...that we can see so clearly where we've been, but can't go there again.

Of all the things ever predicted by science-fiction writers, did any of them predict that after we'd gotten to the moon, we'd let grass grow on the Saturn launching pads?

"History records that the first successful voyage to the Moon was made in 2316 by Grzchopeng M'bennypacker. Some enthusiasts insist that unidentifiable metal fragments in the Taurus-Littrow valley are human artifacts, and are evidence that the United States reached the moon centuries earlier, but professional historians dismiss these as unproven speculation, and do not accept Frafnar Otsumix's alleged "decoding" of binary files alleged to be in what Otsumix calls "jpg" format. In any case, even if a handful of crude United States spacecraft somehow--by design or accident--managed reach the moon in the twentieth century, it is of no importance as nothing further came of it."

No, not very influential outside the Mac community, not all that influential within it. But the as posed here in Slashdot, "if you could go back in time," this is the one, and not because of what it had to say about the Mac, but because it is the only book I've ever read that truly accepts the idea of debugging. Every other book carries the implied notion that you should concentrate on writing bug-free software, and that a good programmer really ought to be able to do it.

About half of the book was devoted to debugging, and it is my personal surmise that the book was originally entitled "How to Debug Macintosh Software" and that the publishers made him change it. Some might charge that the way Mac software was at the time--A5 worlds, very little RAM to spare, and somewhat finicky memory management--writing Mac software intrinsically required more debugging than other environments. It doesn't matter.

What matters was that this is the only book I read that honestly and truly embraced debugging as a fundamental and legitimate part of the software development process.

Wikipedia's article on Maria Mitchell, who discovered "Miss Mitchell's Comet" in 1847, observing from the rooftop of her home in Nantucket.

Microsoft doesn't deserve much credit, either. Microsoft was thought to be late to the tablet party. Conceptually, the credit should go to Alan Kay for the "Dynabook." The 1989 GRiDpad was the first real product, and there was an immense amount of buzz around GO! Computing's 1992 PenPoint. Microsoft really just genned up "Windows for Pen Computing" as a sort of me-too response to PenPoint. Wang Labs had something called "Guide" (after the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) which got lost in the collapse of the company; the people working on it went on to found a company called, if memory serves me, Arthur Dent, but I don't know what happened to it.

Apple deserves credit for the iPad in much the same way as it deserves credit for the GUI... and Edison deserves credit for the electric light, and the Wright Brothers deserve credit for the airplane. None of them really "invented" these things, none of them were really the first, and most of the technology was in the air waiting to be commercialized. But in each case they were the first to make it to market with something that didn't suck--with a finished, usable, "perfected"--to use an old-fashioned word--product.

This doesn't look like a case of censoring the Venus de Milo, or blocking email from someone named Scunthorpe, or anything like that. Nor are there obvious political or religious overtones.

Context matters--what happens to a student who actually uses a "bad" word in an innocent context--"It was a bitch and she had the purtiest coat. I said to the feller owned her, ' When she finds pups,' says I, 'I'd like one.'"--Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, "The Yearling." Or someone who quotes the F-word passage from "The Catcher in the Rye." Or someone who just barely crosses the line in, let's say, a creative writing piece that too-accurately reports the colloquial language of her peers. The actions the school takes matter. But the list itself, as a trigger for action, seems pretty sensible.

One could easily write an essay on eroticism in Walt Whitman ("I sing the body electric,") or Shakespeare playing to the groundlings ("Spake ye of country matters?"), without violating the list.

This list doesn't look like ludicrous overreaching to me. I enjoyed my giggles from reading it as much as anyone else, and am amused by its being available in an open Google Docs document. But it doesn't reflect poorly on North Canton schools.

Any high school student who uses these words in a piece of schoolwork is either committed a mistake--a mistake that could potentially cost them a job if their adult life--or they're engaged in a breaching experiment. Either way, it is perfectly appropriate for the school to take some kind of action.

...when I was at a Fortune 500 high-tech firm that collapsed with startling speed in the 1990s, a frequent internal comment was that the company had been spoiled by some easy success and was in the habit of "giving up if it doesn't strike oil ten feet down."

In the 1950s when I was in my preteens I put my name on a list at the Hayden Planetarium of people who were interested in booking a trip to the Moon as soon as it was commercially available. I wonder if they still have the list... and how much that might be worth as a mailing list when commercial flights become available.

They don't have my email address, though, since I didn't have one then. And my postal mailing address is a little out of date.

Let's not forget Admiral Grace Hopper who programmed, developed a successful programming language, led successful standardization efforts, managed--did just about everything you could do with computers both as a direct individual-contributor and as a high-level manager.

She was a nerd and she did "stuff that mattered."

Well, we will see. My limited experience with research eyetrackers a few decades ago suggests that they are not at all reliable--they track accurately while they are locked on, but fairly easily lose that lock during blinks, etc. And when they do lose it, they go crazy and don't regain the lock quickly.

I don't see how this can work at all without some kind of fairly bright eye illumination to enable the webcam to "see" the eyes... presumably infrared... and that raises issues of its own.

Disruption afford opportunities for opportunists, and some of them are dishonest. Balances worked out over many decades that represent some kind of rough fairness between competing interests are brushed aside in a twinkling, and the new technology creates a chance for early colonizers to make a successful power grab. The ordinary citizens understands intuitively that new technology is used against him first, then checks and balances are worked out later.

"We do recognise that there may be a market need for a cable solution rather than a dongle solution." How is a dongle different from a short cable?

The TechRadar article implies that it (somehow) depends on the gender of the connectors: "cables with a DisplayPort socket on one side and an HDMI female receptacle on the other (essentially a dongle) are okay. This is because a licensed HDMI lead can slot into them." Has anyone seen any definition of "dongle" that defined it in terms of connector gender?

... that we've turned the corner and are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel? Perpetual optimism is neither helpful nor constructive.

"A year ago none of us could see victory. Now we can see it clearly, like light at the end of the tunnel."--Lieutenant-General Henri-Eugène Navarre, 1953."

"Dien Bien Phu has fulfilled the mission...." --French Army spokesperson, 1954

"Victory is in sight."--General Paul D. Harkins, 1963

"I didn't just screw Ho Chi Minh, I cut his pecker off." President Johnson, 1964

"At last there is light at the end of the tunnel." Joseph Alsop, 1965

"The North Vietnamese cannot take the punishment any more in the South. I think we can bring the war to a conclusion within the next year, possibly within the next six months." --General S. L. A. Marshall, 1966

"I believe there is light at the end of what has been a long and lonely tunnel." --President Johnson, 1966

"We have reached an important point where the end begins to come into view."--General Westmoreland, 1967

"We have the enemy licked now. He is beaten."Admiral John S. McCain, 1969

"The enemy is reeling from successive disasters. We are, in fact, winning the war." --William F. Buckley, 1969

"If we just keep up the pressure, these little guys will crack."--U. S. General Earl Wheeler, 1970

(The U.S. continued fighting for three more years. The end of the war is often given as 1975 with the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese)

I had a manager who stated that he was introducing regular code reviews. Well, actually, he stated that he wanted to conduct regular code reviews. Not knowing too much about them, I dug up a copy of Freedman and Weinberg's "The Handbook of Walkthroughs, Inspections, and Technical Reviews," and saw that they spell out--from memory, but I'm sure others will correct me if I'm mistaken--that management should not participate in code reviews and that code reviews should never be used for employee evaluation. I pointed this out to him and he said coldly that he was going to conduct code reviews. (In the event, of course, it didn't mattered. We had one meeting, we wasted some time in unproductive discussions of different people expressing their personal coding tastes and the manager stating his approval/disapproval of same, and somehow the manager never found the time to conduct another).

Any employee should be justifiably leery of walking into a "code review" situation, much as any employee should be cautious in taking advantage of HR "Employee Assistance Programs."

I've been in other "code review" situations that deteriorated into edgy negative criticism. Unfortunately, the degree of collegiality in any situation is that of its least collegial member. It takes an awfully good team to have the degree of companionship and trust to do something like that properly.

It's all well and good to say "well, your bad experiences weren't truly code reviews," and my recollection is that Freedman and Weinberg offer numerous suggestions to make them work... but I can only report my own experience.

And while I've been in good teams, teams that I think could have conducted productive code reviews, the parts of the project we were working on were so different--different computer languages and different development systems--that I doubt we could have given all that much help to each other. If we'd been given the time. Which we weren't.

I was approached by McGraw-Hill indirectly, via an investment forum, and invited to receive a free copy of a book, "The House that Bogle Built" if I'd review it online. Since I'm a fan of John C. Bogle, champion of index mutual funds and founder of Vanguard, I said sure. I liked the book, and gave it a good review. At the end of my review, I noted "Disclosure: the publisher sent me a complimentary copy."

Was I corrupted by the free book? Almost certainly, yes. Not that I sold my soul for a retail value of $28, but certainly, there was a the warm fuzzy comfortable aura of Vanguard fans together helping each other out.

But professional reviewers get free review copies, too. Why is it worse for amateurs to get them? Do people really think professionals are any less corrupt? I very much resent Dvorak's implication that it is somehow fine for professional reviews to accept free review copies because, he says, everybody knows it. (Do they?)

Should amateur reviewers who receive free books disclose that fact. Yes. Do they? Not usually. Should professional reviewers who receive free books disclose that fact? Yes, they should, explicitly, in every review. Do they? I've never seen it, have you?

Amazon Reader Reviews at least tell you whether or not the reviewer personally purchased a copy of the book from Amazon or not. If you want to screen out corrupted reader reviews, only read the reviews that say "Amazon Verified Purchase."

Want to screen out reviews from professional reviewers who haven't personally plunked down their own money for the book they're reviewing? Don't read any professional reviews at all.

I think Dvorak just doesn't like competition from amateurs.

At least I didn't sell my review copy, as professional reviewers often do.

Followed quickly by the Constitution of the United States, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the Bible, the table of logarithms, and "Fanny Hill."