Thanks, it took long enough for someone to get around to saying this.
Google is all about "relevant" advertising. Their early (revenue) success (AdWords) came from watching your search activity to determine what topics are of interest to you. That's fine; Google provides me a service, they get to use the information (my search terms) that I give them as part of the service request.
Google has moved on to hosting my data (email, and now documents) on their servers, and now to installing their software on my desktop and indexing all the data I maintain there. Isn't it the least bit tempting to Google to mine all that data and learn much, much more about what interests I have and make their advertising that much more relevant? Why else would they give me free software?
Maybe they're not doing this now, but it seems all too possible they'll move in that direction.
I would add to this that ISA mattered a lot more when I wrote code in assembly language. For a clean (and simple) instruction set architecture, I fondly remember the PDP-11. Later on, the 680x0 offered more powerful addressing modes for less simplicity (and consistency). Compared to both, the x86 was infuriating to work with.
ISA's still mattered, but less, in my early "C" days when source-level debugging was less robust, or even to understand what the compiler was turning my code into so I could figure out where to optimize.
Today, it hardly matters at all. Looking at generated code tells me little about how the processor with multiple execution units is going to process it; it is necessary to trust the compiler and its optimization strategy. It matters even less with interpreted or JIT'd languages, where the work eventually performed by the processor is far removed from my code. Knowing what's happening at runtime involves much more important factors than the ISA.
Whether a DRM scheme (or any other software implementation) for that matter is more or less secure because of interoperability is in the margins; security is a question of implementation, not licensing. (Some have made the point that open schemes are subject to more scrutiny and more likely to identify flaws early; perhaps so, but I still argue that the difference is probably marginal.)
The point Jobs raised in his essay is that it's harder to propagate fixes to software that is broadly licensed across many vendors, which in turn means that vulnerabilities remain in the field longer. He also asserts that this could threaten the agreement between Apple and music companies, although you might want to add salt to that to suit your tastes.
Microsoft introduced the ability to embed one app's object into another app's document and allow the user to edit the object inplace using the object app's tools (I refer to OLE). Windows has had that since 1993 while Linux and Mac still have yet to have anything to rival it.
IIRC, HP was promoting a technology at the time that was arguably superior to OLE, but they couldn't get a foothold among developers.
Apple had OpenDoc, which was cross-platform, around that time as well; I used it daily to place multiple web page views into a single container that I used as my homepage/dashboard. I know of one prominent multi-platform software vendor that avoided OpenDoc support because Microsoft threatened retaliation if they did so.
Getting back to live-embedding all or part of one document into another, Lotus Jazz provided the functionality and visuals within its suite of integrated Mac apps in 84/85; not the same thing as implementing it in the platform, but platform support for embedding was a logical extension of what Jazz did in a more limited domain.
And, as somebody has already pointed out, Xerox had prior art that pre-dated all of this.
The problem I have with that mea culpa is that the claim of being "upset at Windows" is little more than a backhanded way of saying "if our competition made a decent OS, this wouldn't have happened".
Well, yeah...
Accept the blame...
As in "even more upset with ourselves for not catching it?"
The full sentence on the Apple website as of now (leaving room for the possibility that they've modified it since the uproar) is:
"As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses, and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it."
(Emphasis mine.)
...the full interpretation being that they place more blame on themselves and/or hold themselves to a higher standard.
If the "more upset with ourselves" phrase was in the original quote and people left it out to make Apple look [more] arrogant [than they actually are], shame on them.
Agenda was revolutionary in my view. It was not a PIM in the sense of an address book/email program. It was a freeform database that you could dump text data into and manipulate in ways only limited by your ability and imagination. To this day, there have been no programs released with Agenda-like functionality.
An accurate assessment, IMNSHO. (I worked on Agenda 1.0.) It's an interesting footnote that the term PIM (Personal Information Manager) was originally coined in a paper about Agenda published in the Communications of the ACM, but eventually the genre became defined by "electronic DayTimers" like Lotus Organizer and Outlook, and the original meaning was lost.
Curiously, Chandler strikes me as being more like a "second-generation" PIM than the original Agenda. I make this observation cautiously, as Chandler is Mitch Kapor's project, and Mitch was the driving force behind the original Agenda. Nonethless, I see lots of the traditional email/calendar features in Chandler, and less of the "freeform data" organization capabilities of Agenda. FWIW...
Like it had little compatibility with other apps, had memory and file limitations, and had an ugly GUI.
Agenda was an MS-DOS product, which meant that: a) it was a standalone application with relatively few opportunities to be compatibile; b) it had memory and file limitations inherent with being a DOS application; and c) it didn't have a GUI. The UI it did have was, admittedly, ugly.
These limitations, whether the fault of the Agenda implementation or not, certainly contributed to its demise. To succeed at what Agenda did, an application would have to work with data in its "native" form, interoperate with other applications (the ones used to get actual work done), and implement a contemporary UI. This last would help enormously; a ridiculous amount of the code in Agenda was devoted to implementing menus, dialogs, text editors, tables, and a clever (for its day) persistence model.
When I was working for Novell, I started my move to Linux by installing it on the second drive in my laptop and dual-booting; it was the easiest way to start with Linux and preserve the data on my Windows volume. I booted into WIndows very few times after that, and the last few times I realized that I really hadn't needed to. But my Windows volume remained intact (and unused) for months, until it was worth my time to re-format the volume and do a clean install of Linux. So I was officially in "dual boot" status for months, but using Linux 99% of the time.
Having said that, the transition at Novell had its high and low points. I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly the services on the company intranet shifted from supporting WIndows/IE only to generic browsers. I was disappointed in the quality of the GroupWise client on Linux (not that I was wild about the Windows version...), and the lukewarm support for the Evolution client on the GroupWise servers.
Oddly, the thing that made the Linux move easier for me than many of my co-workers was the fact that I am an OS X user by preference. Of course, the terminal was not a mystery, and I was more accustomed to accepting that similar things are sometimes managed very differently on different platforms.
One constructive criticism I would leave Novell with is that they could learn a lot from Apple about making *nix palatable to the desktop user (specific example: printing), but, from where I sat, it seemed as though Apple was completely invisible to Novell.
Not much, but why rewrite something? The net result is just a notepad that runs about the same as the original, with no physical difference.
As a counter-example, I offer OS X's "Stickies" application, which has been around a long time but remains current with the OS X APIs.
Stuff like Notepad and Stickies serve multiple purposes; they have some genuine utility, but they can also showcase the platform and provide developers and users with ideas about the possibilities. IMHO, it's significant that Microsoft is slow to embrace the technologies that they present to the developers on the platform.
Back in the 80's, some Lotus 1-2-3 developers analyzed Excel and found it not to be using the very APIs that the Lotus developers were being encouraged to use. As Scotty said: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." Or something like that.
In the 80's, I worked for a Major Software Company that is now little more than a brand name for a larger company. We had recently moved into a brand new building carefully designed for developers (i.e., adequate power and network connectivity, server areas), which happened to implement a strong preference for private offices (although some space was left open for potential cubicle space.
Enter a new CTO, who expresses a disdain for private offices, and embarks on a plan to double- and triple-up people in the former private offices, and pack cubicles into any available open space (including underneath open stair cases). Morale drops.
Almost immediately said CTO takes over the largest conference room on our floor, which can seat 20 comfortably and pack in 40 or more for a big meeting, and which happens to have a river view, as his private office! And then knocks down a wall and takes over the adjoining former single office as well! Morale tanks.
I don't know what this guy was trying to prove, but his blind faith in Apple got him burned.
Considering that the picture of the machine posted on the web site (which now seems to be unavailable) showed it sitting on a shelf next to Windows programming books, I'm guessing that his "blind faith" is in something other than Apple, and his motiviation was to generate the misleading buzz that ZDNet and Cnet are facilitating.
Before, it was always a bit sketchy comparing Win/*nix apps against OSX apps due to hardware differences. Now that the hardware is starting to become more "common", direct comparisions will take on more meaning.
Maybe the instruction set differences have been eliminated, but apps on different platforms will differ significantly in terms of how they employ the native API. I would expect an application originally written for one platform and ported to the other to suffer a penalty in performance, features, or both on its non-native platform.
Applications written using platform-neutral toolkits will be dependent on the local implementation of the toolkit.
What's more relevant? How Excel on Windows compares to Excel on OS X? [I expect a disadvantage for OS X here.] Or PowerPoint on Windows vs. Keynote on OS X? [Or is this oranges and apples?]
I always had the impression that Star Trek was dry run of their 68K emulator technology
Interesting thought, but I really don't think so. AFAIK, Star Trek was not emulation; it was the Mac OS APIs recompiled and re-hosted on a different platform. I've seen conflicting reports about how it was really implemented, but (forgive me), Cringely's is the most credible, IMHO. It is possible they learned a thing or two that helped them with the PowerPC platform transition.
And I suppose you could argue that if they were going to switch to Intel eventually, they should have done it sooner rather than later.
Personally, I've never believed that. I worked closely with both the 680x0 and 80x86 architectures in the 80's, and, form my perspective as a user of the instruction set, I found the 68K vastly superior to work with; the only thing the Intel platform had going for it was the fact that IBM had made it a de facto standard.
Architecturally, the Pentium started to close the gap, but the power consumption issues were pretty significant. My five-year-old fanless PowerBook G3 is still a pleasure to use over the Dell laptops my last employer supplied me with.
IMNSHO, Apple's Intel switch wasn't inevitable, it just makes sense at the moment. And I harbor a suspicion that Apple won't necessarily stay mono-architectured. Mac OS X binaries, by design, can accommodate multiple (not just two) processor architectures. Apple will pursue the direction(s) that make the most sense as things play out over the next few years.
Wasn't the "Star Trek" Intel port done at about the same time?
Now that you mention it, yeah. We were given a separate presentation at Lotus about Star Trek, including a demo. (Damn, there goes another NDA.)
To be honest, I remember thinking at the time that Star Trek wasn't really thought through. Certainly the execs at Lotus didn't get it (which says more about the execs than it says about Star Trek). DOS/Windows apps were not going to run under Star Trek (certainly not with the desired user experience). "Porting" these apps to the Mac OS APIs wasn't going to be all that easy. And converting Mac applications of the day, many of which were written in processor-dependent ways, to a new processor architecture would be much more difficult than the conversion of more modern applications today.
It was neat technology, but it didn't solve a problem people thought they had.
I kinda went off topic there; please don't hurt my karma.
I seem to recall seeing a demo of a Mac with a Motorola 88000 RISC processor running my 68000 binary code (Lotus 1-2-3) under emulation, a predecessor to the PowerPC effort.
Oops, I may be in violation of an NDA...
/. sure is a good place for dredging up obscure technical memories.
OK, TFA and several posters here have provided reasons for why Microsoft would continue to produce Office for the Mac, such as "they make a profit on it". But nobody has really offered a reason as to why they would commit, in writing, to producing it for any length of time.
The only explanation that I can see is that they got some sort of concession out of Apple in exchange for the commitment.
I suspect that the concession from Apple was to not actively support OpenOffice. Maybe they offered in exchange for help (that I don't think they need) to get VirtualPC working on the new Intel Macs. But I'd welcome more informed speculation.
The problem lies in intentionally sharing files that include metadata you don't typically look at, and therefore may be unaware that you're sharing along with the visible content of the file.
For example, several years ago Microsoft reportedly posted its annual report as a Word document, which contained evidence that it was composed on a Macintosh.
That example is good for a chuckle (OK, maybe a belly laugh for us Mac fanboys), but suppose someone sent a document to a customer that showed it was filed in a folder named "Correspondence with Idiot Customers" without the sender realizing it...
Back in the 70's, I worked the Help Desk at my college's computer center. I was approached by a student taking the entry-level programming class, which taught FORTRAN; programs for the class were written on punched cards (!) and submitted to our RCA Spectra for batch processing.
Anyway, this guy came to me with a question about a cryptic compiler error message (maybe that's redundant). I asked to look at his listing, and found the problem easily enough, but I was intrigued to see that his code was double spaced! (See it coming, yet?) I wanted to figure out how he did it, because I thought it would be useful in my own work to leave room for writing notes on my listings when I looked at them back in my dorm room.
I couldn't find any special options on his command card (the first card in the deck that specified how the deck was to be processed; I finally realized that every other line was a blank comment line. (A "C" in column one, and nothing else on the line/card, for you young'uns).
I couldn't imaging taking the time at the card punch to type just "C", then feed a new card (which took a couple of seconds) between every line of code, so I asked him why he had bothered.
His answer...
[...wait for it...]
"The professor said the program would be easier to debug if we included a lot of comments."
P.S. The program, about 15-20 lines long, was devoid of actual comment text.
Is it possible these senators are just uneducated?
Well, a disproportionate number of them have law degrees, and I suspect that all but a handful (in the single digits) have bachelor's degrees, so that are not uneducated in the formal sense.
But I suspect you mean "uneducated about the issues relevant to this discussion". That's almost certainly true. I would prefer to have it that way. In the egregious example of the drunk driving bill I cited, too many of the legislators intimately involved (in crafting the compromise) were well educated on the issues, having made a living by defending drunk drivers. (Defending people accused of bad things is not inherently bad; crafting legislation that so cravenly serves your self-interest is.) And, while perusing headlines provides anecdotal and not statistical evidence, it seems safe to guess that a disproportionate number of people who voted on the legislation have been defendants or potential defendants in drunk driving situations.
Back to the issue at hand before I get moderated OT: Yes, there will be a transition period in moving to a new standard of document formats. But we (Massachusetts) are in a constant state of transition anyway. Several years ago, I had occasion to try to assist my town's accountant in preparing a report using a "standard" 1-2-3 Release 2 spreadsheet template using the software she had at hand, 1-2-3 for Windows. The formatting was hopelessly broken, and if she hadn't had a former 1-2-3 developer at hand, she would have had to resort to generating the report by hand.
That's certainly an extreme example; even Microsoft is better at cross-version compatibility that the hash Lotus made of it during the transition to GUI spreadsheets. But document compatibility is the very issue that the led the executive branch to adopt a vendor-neutral format for document interchange, and it was an informed decision made by people who have made themselves familiar with the choices at hand. The decision is analogous to the evolution of interchange formats by the CAD industry starting in the 80s.
If the state senators want to make a rational inquiry into the decision and analyze it objectively, I'm all for it; that's their job. Their track record for doing just that, unfortunately, is abysmal.
...comported themselves over the passage of a drunk driving bill recently, I don't want them anywhere near this decision. (Or any other, come to think of it.) This story is slightly OT but includes a succinct narrative of the story.
In brief, the two houses of the legislature came up with different version of the bill, then handed over to a committee comprised largely of lawyers who have done DUI defense work, who watered it down badly before the legislature passed it overwhelmingly and the legislative leadership literally fled the country. Only after a public uproar, they rushed back and demonstrated their conviction by passing a much-strengthened bill by even a larger margin.
The only thing that gives me some hope on the OD issue is that there aren't any MCSE's in the Mass. legislature. I hope.
Slashdot Mirror
Google is all about "relevant" advertising. Their early (revenue) success (AdWords) came from watching your search activity to determine what topics are of interest to you. That's fine; Google provides me a service, they get to use the information (my search terms) that I give them as part of the service request.
Google has moved on to hosting my data (email, and now documents) on their servers, and now to installing their software on my desktop and indexing all the data I maintain there. Isn't it the least bit tempting to Google to mine all that data and learn much, much more about what interests I have and make their advertising that much more relevant? Why else would they give me free software?
Maybe they're not doing this now, but it seems all too possible they'll move in that direction.
I would add to this that ISA mattered a lot more when I wrote code in assembly language. For a clean (and simple) instruction set architecture, I fondly remember the PDP-11. Later on, the 680x0 offered more powerful addressing modes for less simplicity (and consistency). Compared to both, the x86 was infuriating to work with.
ISA's still mattered, but less, in my early "C" days when source-level debugging was less robust, or even to understand what the compiler was turning my code into so I could figure out where to optimize.
Today, it hardly matters at all. Looking at generated code tells me little about how the processor with multiple execution units is going to process it; it is necessary to trust the compiler and its optimization strategy. It matters even less with interpreted or JIT'd languages, where the work eventually performed by the processor is far removed from my code. Knowing what's happening at runtime involves much more important factors than the ISA.
Whether a DRM scheme (or any other software implementation) for that matter is more or less secure because of interoperability is in the margins; security is a question of implementation, not licensing. (Some have made the point that open schemes are subject to more scrutiny and more likely to identify flaws early; perhaps so, but I still argue that the difference is probably marginal.)
The point Jobs raised in his essay is that it's harder to propagate fixes to software that is broadly licensed across many vendors, which in turn means that vulnerabilities remain in the field longer. He also asserts that this could threaten the agreement between Apple and music companies, although you might want to add salt to that to suit your tastes.
IIRC, the bomb that took down Pan Am 103 looked like a cassette player.
IIRC, HP was promoting a technology at the time that was arguably superior to OLE, but they couldn't get a foothold among developers.
Apple had OpenDoc, which was cross-platform, around that time as well; I used it daily to place multiple web page views into a single container that I used as my homepage/dashboard. I know of one prominent multi-platform software vendor that avoided OpenDoc support because Microsoft threatened retaliation if they did so.
Getting back to live-embedding all or part of one document into another, Lotus Jazz provided the functionality and visuals within its suite of integrated Mac apps in 84/85; not the same thing as implementing it in the platform, but platform support for embedding was a logical extension of what Jazz did in a more limited domain.
And, as somebody has already pointed out, Xerox had prior art that pre-dated all of this.
Well, yeah...
As in "even more upset with ourselves for not catching it?"
Yeah, that'll happen.
If the "more upset with ourselves" phrase was in the original quote and people left it out to make Apple look [more] arrogant [than they actually are], shame on them.
An accurate assessment, IMNSHO. (I worked on Agenda 1.0.) It's an interesting footnote that the term PIM (Personal Information Manager) was originally coined in a paper about Agenda published in the Communications of the ACM, but eventually the genre became defined by "electronic DayTimers" like Lotus Organizer and Outlook, and the original meaning was lost.
Curiously, Chandler strikes me as being more like a "second-generation" PIM than the original Agenda. I make this observation cautiously, as Chandler is Mitch Kapor's project, and Mitch was the driving force behind the original Agenda. Nonethless, I see lots of the traditional email/calendar features in Chandler, and less of the "freeform data" organization capabilities of Agenda. FWIW...
Agenda was an MS-DOS product, which meant that: a) it was a standalone application with relatively few opportunities to be compatibile; b) it had memory and file limitations inherent with being a DOS application; and c) it didn't have a GUI. The UI it did have was, admittedly, ugly.
These limitations, whether the fault of the Agenda implementation or not, certainly contributed to its demise. To succeed at what Agenda did, an application would have to work with data in its "native" form, interoperate with other applications (the ones used to get actual work done), and implement a contemporary UI. This last would help enormously; a ridiculous amount of the code in Agenda was devoted to implementing menus, dialogs, text editors, tables, and a clever (for its day) persistence model.
Having said that, the transition at Novell had its high and low points. I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly the services on the company intranet shifted from supporting WIndows/IE only to generic browsers. I was disappointed in the quality of the GroupWise client on Linux (not that I was wild about the Windows version...), and the lukewarm support for the Evolution client on the GroupWise servers.
Oddly, the thing that made the Linux move easier for me than many of my co-workers was the fact that I am an OS X user by preference. Of course, the terminal was not a mystery, and I was more accustomed to accepting that similar things are sometimes managed very differently on different platforms.
One constructive criticism I would leave Novell with is that they could learn a lot from Apple about making *nix palatable to the desktop user (specific example: printing), but, from where I sat, it seemed as though Apple was completely invisible to Novell.
As a counter-example, I offer OS X's "Stickies" application, which has been around a long time but remains current with the OS X APIs.
Stuff like Notepad and Stickies serve multiple purposes; they have some genuine utility, but they can also showcase the platform and provide developers and users with ideas about the possibilities. IMHO, it's significant that Microsoft is slow to embrace the technologies that they present to the developers on the platform.
Back in the 80's, some Lotus 1-2-3 developers analyzed Excel and found it not to be using the very APIs that the Lotus developers were being encouraged to use. As Scotty said: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." Or something like that.
In the 80's, I worked for a Major Software Company that is now little more than a brand name for a larger company. We had recently moved into a brand new building carefully designed for developers (i.e., adequate power and network connectivity, server areas), which happened to implement a strong preference for private offices (although some space was left open for potential cubicle space.
Enter a new CTO, who expresses a disdain for private offices, and embarks on a plan to double- and triple-up people in the former private offices, and pack cubicles into any available open space (including underneath open stair cases). Morale drops.
Almost immediately said CTO takes over the largest conference room on our floor, which can seat 20 comfortably and pack in 40 or more for a big meeting, and which happens to have a river view, as his private office! And then knocks down a wall and takes over the adjoining former single office as well! Morale tanks.
You can't make this stuff up.
Considering that the picture of the machine posted on the web site (which now seems to be unavailable) showed it sitting on a shelf next to Windows programming books, I'm guessing that his "blind faith" is in something other than Apple, and his motiviation was to generate the misleading buzz that ZDNet and Cnet are facilitating.
All in the same place? (More appropriately, only reported in one place?)
Come on, /. When I want to waste my time on crap like this, I turn to digg.
Maybe the instruction set differences have been eliminated, but apps on different platforms will differ significantly in terms of how they employ the native API. I would expect an application originally written for one platform and ported to the other to suffer a penalty in performance, features, or both on its non-native platform.
Applications written using platform-neutral toolkits will be dependent on the local implementation of the toolkit.
What's more relevant? How Excel on Windows compares to Excel on OS X? [I expect a disadvantage for OS X here.] Or PowerPoint on Windows vs. Keynote on OS X? [Or is this oranges and apples?]
Interesting thought, but I really don't think so. AFAIK, Star Trek was not emulation; it was the Mac OS APIs recompiled and re-hosted on a different platform. I've seen conflicting reports about how it was really implemented, but (forgive me), Cringely's is the most credible, IMHO. It is possible they learned a thing or two that helped them with the PowerPC platform transition.
And I suppose you could argue that if they were going to switch to Intel eventually, they should have done it sooner rather than later.
Personally, I've never believed that. I worked closely with both the 680x0 and 80x86 architectures in the 80's, and, form my perspective as a user of the instruction set, I found the 68K vastly superior to work with; the only thing the Intel platform had going for it was the fact that IBM had made it a de facto standard.
Architecturally, the Pentium started to close the gap, but the power consumption issues were pretty significant. My five-year-old fanless PowerBook G3 is still a pleasure to use over the Dell laptops my last employer supplied me with.
IMNSHO, Apple's Intel switch wasn't inevitable, it just makes sense at the moment. And I harbor a suspicion that Apple won't necessarily stay mono-architectured. Mac OS X binaries, by design, can accommodate multiple (not just two) processor architectures. Apple will pursue the direction(s) that make the most sense as things play out over the next few years.
Now that you mention it, yeah. We were given a separate presentation at Lotus about Star Trek, including a demo. (Damn, there goes another NDA.)
To be honest, I remember thinking at the time that Star Trek wasn't really thought through. Certainly the execs at Lotus didn't get it (which says more about the execs than it says about Star Trek). DOS/Windows apps were not going to run under Star Trek (certainly not with the desired user experience). "Porting" these apps to the Mac OS APIs wasn't going to be all that easy. And converting Mac applications of the day, many of which were written in processor-dependent ways, to a new processor architecture would be much more difficult than the conversion of more modern applications today.
It was neat technology, but it didn't solve a problem people thought they had.
I kinda went off topic there; please don't hurt my karma.
Oops, I may be in violation of an NDA...
Copy it, probably.
The only explanation that I can see is that they got some sort of concession out of Apple in exchange for the commitment.
I suspect that the concession from Apple was to not actively support OpenOffice. Maybe they offered in exchange for help (that I don't think they need) to get VirtualPC working on the new Intel Macs. But I'd welcome more informed speculation.
For example, several years ago Microsoft reportedly posted its annual report as a Word document, which contained evidence that it was composed on a Macintosh.
That example is good for a chuckle (OK, maybe a belly laugh for us Mac fanboys), but suppose someone sent a document to a customer that showed it was filed in a folder named "Correspondence with Idiot Customers" without the sender realizing it...
Back in the 70's, I worked the Help Desk at my college's computer center. I was approached by a student taking the entry-level programming class, which taught FORTRAN; programs for the class were written on punched cards (!) and submitted to our RCA Spectra for batch processing.
Anyway, this guy came to me with a question about a cryptic compiler error message (maybe that's redundant). I asked to look at his listing, and found the problem easily enough, but I was intrigued to see that his code was double spaced! (See it coming, yet?) I wanted to figure out how he did it, because I thought it would be useful in my own work to leave room for writing notes on my listings when I looked at them back in my dorm room.
I couldn't find any special options on his command card (the first card in the deck that specified how the deck was to be processed; I finally realized that every other line was a blank comment line. (A "C" in column one, and nothing else on the line/card, for you young'uns).
I couldn't imaging taking the time at the card punch to type just "C", then feed a new card (which took a couple of seconds) between every line of code, so I asked him why he had bothered.
His answer...
[...wait for it...]
"The professor said the program would be easier to debug if we included a lot of comments."
P.S. The program, about 15-20 lines long, was devoid of actual comment text.
Well, a disproportionate number of them have law degrees, and I suspect that all but a handful (in the single digits) have bachelor's degrees, so that are not uneducated in the formal sense.
But I suspect you mean "uneducated about the issues relevant to this discussion". That's almost certainly true. I would prefer to have it that way. In the egregious example of the drunk driving bill I cited, too many of the legislators intimately involved (in crafting the compromise) were well educated on the issues, having made a living by defending drunk drivers. (Defending people accused of bad things is not inherently bad; crafting legislation that so cravenly serves your self-interest is.) And, while perusing headlines provides anecdotal and not statistical evidence, it seems safe to guess that a disproportionate number of people who voted on the legislation have been defendants or potential defendants in drunk driving situations.
Back to the issue at hand before I get moderated OT: Yes, there will be a transition period in moving to a new standard of document formats. But we (Massachusetts) are in a constant state of transition anyway. Several years ago, I had occasion to try to assist my town's accountant in preparing a report using a "standard" 1-2-3 Release 2 spreadsheet template using the software she had at hand, 1-2-3 for Windows. The formatting was hopelessly broken, and if she hadn't had a former 1-2-3 developer at hand, she would have had to resort to generating the report by hand.
That's certainly an extreme example; even Microsoft is better at cross-version compatibility that the hash Lotus made of it during the transition to GUI spreadsheets. But document compatibility is the very issue that the led the executive branch to adopt a vendor-neutral format for document interchange, and it was an informed decision made by people who have made themselves familiar with the choices at hand. The decision is analogous to the evolution of interchange formats by the CAD industry starting in the 80s.
If the state senators want to make a rational inquiry into the decision and analyze it objectively, I'm all for it; that's their job. Their track record for doing just that, unfortunately, is abysmal.
As others have pointed out, Kerry is a United States Senator who happens to be from Massachusetts, not a Massachusetts state senator.
Massachusetts state senators come much cheaper. (And that's saying something...)
In brief, the two houses of the legislature came up with different version of the bill, then handed over to a committee comprised largely of lawyers who have done DUI defense work, who watered it down badly before the legislature passed it overwhelmingly and the legislative leadership literally fled the country. Only after a public uproar, they rushed back and demonstrated their conviction by passing a much-strengthened bill by even a larger margin.
The only thing that gives me some hope on the OD issue is that there aren't any MCSE's in the Mass. legislature. I hope.