Viewing profile — wlindley

Excellent that Control Data is contributing! Oh wait, I'm a few decades out of sync

Isn't it odd to read "curly" braces? Every printed dictionary I have, up through the 1990s at least, says that braces are {these}, brackets are [these], and parentheses are (these)…

The real mystery is why anyone remotely aware of the Free Software movement would have ever been duped into advocating for handheld computers so hostile to their own goals.

"Self-driving cars" and Fusion power also come to mind. With the advent of photography, it was widely believed that drawing and painting would vanish as art forms. Radio would obso…

What does "compute" mean here? It is supposed to be a verb, but here seems to be a noun. I have recently started seeing it apparently mean "computational capacity" but here it seem…

As an emacs user since the mid-80s, I do note this functionality would be nice as a Major Mode, if one were an avid Lisp programmer. As a Perl Monger since 1994, and as a developer…

The original IBM PC could be purchased either with 160KB/180KB single-sided floppy drives, or the 320KB/360KB double-sided. Some early IBM PC users still needed the "flippy" trick!…

"...whenever 'a software' doesn't...." Ugh. "A software package" or "a piece of software" or perhaps "a program" but you don't have "one software" any more than you can have "one h…

My company "Lindley Systems" did all this from 1980 (when I was 14) until the mid 90s, in the Heathkit (later Heath/Zenith) arena. I still have master diskettes and original manual…

And again, There is no cloud, only someone else's computer.

Thank you, and all the best for a long-awaited and much-needed update to the book!

Also "napkin" (from nappe, old for "tablecloth"). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napkin#Etymology_and_terminolo...

Listed is "HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide (6th ed.)" by Chuck Musciano and Bill Kennedy from 2006. However there was a 7th edition, ISBN 9781449302597, published 2011. Yet nowh…

Garbage in, garbage out. Code spewed by a random generator that has not the slightest understanding of what it is doing, whacked at by a hammer until it seems to be working. What i…

According to: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/8038... "FOREIGN ADVERSARY CONTROLLED APPLICATION.—The term “foreign adversary controlled application” means a…

What exactly is being forbidden here? Outlawing installing a program ("app" being short for "application program") on your computer (even if it is called a "telephone" it is obviou…

It's a program. "App" is a word, short for "Application Program," publicized by Apple for its handheld computers that masquerade as (and are euphemistically called) "telephones." "…

Most shocking of all is how almost every free-software, anti-big-government, anti-big-business, and libertarian advocate swallowed these allegedly "smart" alleged "telephones" -- w…

In the 1940s, the Army used a phonetic alphabet starting Able, Baker, Charlie. My late father was on the first two postwar atomic bomb tests (the first after Trinity, and at Hirosh…

a/k/a It is all a clever scam. True, or true?

And this is why it is so shocking that even folks who should know better, who are technically savvy in the slightest, would ever consent to use such a brain-damaged computer system…

Indeed. Wouldn't be surprised if San Francisco tried to ban software, and criticism too. Perhaps "Software, critics, and software critics seek to ban San Francisco."

I have a kitchen phone and a desk phone (both VOIP), a Linux workstation, a DSLR camera, a radio, and read real books and play CDs. Also an RCA Orthophonic High Fidelity phonograph…

"De-skilling" would be a better way to write this. I was halfway through before realizing it wasn't about "desk-killing" or the pretending that workers are incorporeal gossamer ent…

Heath/Zenith's ZBASIC on the MSDOS-but-not-PCDOS Z-100 used a similar format but with at least different keywords. Somewhere I had a set of programs I had written in ZBASIC but cou…