TV news is curated for a particular effect; Why this story, and not that one?
It is a type of commercial entertainment. It it simultaneously inane and culturally violent. Here are people dying in an ongoing struggle for power between warlords and a corrupt government; here are professional athletes winning a tournament. Here's the weather forecast. These subjects merit approximately equal time and similar sentiment in tone. As a viewer of TV news, you are not empowered to change anything because you are not informed of any of the forces and complexities driving the violence and there is no call to action.
That's part of the system. Management is failing if it's not acknowledging and tackling this part of the system that's prepared to destroy the whole to preserve itself.
Yes, it made a racket! There is a description of the Harvard Mark I crashing in Beyer's "Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age":
> Hopper, Campbell, and Bloch invested substantial energy in developing practices and procedures for debugging. Like physicians, they identified symptoms, made diagnoses, and prescribed treatments. Sometimes symptoms were obvious, as when Mark I would come to a crashing halt: “The crash of that thing sounded as if a plane had run into the building,” Hopper recalled. ”You never heard such a crash in your life.”
Is that where the term of a computer "crashing" comes from?
Similar to how the term debugging may or may not have been "reinforced" by the finding of an actual moth on the Mark II (it wasn't its origin, according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debugging#Etymology ).
Laurent Bossavit's "The Leprechauns of Software Engineering"[1] is fun and accessible. It claims that much of what we consider fact in software engineering is actually folklore.
Wonderful stuff. Gerald Weinberg had a huge influence on at least the 1990s generation of testers, with his ethnographic approach. He doesn't seem to have had as much influence on the same generation of programmers. Perhaps the techniques he described had already been internalised?
Dennis Geller is the author of Structured Programming in APL[2] and Tom Plum seems to have gone on to a career in writing books on C[3].
It looks like this film is just one part of a series, probably presenting approaches from Weinberg's early structured programming books[1].
I'd love to know where this gem was discovered and if the rest of the putative series still exists.
This is from a reel owned by youtuber TechnologyConnections.
Short clips of it appeared in his recent video about his film projector.
After that video went up he made a YouTube community post that reads:
Merry Christmas, everybody!
If you're interested in seeing the entirety of that programming film, I've uploaded it on Connextras. This is the only reel I have, unfortunately, so I can't show you part 2 (or three? maybe? don't have a clue how many reels there were).
...and the filename is shown as a focused highlight, leading you to think that's where the focus actually is! But no, it's in the search field, at the bottom right of the dialog.
"Every other week" or "twice a week" is much more understood, even if it's a bit wordier. Fortnightly is nice if fortnight were a real word, not some made up british thing.
It is a type of commercial entertainment. It it simultaneously inane and culturally violent. Here are people dying in an ongoing struggle for power between warlords and a corrupt government; here are professional athletes winning a tournament. Here's the weather forecast. These subjects merit approximately equal time and similar sentiment in tone. As a viewer of TV news, you are not empowered to change anything because you are not informed of any of the forces and complexities driving the violence and there is no call to action.