SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
dw861 (1561)
I used to receive a daily SoylentNews digest, by email. However, my last message received was towards the end of October, and then nothing since.
Was it something that I did?
Have others also experienced this issue?
The National Capital Freenet informs me that tomorrow, March 16, is Affordable Internet Day.
https://affordable-internet.ca/
Interesting lineup of speakers, including Michael Geist and Cory Doctorow.
Unfortunately I can't participate, but you might be available.
Recently, there was a submission on SN that only generated one poor-quality comment and two replies.
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=20/01/21/1952239
Given the original journal aricle's argument, that there were only natural, and no Indigenous impacts on the landscape, until after contact, I was surprised that it didn't generate more commentary here. Soylentils might like to know that the original journal article has since created an academic firestorm. For instance, this academic rebuttal:
https://ecoevorxiv.org/tgu65/
This isn't my field, but I do research in an adjacent discipline. Will be very interesting to watch how it plays out.
Thrilled that Peter Stone has once again devoted a lot of time to making WordPerfect for Linux 8.1 "current". An entirely new method to install, and print from a circa 1999 program.
The New York Times (and many other sources) report that Evelyn Berezin has died at the age of 93.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/obituaries/evelyn-berezin-dead.html [nytimes.com]
Berezin was a computer pioneer who emancipated many a frazzled secretary from the shackles of the typewriter nearly a half-century ago. In the late 1960s Berezin was described as an adventurous do-it-herself polymath with the logical mind of an engineer, the curiosity of an inventor and the entrepreneurial skills of a CEO. As founder of Redactron Corp, Berezin and her company produced "Data Secretary" machines that arrived in offices in 1969 like a box of magic tricks. The machines were bulky, slow and noisy, but they could edit, delete and cut and paste text.
The size of a small refrigerator, the machine had no screen. Its keyboard and printer was an IBM Selectric Typewriter with a rattling print head the size of a golf ball. The device had 13 semi-conductor chips, some of which Ms. Berezin designed, and programmable logic to drive its word-processing functions.
In this era, secretaries represented 6% of the American workforce, and in time the machine's functions would liberate users from the tyranny of of having to retype pages marred by bad keystrokes. "I'm embarrassed to tell you that I never thought of it--it never entered my mind" that the word processor might endanger women's jobs. The first advert for the Redactron word processor was placed in Ms. magazine in 1971, hailing the "death of the dead-end secretary."
Early in her career, Berezin designed numerous single-purpose computer systems. They calculated the firing ranges of big guns, controlled the distribution of magazines, kept accounts for corporations and automated banking transactions. She also claimed credit for the world's first computerized airline reservations system.
Berezin joined the Electronic Computer Corp in 1951 as the only woman in a shop of Brooklyn engineers. They said to her "Design us a computer", however she had never seen one before. Hardly anybody had. "So, I just had to figure out how to do it" she reported in a 1972 interview. "it was a lot of fun--when I wan't terrified!"
Ms Berezin was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in Los Angeles in 2011. "Why is this woman not more famous? " British writer and entrepreneur Gwyn Headley asked in a 2010 blog post.
