I get the Route Fifty morning email because that’s what is left of Government Computing News magazine. Don’t worry, you can’t find any reference to Government Computing magazine via Google. You see, Government Computing News magazine was the only media to publicly document the reason HealthCare.gov failed during its initial roll-out. Agile. All of the rest of the media simply quoted the peddlers of this fatal snake oil who all said it failed because it … The Last IBM EngineerRead more
IBM
Posted inExperience / Information Technology
Flatpaks are Magically Bloated in Size
In a discussion thread on the MX Linux forum someone made the comment “flatpaks are magically bloated in size.” Kids today! Statements like this require a lengthy response. Despite what Twitter and “news media” have conditioned you to believe, life is not a soundbite. Being a very old geek who started out on Commodore Super PET then moved to PDP-11/70 running RSTS/E . . . having written some geek books that won an award or two, … Flatpaks are Magically Bloated in SizeRead more
Posted inInformation Technology
Win-G
I’ve been seeing this Win-G contract for a few months now. That’s by no means its official name, but good enough for who it is for. You have to be old to understand this. Here is one thing you have to know up-front. Every stupid idea in IT will be repeated at least two more times if you live long enough. Roland Hughes IBM made the same stupid mistake twice that I know of. Early … Win-GRead more
Posted inInformation Technology
Trigraphs and Digraphs
I remember thinking trigraphs were a cheap hack when they were first introduced. Now that I’m old I get called on to help “modernize” legacy code. Keyboard images courtesy of Admiral Shark’s Keyboards. Too much of the information posted on-line about Trigraphs and Digraphs is incomplete or just plain wrong. Those who have only ever worked on x86 hobby computer systems blame the 7-bit ASCII-ish ISO 646 character set not having some of the critical … Trigraphs and DigraphsRead more
Posted inInformation Technology
The Death of Commercial Application Frameworks
I was going to title this post “The Death of Qt” but it is really all commercial event driven application frameworks. To understand this you need to take a journey with me. Most of you reading this aren’t as old as me and didn’t live through all of it. What brought this on? Continually getting questions about why things are the way they are in Qt and application frameworks in general has been a big … The Death of Commercial Application FrameworksRead more