They found them useful. http://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~... https://www.computerhistory.or...

I once administered an application that ran on a group of Windows servers. I needed to maintain RDP sessions to multiple systems for extended periods of time. The site policy was to force a logout after 10 minutes of inactivity. It was highly annoying to work on one system for a while, only to go back to find the others logged out. I wrote a keepalive script using the estimable AutoIt tool to scan the processes on my workstation every 5 minutes to find the RDP processes. The script would activate each process, send a 0-pixel cursor movement command to it, then move on to the next one. This kept the sessions alive. The effect was a brief flicker to the session I was using. Since I was mostly working from home, this was no security issue. When I was in the office, I would lock the workstation screen when I left my desk.

P.S. The security people never caught me, although they surely would have objected if they had known what I was doing.

If you have a disease that is due to a genetic defect, this is good news. Please, no sneers. There's still a long row to hoe for clinical applications, but it is a very positive finding.

If you are not familiar with Perl6/Raku, you should take a look at it. It is really a very powerful language. The fact that it took 15 years to develop--with volunteer labor--and a few diversions along the way has hurt it in mind share among developers, but that doesn't mean that the final result is without merit. There are a lot of good Perl 6 references on the web, but most suffer from trying to do too much with the language too fast. Like many languages, you don't have to learn it all to find it very useful. This reference is an easy intro to anyone who already knows Perl 5 and many who do not.
https://deeptext.media/i/using-raku/UsingRaku.pdf

What this technology is missing is a tie-in to blockchain. If they can find that, it will close the hype loop.

It was a great book. Now I know why the movies stank.

Bird cuisinarts. http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DO....

Reminds me of chicken little in The Space Merchants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants. A major source of protein for an over-populated world was this vast mass of growing tissue, which advertising convinced people that it tasted good.

Yes, Khan Academy is on Roku.

http://www.roku-channels.com/

http://www.rokuguide.com/channels/khan-academy

More at:

http://hiddenchannel.com/

I smell a patent application coming on....

I agree completely. As a UNIX sysadmin I frequently write scripts. For short and simple things, shell is preferred. But if I anticipate any complexity, I reach for Perl. I've had the experience of getting deeply into a shell script and thinking "I should have used Perl". Perl has never let me down, although I confess at times the programs have that write-only, line-noise appearance. But that's just because I've learned to use the idioms, and I comment on the complex stuff for the benefit of those who follow me--which could include myself six months later.

I'd write Ruby if I could. The syntax is cleaner, and objects are built-in, not bolted on. But Ruby is just not available where I need it. Does anybody know of an AIX LPP package for Ruby?

Also, I've been deeply disappointed at the progress of Perl 6--but Perl 5 does everything I need, so I really don't miss it. Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these--it might have been.

I don't see where anyone has yet mentioned Doug Crockford's excellent videos on JavaScript. These are all on YUI theater. http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/ All the criticisms mentioned here are discussed in depth. Crockford deals with the good and bad parts of JavaScript from the perspective of years of detailed research on it. And like it or no, JS is available in a useful, common subset on all modern browsers. The whole HTML, CSS, DOM, JavaScript ball of wax is a kludge that happened by the chaos of historic accident. But we are stuck with them, and Crockford's notions of how to do JS right are worth your time in viewing the videos.

I know this is /., but seriously now....Real-time collection and reporting of blood pressure, heart rate (or not!), glucose, cholesterol, liver enzymes, O2 and PSA levels, all relayed via your cellphone/base station to your trusted medical service. These are right around the corner, awaiting only the right transducers. I, for one, welcome our new medical capabilities.