(More of a test to see if I'm still subscribed; a long story - see TUHS
for more details.)
Sir Maurice Wilkes FRS FREng was born on this day in 1913; he was involved
with EDSAC, microprogramming, etc.
Now, if I'm still subscribed then this will appear; if it has gone
post-only for me (as TUHS has) then it won't come back to me, and if I'm
no longer subscribed then it should bounce with an URL...
-- Dave
>Now, if I'm still subscribed then this will appear; if it has gone post-only for me (as TUHS >has) then it won't come back to me, and if I'm no longer subscribed then it should bounce >with an URL...
Maybe its a matter of electronic delay. Like with old tube
televisions, a good bang on top and all works again ... mostly :-)
Cheers,
uncle rubl
I just finished reading "Life under the Sun" by David Yen, a 296-page
collection of anecdotes in historical order covering his 20y at Sun. An
amusing, and sometimes sad, read.
Here are two: (1) During the Serengeti project, Sunsoft lost the only
person who knew FORTH and they waited two months to find someone to
modify the OBF. (2) Google's purchasing dep't rejected their engineers'
purchase requisitions for T1 machines because they were single-sourced,
despite running their search s/w six times faster than comparably priced
Intel boxes.
N.
No details left, so not sure it was this particular virus, but a
customer running SCO UNIX on a DEC box left a DOS diskette in the
floppy drive and after the CRON scheduled nightly reboot (to clean up
application logs) the server found the diskette and started booting
from it. Staff arriving in the morning were wondering why their PCs
couldn't connect to the server.
Seems someone had forgotten to disable in the BIOS the booting from floppy.
Server was re-installed, booting from floppy disabled, about 200
servers spread over the country checked 'on site'!
Fast forward to the 'here and now' we still see regular warnings
posted about "don't stick a unknown USB memory stick in your PC or
notebook"
Nothing changes?
Commemorating Michelangelo's birthday in 1457, this was the scourge of
DOS-box users everywhere in 1992 (I was still using CP/M at the time
before upgrading to Unix).
-- Dave
Dick Hustvedt was born on this day in 1946; an architect of RSX-11 and VMS, he
also had a weird sense of humour which he demonstrated by enshrining the
"microfortnight" into VMS in order to make admins RTFM.
Sadly, we lost him in a car accident in 2008.
-- Dave
Almost forgot...
Born on this day in 1934, he pretty much invented ALGOL (and algorithmic
languages in general; the running joke was that you could call him by
name or by value)... From Clem Cole: "The actual joke was Europeans
called him by name ("ni-klaus vurt") and Americans by value ("nickel-less
worth").
-- Dave
On Thu, 14 Feb 2019, Thomas Kellar wrote:
> I am learning from the discussion. I disagree with the binary
> argument. Women and men both have personalities and brains that range
> over a huge spectrum of differences. It is society that tries to force
> them into particular molds.
Hi Thomas.
FWIW, the mainstream on both sides of this argument agree that men and
women overlap in characteristics. The question is what causes the
differences.
Many human characteristics are bimodal with most people clustering around
one of two points, and those points correlating with biological gender.
Opponents of inate gender differences argue that the observed differences
are socialised. They point out that neuroplasticity means that even
differences in brain structure between genders *could* be socialised.
This is why I find studies on infants so interesting. There are plenty of
examples but I've linked a study below that monitored the behaviour of
infants that are around 24 hours old. Statistically significant
differences in behaviour were observed between boys and girls. This is
far too early for any socialisation to have occured.
https://www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/5b1501/F/sex.pdf
When I was a young man I believed that gender differences (beyond obvious
morphological differences) were socialised. But the evidence grew, and
has continued to grow, that to a large degree this isn't so.
A really fascinating area is "greater male variability" (GMV) which really
explains a lot about the world. I wrote an article on that for a well
known blog a few years ago. While researching the article I discovered
that men vary more than women in personality. That is to say that on
average women are more similar to each other in personality than men are.
I admit that one really surprised me.
Some people claim GMV has been discredited. It hasn't. People claiming
GMV has been discredited usually cite a handful of counter examples as
evidence of this. GMV was never claimed to be univerally true, only true
for most characteristics.. I suspect there is at least one case where
females, not males, exhibit greater variability but this still doesn't
discredit GMV.
Getting back to employment, there have been many studies on employment
patterns and gender by researchers and governments. They consistently
show that men and women make a myriad of different choices in employment.
In particular they show that men will tend to prioritise earning potential
over many other characteristics of employment while women tend to do the
reverse. The largest study on this topic anywhere is probably the
CONSAD Report, commissioned by the US Dept of Labor. The CONSAD Report is
actually on the gender earnings gap but it's still relevant to a
discussion on different choices men and women make in employment.
Here's a tiny URL to the CONSAD Report:
https://tinyurl.com/y6vvzm4v
Cheers,
Rob
