communication towers called “the clacks”. When John Dearheart, the son of its inventor, is murdered, a piece of code is written called “GNU John Dearheart” to echo his name up and down the lines. “G” means that the message must be passed on, “N” means “not logged”, and “U” means the message should be turned around at the end of a line. (This was also a realworld tech joke: GNU is an open-source operating system, and its name stands, with recursive geek humour, for “GNU’s not Unix”.) The code causes Dearheart’s name to be repeated indefinitely throughout the system, because “A man is not dead while his name is still spoken."

What better way to remember the beloved inventor of this fictional system, then, than “GNU Terry Pratchett”? Reddit users have designed a code that anyone with basic webcoding knowledge can embed into their own websites (anyone without basic webcoding knowledge can use the plugins for Wordpress and other platforms). The code is called the XClacksOverhead, and it sets a header reading “GNU Terry Pratchett”. “If you had to be dead,” thinks a character in Going Postal, “it seemed a lot better to spend your time flying between the towers than lying underground.” And so Pratchett is, in a way.

Source The Guardian

Reddit link with suggested code mod here.

 
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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by prospectacle on Wednesday March 18 2015, @10:49PM

    by prospectacle (3422) on Wednesday March 18 2015, @10:49PM (#159633) Journal

    Some select quotes:

    Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can.

    In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.

    Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

    “I was merely endeavoring to indicate that if we do not grab events by the collar they will have us by the throat.
    -Lord Vetinari”

    --
    If a plan isn't flexible it isn't realistic
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