Monthly Archives: August 2024

WordStar 7, the last version of the first word processor, has finally been posted as a complete application, with manuals and much more than ever came in the box by science-fiction author Robert J. Sawyer. 

To describe the impact or the rationale would simply be to recap one of Sawyers’ bests posts on WS, which go back to the early days of the internet.  I will simply link to some relevant pages and provide a few notes.

Meanwhile, here’s the first three paragraphs from his post:

As you all know, I continue to use … Continue reading →

We’ll see how this comes out on the other siiiideee

…

Major maintenance complete.

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I try not to spam YouTube links — YouTube is evil and linking isn’t exactly providing content.  But I’m not in a position to check this guy’s math and likewise for the expected results of a baryon-baryon collision.  Sigh.  Still, this short and engaging video is as tractable and as interesting as another one about pilot waves made perhaps ten years ago.  Shush now, we’re talking about the pendulum video here:

If you’re having a hard time putting together just how these pendula are actually put together, the word he should have mentioned is “torque”.  You’re welcome.

Also, here’s the one on pilot waves, er I mean driven bouncing droplets of oil:

Finally, I had to use an alternate browser to make this second video pop … Continue reading →

I don’t want us playing world cop.  I personally have gone, and while I ate up the mission at first, it soured around the time some of my friends were killed (I identified them and signed for their uh receipt at the big military hospital there), and my second tour was an exercise in finding a job I could do with all my heart.  All I did was take care of our people, which I can do all day long.  No “host-nation” partnering, no nation-building, no joint security tomfoolery; just take care of our people over there.  Happy to do so, because the whole thing was a piece of refuse, and I wanted to take care of people who thought the way I had on my previous deployment, … Continue reading →

Here’s a reasonable-sounding guy talking about how Agile (the software development “discipline”) has been co-opted by management and that’s why it never works.  He’s not entirely wrong, but his larger point is the same-old same-old.  “But real Agile has never been tried!” they cry, while it just keeps on failing.  Sound familiar?

Agile in my limited experience looks like this: the coding nerds with no higher responsiblity shot the managers, declared an autonomous anarchic coding collective and colluded with end-user customers who also bear no higher responsibility to produce, approve, and certify requirements and results.  Nobody lived happily ever after, Amen.

What happened instead has been a profusion of cobbled-together software which does not meet the actual requirements of the larger customer organization, forcing agglomerations of non-process … Continue reading →