I'm not a moderator this week.

Discrediting women's technical work is what people like that do in between making rape threats and SWATing them and editing them out of Wikipedia and it's totally disgusting and way too common.

And Microsoft has been complaining lately that the pipeline of potential technical employees doesn't have enough women in it, so that's why they don't hire many women. Why do they think women leave the pipeline? Most women in tech don't get quite the level of abuse that the Gamergaters have been giving their big-name targets, but Wu's hardly the only woman I've heard say they used a gender-neutral username on Github or Slashdot or in academia, because otherwise they get a constant overflow of shit, and that's after putting up with lower levels of sexism and obnoxiousness from nearly the beginning.

This kind of thing especially pisses me off because I'm old enough to remember the business environment of the late 70s and early 80s when things were getting better and the fraction of women in computer fields was a lot higher than in most of engineering. (That wasn't necessarily CS degrees; colleges didn't all have those yet for undergrads, so my wife and the other people she studied with tended to have interdisciplinary engineering degrees or EE degrees with CS concentrations.)

If you're an entrepreneur of any sort, you find that you've got to be a manager, and a CFO, and an HR department, and the Engineering VP, and the engineer, and the janitor, and the dishwasher, and the sales rep, and the marketing department, and hunt for funding, and a dozen other roles until your company's big enough to hire other people to do them. Every techie I know who's started a company, either by themselves or with a small group of other people, complains about this, but it's the reality of running a business - you're responsible for all the work getting done, not just the fun engineering you started the company to do. If you get big enough to get VC money, sometimes you can hire a CEO to do some of those things for you, but basically it's not your company once you've done that.

Some games can be done by one person, some are much larger projects needing lots of workers. (I'm not a gamer, so I don't know the scale of Wu's games, but it sounds like they're a lot bigger than Depression Quest and probably smaller than EA's FIFA-thing-2015.)

Authors have to deal with similar issues - they also have to put up with people saying "Why don't you self-publish? I'm sure you'll make LOTS more money than working with an old-style dead-tree publishing house!" (The usual answer from successful writers like Charlie Stross is that publishing books is a lot of work, and it's much more productive for him to spend 100% of his time writing, which he's good at, instead of 30% of his time writing and 70% of his time doing marketing and sales and typesetting and financial management and negotiating with Amazon and Apple, none of which he enjoys nor is especially good at, even though he'd get a bigger fraction of the cash, plus the way you get to be a good writer is to do a lot of writing, and the way you build a stable audience is to put out books as often as you can do it well, and being a publisher takes time away from both of those.)

From 1960-1996, the Guatemalan military government was running a civil war against anybody suspected of being Communist, where "Communist" meant anybody to the left of Genghis Khan or any poor peasant who knew anybody who might be a Communist or anybody who wanted land reform (which was the issue that prompted the US to overthrow the elected government in 1954), and they murdered and tortured a lot of people, and sometimes kept records. Some time in the late 2000s, a bunch of human rights folks investigating the dirty war and its history found a bunch of secret-police records, some on paper and some on 8" CP/M floppies.

My friend Hugh Daniel got asked to help them recover the data from the floppies - it took him months just to find enough working disk drives in the US that could read them and build a computer that could interface with them, so he could haul it down to Guatemala to copy the data and turn it into some modern format that could be read.

Eventually there was a trial in around 2012-2013, and General Rios-Montt (who'd been "President" in 1982-1983, and had come back into politics again after democracy was restored) got convicted and then got a court to grant him immunity because he'd been President. Ugly business, and not enough justice got done, but some, and at least a lot of injustice got publicly exposed.

I worked on a project in the mid-late 80s that required us to collect data from a bunch of different telcos around the country. It got sent to us in all kinds of different formats, anything from 6250 bpi 9-track tape (Yay! Oh, wait, what do you mean it's in VMS Backup format?) to 8-inch floppies to a box of tape reels with duct-tape on them indicating the tape number and a badly-Xerographed paper copy of the data format.) I really appreciated the folks who sent us dumb vanilla IBM-style tapes, with 80-column records on them - it was boring but reliable.

If you don't remember the VAX 11/780, it had a microcomputer PDP-11-on-a-chip implementation with an 8" floppy drive that it used to load boot code. We decided it really would be safe to put use that drive to read the data off 8" floppies, just as long as we didn't try to boot the machine from them, and it did in fact work.

They didn't need it to be reliable at speeds over 19200. I've run 9600 bps just fine over 1000' of unshielded twisted-pair phone cable.

Yes, I meant that. The Visa-2 credit card protocols have about 100 bytes of data to send, so it's faster to spend 3 seconds syncing up at 300 baud and 3 seconds sending the data than to spend 45 seconds or more syncing 9600 baud or faster modem protocols and 0.1 seconds sending the data.

No, we weren't allowed to touch it, nor were we allowed to touch the 1960s ATC we were trying to build a replacement for, and mostly the 1950s stuff had been upgraded in the 1970s so it was newer (but still dumber) than the 1960s primary system. The 1960s stuff was written in JOVIAL and ran on IBM 360/50 and 360/90 mainframes, which were long out of production; you couldn't even get the connectors for some of the cabling types any more. The 1950s/1970s stuff was kept around as a backup, and we eventually learned that even though the reliability specs for the system we were designing were so high (99.999999% uptime) that we couldn't afford to take down the backup element in a pair for 5 minutes a year of preventive maintenance, they'd take down the 1960s systems for 4 hours a night and run the backups to make sure they worked and make sure the operators were trained in it :-)

Some of the requirements and design of the old systems was documented, some wasn't, but the real way you learned about the system was by guessing the right questions to ask an old guy named Skippy who'd worked on all this stuff for decades, so while he was explaining it to you he'd happen to mention the things you really needed to know but didn't know to ask.

Fortunately for us, we didn't win the bid; IBM were the poor suckers who did and were stuck trying to make it work.

Then you don't have to depend on the walls and roof at your office, and clothing is also usually optional.

Hyperterminal was still standard in WinXP, and we occasionally use it to talk to serial consoles on routers. (The problem is finding laptops that still have serial ports and still boot, or getting USB-to-serial converters to work reliably; they're pretty consistent at 9600 or 19200, but often flaky at higher speeds.) And surprisingly many environments that had RS232 ports had at least some variation on XModem, or if you were lucky, Kermit, so you could do file transfer over them if you were desperate.

Aperture cards are punch cards with a cutout for a piece of 35mm microfilm (picture) and about 50-60 characters of indexing data. They were used in the aircraft industry to handle blueprints, because they're fairly high density - a 747 can't even hold all of its blueprints on paper, much less take off with them, and almost all large aircraft back then were unique, with slightly different parts, shapes of metal pieces, etc., due to design and manufacturing changes that happen in parallel to construction, as well as to different end-user requirements.

My company had a contract to develop an aperture-card scanning system that would digitize the pictures and upload the index data to a CICS database. We were the low bidder, which back then usually meant that either we were bidding against system integrators who were even more expensive than we were, or else that the department that was doing the bidding didn't have a clue what they were doing. (Yup, it was the latter.) The contract was hopelessly underspecified, the end-users had pushed lots of scope-creep into it without changing the price, and the only things that were really specific were that it had to scan 1000 cards/hour (it was getting about 200) and the database had 5 unique key fields (the end-users had upped that to 6, which also meant the keys were no longer unique which the database needed), and the price and due date were fixed (they'd way exceeded both, but the database change gave them some negotiating room on schedule.)

My department got asked to help, because we did R&D on things like electronic publishing and Unix systems and system integration, but it wasn't as risky as it sounded, because we'd get lots of credit if we succeeded and wouldn't get the blame if we couldn't help them fix it. I got sent in to do the consultant thing, found many of the things we needed to find (mostly by asking lots of dumb questions about the right parts; I'd dealt with TSO about 5 years earlier and mainframes in college, but had never heard of CICS, and I was mainly a systems generalist and Unix hacker), and we borrowed some people who actually understood CICS to help. Fortunately, most of the problem turned out to be bottlenecks in the interaction between the Unix box driving the scanner and the CICS front-end to the database, which led to the scanners having to stop and wait and get up to speed again on each card, and once the communications got straightened out the scanners could run at full hardware speed, which was something like 1500-2000 cards/hour.

SELECT * FROM ashleymadison WHERE match(email, ".gov")

Really, though, it would be useful to remind lots of anti-privacy Feds that encryption is important for lots of things, including protecting civil liberties and keeping them from getting into trouble with their spouses and potentially losing their jobs.

Yes, I know you were trolling, but in your mythical 7-bit-clean English, even if you're not using English letters like ð or , or ligatures like æ , or distinguishing between short and long S's (you know, the s you used to think were f's), how do you put diaeresis marks over words like cooperate, or distinguish between m-dash and n-dash and hyphen, or get the left- and right-side quotation marks without using some Microsoft or Apple ``smart quote'' breakage, much less deal with accent marks in words of foreign origin that are now part of English because we stole them fair and square and they're ours now, or handle degree marks, or words with superscript letters like the abbreviations for the and that and George and Your, or ...

And turning them all into leet-speak, like earlier Ye Olde Hwaetever's, just doesn't count.

I'm pretty sure my mom's manual typewriter when I was a kid didn't have 1, less sure about whether it had 0. But it did have the proper French and Spanish accent marks (left, right, circumflex, N~, cedilla, most of which my PC keyboard doesn't have), and you composed them with letters by using the backspace.

And yes, she could do two-column left-and-right-justified newsletters on it - she'd type a draft, count the letters, type the final. But she happily switched to using a Macintosh to type them, and let it handle that stuff.

I was once at a conference in Germany, most of which was given in English because it was an international crowd. One of the German speakers started off by saying that he used to start by apologizing for his bad English, but the host (who was Turkish) told him not to worry; Bad English is the most widely spoken language in the world. (Which is fine; English is flexible enough about most things that if you don't need to be subtle, Bad English will usually do.)

German's the only non-English language that I'm even vaguely functional in, and even then it was much more useful for me in Czechoslovakia, where people had learned German in school to deal with tourists, and I mainly wanted to talk to them about the same sets of things, like train schedules and getting food and hotels and which bridge went to the castle. Northern Germans speak a relatively comprehensible dialect, though too fast for me to do much in real time; understanding Austrians is more like being a New Yorker in deep Alabama. (I play music at a local German jam session, and some of the tunes have the lyrics translated from Bavarian or Swiss into German...)