[#]Toganazzini did a good job in 1996 of predicting today's Plagiarisation Machines:
...future students may be more desirous of taking advantage of certain technological shortcuts. As a final example of the changes computers will visit on education, let me suggest to you my personal favorite: the Automatic Plagiarizer (pat.pending).
When I was a lad, we wrote our term papers the old-fashioned way. We assembled them from passages gleaned from The World Book Encyclopedia, The illustrated Classics, and other sources, shifting the vocabulary just as much as necessary to throw our teachers off the scent. When it worked, it was great; when it didn't, it was disaster. One student in our school attempted to crib an entire term paper from an article in the rather obscure California Historical Society Quarterly. This journal was so obscure, in fact,that only two people had ever read it: he and his teacher. The teacher hadn't read it prior to perusing the student's paper, mind you, but once having recognized a vocabulary level far beyond that of the offending student, the teacher took time out of his otherwise busy schedule to spend three days down at the county library, ferreting out the original source.
Would that the teacher had stopped there, but he didn't. Instead, he announced a lecture for all the school to attend entitled, “On Comparative Historical Perspective,” during which he alternately read from the historical journal and the student paper, claiming to want to show how differently two historians viewed the same event. Within seconds, the entire school not only recognized that the student historian's views were more than passingly similar to the journal historian's, but we knew who the culprit was. He was the one doing his best to dig a hole through the concrete subfloor into which he could sink out of sight forever.
This incident was the unhappy result of low technology. Fortunately, a solution should soon be at hand. Students should soon be able to buy an application that will do their plagiarizing for them. The application will first ask the student purchasers to feed into the application a sample of work they actually did on their own, should they possess such a document. The plagiarizer will then be prepared to digest thoroughly an article from the California Historical Society Quarterly or any other source that might be found kicking around the electronic Library of Congress. After a few moments of munching, it will spit out a neatly typed document chock-a-block with cleverly disguised statements such as, “So the dude goes, 'Yo, Dude, I'm like totally bummed that I have like, only, one life to, like, lay on my country.'"
Certain bugs may need to be worked out.
Students will herald the automatic plagiarizer as nothing more than the pocket calculator of the next century, a simple student aid. Their more moss-backed teachers may adopt a contrarian position. Like so many other areas of emerging technology, electronic documents and reader control will force us to reexamine and extend our ethics - or give up trying.
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OK, reading the "K-12 Schools" chapter, it's clear that the future outlined in this book is a neoliberal wet dream.
Halfway through the chapter the author bangs on about how high-tech industry spends 10 to 20 percent of revenues on R&D and schools spend two hundredths of a percent - and then we get this gem:
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Wow, the #Toganazzini book is deeply cynical and anti-worker to its politically ignorant core.
Chiat/Day used to be in two buildings. Now all employees are in one, at a substantial real estate cost saving of around 35 percent. They love their new freedom, and Chiat/Day was happy enough with the new way of working that six months later they changed their Manhattan office over to the same system.
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There was no more space in the alt text for the back cover blurb for the Tog book, so here it is.
Tog on Software Design
“An amazing combination of technical depth and humanism. which is always relevant, often witty, and sometimes very moving."
Jean-Louís Gassée, Chaírman and CEO, Be. Inc.: former President of the Product Division. Apple Computer. Inc.
"Tog takes us on an extraordinary journey as software design crawls out of the operating system of computers and on to the landscape of networks and new media content. He is a gifted hands-on designer who weaves a very compelling story."
John Sculley, former CEO, Apple Computer, Inc.
"Vintage Tog - great potential with a taste of nuttiness. Intelligendly bombastic. Insightfully outrageous."
Don Norman, Vice President, Apple Computer, Inc., author of Things That Make Us Smart
The computer industry is poised for its second great revolution, and within ten years, society will be in the midst of an equally great transformation. In Tog on Software Design, Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini. respected industry futurist, presents his vision of our technological future, detailing the steps computer professionals need to take now to deliver powerful new technologies in a form that will profit the industry and benefit society in general.
Tog on Software Design discusses the evolution computers will undergo in the coming decade and the impact these changes will have on society as a whole. You'll find lively, thought-provoking essays on topics from quality management to the meaning of standards, to corporate structure and cooperation, interspersed with responses to queries supplied by designers and developers. These essays will furnish industry managers, programmers, and designers with a blueprint for success in the coming decade. Discussion of issues surrounding home, school, and business will give computer enthusiasts a fascinating view of how their lives will soon be transformed.
Always insightful, often provocative, occasionally controversial, and perpetually entertaining, Tog provides an easy read that's as accessible to lay computer users as it is to computer professionals.
Bruce Tognazzini has been an articulate visionary, outspoken user advocate, and popular keynote speaker from the beginning of the personal computer revolution. He worked at Apple from 1978 to 1992, during which time he played a major role in Macintosh interface design. Now he is a Distinguished Engineer in the Office of Strategic Technology at Sun Microsystems. He is the author of Tog on Interface, [text obscured by original price sticker] by Addison-Wesley.
[Hodges Figgis IR£24.95]
Cover design by Jean Seal
Cover photograph by BruceCook
9 780201 489170
ISBN 0-201-48917-1
Addison-Wesley Publishing Company
$29.95
US
$41.00
CANADA
Find A-W Developers Press on the World-Wide Web at: http://www.aw.com/devpress/
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I picked up these two, "Instant Delphi Programming" (1995) by David Jewell, with floppy disk, and "Tog on Software Design" (1996) by Bruce Tognazzini, who used to be at #SunMicrosystems and worked on StarFire, a vision for a future computer user interface.
His page is still up but the cert has expired. You can fetch the video mentioned in the book from there.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfire_video_prototype
https://www.asktog.com/starfire/
https://www.asktog.com/starfire/starfire.mp4
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[#]Dublin #RetroComputing folks - want to share bookshops you know of that have interesting old computer books?
I'll go first: the independent "Bookmart and Game Exchange" on Talbot Street:
(The owner must have let the domain lapse - it's now in use by a book shop in Sligo.)
Many titles listed in the alt text.
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Can anyone please point me at a toot that I saw go by in the last month or so?
It outlined how one of the #AgileManifesto signatories realised after the fact (I'm paraphrasing badly here) that the manifesto was in fact a statement of #worker #rights, and they ought to have advocated better for that.
I think there was a link to an article, too.
[Edited to add tags, maybe for wider reach?]
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I think I'm in an extreme minority of enjoying #RetroComputing but finding the on-screen visual design of pretty much everything in this world - type design, composition and layout, colour palettes - uniquely and irretrievably ugly.
Not only that; I find the universe of ideas and tropes for games depressingly narrow and centred exclusively on competition and violence. Settler colonist games. Trading and conquest games. War in the air. War in space. Violence in the city. Violence in some regurgitated Tolkien-esque mythical mediaeval period with magic and orcs. Where's the cooperation, the kindness, the nurturing?
It's almost as though the Capitalist mindset of capture, control, expansion and exploitation had been absorbed and internalised by the people who initiated and set the boundaries of this initially underground, countercultural, subversive world.
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[#]PlutoBooks have a Kickstarter on the go for a boardgame they're calling "Billionaires and Guillotines":
In Billionaires and Guillotines, players take on the role of 2-5 rival plutocrats vying to grab the wealth of the world before their actions trigger a revolution where they all lose… a lot more than their assets.
Will you play the aristocrat or the war profiteer? The tech overlord or the property speculator? You will try to build a private space program, marry (and divorce) a celebrity spouse and start your own scam charity in this raucous game for aspiring billionaires and their enemies.
As the revolution approaches, the billionaires have one chance to cooperate to delay their downfall… but otherwise, may the best (or worst) tycoon win.
Billionaires and Guillotines is so easy that 2-5 envious losers can learn and play in under an hour. It is heartily approved by many satisfied players who hate games and the uber-rich.
It’s the first board game produced by the legendary radical publishing house Pluto Press in cooperation with designer Max Haiven, author of many books including Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/plutopress/billionaires-and-guillotines
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I was simultaneously delighted and disappointed at the queue for #repaircafe at #tog #hackerspace in #Dublin today! I arrived at 15:00, an hour before it was due to finish up (with my #SovietEra radio, which I guess needs to have some capacitors replaced) and there was a queue out the door! I'm delighted to see there's such a demand for #mending and #repair. I didn't have time to have my radio seen to! Next time, when I'll also volunteer to be available for folks with slow computers!
I should have taken a snap at TOG to accompany this post - didn't think of it at the time - so here's the radio.
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[#]IronFox appears to be the natural successor:
https://gitlab.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox
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Sad to see that #MullBrowser, the privacy-oriented fork of #Firefox for #Android, has been abandoned.
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Am I the only one whose gears get ground every time I hear a YouTuber start with "Hi, guys!"?
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@adventofcomputing crickets over at internet archive:
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@adventofcomputing here's #IDRIS for the 68000:
https://bitsavers.org/bits/Whitesmiths/IDRIS_68K/
It's not clear what system that's designed to run on though! I'll see if I can boot the root disk in #Hatari, the Atari ST emulator.
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Sean Haas of @adventofcomputing has a fascinating episode out about #IDRIS, a reimplementation of #UNIX for a variety of early personal computers with #Intel8086, #Motorola68000 CPUs as well as #DEC #PDP11. Bizarrely, the OS seems mostly lost.
adventofcomputing: Episode 149 - IDRIS is Not UNIX
https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-149-is-119316624
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idris_(operating_system)
A version of IDRIS that starts from #DOS is available on GitHub, though!
https://github.com/hansake/Whitesmiths-Idris-OS/tree/main/co-idris_setup
[#]RetroComputing
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@adventofcomputing , something for you?
https://fosstodon.org/@interlisp/113764015401132219
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Most intriguing conversation unfolding at https://touch.adverts.ie/other-computers/computers/35853721
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I was wondering why #GreaseWeazle docs suggest SCP as the file extension for flux images. Turns out the format is an open spec originally designed for a device called SuperCard Pro:
https://www.cbmstuff.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=52
https://www.cbmstuff.com/downloads/scp/scp_image_specs.txt
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[#]Atari8bit aficionados - there's no support in #Altirra emulator for #flux #disk images, is there?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22altirra%22+%22flux%22&ia=web
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text/gemini
