Announcements to the World


Introduction.
In these days of a crashing U.S. economy, the doom and gloom attitude can easily mess things up by making people think there's only so much pie left to go around, and they better grab their crumb. It's time to point out that all money-making enterprises are based on ideas. Ideas, ideas ideas, ideas are everything. When the economy is deflating, it's time to go back to the Idea Well. Is yours empty? Let's say yes. Well, mine is full. I got so many ideas that I'd need ten thousand lifetimes to work them all out, so since I only got one life and would rather live it as a blonde, keeping my options open, I'm giving free ideas away today. As an old fart into history, I'd love to see acres of buildings full of people working my ideas, whether they gave me credit or not (hopefully historians will), entire regions of the country, entire nations, the entire world. I like to think of myself as the idea man at the toppy top top top, up on Mount Olympus, where I wear a toga and sandals with my long white beard and carry a cane. Spend awhile and see if there's one for you.

Investor Wanted - Tommy's Toys Software Co.

Oct. 11, 2008. In 1985-2001 I ran a PC game software co. called Tommy's Toys, which has a unique image and marketing formula to the effect that the software is programmed by aliens from outer space, and that Tommy, an eternal infant humanoid with a giant brain (based on my baby picture) is the head alien (I should have spelled it with three Ms). In the days when software tycoons like Bill Gates were busy trying to monopolize the PC software market and upping the ante by hiring ever-more college grads who like to work all night for free pizza, my private joke is that my entire company was just one person, me, churning out zillions of lines of code in a home office while trying to lay low, contenting myself with knowing I was the world's greatest computer programmer and everybody else was a piker, and I didn't want to become a businessman and manage the managers of managers of computer programmers but do it all myself - like, who cares about becoming a billionaire and having to figure out what to do with it and avoid the pies in the face? I started out in 1985 in the days of DOS, taking the idea of BASIC games to the extreme using QuickBasic to produce over 200 different titles, mainly word, card, and mind games, which I ended up mainly giving away for free because of the massive piracy, but at least it ruined the market for everybody else, particularly Microsoft, another one of my private jokes, the real reason they never got into the game software biz very deep. The technical point is that I almost never descended into C or assembly language but stayed in Basic so that I could whip out a new game a week as if I was a big company with 50 programmers rather than spend years on one game that would have cost a lot of development money and couldn't have survived being pirated (too bad, for all those companies that went belly up, grin). Thus I stayed away from arcade games that require the last ounce of performance, and concentrated on the type of games that rely on your memory and skill rather than reflexes, which worked out nicely when the Japanese took over the arcade game biz but couldn't handle English mind games since they couldn't speak good enough English. After Windows came out I never used Visual Basic but kept using QuickBasic since Windows can run DOS anyway. Tommy's Toys are a legend now, the kind you either love or hate, but had to deal with in the PC/Windows world, and if you're in your 30s maybe you played with them in the day. Way into the late 1990s I was the only software company still putting out DOS programs. I quit making new games in 1998 to start a new career as a novelist and historyscoper (which had nothing to do with the market, but is my own personal biological clock kicking in), but now I'm thinking would be a good time to revamp the software on a new standard, namely the Web of today, and make the entire set into an online multiuser Web toy chest. The only problem is the sheer mass of it, and the fact that I am too busy to go back to computer programming or game design except as a minor activity, and already expended massive mental effort to produce the code I got. The core routines and sense of humor are priceless, and all they need is conversion to Visual Basic, er, something Internet-oriented such as Java, a new graphical user interface, and new graphic and sound FX and multiuser operating system, which all only has to be developed once then applied across the entire game set. And this time, thanks to the Internet, we can insure that they all pay for the play, preferably as a service rather than trying to sell game programs per se. So I'm looking for an investor, buyer, or partner with enough bucks to hire at least 50 programmers, plus enough bucks to give it a marketing push and host a big enough Web site. In return I'll provide my secret source code, and my expertise as a master consultant, head toymaker and editor in chief. The potential is the possibility of virtually everybody on the Net playing these silly engrossing software toys all the time, a Universal Family Game Channel, a Disney Channel from Outer Space, and a new billion dollar corporation with me as the figurehead and you as the fat cat. Massive time-wasters, granted, but good for the brain too, and all G-rated - what better biz to be in?

The archived Web site is available on the Wayback machine: Tommystoys.com


More on the proposed deal:
Tommy's Toys Blog


If interested email me at tlwinslow 'at' a o l dot com and present your credentials and business proposal; use msg title "TOMMY'S TOYS/INVESTOR".

The Live Protocol - the next big breakthrough for ecommerce

Sept. 5, 2008. The original Internet was created by anything but business-oriented designers. The spam problem is just one of many proofs of this. Jeesh, how dumb not to include in the design of email a 'password' field, so that email with a blank or wrong password can be automatically sorted by the receiver into a junk mail bin, while mail with different passwords is automatically sorted into different bins of your choice, like in any big company that has a mail sorting room. Instead, they let spam rage on and try to criminalize it, making the lawyers rich.

The next big problem with the Internet is the fundamental design of Web sites. Basically, they allow companies to create online vending machines. Duh, what makes any commercial enterprise go is salesmen. Salesmen made America great and were the secret weapon that defeated Soviet Communism and European Socialism, grin. Vending machines don't have salesmen, are lame and require the customer to have to read a catalog and do too much work to select what they really want, and are great targets for thieves. Ergo, the commercial potential of the Internet is languishing in a sea of lawlessness and piracy, where ironically the real salesmen are those using spam to hook sales, or the porno sites where what you see is what you get, after providing your credit card info.

The Internet should be the great world store, and here's the magic solution, straight from TLW the WGG. I want to create a new type of protocol, call it live://, which reverses the control scheme so that the Web site operators do the pointing and clicking for the customer. In other words, like a 2-way TV set, where a live salesman appears when you connect with them, and they ask you what you'd like to see, and then show it to you by utilizing their knowledge of the merchandize, and suggest products and puff the merch and cut deals, then close the sale, at which point all you do is fill in the customer info., which itself can be done electronically with pre-validated payment keys. People don't want to buy, they want to be sold, look it up in your Funk & Wagnalls, 877-CASH-NOW. Companies can then close down their physical stores and use all their salesmen online, working out of their homes, to do biz on a worldwide basis 24/7, and drop-ship the merch. Big chains can still keep their service centers for big ticket items. Unlike http sites, connecting to a live site requires the company to have a switchboard-like system that routes you to an available live operator. The customer can utilize his video camera to become visible to the live operator, or just connect via voice and keyboard, or maybe dress up in costume, who cares, it's da Internet and the customer is always right. When operators are not available, the live sites can default to the old vending machine http kind, groan. The key to the new protocol is that it is parallel to and overrrides the http protocol, allowing the "live world" to grow up and dominate. For instance, an online store might have an http store, or several http stores, which it can connect to its live store via the Internet authorities, permitting anybody calling up an http store to be overriden and steered to the live store first. Once the new protocol takes over the Internet, the possibilities are endless, such as operators acting as auctioneers to a bunch of customers at the same time. People like to wheel and deal with people, and vending machines can go to hell.

Meanwhile I've found time to spec out a revolutionary Live Salesperson Front End package for e-commerce Web sites, and am game to a smart investor providing seed money to found the Livesafe Company, with me as idea man. If interested in my business plan, email tlwinslow 'at' a o l dot com, msg title: "INVESTOR/LIVESAFE".

New Energy Idea by TLW: the Winslow

Sept. 5, 2008. In an era when petroleum is too expensive and has too many environmental problems, wind power beckons. I'm too busy being a Historyscoper to take the time out to crack the engineering books and go at it myself, but I'm offering another idea to the world for some lucky smart duck plucker. I call it the Winslow. Hopefully when you become a zillionaire you'll at least still call it that? Peel me off a zillion too for a finder's fee and I won't turn it down :)

Basically, my idea is this. Ever see The Wizard of Oz and that great tornado? Okay, Nature makes tornadoes, and uncontrolled, they're bad. What if we could make an artificial tornado, inside a big concrete or other nonmagnetic cylinder, and maintain it indefinitely? Let's say the cylinder is wound with iron coils, and we inject into the tornado some magnetized iron balls, with a screen that prevents them from flying out of the cylinder. The rotation of the magnets inside the coil all in the same direction will produce guess what? I'm going to say B, the Universe, made of electricity.

How do we create a tornado? Think of a bathtub with a vortex going in the drain, only with wind. What I envisage is a huge installation on some desert land which has available wind. The mathematical physics work needs to be done, but let's imagine a bunch of concrete canyonlike walls that from the sky look like a giant conch shell, probably with some kinky topology, perhaps shaping the walls like airplane wings, to give the wind an uplift as well as a twist. All the winds from every direction are slowly aggregated and given the same uptwist, and as they approach the center they should increase in volume and speed and go tornado, with the waste wind exiting out the top. And if the wind collection area is large enough to create a constant reserve, the tornado can be kept alive indefinitely, even with average slow winds, because, like a bathtub, it's just a matter of keeping the water level high enough to keep the vertex going in the drain. Maybe I'm nuts, but let's say we get our computer simulators going, then go to wind tunnel tests. Obviously, if it can be made to work, we have free electricity, after paying for the initial installation. And there are no moving parts like with stupid propeller-driven windmills and rotor-driven electric generators, so upkeep is cheap. An installation can last 100 years, becoming a money machine after so many years. And it's environmentally friendly, once precautions are taken for birds and wildlife, indeed, each Winslow installation can become a wildlife habitat. Maybe a 2nd generation portable Winslow will materalize, allowing the so-called Third World to electricize at jet speed. Okay, it's just a dream now, but something tells me it can be made to work by a persistent Edison type. Wind. Slow. Winslow, get it? How about General Winslow Corporation, headed by you? Check back with me when you get anywhere, I'd be glad to sit on the board as long as I don't have to do anything but dispense advice and get a fat paycheck and get off on the double meaning of the name of the company.


EBS:The Next Big Thing on the Highways, by TLW

May 1, 2009

Way back around 1976 I saw "The Silencers" (1966), starring Dean Martin as Matt Helm. At one point his spy car flashes messages off its bumper, like an electronic billboard. A light went off.

I call it the Electronic Bumper Sticker (EBS). Every moving vehicle ought to have an EBS installed as factory equipment. They are just what's missing from vehicles. Every time I go on the highway I wonder why why what happened, is it my fault, yes it is. I even put the idea in one of my novels, "The Incredible Billion Dollar Geek", and still nobody got it. Do we have a drumroll effect here, seriously? The idea is that when you're driving a car, it's impossible to figure out what the vehicles around you intend to do next. If only they would tell you. If only you could communicate with them. How? Use a CB radio? How do you know what channel to use, and if they even have a CB? Text them on your iPod? How do you know their email address, and if they even have a cell phone? Either way, they require you to use your hands too much, which is dangerous to you and everybody else on the road.

If I'm trying to merge left so I can take a highway exit, I can put on my blinkers. Trouble is, the assholes won't let me over. Maybe they think I left them on by mistake, or I just want to ride in the right lane. Maybe they think I want to take the exit two exits down, not the one coming up in a few blocks. If I could put a message on my back bumper saying "I'm exiting Exit 212A, please let me in", it might help. Ah, that's a really bad wreck, the guy needs a lawyer like mine. But that would require me to type on a keyboard? Yes and no. After enough are on the road, the highway guys would no doubt build transponders into every exit sign and all you have to do is push a button and keep pushing until the right exit sign comes up.

Let's say I'm a studly single guy and drive by a hot looking chick in a sports car. What am I supposed to do? It'd be nice if I could put my cell phone number on my bumper in case she'd like it. Or vice-versa, since she's got her own EBS. Get the idea yet?

The ramifications are interesting. It shouldn't take long for companies to start soliciting space on EBSes for advertising. Think of a highway full of vehicles, every one having their EBS going full time, with ads cycling and all making a few bucks to pay for gas. I suppose they could become distracting, but I'm sure the government will step in with regulations, perhaps starting with illumination wattage limits. Some vehicles might have EBses on all four sides, maybe a bank of them on all four sides. The EBS in front can be made to read backwards, so the vehicles in front can read it via their rearview mirror. Of course color videos will be available in at least the 2nd generation.

You might think that the government would try to outlaw them, but guess what? They might mandate them instead, since they will soon realize that a police override can be built in, for example, if there's an accident two miles ahead, so they can make all EBSes flash an informative message. Or at border crossings, toll gates, airports, whatever. Much more powerful than detour signs. And they can be instantly changed, rippling on back down the vehicles. Note that the messages being flashed on the EBS will also show up in the driver's console display.

Of course, EBSes will come with keyboards, and a driver can get in the same dangerous trouble with them that he gets with cell phones. But with EBSes, a passenger can work the keyboard too, just don't let the kids get their hands on them or you might become instant roadkill, you suck what? At least, the EBS will open up a world of private vehicle-to-vehicle communication that isn't subject to easy eavesdropping like with CB radio or cell phone. Only the vehicles close enough to read the EBS will know what you're saying to them, but my heart is a lonely hunter is a line from the 1896 poem.

Then there's a market for EBS apps, like with iPhone. I know, I know, there will be Cussing Out Apps, Political Propaganda Apps, the economic possibilities are endless, Cinco de Mayo Barbie, Personal Bankruptcy Barbie.

What's stopping the EBS Revolution? Back in the 1970s, it was the lack of technology. Now, nothing. I hope somebody takes my idea and runs with it, and helps create a bustling new industry with 100,000 jobs. It would be nice if I could get a 3% idea fee out of the charity of their heart, plus a lifetime supply of free chaffeured limos with EBSes included and all expenses paid.

Ciao, TLW


The Antarctic Volcanoes Project: Greenhouse Gases Are the Solution Not the Problem

Dec. 14, 2009. It's too bad the current brouhaha about CO2 is so narrowly focused. So what if a higher concentration in the atmosphere raises global average temps? Too bad, it might take a lot more CO2 than you think to really do it. Why do they call CO2 greenhouse gas? Because plants thrive in it, and they pump it into greenhouses to help them grow. Polar regions and deserts look good in postcards, but who wants to live there. Meanwhile global pop. is zooming, so obviously the real answer is to pump more CO2 into the atmosphere to turn deserts into lush green crop-growing regions like 35 million years ago, when avg. global temp was 88F and the CO2 level was 1K PPM (vs. 390 today). So we lose some polar regions and coastline, the adjustments will be inconvenient but temporary, but I prefer shirt-sleeve weather to Frosty the Snowman. How many arctic animals can't adapt to a warmer climate? What animal needs to live in ice and snow and wouldn't like a vacation to Tahiti? They can lose the fat, hair or feathers. The real question is can we make and keep the global CO2 level high, and for how long? One idea is to find a way to reactivate dormant volcanoes in wasteland areas we want to turn green and/or faraway regions like Antarctica, call it the Antarctic Volcanoes Project, an ideal place to spread CO2 equally around the planet from. Too bad, I'm too busy with other questions right now, so maybe somebody will work on this problem for or with me. Sooner or later mass global starvation will become unstoppable if world pop. keeps climbing, and CO2 is the way to forestall it, if we act soon enough. Don't give me them Malthusian objections, give me some CO2 solutions. There might even be a paradise Earth in the possibility window. Check out my Antarctic Volcanoes Project Blog.

The Robotification of U.S. Armies

Dec. 24, 2009. As I write, the U.S. is using drones to kill enemy combatants in Pakistan and Yemen, causing some political analysts to call it some kind of crime against humanity and for banning the practice. Actually, a drone is just a smart kind of artillery shell, and in war you have to use force to take out the enemy, and the smarter it is the more effective, plus the less collateral damage. Instead the U.S. should launch an Apollo Project to robotify the army, with the goal being to no longer recruit noncommissioned soldiers, but only officers, who will command the robot platoons and battalions, with a minimum ratio of 25 robots to 1 human.

What are the main R&D lines that need to be funded?

1. Robot gunnery. Robots must be taught to fire guns, using all available sensors. Theoretically they should become far superior to humans, with more accuracy, and more firepower, able to handle guns that would blow a human gunman's arm out of its socket. Even before robots are put in the field, human soldiers should be supplied with robotized guns that never require them to place their heads or bodies in the direct path of enemy fire. To pay back the funding incrementally, robot platoons for use against terrorists can be created first, starting with a hardened van full of them with a single human operator inside controlling what they aim and fire at. A terrorist holding hostages should be able to be targeted and his brain blown with great precision before he even hears the blast, etc. The robots don't have to move for this application, since they can be set up around the van after it parks for a fixed terrorist nest. Later a robot platoon can be created to defend any forward base in enemy territory, like in them Alien movies.

2. Robot mobility. That's the hardest part, luckily the Japanese are already making walking robots. A first obvious use is to go out ahead of human troops to bait IEDs.

3. Command and control. A robot soldier is no good if it can be commandeered or captured by the enemy. It must have a highly encrypted fail-safe comm line or channel, and also be rigged with explosives that go off when messed with. To prevent the self-destruct device from being used when not needed, it can be constructed of two packs of chemicals that first have to be mixed to make it explosive.

4. Release and waste battalions. When a foreign nation messes with the U.S., like say Iran, why parachute humans into the country until it's safe to do so? After the USAF uses its Shock & Awe capability to take out major installations, the U.S. should parachute robot battalions into the country that are programmed to systematically hunt and kill any human life until they run out of ammo, then blow up for good measure. It sounds cruel, but they messed with the U.S. didn't they? What do they want, for our soldiers to come back in coffins? Sorry, the soldier is the weapon, and is totally expendable, we don't want it back, we just want each robot soldier to kill as many humans as possible to get our money's worth. Talk about a boon for the defense industry, imagine the first trillion dollar contract to field a million-robot-soldier army. That's $1 million per robot, which is allegedly the cost for fielding a human soldier for one year, but will be cheaper because no survivor benefits have to be paid etc. Of course officers can parachute down with their robot platoons to direct them, at the risk of their lives. To avoid the Cowboy-Indian loser scenario, the robot armies should be optimized to attack at night since everybody is reduced to infrared vision, and then hunker down mainly in defensive mode during the day.

5. Anti-robot robot technology. Too bad, our enemies might find a way to clone our R&D and use it against us, so we also have to keep a jump ahead with bigger better robot-killer robots. There's also the sad probability that robots will be used for interrogation and torture, imagine the Hollywood 3-D flicks that will come out showing a person being methodically flayed alive with nanosurgical precision.

On second thought, war is insane, but this idea can't be stopped, can it, and to the winner go the spoils. Did I mention welcome to the 21st century? :)

Cracking the Genetic Code by Top-Down Design

Jan. 13, 2010. Like everything else, biology has too many super-specialists and not enough super-generalists, if any. So, as the ultimate super-generalist, let me give you biologists a clue. If you really want to make some fast progress in cracking the genetic code, try turning the problem inside out. That is, back off from reading actual genetic codes, and think how, if you were God, you'd make a life form using them. What would a genetic code have to contain in terms of information? Clearly, it would have to be like a computer program, where the "program counter" for a new cell tells it where to start in the program, which is copied along. For example, "I'm the initial 1-celled embryo, my PC starts here." Or, "I'm a bone cell, my PC starts here". Starting that way, why can't an entire genetic program that makes say an amoeba be developed? Now you can go back to a real amoeba and compare notes, get it?

But now let's leave biology and go to the world of machines and robots. Can we develop a "basic robot cell" that can survive with an energy and materials supply, and can reproduce? Can we develop a higher level collection of robot cells that become a machine? My dream is giant machines, say a mile in diameter, that can build entire cities, travel into the interior of the Earth, and other Megazilla tasks. Imagine a world rescue service for earthquake recovery or after a war is over, made up of a giant robot force. It all boils down to making the robot cell then making the program to use as it replicates, resetting the PC after each cell division to the proper location so the cell knows what it's supposed to do. As to job creation, the Apollo Project to create the technology can easily soak up 100K or 500K workers, but after it succeeds it will bring a new age for mankind of universal great wealth, with the so-called economy being reduced to luxury items instead of necessities, at least that's da dream.

Operating System Overlays

Feb. 22, 2010. While there's tons of online game companies, they all missed the big opportunity of operating system overlays that turn the computer into let's say a spaceship, and start a voyage with its own starclock, letting you use the operating system as usual then notifying you of events happening to the ship such as reaching a new star system or an enemy attack so you can react and get involved. With the multiplayer angle, entire communities of people can man a large starship, go against other starships, and so on. You will be able to assume an identity such as first officer and build your fake life history up. I don't just mean an online game that opens in a window, no, an operating system overlay is the new operating system, and the old one is in a window, hence when you boot up you will see let's say the starship viewscreen and control panel, it will seem to be real, as if you're there. As iPods and iPads replace desktops and laptops, this can be a way to make them attractive again, especially the desktop, since a real starship freak will want to purchase other hardware to make the starship more real, think of the possibilities starting with space helmets. Another use is permanent avatars or genies that live in your computer and are always there to talk with you and share your secrets, either with artificial intelligence, or more kinky, with rooms full of company operators who play the avatars, call it the next generation of phone sex. Speaking of sex, you should be able to upload intimate photos of yourself then see them turned into real-time 3-d nude yous who then can experiment with sex with other nude dudes or dudettes, talk about safe sex. I suppose this can get abusive if the company leaks personal info., so there's more jobs for lawyers, but either way there should be plenty of jobs for programmers. Too bad, I'm too busy to start up a company in this field, so the idea is yours, just send me a finder's fee, a new house and car would also be nice.

Smoker Helmets

Feb. 22, 2010. As more laws are passed making it nearly impossible to smoke in a workplace or even a public place, there is a giant market for smoker helmets, by which I mean a sealed helmet with either air filters or oxygen tanks that allow a person to smoke while keeping all smoke and exhalation products out of the environment, imagine a space helmet you wear at work when you want to smoke, and which either scrubs the smoke and releases clean air, or saves the smoke in some kind of tank. It should permit work to be carried on as usual, and be safe to use without suffocating the user and so on. One that really works and is not too expensive could sell to virtually every smoker, maybe by govt. mandate, maybe the govt. will pay for it or subsidize it. If you take off with this idea all I want is a lifetime supply of helmets, size 6XXX, plus first class cigars, Churchill size, one a day, plus a little stock in your corporation, say 1%, I always wanted to say I was in the space helmet business.


Apr. 14, 2010

Godly Computer Theory - new field

Is there a limit to the size of a digital IC memory? Kilobyte (3), megabyte (6), gigabyte (9), terabyte (12), petabyte (15), exabyte (18), zettabyte (21), yottabyte (24)?

Bertrand Russell and Alan Turing were pikers. Why? They couldn't see that the Universe is a galactic computer. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but if it is, what kind of numbers is it crunching anyway?

Let's found a new field called Winslowics, er, Godly Computer Theory, the science of Universe design, assuming a galactic computer exists to run it on, or, since the Universe is already here, we instead want to derive the computer design, algorithms and programs, call it a quest for an existence theorem. There's allegedly 8*10^80 atoms in the Universe. We don't know how many subparticles and subparticles of subsubparticles comprise each atom, but let's say 8*10^80 to be generous. If every subparticle in our Universe were an object in the galactic program, how big would the instruction words have to be, and how many words would each subparticle take, a googleplex or something? Is she a superfreak, superfreak, superfreaky? How big must the random access memory be, how fast must the galactic computer clock run, and how many computations a nanosecond would the galactic CPU have to make, or is that circular reasoning? How many bits does every gaping pie hole require, and how about the plow that broke the plains? What would the program code look like? Would every object, even the Satan object be an instantiation of a subtype of supertype Logos? It's my first day here, I just joined the Universe Police two google years ago, do you have any advice for me other than don't get shot?

Back to the galactic computer question. Is the ultimate reality we can know umpteen-dimension vibrating energy superstring objects, which we can never actually measure per se because they're just numbers held in the galactic computer memory as data in a running program called U Know What, which only have meaning to the program using them, which we cannot see or manipulate, because we're also data inside it? I'm curious, I really want to know. I want to wrap my mind around the sheer size of the numbers involved in such a computer.

Forget paltry googles and googleplexes, how about Winslow, er, Godly Numbers, the biggest numbers that our minds can conceive of and precisely define in words that can be used in a galactic computer program? I can tell you about computer programs on small computers with giant do-loops that take forever, but can I show you a number written down in words so I can type it into my U-code now, where's your Big Chief tablet? How about using the entire Universe as the Big Chief, with a winslow being the natural number described by using every vibrating energy string inside every elementary particle in the Universe as unique binary digits to write it out, with each digit being taken as 1? Sorry, that doesn't count, anymore than a computer program that promises to write it out one day, because one day is the function the galactic program performs, not a word in its galactic program; a more concrete example is google to the google to the google to the google to the google; anybody can imagine the entire surface of the Earth covered with computer monitors that are filled with "google to the google" to the max, but that's still not good enough, because what is going on in the system operator's console, that's the Q. One has to think harder, dig deeper. How about defining a winslow as a one followed by a google zeroes, that's the style. And how about a winslowplex, defined as a winslow followed by a winslow winslows. A superwinslowplex would be a winslowplex followed by a winslowplex winslowplexes, don't even mention a supersuperwinslowwinslowplex. I still work at it every night even though now we don't call it speech therapy we call it reading to the kids? What if the galactic computer is itself a program inside a supergalactic computer, like a spitfire flaming fugue, or is that the Devil's propaganda since the bum's computer illiterate and all bluff?

Software Rewriting Systems

Nov. 14, 2011

TLW got into computing way back in the early 1970s, and could have been Bill Gates, but didn't want to be, because he wants knowledge not money. One sad thing to see is the total failure of the software industry to improve quality and productivity. TLW knows the reason: it's called software rewriting. You see, it's easy to use a text editor with or without syntactic checking capability to write a nifty new program. The trouble is, if it gets successful you will hire more programmers to add all kinds of new capabilities and features, and what soon happens is that you have to go back through all the code and change variable and module names constantly, creating a huge productivity drain. All along the industry failed to understand that a professional programming environment needs a software rewriting system that automatically rewrites the code when needed. Another big problem is loading a program with options, which creates tons of real-time tests for the option's state along with code for all states of the option, making the program big and slow. A software rewriting system can squeeze out the unused code completely, creating an object code that's lean and fast. Hopefully some bright programmers will see this and get a clue, TLW's been waiting to see this since the early 1980s.