Word: months
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...scientists, including a Navy officer named Grace Murray Hopper, begat a standard programming language called COBOL (common business-oriented language). To save precious space on the 80-column punch cards, COBOL programmers used just six digits to render the day's date: two for the day, two for the month, two for the year. It was the middle of the century, and nobody cared much about what would happen at the next click of the cosmic odometer. But today the world runs on computers, and older machines run on jury-rigged versions of COBOL that may well crash...
Much of the fuss centers on the revelation in the family memoir, re-created in the movie, that Du Pre had a 16-month affair with her brother-in-law and that the relationship was condoned by her sister Hilary. When excerpts appeared in the London Sunday Times, outraged fans and friends of Jacqueline's vilified the book, charging that it sullied one of Britain's greatest virtuosos. Hilary and Piers defend their memoir as an attempt to reveal the personal side of their sister and argue that the excerpts played up the sensational parts of the story. "If people...
...main risk in selling short is that your potential losses are unlimited. There is no telling how high a stock will go. If you had sold short 100 shares of eBay just a month ago, you would have a paper loss today of $12,000. Professionals have lost hundreds of millions betting against Net mania. Compounding the problem, Net stocks have relatively few shares in circulation, and that makes them difficult to borrow and sell. The ones you would want to short--those without earnings or a compelling business plan--are precisely the ones whose shares are hardest to borrow...
REPRIEVE Four years ago this month, New Orleans teenager Shareef Cousin briefly became America's youngest condemned man. Charged at 16 with killing Michael Gerardi, 25, in a French Quarter street robbery, the clean-cut Cousin never quite fit the part. After his conviction, appeals lawyer Clive Stafford-Smith unearthed a host of prosecutorial misdeeds, including false police statements and suppressed evidence that placed Cousin squarely in the middle of a recreation-league basketball game at the time of the murder...
Publishing Trends, an industry newsletter, cites it as "the most controversial medical book ever, hear that, ever published." Or soon to be published, anyway. After a heated auction last month, Pocket Books won the rights to Kept in the Dark: The Killer Connection Between Sleep and Food. The advance was just north of $200,000, a surprisingly hefty sum for a nonfiction book by two unknowns (T.S. Wiley, a medical researcher, and Bent Formby, a cell biologist...