Posts by David Shields

Well done Pamela!

This must have taken some stamina.

I smirked when I remembered IBM's lawyers described as the Nazgul.

The problem is ...

...that all COBOL's seem to have been eaten by MicroFocus. They certainly ate Ryan McFarland and seem to have swallowed acuCOBOL.

Now, I may be wrong now (as I haven't looked at MF for a year or two) but MF's COBOL offerings are *bloody* expensive. I was looking at about 5 grand for a development environment just so I could attempt to keep a company going that had some legacy COBOL from the 80's. For a small company, this was simply not achievable.

As an ex COBOL codegrinder in the 80's I'd love to be heroically recompensed for my obsolete skills, but COBOL offerings in the north are few and far between.

Gizza job anyone ?

The worrying thing ...

Is when Microsoft's black-ops FUD department wikifiddles the ODF and OOXML articles to make themselves look super innocent and smelling of roses, then snapshots *those* wiki pages, neglecting the later updates that show the lies, FUD and dirty tricks used by them in the international standards process.

For example.

Gotta be Steve, hasn't it?

Heat Shunting

I have been wondering about this on and off for a few years now. Let's say we automagically get fusion working, and there are gazillions of fusion plants all over the shop producing super cheap leccy for farthings, and we're generating lots and lots of heat on the planet. Is there a way of shunting this excess heat off-planet ? I guess IR radiation outbound would help, but is there a physics-acceptable way of heat-pumping outwards ?

Automagically

I'm pretty sure automagically was used by Catweazle in the 1970's kids program, and thus should be excluded from this list. Besides, I like it.

Other Catweazleogisms include Tellingbone (telephone) and Electrickery.

Old fart.