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Software Paradigms
In my youth there was a lot of support for object oriented programming. It was generally agreed that we had a software productivity problem: it was too hard to write programs. The solution was supposedly to adopt object oriented programming techniques. This was expressed in its purest form in Smalltalk, and was brought to the…
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Oklahoma bombing
Today is the 15th anniversary of the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma, the second worst terrorist attack in U.S. history to date. 168 people died. I’ve tried to write something about what happened and the government response, but it keeps getting more political than I really want, so I’ve given up. Terrorists are…
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AOL Facebook
The first computer networks widely used outside of academia were things like CompuServe, Prodigy and then AOL. They were walled gardens: all you could access were the things they provided. With the wider spread of the Internet, they slowly granted increasing access to the Internet. Eventually everybody just used the Internet directly via an Internet…
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SCO
I was thinking recently about my visit to SCO back in 2003. Since then SCO has been through bankruptcy and their various court cases have collapsed several times, although they are still struggling on. Their argument was always very weak. I could see that at the time, although I was also scared that the court…
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California Taxes
My blog used to have just two readers, and I wrote a lot of random stuff. These days I seem to have acquired some 30 readers or so, and I feel a bit of pressure to make these posts actually interesting. That tends to reduce the number of postings, which of course is not a…