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If you believe Alan Cooper (see especially his book The Inmates are Running the Asylum), the problem is that programmers are in charge of actual UI development, and artists are in charge of how it looks, but rather than have interaction designers design the UI, companies make the programmers do that too - and Microsoft is the worst offender.

So you get UIs that look shiny, and UIs that programmers find easy to use but that normal users find difficult and/or impossible to understand.

Yeah, it's really a shame that they can't sell it.

"Clearly wrong. I don't even understand why you attempt this claim."
I find it interesting you don't understand my point. While specific rules are different in different jobs, most jobs, in most industries, are usually very similar variations of each other. I've lost count of the number of times, different employers have said to me, that a certain aspect of how the company works, is the standard way, for that industry. (Its an excuse of course, but that is all part of the negotiating game). For example, all games industry programmers, in whatever job they go to, do not get payed overtime. Also overtime is a very expected part of the rush to meet deadlines. Excuses are given like, programmer are payed more, as compensation for the overtime. But its a total industry wide lie. Programmers in the games industry, when there wages are divided by total hours worked, often end up on a similar hourly wages, as very unskilled jobs, even sometimes as bad as jobs like shelf stacker's in supermarkets. Of course, the bosses are simply saying no payed overtime, as they don't want to pay overtime. To the bosses its simply a negotiating strategy, to say no payed overtime in the industry. Plus the bosses then also say that anyone who leaves the games industry, is suffering burnout. Its not burnout at all, its simply they are wising up the nature of how they are getting exploited. But then for all the employees years of experience, they still struggle to earn a good living in a new industry. Even leaving one industry, to go into another industry doesn't totally remove the similarities between working conditions for employees, as all employers in every industry are playing similar games, to negotiate wages down for their benefit. This is why many industries (and not just programmers) suffer from working cultures that get called a corporate cult.

Here's the link about it. Its very worth while to read the peoples replies and comments about this book towards the end of the page. There comments gives a very interesting insight. These comments are from people's own employment experiences. Its far more common than most people realize...
http://www.amazon.com/Corporate-Cults-Insidious-All-Consuming-Organization/dp/0814404936/

"Cost of living would not be the same for Person A and B."
Sorry that is fundamentally flawed thinking. Person A would like the same cost of living as person B. People have to survive. That costs money. Anything beyond basic survival is an extra. Everyone has the same basic survival needs. Any money beyond this is extra. Everyone would like more money, beyond basic cost of survival, but most do not earn much beyond basic cost of survival.

As for your talk on dividend reinvestment plans, that shows you know about investments. But the point is, most people do not know, as most people are afraid of gambling what little they have on the stock market. When you can only save 1k per year, then that 1k is very important. When you can save 10k per year, then risking 1k isn't such a massive blow, as they still have 9k saved. The fewer savings someone has, the more fearful they are of loosing what little they have managed to save. Most people do not risk it. But as you do understand these kinds of investments, then I suspect your income isn't so tight, that you would fully understand how fearful people can be, about what little savings they can collect together. Which would explain why you don't see such a problem, for people to break free of having little savings.

I mostly agree with your excellent reply. However:

Phase 5: the whole thing becomes common practise, FOSS starts to develop and lags 5 years behind on everything

I already have a FOSS 'cloud based' OS. It's a Debian server, with no X or desktop environment, accessible over the Web. The applications hosted on it have HTML/Javascript/CSS front ends and use PHP/Python/Perl/MySQL on the back end.

Cloud computing may or may not be a bubble, but whichever way you turn and twist it someone has to start. It'll take baby-steps and corrections along the way, but so far this is the first real attempt at it.

I don't believe you are correct here. Microsoft are producing a me too alternative to to the flexible, FOSS-based, cloud computing from Amazon (note: it's also possible to get Windows from Amazon, at a higher price).

FOSS is in the same place, if not slightly ahead, of Microsoft here.

So "showing some love for the Rays" amounts to a flip-flop, much less a disqualifying one?

It is fairly obvious to everyone, that Obama is indifferent to the Rays or any other team (including "his own" White Socks). And I don't blame him for that — I too hold obsession with sport-teams in certain mild contempt.

What is a "disqualifying flip-flop" is lying, that you care... Hillary did that too, but, at least, she picked one team and stuck with it, unlike Obama, who picked a different lie for a different crowd.

Nobody was forcing him to pick vi over emacs, or big endian over little. He did it himself and — by picking whatever was immediately expedient — shown himself to be untrustworthy.

All I could think of was that I really wish they called micro black holes that exist for minute fractions of a second something other than "black holes."

Bugophants?

Actually, in that book they don't evaporate and never stop eating, but they do send information back in time commensurate with their size.

One of the most interesting decisions in Soviet science was the establishment of Akademgorodok, an enclave outside Novosibirsk dedicated entirely to scientists (see e.g. Josephson's New Atlantis Revisited published by Princeton University Press). I don't understand why that wasn't more popular in Western countries. Maybe sciences move ahead when you give scientists peace, a sense of respect and dignity, and ability to manage their own work. Of course, generous funding is essential, lest it all go down the tubes.

So since you are so very Concerned over the issue of experience

No, not experience. I was just defending the point, that Obama's support for two competing sport-teams is important (in judging his character) in the absence of much else known about him. If we had much else to go by with him, fine — I am not a sports fan myself. But we don't, and his willingness to please the crowd with such lies is telling volumes.

Appeal to a local sports-team must be a Democratic fixture... When Clintons settled in NY, Hillary claimed to have always been a Yankees fan. Yeah, right... But, at least, she didn't contradict herself in front of Mets fans the way Obama did.

This was in my kids book. I just read it to him last night.

I am not an astrophysicist (IANAAP?), but this would seem to have some interesting implications for galactic mechanics. For one, does this means that stars are continously recycled by the black hole believed to be at the center of each galaxy? i.e. They get sucked in, crushed, then ejected as gassous emmisions which then collect and reform as a new star.

Wouldn't this also create a "galactic wind" similar to the solar wind experienced inside a solar system? Could such a wind (as weak as it may be on a micro scale) be responsible for the universe's apparent anti-gravity effect? It seems to me that if a galactic wind did exist, it would cause the galaxies to repel each other as the particles communicate back the forces of the particle collisions over billions of years.

Speaking of Black Holes, I was just listening to an interview with Brian Greene on NPR this morning. It seems that he has released a children's book designed to help children understand Relativity. Specifically, the link between gravity and time. Amazon has a nice video* where Mr. Greene explains the story and how he attempts to create an emotional connection between readers and the physics of Relativity.

* Full Disclosure: I did NOT include a referral code. This is a clean link
** Someone should really make a joke out of LHC doomsday and how we're all saved. I couldn't come up with anything funny.

You're going to have all kinds of mistakes, and the user will SWEAR that it was the machine's fault, rather than admit they don't know what they are doing. Nobody wants to look stupid.

Donald Norman would say that it is the machine's fault and I think I'd agree. In my limited experience with computerized voting machines, they're horribly designed and I'm sure the UI is less important to the vendor than their Accounts Receivable.

I'm not sure it would be a perceived cage. I think its more that there are cages of different sizes, some with different standards of living in the cages. If you live in a good zoo, then it could be a very nice cage. But even some apparently good cages, can often turn out to be Corporate Cults, (I've worked in a few of these, unfortunately just like a lot of programmers over the years).
http://www.amazon.com/Corporate-Cults-Insidious-All-Consuming-Organization/dp/0814404936

I think all societies requires an overall cage for everyone. We all must live within its boundaries and the edges of this overall cage, defines what society considers its outer accepted boundaries. But there are also nested cages within cages. These nested cages are created by some people with power over us. Our zoo keeper bosses. These zoo cages, seek to confine us to other more restricted cage boundaries. Which are for the gain of the zoo keepers and are the rules which maintainance power over us. There are some people who seek to gain power over us and not just governments. Some bosses also seek the power to dictate boundaries of accepted behaviour. This can make some cages unhappy places to be in. Unfortunately as most of us need to earn money, then we have to sit quitely in some zoo cage, otherwise our current zoo keep will throw us out and get a new zoo exibit. But then we can leave one zoo and go to another zoo. But most of us still need to live in zoos, but we can still dream of the day, we can run free from the need for any zoos. :)

Snicker. You've just offloaded your incompetence to a small army of IT personnel that now needs to keep a farm of servers running 24x7.

s/incompetence/work. After that... so what?

That army is expensive, the datacenter that needs to be used is expensive.

It's really not.

The programmer is just a one time expense.

Absolutely not, especially in web development. Do you think Google would still be in business if they stopped developing after Version 1.0? Have you noticed that YouTube is able to react to something as small as an XKCD comic, in order to deliver new features?

No, programming is an ongoing expense. So you want to develop in something maintainable, and in something that can scale, even if you can't scale yet.

Oh, and horizontal scaling is more important than vertical scaling, for pretty much all web apps. Vertical scalability is what you're assuming is important -- squeezing more out of every cycle of a single machine. Horizontal scaling is about making sure that you can simply throw more servers at the problem, and your app will actually be able to run concurrently on multiple cores, and on multiple machines, without falling over.

Also: Programmer time is never going to get cheaper. Hardware does all the time, thanks to Moore's law. Unless that trend stops, my position in this argument will only get stronger every year.

The monolith kernel is the OS. Microkernel tries to make more stable OS by moving as much OS parts to userland as possible.

http://www.usenix.org/publications/login/2006-04/openpdfs/herder.pdf

http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0130313580/ref=sib_dp_pt/103-7158569-1619062#reader-link

Monolith kernel is the old way building a OS. Microkernel is the "new" way for building a OS.

But you might be those who believe that OS is that what has desktop, icons, wallpapers etc. And openoffice, Firefox and Gimp are parts of OS?

Slightly off-topic, but statistics show that "stranger danger" is a myth. Telling kids to avoid strangers might make parents feel like they're achieving something, but will not, generally, make much difference to whether or not kids will be sexually abused. The vast majority (76% of reported cases in Victoria, for example) of child sexual abuse is perpetrated by an adult male that the child knows (fathers and step-fathers making up the majority of those perpetrators). And there's no particular profile for the child abuser. The only characteristic of significance is that about 90% of abusers are men. Doesn't say much for my gender. I don't have the citations for this info at hand, but I've verified the numbers from my lecture notes. I've got a family law exam on Wednesday, so I have this info at hand. While I don't have the original citation, the lecturer for this unit is a practising family law barrister who has published books on family violence and child abuse, so I am inclined to accept this information as fact. I would expect that the information (and reference to the source) can be found in her latest book: http://www.amazon.com/Child-Abuse-Family-Understanding-professionals/dp/1865087319

If anyone thinks this is about child porn, they are simply fooling themselves. This is about control. The governments of the world want the serfs to know who their masters are and what their place in society is. The easiest way to do that---as China has found out---is to limit the information coming into the country to that which is approved by the government.

This is nothing new: Australia is simply following an ages-old script. The difference between then and now is that you think you have control because you live in a democracy. Let me assure you that democracy and liberty are two entirely different things, and often are at odds. Please see Hoppe's Democracy: The God that Failed and Hayek's The Road to Serfdom for more detail.

The best reaction you can have to this is to encourage yourself and others (especially your own children) to differentiate respect for others' rights from respect for artificial "law", and to show the latter none while deferring to it only enough to keep from attracting too much attention. Defy all rules that have nothing to do with protecting the rights of others, and you are a free man; obey them, and you are a slave.

If anyone thinks this is about child porn, they are simply fooling themselves. This is about control. The governments of the world want the serfs to know who their masters are and what their place in society is. The easiest way to do that---as China has found out---is to limit the information coming into the country to that which is approved by the government.

This is nothing new: Australia is simply following an ages-old script. The difference between then and now is that you think you have control because you live in a democracy. Let me assure you that democracy and liberty are two entirely different things, and often are at odds. Please see Hoppe's Democracy: The God that Failed and Hayek's The Road to Serfdom for more detail.

The best reaction you can have to this is to encourage yourself and others (especially your own children) to differentiate respect for others' rights from respect for artificial "law", and to show the latter none while deferring to it only enough to keep from attracting too much attention. Defy all rules that have nothing to do with protecting the rights of others, and you are a free man; obey them, and you are a slave.

I don't think there's too much connection between the rise of Christianity and the fall of the Roman empire. The traditional argument as espoused by Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" is essentially that Rome spread itself too thin and became weak due to having to fund an enormous army and continually fight battles on all it's borders; a more recent argument is that instead it was primarily a matter of the barbarians (i.e Germanic/etc tribes surrounding the empire) becoming stronger under constant contact with Rome untik they'd reached the point (together with more porous borders - barbarians settled within the empire, etc) that they were able to topple Rome.

http://www.amazon.com/Fall-Roman-Empire-History-Barbarians/dp/0195325419/

The empire really was in a downward trajectory for a couple hundren years before it fell, not helped by a couple of awful epidemics that eached wiped out a large percentage (maybe 25-30% each time) of the population. The traditional roman religion which held society together was losing favor due to the apparent failure of the gods to protect them from the strife. It probably is true that Christianity was no replacement for the traditional roman religion it in terms of cohesiveness - much more in-fighting among the various factions that existed at that time, but it's probably better to regard the rise of Christianity as more symptomatic of the weakening of the empire (creating a possibility for change)than as a major cause of it.

Looks more like another Chariot... http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Space-Chariot-Plastic-Assembly/dp/B0018RUNJM

http://www.amazon.com/XtremeMac-XHD-4HDS-00-Xtremehd-4-PORT-Switcher/dp/B000OU7MVQ/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1224974967&sr=1-4
this xtremeHD hdmi switch box supports HDCP (hope your monitors do). It also supports DVI seamlessly. I use one.

with these cables
http://www.amazon.com/Cables-Unlimited-PCM-2296-06-Single-Cable/dp/B0007MWE1E/ref=pd_sim_e_7

http://www.amazon.com/XtremeMac-XHD-4HDS-00-Xtremehd-4-PORT-Switcher/dp/B000OU7MVQ/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1224974967&sr=1-4
this xtremeHD hdmi switch box supports HDCP (hope your monitors do). It also supports DVI seamlessly. I use one.

with these cables
http://www.amazon.com/Cables-Unlimited-PCM-2296-06-Single-Cable/dp/B0007MWE1E/ref=pd_sim_e_7

I thought it wasn't possible to tell antimatter from matter from afar?

That's the premise in one of Larry Niven's old Beowulf Shaeffer stories (collected in Crashlander ). Shaeffer and a Steve Fosset-like millionaire come upon an isolated planet, only to discover to their dismay that it is made out of antimatter. Unfortunately, the relatively believable science ends there, because Niven's way of having them colonize it relies on a species of unobtainium

i'm not assuming anything. i'm suggesting that it would be a good move on the part of both companies. that doesn't mean that i think either of them will go for it. in fact, it's very unlikely that such a deal would occur. and you seem to immediately contradict yourself right after your first sentence. first you imply that Sony would not accept a partnership with Amazon's ebook distribution system without offering any kind reason for thinking so. then you go on to state that the Sony reader has a nice design, but lacks content, whereas the Kindle looks homely but has "a MASSIVE selection of content and a terrific distribution system." well isn't that exactly what Sony needs/is missing? if a lack of content and distribution system is what's preventing the Sony Reader from succeeding, then why would they not partner up with Amazon? it seems like that would be the only logical thing for them to do.

the fact that the current Kindle doesn't use WiFi doesn't play any part in this deal. Sony Reader/PSP/Zune/iPhone users can just access the Kindle Store website. it's not like EVDO is required to purchase ebooks from the Kindle Store.

and while Apple is currently making most of its money from selling iPods, the iTunes store is quickly dominating the music retail industry. in 2007 they became the 3rd largest music retailer in the U.S. with 10% market share. in 2008 it accounted for 70% of worldwide digital music sales. and despite the RIAA's claims to the otherwise, iTunes has revitalized the music industry and driven net profits up. our indie record label now receives over 75% of our music sales from iTunes alone.

so while iPod sales generated $3.36 billion in revenue for Apple in 2007, the iTunes Store brought in $1.9 billion of Apple's $2.7 billion in total music-related revenue in 2007. and iPod sales appear to be tapering off while iTunes is experiencing continued growth. so it's not inconceivable that iTunes will become an even bigger revenue stream for Apple in the future.

but i agree with you that the PSP/iPhone are not the ideal ebook reader for everyone. my Dad, for instance, simply can't read text printed on the PSP. so he can't really use his PSP as a web browser or an e-book reader. but that doesn't stop millions of young people from using their PSPs and cellphones to read books (if they can read web pages, then why not e-books?). the Japanese have even created an entire literary genre of serial literature that's distributed and consumed entirely by cellphones.

for older users with poorer eyesight or who have to read long, dense technical materials, a dedicated ebook reader like the Kindle is definitely a must. but that's still a niche market. and for the majority of young people whom the PSP & iPhone are aimed at, being able to read e-books on their portable devices would be a huge value add--it's actually my favorite use for the PSP.

And idiot HR people will want someone having 10 years of" in depth experience" in it.

That's why I still keep my Push Technology For Dummies book on the shelf! Someday I'm going to cash in on that hot offline browsing action!

This stuff actually looks pretty good:

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

It really is just another way of hosting right?

I think S3 seems to work well for some people also.

You know we fought WW2 against you sickening right wing conservative fuckers and now you've signed on for the same fucking thing?

Um...since when is socialism (whether national socialism or any other sort) a conservative creation? If you can stop foaming at the mouth long enough to keep from drooling into the pages, you might want to have a look at Liberal Fascism. You might learn something.

And it's not hard to find cheaper US sources, too, unless you have your heart set on stainless steel: here, here, here, etc

"let me be the first to welcome our new military robotic overlords."

VERY stupid. It's your tax money. Most of those projects never produce anything but expensive trash.

U.S. government corruption: Anything for weapons and oil investors, nothing for average citizens.

Read House of Bush, House of Saud. Bush and his friends and associates sell U.S. government power to those who pay the most. Saudis have paid them 1.4 Billion dollars, so the Saudis got EXACTLY what they wanted.

Yeah, um, about that ... you really need to read this book, paying special attention to who was at war with whom, and for how long. Also of note, is that Bill Gates does not claim that the Internet is just a fad, and never has claimed that the Internet is just a fad. Pay no attention to the fact that Gates said exactly that; so long as he denies it, it never happened!

Anyone who thinks Gates is a "visionary" clearly hasn't read Gates' The Road Behind.

On a side note, Amazon says:
The Road Ahead (Penguin Readers, Level 3) (Paperback)

ROTFLMAO ... They said Penguin in a M$ context; those kidders!

Yeah, um, about that ... you really need to read this book, paying special attention to who was at war with whom, and for how long. Also of note, is that Bill Gates does not claim that the Internet is just a fad, and never has claimed that the Internet is just a fad. Pay no attention to the fact that Gates said exactly that; so long as he denies it, it never happened!

Anyone who thinks Gates is a "visionary" clearly hasn't read Gates' The Road Behind.

On a side note, Amazon says:
The Road Ahead (Penguin Readers, Level 3) (Paperback)

ROTFLMAO ... They said Penguin in a M$ context; those kidders!

Just read a book like Java for S/390 and AS/400 COBOL Programmers and reverse-engineer it.

Perhaps this is the first step in the appearance of anarcho-capitalist security contractors that protect people against the crimes of the state. I know many people who would love to have insurance against imprisonment by tyrannical governments, such as those in the US and UK.

Read Hans-Hermann Hoppe's Democracy: The God that Failed, or refer to the writings of Murray Rothbard and Roderick Long, for more information on how this would work.

Agreed. A "beat" doesn't necessarily imply periodic rhythm. I'm surprised, however, that the story here mentions on Aphex Twin and not an even more topical piece of music. In the 1980s, the French spectralist composer Gerard Grisey wrote a major concert work called Le Noir de l'etoile for six percussionist. The material is partly based on sounds from pulsars, and in fact during the concert a radio telescope is to be used to directly pipe in the sound of a specific pulsar. Grisey's work at this time was increasingly fascinated by musical time, and the contrast between the clockwork of the pulsar and more organic aperiodic rhythms is a major concern of the piece.

you can't find a watch that doesn't have a chip in it.

I refute you thus.

you can't find a watch that doesn't have a chip in it.

I refute you thus.

After reading the SLA at http://aws.amazon.com/ec2-sla/, I see it as all a big show with no real guts behind it:

# Availability is averaged over the last 365 days, but you only get credit for the current month's costs.
# You only get a service credit for 10% of the current month's costs. If you decide to move your business elsewhere, you may not apply the credit toward any past charges, including for the month in which the outage occurred.
# Availability refers to the "region" availability, and makes no guarantees about instance (computer) reliability, storage consistency/reliability. As far as I can imagine, it might be rather hard to figure out what constitutes a region's "availability" independently. The official measure stated in the SLA is basically a measurement made solely by Amazon.
# To receive any of this pathetic service credit (again, it is not a refund), you are required to send Amazon an email documenting (dates, times, regions) and providing evidence (heartbeat request logs, etc). *Yes, they want logs.* For almost all of their customers, the time and effort involved in filing a claim would outweigh the benefit of the credit.

Though I've long admired Amazon's EC2 platform, Spamhaus evidentally considers it a hive of spammers.

Well, of course, haven't you read the terms of use. They've got this great section on indemnification where they wash their hands of any responsibilities from their users.

I could see a really bad pattern of someone approaching Amazon with claims of spamming and Amazon saying that they notified the user of improper behavior and that they are not liable for it.

Thank god they claim you shouldn't be able to do this though:

4.2. Restricted Uses Generally.
4.2.1. You may not interfere or attempt to interfere in any manner with the functionality or proper working of the Services.
4.2.2. You may not compile or use the Amazon Properties or any other information obtained through the Services for the purpose of direct marketing, spamming, unsolicited contacting of sellers or customers, or other impermissible advertising, marketing or other activities, including, without limitation, any activities that violate anti-spamming laws and regulations.
4.2.3. You may not remove, obscure, or alter any notice of any Mark, or other intellectual property or proprietary right designation appearing on or contained within the Services or on any Amazon Properties.
4.2.4. Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, you may generally publicize your use of the Services; however, you may not issue any press release with respect to the Services or this Agreement without our prior written consent.

So really you should see these things get fixed ASAP. Should. I bet spammers are just as good as avoiding being shutdown at EC2 as they are anywhere else.

Though I've long admired Amazon's EC2 platform, Spamhaus evidentally considers it a hive of spammers.

Well, of course, haven't you read the terms of use. They've got this great section on indemnification where they wash their hands of any responsibilities from their users.

I could see a really bad pattern of someone approaching Amazon with claims of spamming and Amazon saying that they notified the user of improper behavior and that they are not liable for it.

Thank god they claim you shouldn't be able to do this though:

4.2. Restricted Uses Generally.
4.2.1. You may not interfere or attempt to interfere in any manner with the functionality or proper working of the Services.
4.2.2. You may not compile or use the Amazon Properties or any other information obtained through the Services for the purpose of direct marketing, spamming, unsolicited contacting of sellers or customers, or other impermissible advertising, marketing or other activities, including, without limitation, any activities that violate anti-spamming laws and regulations.
4.2.3. You may not remove, obscure, or alter any notice of any Mark, or other intellectual property or proprietary right designation appearing on or contained within the Services or on any Amazon Properties.
4.2.4. Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, you may generally publicize your use of the Services; however, you may not issue any press release with respect to the Services or this Agreement without our prior written consent.

So really you should see these things get fixed ASAP. Should. I bet spammers are just as good as avoiding being shutdown at EC2 as they are anywhere else.

As seen here:

For normal instances, Windows is 25% more expensive then Linux/UNIX, and for high CPU instances 50% it is 50% more expensive.

Desktop-computer sellers should learn something from that...

Though I've long admired Amazon's EC2 platform, Spamhaus evidentally considers it a hive of spammers.

Don't forget "use" and "possession" crimes. They should be in the top 10.

Indeed. If you haven't, you should consider reading the most excellent book on this subject, Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do by Peter McWilliams, available from amazon here and full text online here.

(That's not a referral link, I won't make any money if you buy the book from amazon via that link, I'm just posting this because I happen to think that the world will be a better place if more people read that book.)

I usually turn to O'Reilly for getting started with a new language, but oddly they don't have a guide to COBOL (similar situation with LISP, which I'd love to master). How do people learn COBOL? I notice there's a COBOL for Dummies , but I honestly doubt it's a rigorous intro.

If that's what you want, your only real option are college textbooks. Back in college, I used an older version of this book, by the Sterns.

Greenspan really is scarily inept... It amazes me that he was taken as seriously as he was for so long. The most amazing thing I found in his autobiographical book was that he believed in the 90s that computer systems were going to efficiency gains that accounted for the share price rises during the .com bubble.

http://www.amazon.com/Age-Turbulence-Adventures-New-World/dp/1594201315

From The Iliad (Fitzgerald translation). Also spelled Achilles. Greeks didn't have a letter "C" and used "K". Is a little bit more true to the original.

Anyways, it was foretold to Akhillius he would could have a long and happy life and die in obscurity or a short, brutal one but his name would be remembered forever. And so, we do know his name, 3000 years later.

'Course, in the Odyssey, Odysseus meets his ghost and Akhillius says he'd rather be a lowly shepherd than king of all the dead. Looks like everlasting glory isn't all it's cut out to be.

I used to joke about "Visual Cobol" being the next big thing in computer languages... that is, until I learned that it's a real product!
I still think this is a trick to get all those Chinese and Indian software engineers to train for a worthless language, so we can get our old jobs back...

In his novel Red Mars Kim Stanley Robinson tells of Mars being colonized by the First Hundred, a wave sent out after the first manned expedition, who would have to remain there forever. There are some interesting asides into the fact that, to want to leave behind your loved ones and all you know for a barren rock, you're probably not what the government bureaucrats who vet you would consider psychologically stable.

I usually turn to O'Reilly for getting started with a new language, but oddly they don't have a guide to COBOL (similar situation with LISP, which I'd love to master). How do people learn COBOL? I notice there's a COBOL for Dummies , but I honestly doubt it's a rigorous intro.

It seems not to be specifically for AppleBASIC, but is this possibly the one?

This part sounds promising:

Pages and pages of program listings in tiny, all-caps, dot matrix type, with brief introductory paragraphs. Plus, funny illustrations of strangely plausible robots. Don't underestimate the appeal of the robots.

A commenter on that entry also says this, lending plausibility:

I remember checking out of copy of that book from the libray and typing games into an Apple II, making minor adjustments so Applebasic would be happy.

Amazon.com has some used ones listed -- even a couple listed as "new", with a price-tag to match! ;)

If it's not this one, then I hope you find it eventually. I've had similar somewhat frustrating experiences trying to remember kids' TV shows and various books I read as a child, and it's always pleasantly nostalgic to finally pin something down.

It has mechanisms and mechanical ideas that you'd never have thought of to do all sorts of interesting movements - ideal for any dynamic sculptures etc.

And while you're looking for power sources, consider Stirling machines. Unlike steam, they don't use water so can't boil dry.

I get the Wired Campus newsletter digest daily from the Chronicle of Higher Education:

http://www.chronicle.com

There's also plenty of books out there about technology and/or education. Harry Lewis, the former Dean of Harvard College, wrote one:

http://www.amazon.com/Blown-Bits-Liberty-Happiness-Explosion/dp/0137135599/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1224705390&sr=1-1

And I wrote one, myself:

http://www.aarongreenspan.com/authoritas.html

Aaron