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Here's a pic of an ATM with a BSOD. This guy claims to have been able to get to a Windows desktop on an ATM.

Postmaster General Charles Emory Smith thought the same thing in 1900, and in fact, by 1916 there were 112 miles of tubes in place in Boston, Chicago, New York, St. Louis, and Philadelphia:
http://future.newsday.com/1/fbak0115.htm

Of course, he didn't take into account the $17,000 per mile per year cost for the system. Ouch.

Paris, on the other hand, had a fairly successful attempt (only given up in 1983):
http://www.ftech.net/ ~winlink/jdhayhurst/pneumatic/book1.html

There seem to be a fair number of people who think that Fax machines are sending the actual document across the phone lines...somehow. More than once in my days as a Kinko employee I came across people who were amazed I could fax their document and give the original back to them.

The gain on the other hand is immense, the students gain an understanding of the real world. They have access to put forward their ideas. They have a feeling of empoewerment (icky Americanism but it fits perfectly here).

Did the Geeks create the Net or the Net create the Geeks? There is no answer to this question. Each generation of geeks creates the foundation for those that follow. The Net has become a gathering place for many small and widely dispersed, self-selected groups because it makes possible community divorced from location. Large cities have often drawn minorities to them in the past. If you are a minority (linguistic, racial, religious, or otherwise), you stand a better chance of being able to get together with your fellows in a high concentration of people, even if they are no more common there.

If you draw the definition of geek broadly enough, then it fits any marginalized minority. True enough, it is frequently used almost that broadly. And oddly enough, I suspect there are some other odd commonalities among those of us who fit the definition of 20 years ago, bright, focused on intellectual interests to the exclusion of more common hobbies, socially awkward to some degree.
Many of us have never been called geeks by anyone who isn't actually a geek. As The Jargon File points out in A Portrait of J. Random Hacker, the typical hacker is a voracious reader on a surprisingly wide range of subjects. Reading that description, I saw more of myself in it than I saw in Katz's piece above. I knew when I read it that the person or people who wrote it understood.

Not surprisingly, geeks can harbor a xenophobic streak of their own. Geeks often see the workplace, and the world, as split into two camps-those who get it and those who don't. The latter are usually derided as clueless "suits," irritating obstacles to efficiency and technological progress. "We make the systems that the suits screw up," is how one geek described this conflict.

This particular statement reminded me instantly of The Programmers' Stone. It describes the tension between what The Stone referred to as mappers and packers. One of the things that I regret about print media is that it must, of necessity, be more self-contained. Readers are less well served by references to other sources rather than led to further clarification. In this case, I believe that the discussion in The Stone about the effect of education on children's natural tendency towards mapping may shed more light on what geeks are than any single other source I have read recently. We are the ones who have not forgotten how to map, but who in many cases felt isolated because of that. Another article that examines this same issue from the perspective of intelligence and psychology is The Outsiders. If you've had a difficulty communicating with non-geeks, both of these articles are worth reading.

A while back (~3 months?) I read an article linked to by /. about bloated apps. The author was stating that users ask for and want bloated software. I see this argument time and time again in the press, newsgroups and so on...

Well, I think the point is really:

Does an app need to be bloated to have features?

Obviously, 90% of the people who read this will exclaim "NO!". So the quesion remains "why is software bloated?" This is the thing that is addressed in the Programmer's Stone as well as many books. Everyone on this site should read The UNIX Philosophy for a dissussion of the stages of software development as well as lots of discussion on why unix has developed into what it is. Only in the second growth stage of development does software become bloated. This is due to the addition of all of the requests for more features being implemented. They all are added withought thought until the software becomes too big and the app just about breaks. The UNIX Philosophy of code reuse and small applications still allow features to be added. An example would be the ability to pipe information from one app to another to gain more functionality. This same philosophy of code reuse still holds true in today's GUI world and is why I find KDE so interesting.

The problem comes when code has to be churned out on a deadline without planning or thought. This is usually driven by coporations and Marketing/management. Without artificial deadlines Open Source/*n*x apps can stay small and elegant.

They can also be trimmed back and restructured by anyone. As a community it is important to always grow as fast as possible by adding features but to also look back and take out the features that only benefit a small group of users. That part might hurt a little, but is very important to get the software into the 3rd stage of life. So look back thorough your code and rewrite some stuff every now and then. It makes your code smaller and you will be able to work faster. You get a net gain in the end.

-pos




The truth is more important than the facts.

I have read the book. It took more than one night of Jolt induced alertness to get through it (several weeks actually, without the Jolt). I highly recommend it to all geeks everywhere. Some of it is pretty heavy-going, but you can skim some of the heaviest chapters (like chapter 7) without affecting your understanding of the rest of the book. It makes most of the objections from people who have not read the book seem simplistic and ill-considered.
The developments in technology you will see over the next few years (and which we have started seeing already) will provide concrete examples of many of the things that Drexler describes.
"Imagine how ten thousand hyperlinked Slashdotters with a strong understanding of nanotech could influence this technology... and have so much damn fun doing it." Do you want to miss out on this?

Read The Book!

PS Read Engines of Creation first

And don't forget to read The Programmers' Stone and Reciprocality

Michael Richards (no, not the actor)

If you're interested in quantum computation and cryptography you may be interested in checking out the Los Alamos site on quantum crypto.


Also some of you may be interested in Bruce Scheier's book Applied cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C, which was previously mentioned in other posts. You can find information on it at this Amazon.com link.

I might as well also give the link to a site on basic cryptology, called a "beginners page on cryptography" It may or may not help/interest readers.

On a side note, I really have enjoyed reading everyone's comments on this subject today. Hopefully these links don't come to late in the "day" for anyone to get good use out of them.