TV news is curated for a particular effect; Why this story, and not that one?
It is a type of commercial entertainment. It it simultaneously inane and culturally violent. Here are people dying in an ongoing struggle for power between warlords and a corrupt government; here are professional athletes winning a tournament. Here's the weather forecast. These subjects merit approximately equal time and similar sentiment in tone. As a viewer of TV news, you are not empowered to change anything because you are not informed of any of the forces and complexities driving the violence and there is no call to action.
That's part of the system. Management is failing if it's not acknowledging and tackling this part of the system that's prepared to destroy the whole to preserve itself.
Yes, it made a racket! There is a description of the Harvard Mark I crashing in Beyer's "Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age":
> Hopper, Campbell, and Bloch invested substantial energy in developing practices and procedures for debugging. Like physicians, they identified symptoms, made diagnoses, and prescribed treatments. Sometimes symptoms were obvious, as when Mark I would come to a crashing halt: “The crash of that thing sounded as if a plane had run into the building,” Hopper recalled. ”You never heard such a crash in your life.”
Laurent Bossavit's "The Leprechauns of Software Engineering"[1] is fun and accessible. It claims that much of what we consider fact in software engineering is actually folklore.
Wonderful stuff. Gerald Weinberg had a huge influence on at least the 1990s generation of testers, with his ethnographic approach. He doesn't seem to have had as much influence on the same generation of programmers. Perhaps the techniques he described had already been internalised?
Dennis Geller is the author of Structured Programming in APL[2] and Tom Plum seems to have gone on to a career in writing books on C[3].
It looks like this film is just one part of a series, probably presenting approaches from Weinberg's early structured programming books[1].
I'd love to know where this gem was discovered and if the rest of the putative series still exists.
...and the filename is shown as a focused highlight, leading you to think that's where the focus actually is! But no, it's in the search field, at the bottom right of the dialog.
For near-line stuff and long-term storage, a HP Microserver with software RAID5 array via Linux mdraid. No inbound access from outside the network. Powered on as necessary. I've replaced the entire disk array once so far, as the disks neared end-of-life.
For online, accessible-anywhere data, a largely geo-blocked self-hosted Nextcloud instance running on a Partaker mini PC, backed up nightly with restic to encrypted blobs on B2, which are browseable with the wonderful restic-browser.
> (my hips would need a day to recover from a 20 km walk).
>
> I'm in my mid 50s, so I'd like to believe my age is part of that.
Nah, it's just lack of practice. I turned fifty during my walk across Europe from Dublin to Istanbul. I'm 55 now and can happily cover 30 km every few months.
Try going for an extra ten or twenty minutes on your regular walk, and when that feels good, add another ten or twenty minutes. Keep going until you can knock out 30 km in a day's walk, with a break for lunch. Good luck, and enjoy it!
Alan Bromley and Doron Swade's rebuild of the Difference Engine, done using metals and techniques that were available in Babbage's time, seem to have put paid to that idea.
These days it's Babbage's poor project management that's cited as the cause. He had a stormy relationship with his engineer, and couldn't settle on a design long enough for it to be implemented.
Nextcloud will soon be at version 25, which will also be named Nextcloud Hub 3. Frank Karlitchek talks about this during the Q&A, about an hour and a half into the video linked below.
However there are major improvements coming in that new version, specifically to the Photos app[1]
It is a type of commercial entertainment. It it simultaneously inane and culturally violent. Here are people dying in an ongoing struggle for power between warlords and a corrupt government; here are professional athletes winning a tournament. Here's the weather forecast. These subjects merit approximately equal time and similar sentiment in tone. As a viewer of TV news, you are not empowered to change anything because you are not informed of any of the forces and complexities driving the violence and there is no call to action.