Niels Bohr famously said, "Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future." I think he was on target, even factoring in possible facetiousness.

Several of us were talking recently about the SDS/XDS Fortran IV compiler. If my memory is correct, Steve Hartman (not sure of the spelling) and Buzz O'Gard (not sure of this spelling either) were the authors. I would definitely nominate them as the best programmers, along with whoever wrote the MetaSymbol assembler.

In addition to a number of amazing features, Fortran IV had the first Easter egg I ever saw, a funny compiler message that came out if you used a GO TO JAIL statement.

... on my local cable system, The Weather Channel has been replaced by the lamer WeatherNation...

There's something lamer than the Weather Channel? Hard to imagine. It was ok (exception noted below) before they tried to be the next Today show, now it's approaching worthless. I don't want endless moronic, idle chitchat, I want the weather.

Exception: whoever thought it was a good idea for the Wx Channel to broadcast all the idiotic reality crap needs to go back to the janitorial crew.

This was from the "beatings-continued-until-morale-improved" dept. It should have been from the "tremendous-grasp-of-the-obvious" dept.

Somebody needs to go to jail for mishandling this situation. Our government has gotten way, way out of control.

See Jim Schefter's "Rocket's Red Glare" (http://books.google.com/books?id=xA5vzkW8IDsC&pg=PA7&lpg=PA7&dq=%22rocket's+red+glare%22+%22jim+schefter%22&source=bl&ots=6FVQPrjyrs&sig=D9tFU6qyj_Ybv82EVLwkm4_-R9U&hl=en&sa=X&ei=YmugU9mHA9SNqAaDxYCYDA&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22rocket's%20red%20glare%22%20%22jim%20schefter%22&f=false) on the RD-180.

It's only been three years since Bob and Jim left us.

I exchanged a few emails with Bob Pease. He was a giant among analog engineers.

Don't forget Bob Widlar, another giant. Here's what BP said about BW: http://electronicdesign.com/analog/what-s-all-widlar-stuff-anyhow

Why does this story bring "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049366/) to mind?

This reminds me of the story of the kid who murdered his parents, then threw himself on the mercy of the court because he was an orphan.

We have (or at least had) a Constitution to protect citizens from governmental abuses of this nature.

rationale

The koblents.com link is an interesting read and using a goto may actually be valid inside an o.s. Having said that, after having written a significant number of tens of thousands of lines of C (most of which was outside the kernel), I still have never used a goto and I don't plan to.

... "spreadsheets should not be used for work that's not suitable for spreadsheets".

I previously worked for a multi-billion dollar, multi-national company that everyone has heard of. They did the goofiest things imaginable with spreadsheets and thought they were providing us tools. It was similar to using jello to build a hundred foot tall tower.

As someone else wrote, most people who build spreadsheets have no business building spreadsheets.

I often convert the things to plain text files so I can use Unix or Linux tools such as grep, awk, less, and others.

For perfect examples, see anyone in Washington, D.C.

Good Enough For Government Work In 1983 isn't good enough, even for government work.

In the mid- to late-70s, our XDS Sigma computers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDS_Sigma_series) were doing everything online (unless you really wanted to do it offline for some reason). As many as 16 offline ("batch") jobs ran at one time with (in our environment) about 60 to 70 online users. And this was with one CPU and two megabytes (yes, 2MB) of memory.

People knew how to code operating systems well with few resources back in those days.

I forgot one: Quest is an excellent magazine devoted to the history of spaceflight. Highly recommended.

QST, Nuts & Volts, Air & Space, maybe Circuit Cellar, although CC seems to be changing and not necessarily for the better.

Arizona Highways has, very sadly, fallen from a great height. I couldn't recommend it to new readers.