Great! Now there's new way for nerds to show off: by reciting the names of the planets. Easy when there were only nine, easier then there were eight, now it's a real challenge. Way more interesting than the digits of pi. Although that's setting the bar pretty low.

Metro might be OK if you don't actually care what your computer does and don't want the machine to accomplish any particular task, just do the computer equivalent of channel surfing. If you just want to poke here and there and experience pleasant little surprises at what comes up, it's OK. As soon as you try to accomplish any specific task you have decided on yourself, it is bad.

My wife is a neither a computerphobic or a techie. She just wants to get "simple" stuff done. She bought Windows 8 with careful consideration, spending time in a Microsoft store having a rep show it to her and saying to me "I know it's different, but I'll just learn it."

And she hates it.

One of the few things she really LIKED in Windows 8 was having the Bing picture of the day on her desktop. And it just quit working in 8.1. And she hasn't been able to figure out why or how to get it back. That's pure Microsoft for you

Medium-sized company, small groups, but nevertheless excellent managers. And, incidentally, willing and able to pitch in and do some of the work occasionally. One of the interesting things is that both of the excellent managers always chose to use the slowest, oldest, hand-me-down PCs.

I've also... ONCE in my career... gone to engineering planning meetings led by the VP of R&D, who insisted on doing everything in detail with Microsoft Project, and... you'll never believe this, never... actually used the tool to get a picture of the overall project and the critical paths. Someone would say something like "So, according to the chart, we're going to be three weeks late here," and he might say "Well, that's when marketing says they want it, but they don't really need it and I'm pretty sure I can push that back."

Or he would stare at another part and say, "Well, this looks like the critical path, and why is it going to take eight weeks to get this lens made?" And the optical engineer would say "That's what XYZ in Rochester is quoting us." And the VP would say "Hmmm... is there any way to get that faster?" "Well, we could get it in five weeks if we placed an expedited order but that's very expensive." "How expensive?" "It will cost $22,000 instead of $8,000." Pause. VP says "Well, it looks to me like we'd better do that, then."

There's no good reason for it, it simply reflects the tastes and preferences of people who are attracted to programming who are the market. The people who like visual aspects of programming are a minority. The mainstream does not "get" it, doesn't want it, and doesn't care about it.

To prove this, take a case that is much simpler than visual programming: Donald Knuth's "literate programming." This simply means an environment in which the source code can be commented with comments having the full capability of TeX, with rich text and illustrations.

Why is it that IDEs, programmers' editors and compilers are restricted to plain text? Why not rich text and compound documents (embedded graphics?) It not a difficult technical problem, as shown by the fact that Knuth already solved it. It is not a standards issue, as there is at least one perfectly good open and ubiquitous standard that could be used--HTML. It is not a cost or difficulty of migration issue, as shown by the fact that everyone was able to migrate from ASCII to Unicode. Yes, HTML would be harder, but perfectly feasible. Unlike visual programming, it is still just text.

The reason we do not have mainstream "literate programming" environments is because the vast majority of programmers, who form the market, don't care. They just don't want code with word-processor-like comments in it. They are perfectly happy to represent emphasis with leading and trailing underbars--after all, the semantics is the same.

Closest I ever came to literate programming was the original version of Nisus, a Mac word processor which stored all the formatting information in the resource fork. It was a fully formatted WP document, but if you ignored the resource fork it was an ASCII document. No, it didn't need to be converted, it just was. And you could use Nisus to write literate-programming-like documents, and provided the comments were delimited by /* and */ you absolutely could use a Nisus document as input to any standard Mac compiler with no change. However, there was no good way to integrate it into an IDE...

I've heard Apple people describe this with the too-kind phrase "tradition of demonstrating a wolf in sheep's clothing." That is to say, the Mac he was demonstrating was different from the Mac Apple was selling: it had 512K of RAM. The only Mac available for purchase at launch had 128K and was not capable of running the MacInTalk speech synthesis software.

This was indeed a Steve Jobs tradition; I recall him demonstrating a NeXT in Boston--brilliant demo, brilliant showmanship--and the NeXT he was demonstrating had an internal hard drive, which delivered much better performance than the product available for sale which ran entirely off a read/write optical drive.

Very reminiscent of the sad story of Frederick Taylor and "Scientific Management." Taylor meant to be a good guy, and believed he researches on the best ways to organize industrial work would be a good-for-everything win-win. He advocated good pay, good treatment, frequent breaks, etc.

He actually believed that scientific management would put an end to labor-management conflict: "The great revolution that takes place in the mental attitude of the two parties under scientific management is that both sides take their eyes off the division of the surplus as the all-important matter, and together turn their attention toward increasing the size of the surplus until this surplus becomes so large that it is unnecessary to quarrel over how it shall be divided."

Labor unions opposed "scientific management" as just a kind of speed-up, a way of squeezing workers, and that essentially is how it was applied. In his later years Taylor regretted what he said was the misapplication of his methodology, but the damage was done.

And so it is with the open office. What might originally have become a well-intentioned effort at innovating on office architecture quickly became just a way of squeezing workers--almost literally, into smaller and smaller spaces, with facile "proof by repeated assertion" that it was an actual improvement on what had gone before.

The best that can be said about it is that cubicles are at least better than the arrangements of some office in the 1960s and 1970s, which looked just like classrooms but with bigger desks.

How could this ever be more than a guess? How could it ever be determined, documented, or verified?

And for that matter, what is the definition of whether something is "the same" piece of code? For example, if the same source code compiles to different instructions on two platforms, are they running the same code?

How about if one of them actually compiles code that gets executed, and the other optimizes it out?

"[they believe they have found an algorithm that might] predict which fiction books will be successful. Their algorithm had as much as an 84 percent accuracy rate when applied to already published manuscripts in Project Gutenberg and other sources."

I can predict the success rate of already published books with 100% accuracy.

Backtesting is usually bogus because it means nothing unless the experimenter can precisely enumerate the total number of rules that were formulated and discarded--including those formulated and discarded intuitively--before arriving at the one that tested well. If you consider 100 possible systems, the chances that at least one of them will test with results significant at the 1% level is 63%.

Also, "A Tale of Two Cities" IS in the Project Gutenberg database, right here, which doesn't give me much confidence in anything else they say...

We "countervail" the effect of gravity whenever we lift something. It might be said that we "countervail" the effect of gravity whenever we are not falling.

Words DO have meanings, and according to the American Heritage Dictionary, antigravity means "The hypothetical effect of reducing or canceling a gravitational field." H. G. Well's fictional "Cavorite" in "The First Men in the Moon" meets that definition precisely.

Ways of lifting and pushing things around without anything solid touching them are cool, especially if the levitation is more or less stable and under control, but hardly miraculous. The old trick of levitating a lightweight ball in the jet of air from a vacuum cleaner's exhaust falls in that category, and so for that matter does an air-bearing motor.

This book is more irreverent and more subversive than Mark Twain. And it is very funny and an entertaining read. It's especially good if you happen to be feeling annoyed at your parents.

He said: "Oh, don't talk about rewards. Look at Milton, who only got â5 for 'Paradise Lost.'
"And a great deal too much," I rejoined promptly. "I would have given him twice as much myself not to have written it at all."

Surely nature might find some less irritating way of carrying on business if she would give her mind to it. Why should the generations overlap one another at all? Why cannot we be buried as eggs in neat little cells with ten or twenty thousand pounds each wrapped round us in Bank of England notes, and wake up, as the sphex wasp does, to find that its papa and mamma have not only left ample provision at its elbow, but have been eaten by sparrows some weeks before it began to live consciously on its own account?

All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it- and they do enjoy it as much as man and other circumstances will allow. He has spent his life best who has enjoyed it most; God will take care that we do not enjoy it any more than is good for us.

Never learn anything until you find you have been made uncomfortable for a good long while by not knowing it; when you find that you have occasion for this or that knowledge, or foresee that you will have occasion for it shortly, the sooner you learn it the better, but till then spend your time in growing bone and muscle; these will be much more useful to you than Latin and Greek, nor will you ever be able to make them if you do not do so now, whereas Latin and Greek can be acquired at any time by those who want them.

Nothing is well done nor worth doing unless, take it all round, it has come pretty easily.

Tennyson has said that more things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of, but he has wisely refrained from saying whether they are good things or bad things. It might perhaps be as well if the world were to dream of, or even become wide awake to, some of the things that are being wrought by prayer.

And, best of all:

[Mendelssohn] wrote "I then went to the Tribune [a room in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence]. This room is so delightfully small you can traverse it in fifteen paces, yet it contains a world of art. I again sought out my favourite arm chair which stands under the statue of the 'Slave whetting his knife' (L'Arrotino), and taking possession of it I enjoyed myself for a couple of hours..." I wonder how many chalks Mendelssohn gave himself for having sat two hours on that chair. I wonder how often he looked at his watch to see if his two hours were up. I wonder how often he told himself that he was quite as big a gun, if the truth were known, as any of the men whose works he saw before him, how often he wondered whether any of the visitors were recognizing him and admiring him for sitting such a long time in the same chair, and how often he was vexed at seeing them pass him by and take no notice of him. But perhaps if the truth were known his two hours was not quite two hours.

I worked for over a decade at a midsized company, founded in the late sixties, whose business was the manufacture of $30,000-$100,000 high-tech products. The development process included internal firmware, quite a lot of interesting and non-obvious mechanical and optical engineering, and driver software.

To say they were casual about intellectual property was putting it mildly. The mindset seemed to be, basically, that they copied good ideas from the competition and expected the competition to copy ideas from them. (I do mean IDEAS though, nothing more). They felt their business success depended on getting needed products to market in a timely way, and that it was all about good execution of ideas, not exclusive possession of ideas.

All of us software people put copyright notices on our code because we just thought it was good practice, but nobody told us to do so or send out memos on how to do it or monitored us to make sure we were doing it right.

I created a mini dust-up once when the head of marketing told me to send the complete source code to one of our software drivers to another company--a 200-age listing--and I said sure, but that I wouldn't do it without written directions from an officer of the company. He was furious that I would even question his directions and insisting that it was inappropriate for me to demur because it was no big deal, and I replied, sincerely, that I didn't think it was a big deal, either--in context it really wasn't--but that nevertheless I thought I needed to have that level of authorization, and that since it wasn't a big deal it shouldn't be hard to get it. It's not that he was being a PHB, either--the point is that nobody in the company quite got it that maybe you didn't just send out half a pound of listing on a casual say-so.

For a while, there was one mid-level manager who liked patents and embarked on a semi-systematic effort to get things patented, and recognize engineers by posting framed notices about the patents that they had gotten--there were maybe about ten such frames on the wall by the time he left. But it was not part of the corporate culture.

I don't remember ever hearing about the company suing or being sued over a patent except for one case, where it was embroiled as a party in a lawsuit involving some software components they had purchased and licensed from another firm.

...the kind that starts out regarded by the established players as almost a joke, who ignore it because its not what the important customers are asking for, just some bargain-hunting fools... then the low-end, joke product develops its own specialized market, gradually improves, starts eating the lunch of the big guys, and somehow they fade away.

The Ford Model Twas regarded as such a piece of junk the "Ford joke" became a genre in itself, and people published entire BOOKS of nothing but Ford jokes. "Does your Ford make a racket?" "Oh, no, only when it's running" etc.