User:Gerben49~enwiki
Since February 2005, when inspired by an article by Jef Raskin via a Google search, I have become interested in the wikipedia phenomenon. Although my Google search was for something completely different (I do not remember what) I got interested in Raskins theory about airflow around airfoils, and also found a Wikipedia article about lift.
I have made some additions to existing articles in the English and Dutch wikipedia. I live in Winterswijk, together with my wife Joke, in the east of the Netherlands, and was born in 1949 in Groningen, the Netherlands. Our daughter and 2 sons visit us every now and then, they live in Groningen and Amsterdam, for their education. From 1975 until 1977 I have done some work on thermal imaging with a pyroelectric vidicon at Twente University.
Since 1978 I work for Nedap Groenlo the Netherlands, R&D power supplies. I designed power electronic equipment for companies in Sweden, Germany, the US, Great Britain, and the Netherlands. In my early years I was also involved in the design of automatic test equipment, in those days based on EEPROM programming, and discrete logical circuits. That enabled us to do semi-automatic testing of switching power supplies. Working with a lot of different customers from most international companies was an interesting experience for me, as was the existence of a lot of international rules for safety and EMC, as well as a lot of standardization (e.g. Technical requirements for components).
Now I get to a link with what has surprised me as well as has irritated me: the development of software for PCs over the past 20 years. I admire the work of Linus Torvalds and all involved in developing Linux, and I am surprised that the whole world seems to accept the use of a proprietary “hidden” operating system: of the Microsoft Windows family, being a kind of infrastructure for other programs, needing open documentation. The result of this infrastructure not being open and developed in corporation with all users involved, as usual for any mature technology has been the cause of pushing almost all major suppliers of application software out of the market. I do use programs like the Gimp, Irfanview, Open Office, Firefox (where tabbed browsing is really helpful in finding and checking links for use in Wikipedia), the independent Spybot, AVG virus scanner and more. A true normal market situation in the software business could emerge, if companies would take over responsibility for a complete software set on computers based on open source components, with additional proprietary software running on top of the oprerating system. Intelligent self restoring computers (supervised by crash free systems and not interrupting our daily work) could do this. The whole re-installation effort when switching to a new system or restoring an infected or crashed computer system, the whole complicated archaic structure of making back ups and so on, combined with an unneeded abundancy of automatic features in software, that do not help but is just confusing and anti-productive should be superseded by something better that can evolve in an open market with open standards. Will this ever happen.....
Sometimes I am windsurfing or bicycling, the first activity being the best way for me to relax, although not very frequently at present, because all my concentration is needed to attain maximum speed. I have still a lot to learn, my sons do much better.