gjmilne

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• Commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
  C's success was largely a matter of being the right language at the right time. Richard Gabriel's series of essays on "Worse Is Better" does a very good job of explaining why Unix/C became so successful. The first essay is...
• Commented on The regular holy war ...
  Unfortunately that "endless stream of OS's" is not bringing us much innovation. In the Macintosh family we have something totally weird that transmogrified before us into a unix clone. Albeit one with the niced looking UI eye candy about. Windows...
• Commented on The regular holy war ...
  I bought one of those licensed clones. It was a Motorola StarMax and it was glorious to use. Word on it was a joy compared to the disaster that it was on Windows. And then Jobs came back and killed...
• Commented on Why Microsoft Word must Die
  "These idiots have obviously never come across Tufte" Or they have and disagree....
• Commented on On Syria
  So we just keep letting the biggest kid in the room tell everyone else what to do? How is that working out for the rest of us?...
• Commented on On Syria
  We are going here because politicians feel they need to be seen to be doing something lest the public judge them poorly. If there was a bush-a-like in the white house we would have done something nasty and irrevocable by...
• Commented on Snowden leaks: the real take-home
  Isn't it better to work for somebody for as long as it is rewarding and then go work for somebody else? I think the freedom to say fuck off helps to sleep much better. That freedom only exists when you...
• Commented on The Fumes of Mordor & Other World Building Models
  I have never been to a convention. To quote a friend, "I just read the stuff". Neither he, nor I, have ever felt any need to do the convention thing. I wonder how many readers of SF even care about...
• Commented on How I feel this morning
  I guess they aren't getting enough ad clicks. Should I start getting worried about gmail? Would 20NZD a year get me the bigger gmail acct limits AND keep reader working for me? I must ask Larry the next time I...
• Commented on The jet lag game
  The only ever time I flew from the US (JFK) back to the UK (LHR) and did not experience jet lag was when I took an early morning flight from JFK at 8am. That gets you into LHR at around...
• Commented on E Ticket*
  The early Culture novels of Banks are re-readable. I have re-read Use of Weapons and The Player of Games aprrox 5 times each in the last decade. I find the later Culture novels less worth of a second visit. I...
• Commented on E Ticket*
  I loved The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress when I read it as a teenager. However, I tried re-reading it around 2 years ago when I was in my mid-forties and I found I did not have the patience for...
• Commented on Zoom-Zoom
  Time zones are an irrelevance. Charlie's little piece of the web has a wide audience so posting in the UK morning is not important. I am sure that somewhere in the world it is morning for someone in the audience...