Posts by Michael Wojcik

Re: first time I saw MS Windows

If you had an IBM mainframe, you had SCRIPT. SCRIPT's language was GML, created by Goldfarb, Mosher, and Lorie, and then backronymed to "Generalized Markup Language". GML was adapted to create SGML.

Technically, you don't create documents in SGML. You use SGML to specify a domain-specific markup language, aka "application", and that's what you use for your documents. XML is an SGML application. HTML started life as a broken (non-conforming) SGML application, and then wandered off and became its own thing (though the late, unlamented XHTML was an XML DTD, and thus an SGML application).

Re: Ah Stock options…

Agreed. I've always looked at mine as a potential windfall that might well not pay off. Nice if it does, but don't plan on it.

Yeah, I left in 1991, turning down an offer to continue. That's not a decision I regret in hindsight. I feel sorry for my friends there who stayed.

Unfortunately, deciding what feelings to have is not your option. To paraphrase Richard Ayoade, that's why they're called "feelings". And not, say, "doings".

This was the first time anybody had raised such issues outside a few fringe predecessors

Rubbish. The first Earth Day observance in the US was 1970, and ~20 million people participated in demonstrations. That's a rather large value for "few".

The US conservation movement is generally held to have started in the 1860s and gained major Federal-government support under Teddy Roosevelt.

Anti-Concorde protests in the US were primarily organized by Carol Berman in the mid-70s. They were roughly contemporaneous with the outcry over Love Canal, so not even the biggest environmental-protest issue in New York State at the time.

Re: Sod the luxury

Perhaps. But for many people, the difference between, say, New York - Paris at 8 hours in conventional aircraft, or 3 1/2 hours on Concorde, isn't really all that significant. You still lose a day once you include travel to and from airports, waiting in airports, customs & immigration, and so forth. And obviously it doesn't help with jet lag.

Saving half the time sounds nice, and certainly for smokers, people who are particularly uncomfortable in airline seating, and some others the difference is significant. But for the average traveler it's not going to be worth that much of a price premium.

That's not a criticism of Concorde's engineering, or indeed of the idea of commercial passenger SST. It's just the economics of the thing. Most air travelers these days are people looking for the cheapest tourist-class tickets they can find. So Concorde was always going to be chasing a luxury market, which is tough in the air-travel business – which these days is mostly a loss leader for a financial-services organization already.

Re: Musk, the Trump doppelganger, knows what to do.

Oh, so that's what "drain the swamp" meant!

Personally, I value the work done by good lawyers, but it's certainly true that we could do with a whole lot fewer Sydney Powells and Ken Chesebros and the like.

Pretty sure Randall's just describing PHP there.

Re: Optional

What does that have to do with Excel's many sins against data?

Re: Optional

Yes. Now if only I could get everyone else in the company to do the same...

I utter a curse every time someone asks me to open a spreadsheet. I have always hated Excel, and every time I use it, I loathe it more. It's a festering pile of unhelpful garbage.

Re: Tim Cook's punishment?

How about an option to not install unnecessary crap in the first place?

Re: the word GOT (was Tim Cook's punishment?)

Thanks, got it!

(Yes, it's rather cacophonous for a single-syllable word, isn't it? An awkward little word to stub your toe on as you trip along.)

Re: Tim Cook's punishment?

Of course, you have to take such explanations with a grain of salt (not the ones upthread in particular, necessarily, but in general). There is a vast corpus of lore about English grammar, usage,¹ diction, orthography, dialects, etymology, and so on, and much of it is at best weakly supported by the evidence, if not outright contradicted. Someone's already mentioned the efforts of Augustan writers to Latinize English, giving us such nonsense as the prohibition on split infinitives – a useful, if accidental, feature of English that should be welcomed by those interested in style.

Online debates about English often devolve into, if not start from, a series of jejune² arguments appealing to such sources as dim memories of lessons learned from elementary-school teachers.

And, of course, there are many matters which are largely subjective, such as English punctuation. There pundits are primarily divided into the "scientific" school (punctuate according to grammatical structure³) and the "natural" school (punctuate so it feels right) – and the latter into the aural camp (punctuate to insert pauses where a speaker might) and visual (make it look pretty). Some reprobates will even suggest that the punctuation scheme might follow the dictates of style and change depending on purpose, tone, audience, and the like.

¹When people refer offhand to English "grammar", they're more likely to be talking about usage or mechanics. Not always, of course, but more often than not.

²An English loan-word, a modification of the Latin ieiunus, "fasting", and meaning "thin", "wanting". Not, as commonly held, related to French jeune or anything like it, and has nothing to do with age. Kingsley Amis notes a reprehensible tendency among some authors to add accents to it.

³The readiness of English grammar to parse ambiguously apparently is not an obstacle.

Re: Darwin in action

I suppose that's true, for extremely small values of "nice".

Re: Darwin in action

Yes, and this is a bench trial, because the defense did not request a jury trial. The Trump Corporation was found guilty. Unless they can get that verdict reversed by a higher court, that's the end of the matter as far as guilt is concerned.

Re: Lest anyone forgets who the real criminals are ...

Did Autonomy's software ever actually work?

We (OpenText, now) still sell it, and people still buy it. You can see that in the last Micro Focus annual report, and presumably in the next OpenText one. I don't work in that unit, but I suspect that, like most software (including the stuff I do work on), it solves problems for some people who try it, and not so much for others. I saw a tech presentation and demo once which looked good, but you know how it is with demos.

What I don't have a good sense of is how much it complements or overlaps with OpenText's other "enterprise information management" products, which after all is where OpenText got its start — spun off from U Waterloo to commercialize the TEXT indexing system created for the OED, if memory serves. (Thirty years ago, when I was a grad student, a professor gave me a copy of TEXT on a floppy disk and photocopied documentation to play around with. It's in a box in my office somewhere.) Historically Micro Focus generally kept overlapping products alive; we still sell, and regularly update, the RM and Acu COBOL products alongside the "flagship" MF COBOL, for example. But I have no idea whether OT will want to keep the Autonomy product in the long term if it isn't strongly differentiated from our other information-management products.

All my opinion, not official OpenText anything.

Re: Best argument for rejoining EU

To be fair, I think being able to "read people's mind[s] over the net" would be more a nightmarish curse rather than a superpower, and would probably prevent getting any work done unless you could turn it off.

I'm not entirely comfortable with what goes on in my own mind, and I have a very high opinion of me. I'd hate to have direct access to anyone else's.

Re: What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted ?

Nice victim-blaming you have there. Seems a bit harsh for those who, unlike you, are not perfect.

Re: Crypto Currency

More importantly, the supply of Greater Fools who still have money is not only finite but sufficiently tightly bounded that the whole thing is likely to collapse before you get out. A lot of broke Greater Fools running around won't help you.

Obviously some people do get out early and reap the rewards, but in general people have trouble knowing when to quit.

And, of course, some people have some sort of mysterious reservation about taking a grandmother's life savings, even if she "should know better", and would rather not play the game at all.

Much as some airlines now make all their net profits from their frequent-flyer programs (which are also effectively banks, specializing in consumer credit).

Re: A contrary view

I'm unsure why 2 people downvoted you.

Perhaps because of unsupported generalizations like "much better for mental health", which just might not apply to everyone?

Re: Want to drive down office costs?

Yes. I'd love to see in some company's annual report that they capped executive compensation, had to hire people relatively early in their careers instead of "seasoned veterans" into those positions because of it, and ended up doing just as well nonetheless. Let's take some air out of excessive executive compensation.

Re: WFH - nope - come back....

Nobody is scared of a couple of days a week on-prem

The nearest office to me is a five-hour drive (or flight, since that would involve three-and-a-half hours of driving to the airport). I'm not going to spend any days a week there.

Indeed, I've found it better to be beautiful and rich, rather than just one or the other. Recommended.

Re: These usually involve someone buying something advertised on Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat

It wasn't clear to me from the article whether these were primarily advertisements or just regular posts, offering (bogus) goods for sale from private sellers, as with e.g. Facebook Marketplace.

I mean, in either case I wouldn't engage – I don't even like buying online from (ostensibly) reputable vendors, if I can find a local source. But policing regular SM posts for scams would be technologically infeasible and potentially cause a lot of false positives. And getting rid of things like Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist would largely destroy the private-individual markets in many areas, now that such things have largely destroyed the newspaper classified ads, flea markets, and the like that came before them.

(Yes, I know there are still newspaper classified ads; I read them every week in our paper. And yes, I know there are still flea markets; there's one that happens weekly not far from here. They are greatly diminished.)

Re: Meanwhile, here in the UK

Hey, there's a lot of boot-putting-in to be done. The police can't investigate every white-collar crime.