Are there any sample sections available?

The minimum price of the book is free. You could grab a copy and determine if you like what you see and then pay the full price.

and that is the appropriate price for a collection of reddit(?)-messages grouped by topic.

What do you mean?

That there are tasks out there that some ought to do for free if someone else thinks these should be done for free?

The "pay what you think it is worth" model is not a scalable and viable approach. It most likely only works when everything costs money and "pay what you think" is a novelty that gains sympathy and attention.

But as soon as the novelty wears off it is not a sustainable approach.

This is an outstanding paper; one of my favorites in all of computing. Read it and marvel at all that Kay has been part of.

Too much (self) marketing for my taste; I much prefer this one: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386335 (Ingalls, 2020, The evolution of Smalltalk: from Smalltalk-72 through Squeak)

I don't think I'd ever seen that document. Thank you!

I worked on the Basic Workstation team; my part was the desktop and folders code. As I recall, the whole BWS rewrite was the result of Robert Ayers coming along and trying to rewrite the bottom layers of Star from scratch. The framework he came up with became the basis for BWS.

I was one aisle over on the editor team. Your memory matches mine about how the BWS came about. It was about opening the system up to allow apps to easily be added unlike the original “trait”-based system that was closed by design.

Traits was the object oriented multiple inheritance archetypes layered on top of Mesa that Star was based upon and required a static analysis step of all objects in the system to optimize object layouts—this is why it was a closed system. After the changeover to BWS, a few years later, only the document editor, and all object types represented in documents (graphics, tables, equations…) continued to use traits.

Federico Viticci of MacStories has created S-GPT, a free shortcut that allows you to submit queries to ChatGPT. The shortcut works on iPhones, iPads, and MacOS devices, and allows integrations with the native device OS. Example: you can ask ChatGPT to create a list of songs, and S-GPT can create the playlist in Apple Music.

Using the shortcut requires a paid account and an api key from OpenAI, but as Viticci points out, he spent only $1.50 during his entire time testing the shortcut.

"The G3000 also monitors pilot activity/inactivity and cabin pressure and can automatically engage Autoland or Emergency Descent Mode if no activity is detected." - Arstechnica article. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/11/this-system-from-garmin...

Yes! When I was a junior or senior in college, I went through the list of PARC reports and made a list of perhaps 20 or more of them I might like. I was very surprised to eventually get a book-sized box full of reports.

That lead me to an interest in Xerox, and when I got out of college I went to work for Xerox in El Segundo on the Star project.

I stayed there for 7 years, so I'd say the company got their money's worth out of sending a college student a bunch of tech reports.

The writer, Nilay Patel, is editor-in-chief of The Verge.

"Courage" is a reference to Apple executive Phil Schiller's use of that word to describe Apple's removal of the headphone jack from the iPhone 7 last Fall.

The current holder of the title of oldest person ever was 123, and even that age is well beyond the current oldest person person at 116.

I'm skeptical that they'll be able to independently verify an age of 145, but we'll see.

Said book - Annals of the Former World - is only $5.99 in Kindle form at Amazon. It's far from my favorite work of McPhee's, but $5.99 is quite a bargain.

http://www.amazon.com/Annals-Former-World-John-McPhee-ebook/...