The official job posting doesn't mention a salary; neither does the informal posting. It acknowledges "Yes I know this is a hard-to-find (existing) skill." It doesn't say whether the compensation is commensurate. When pointy-haired bosses say that workers with certain skills are not available, what they often mean is that they are not available for the salary they feel like paying.

The PDP-11 was an extremely popular machine and remained so up to at least the mid-1980s. I remember the RSX people at DECUS griping about being high-hatted by the VAX people, and a slightly bitter funny song, "He's got the whole world on his VAX." Someone who was in their twenties at the height of the PDP-11's popularity would be in their fifties today.

And it's not an arcane architecture, it is crystal-clear, logical, and symmetrical; it set the pattern for a number of popular microprocessors, including the Motorola 68000, and the posting says plainly "We will also consider programming experience with other assembly language." Frankly, anyone with ANY experience in assembly language programming could pick it up in a couple of weeks.

I'm in my late sixties, retired, not interested in working full time or moving, but I can't believe their problem would be difficult to solve IF they offered appropriate compensation.

And whose fault would that be, exactly? For five months, Surface MEANT "Surface RT." Did someone hold a gun to Microsoft's head and say "Release Surface RT first?" Did someone hold a gun to Microsoft's head and say "Do Surface RT in the first place?"

Remember that portability was supposed to be one of the primary design goals for Windows NT, and it originally ran on, IIRC, Digital Alpha, IBM PowerPC, SPARC promised (but never delivered), etc. etc. If they'd stuck to their design goals, every Windows application could have been offered for Windows RT. Did someone hold a gun to their head and say "Forget portability, break your promises, ditch every platform but Intel?"

And then, having deliberately burned their bridges to everything but Intel, did someone hold a gun to their heads and say "Now release a product that isn't viable now that those bridges are burned?"

The yellow color was intended to evoke Mongolia--racism in the most literal sense--because Mongolia was the site then famous as the site where a lode of the highest-quality graphite had been discovered.

So yellow pencils could not have been patented--I hope--but whoever made them first might very well have had a legitimate claim to trademark protection as "trade dress."

...because of surface-to-volume and scaling considerations, the smaller these things get, the less fragile they get. I dropped my iPod Mini (rotating drive) at least as often as I dropped my current flash-memory iPod and never had a problem. Yes, battery life is an issue. Quite possibly, service life might be an issue (bearing wear).

Seagate is claiming 400 Gs maximum operating shock. I, um, gee, well truthfully I have no idea what that means in practical terms but it seems like a big number to me. They are claiming 80 Gs for the first desktop drive I looked at.

...if people don't have good enough stereopsis to tell the difference between a flat screen two meters away, and a scene outside a window at infinity--even when they are free to move their head or rock their body to increase parallax--then 3D can't be worth paying much for.

Amusing, of course, but irrelevant, because DRM isn't about piracy, and it certainly isn't about rewarding content creators, it's about preventing competition.

As long as you can't read an Amazon Kindle on a Nook, DRM is doing its job. If Nooks and Barnes and Noble are getting driven out of business, DRM is doing its job well.

An automated eBook scanner doesn't do anything to make the eBook business more competitive.

Another fascinating package of hits and misses was H. G. Wells' 1938 book--actually a collection of articles--"World Brain." In some ways it anticipates the Internet in general and Wikipedia in particular. It describes a network of scholars, producing a gigantic encyclopedia, using desktop terminals capable of calling up vast quantities of information. Well, that's the "prophetic" spin. Where he got it ludicrously wrong was that the technology involved microfilm, reels of microfilm be mailed around the world, and, of course, it was a dignified, high-minded community of certified academic scholars. No articles on Pokemon characters, Miley Cyrus, or striptease!

I've occasionally wondered whether Isaac Asimov's "Encyclopedia Foundation" was directly inspired by Diderot or whether he was also thinking of "World Brain."

...I'm so disappointed. It would have been so cool to discover that Chrome was written in Visual Basic.

It all may be so, but nevertheless Google is an awful lot closer to Isaac Asimov's Multivac than I ever expected to see in my lifetime.

In the 1960s, when I would tell people that I was working with computers, a very common response is "What does that mean? Do you ask it questions?" At the time, I always thought it was a laughably naÃve question.

Google DOESN'T understand English, and that it takes a lot of lateral-thinking and adventure-game knowhow to formulate a question well. (For example: if you want the text of a poem or a song lyric, don't search on the title or the first line, search on the most obscure line or phrase from the poem you can think of because that's what's most likely to get you the full text).

Nevertheless, I just used Google to find me the ext of Isaac Asimov's The FInal Question.

After saying how much they respected and admired the Globe, the New York Times made it clear that they regarded Boston as the sticks and just wanted to milk the cash cow.

I was a subscriber for decades and might still be if they had basically not driven me away.

They gradually cut out all my favorite columnists and started to use wire services for national stories they would once have covered themselves.

Royal Ford, their auto writer, always talked about things like how the tested car did during a snowy ski trip to New Hampshire. So one day I open the paper to find that he's been replaced by a syndicated column written by someone in California.

The last straw was billing. They screwed up the billing. We were on quarterly billing, and when the New York Times took over, we continued to receive quarterly bills--but EVERY bill we got was accompanied with a 90-day late notice and threats to send it to collection.

We got that straightened out--went to automatic monthly payments by credit card--and THEN someone at the Globe decided it would be cool to wrap all of their newspaper bundles in computer printouts of customer credit card information.

My wife says to me, "Well, I hate the work of mailing a check every month, but should we do that?" And I say "Honey, didn't you read the rest of the story? They wrapped the Globe in credit card printouts, but they were wrapping the Worcester Telegram in customer checking account information printouts!

What can you say to a company that does a thing like that? Except "goodbye."

...due to screen sizing problems. The typical problem is that the font size and touch-sensitive areas are far too small, and don't respond to the "pinch" gesture.

In almost ALL applications, text entry of more than a word or phrase is close to unusable the text-selection cursors are too small to manipulate accurately; if you don't type it perfectly the first time, seeing and backspacing every error as you type it, your ability to make a correction in the middle of a block of text is close to nil.

If you read app reviews, you'll see that maybe 1/4 of all hidden-picture-adventure type games will be reported as unusable because something about the fit of the game to the physical screen ends up a required object, needed for future progress, unselectable.

So maybe the Android environment has solutions to all such problems, but on the evidence of actual applications, a LOT of developers either don't know the solutions or don't care about the user experience.

PBS at least shows that they care about the user experience.

When I think of Santa Cruz, all I can think of is SCO (Santa Cruz Operation). My mental picture of Santa Cruz is one of suits bringing lawsuits.

No, the outrage is about what they were hired to do. Things can be legal, yet objectionable or unethical or deceptive. Talking on a cell phone in movie theatres, or paying for one newspaper in a vending box but taking five, or farting in church--are all legal as far as I know, but they are all objectionable. If someone paid people to do it, it would not be come less objectionable merely because they were being paid.