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So, basically the Fujifilm X100 series then?

sPh

XT-1 if you really need interchangeable lenses.

- - - - - and living like a king in Patagonia. - - - - -

And a good argument that would have been. If the FBI had tracked him down at a resort in Patagonia with no Internet connection that is, instead of a library in California.

- - - - - and the only way to prevent that is for Dave to kill Fred, - - - - -

As with most glibertarian arguments, there is a hidden clause that does a lot of heavy lifting.

sPh

I remember reading a thread on netnews back around 1983 where an 'old-timer' observed, "This discussion has reached the FIJA stage. Time to log off".

Good to see some things never change.

sPh

- - - - - Yes. You're talking about a singular FEATURE. Yes, the feature helped revolutionize the market. But the market existed BEFORE the feature. - - - - -

Funny how the Newton gets left off the canonical list of the giants upon whose shoulders we stand then.

sPh

- - - - - That's not creating a new business out of nothing, nor is it being particularly visionary. It's a natural improvement on an existing market segment. - - - - -

One has to be careful about trusting accounts written later, whether written by the winners or the losers. But multiple sources have reported that the response to the introductory demo of the iPhone at the highest levels of both Nokia and Blackberry was "that's impossible - they must be faking it". Nokia and Ericsson at least did a reality reset within a year and tried to get back in the game, but Blackberry only realized the iPhone was for real 18 months ago - say early 2014, 7 years after the iPhone was introduced.

I'd call that creating, or recreating, a new segment.

sPh

What is that "better" program? Probably the professional version of TaxAct. Hard to think that there is any software developer more into the details of the tax code than the ones that build the software that does 10s of millions of returns, namely TurboTax and TaxAct.

Thanks for that reference - it might come in useful. I had no idea anyone was still making systems in the classic the "sewing machine" form!

sPh

Fair request. Unfortunately that's based on 30 years of reading the history of computing (as well as being there when some of it occurred), generally in sources which were never transferred to digital/online. Also working for a professor who had a NSF contract to study that question ~1983 and helping him collate surveys (again - paper!), run stats, etc. Probably read a lot of the papers he had ordered prints of as well. Would probably take a PhD research effort to put it all into citation form, even if some of that data is still available.

sPh

Excellent summary. Thanks.

sPh

Yes, the women who were finally admitted to engineering school in 1943, 44, and 45, and who were then kicked out (in some cases bodily) in 1946 without being allowed to graduate (much less take the jobs for which they had sought education) were just playing out a male-centric fantasy of evolutionary biology "explaining" pre-historic history. Got it.

sPh

- - - - - Step 1: Stigmatize the traits that lead people to excel in tech fields, men posessing those traits, and anyone in tech - - - - -

Technology people were global heroes from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. Whilst arising from groups and cultures that had been stigmatized in the 60s/70s their success at opening up the new world was lionized as the PC/technology revolution got rolling. Nerd became a cool thing to be.

  Problem is that starting in the 1990s and really rolling after 2000 the tech world damaged itself in some fundamental way, and is now being looked on much more skeptically. Source of that damage isn't totally clear (well, then there's Uber) but it isn't accurate to blame society for stigmatizing technology people out of nowhere; there are reasons.

sPh

I remember reading "how to interview in Silicon Valley" articles during that time period that described firms doing things such as flying entire recruiting classes to Las Vegas and eliminating any candidates who didn't gamble and drink in large quantities. That's behavior that predictive for success in complex business-focused entities for sure.

sPH

- - - - - So before 1994, women were nearly equally represented in computing? HAHAHAHA. - - - - -

Um, much more nearly, yes.

1943 to 1945 - women were about 95% of the computing workforce.

1946 to mid/late 1950s - still a very large percentage of women, since they had the experience (from the war) and were pushed back out of other engineering fields. Computing, being a branch of applied mathematics, was considered "acceptable" for women to take up

1960-1980 - still a large percentage of women in "data processing" (as programmers and systems analysts, not just keypunch operators), esp in very large companies.

1980 - boom in university computer science begins and many women are interested. 1984 is the peak post-war year for women graduating from engineering programs (around 40% IIRC); a large percentage are CS with many of the rest EE. Many of these women (my classmates) go on to critical roles in companies and universities building out this " 'net " concept (later renamed the Internet).

post-1990 - something goes completely wacky in the industry and women are driven out of computing in large numbers; younger women don't even enter the field.

So, since you seem to be a younger dude perhaps you could explain exactly what it is that happened 1990-2000 that made the field so undesirable to women.

Supporting Excellent Iraq War II, pumping the _Bell Curve_, publishing the racist fantasies of Stephen Glass, joining the anti-public education movement, and also publishing the "No Exit" hatchet job on Bill Clinton's health care reform proposal isn't in any way shape or form liberal. And that's not even taking into account Martin Perez' racism and ethnic hatred which is of a variety that is a bit harder to criticize in US society but which most liberals reject.

Representative quote from Andrew Sullivan: "The middle part of the country—the great red zone that voted for Bush—is clearly ready for war. The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead—and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column." [note that he later altered that essay as published on his blog to make it less self-damning; this is the original wording]. Yes, he's gay. No, he's not liberal.

sPh