2007 — 11 Apr: blogged to rights
My favorite Police Constable is featured in today's Guardian, "Society" section (which is running a special on the Public Services sector viewed from inside). Needless to say, he is not the preferred police spokesperson of the Home Office (or do I mean Department of Homeland Security in embryo?) He describes his daily working life as like being:
"on another planet dealing with an alien race with very small brains and enlarged vocal chords".1
Does that mean they won't come quietly?
Give it a whirr... department
I was once called a "nit-picking pedant" by my third-line manager in IBM (light banter for that Corporation, trust me) but I pale as a pedant beside the correction I note today regarding a line about the "whirring tapes" of IBM's latest computer in 1949 that appeared in the Guardian's obituary of John Backus. Mag tape drives weren't used until 1951...
It amuses me to ponder on the fact that some 4 billion people have sprung into existence since that first handful of computers (and whirring mag tape drives, of course) appeared. Back in 1999, Jim Turley was already suggesting that "About zero percent of the world's microprocessors are used in computers" because of the explosive proliferation of embedded systems. And I host here a telling quotation from one Thomas Watson Sr. about the size of the world market for the blessed devices.
On a somewhat-related theme, Douglas Hofstadter (whose new book I am a strange loop is on order, and eagerly awaited by the one now typing on the iMac while the XP machine digests all his MP3s — not for the first time!) features in a "telephone interview" here. I hadn't even finished reading it before I knew I wanted to mention it!