John McPhee is a great underrated non-fiction author, up there with the late Tracy Kidder. I particularly like McPhee's "The Curve of Binding Energy" about the physicist Theodore B. Taylor.
He may have little name recognition, but he's considered, at a minimum, one of the most important, influential, masterful nonfiction writers of his generation.
Or, maybe the jobs are there because people companies want to hire want to live there. We have a way of testing this now given that remote work is a thing. We can see if people would rather work remotely from a cheap house in rural Kansas and have nothing to do in the evenings or live in an expensive apartment in an exciting city where their job is.
Up to a point. Yes, it is nice to mix housing and retail and the like, and some zoning laws prevent this. But you have to look back into the 19th century before zoning laws existed and you had things like slaughterhouses opening in residential neighborhoods. Zoning has good reasons to exist.
Residential and commercial can work pretty well together, up to the point of noise and chemical risks. Industrial will pretty much always need to be zoned because of different hazards it presents.
Correction: zoning had good reasons to exist, but it doesn't anymore. Everything that we used to solve that problem is better solved by environmental laws than it ever was by zoning. It turns out that if you make companies pay for their environmental pollution via noise, chemicals, air pollution, etc., they tend to locate their industrial capacity where it is easier to solve or less impactful.
And while every single reasonable but outdated justification for zoning has slowly disappeared, zoning has been thoroughly co-opted by greedy sociopaths and meddlesome wannabe HOA presidents who want to control their neighbors and police aesthetics and keep out undesirables and inflate the value of their investments.
Although it didn't call it that, Simula-67 was basically object-oriented and both preceded and inspired Smalltalk. But syntactically it looks much like other Algol-inspired langages so it doesn't look that interesting at first glance.
Exactly, just as there are rational reasons to dislike Bayer/Monsanto's influence on the business of agriculture without being hysterical about "Frankenfood", you can be against OpenAI, etc. without thinking AI is going to destroy civilization or whatever.
There's also (besides Tate's sequel of 7 more languages), Dimitry Zinoviev's 7 Obscure Languahes in Seven Weeks. I liked it a lot, even if it hurt my feelings a bit to have my beloved Forth be one of the obscure languages (the others were APL, SNOBOL, Occam, Simula, Starset, and M4) -- I'm old and nerdy, but hadn't even heard of Occam and Starset.
Perhaps better IMHO is "Strange code" by Ronald Kneusel (NoStarch, 2022) [0], which I found more didactic and developed. Please note than I'm quite a fan of this author's other books [1].
Amusingly, the Soviets managed to do what DEC failed to do -- make microcomputers based on the PDP/11. They had cloned the PDP-11 on a chip and used it as the basis of a microcomputer line!
DEC had a 1-chip PDP-11 but a 1-chip PDP-11 wasn't competitive with the better chips coming out around 1982. That DEC Professional was not such a great machine and the software support for it was worse. You couldn't run software from the minicomputer and even if you could it wasn't suitable for the needs of end users on a single-user system who were asking to open bigger spreadsheets and such.
Absolutely from the publisher's/advertisers perspective, sure, but back in the day ads weren't something just to be tolerated by the consumer in order to get to the content, but actually valued by them as much as the content.
Although before the Web, ads in specialist magazines weren't just annoyances -- they were half the point of the magazine as there was no other way to find out what was out there to buy. A bit later than BYTE was Computer Shopper (which did have articles to keep it legally a magazine), whose whole purpose was to have ads!
Collie Ryan is mine. She did three albums in the 1970s and then basically disappeared. I became aware of her through the use of her (amazing) song "It's Gonna Rain" which was featured on the soundtrack of Computer Chess (2013), a very weird (but good) film that seems to be about a computer chess tournament in the 1980s but gets weirder.
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