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This article smacks of MS shilling.

I agree.

It has all the ear-marks of a "Submarine" article, as defined by Paul Graham.
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

That this is true is born out by IDC's evaluation of the data.
http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php/id;17540595 24;fp;2;fpid;1
"After a long period focused on cutting costs and buying servers just to run current applications, enterprises are once again investing strategically in systems to handle future workloads, said IDC analyst Matt Eastwood. IT organizations are once again being asked to support real growth, he said."

This article contains some MS PR spin that the Gartner version did not: that purchases of Linux servers is short sighted because Linux server cannot be 'strategically' deployed but MS servers can. An odd assertion given the fact that many deploying Linux servers to replace Microsoft servers find that one Linux server can easily handle the load of 3 or 4 Microsoft servers, and do so more reliably and with less maintenance. Microsoft servers are notorious for being able to support only ONE application per server, a deployment model recommended by Microsoft itself, if not to improve MS server speed and stability then to improve Microsoft's sales figures.

As you point out, comparing sales levels of prior years with those given this year by Gartner and IDC, with Microsoft FUD wrappings, either Microsoft server shares have been declining while Linux' have been rising, or these "Consulting" firms are merely passing on MS PR memos with their own corporate dressing on them. I have no doubt that Linux server shares are rising, having grown from a few percent a few years ago to 31% this year, AND that Gartner was and is a mere extension of Microsoft's PR department. After all, they've been revealed as such in prior "research" reports that they put on line where they claimed the report was their work but they forgot to remove the Microsoft PR logo from the article.

Screwed up the link: The Venture Capital Squeeze

The Wallstree Journal has an article titled "Google Ignites Silicon Valley Hiring Frenzy".

I don't know why so many people want to work at Google. It confuses the hell out of me. Okay, they're in the news a lot. They currently have some people that produce a good product. But, you know...those people didn't say to themselves, "Damn, Microsoft seems to be the hot place to be today! I should go work there!" They just decided what they wanted to make and started making it.

In the software world, you need very, very little capital to do incredible things. Talent is the limiting factor, not how many investment dollars you need. You don't need heavy machinery or bands of Korean workers. You don't even need that many people.

Now, it may be neat to work at Google because you have some people who can carry on interesting conversations at lunch...but it's hardly as if tying yourself to Google's rising star is the fastest and best way to do anything. Google is just a bunch of guys (some of whom, in the past, hacked some neat code). You're just a guy, too. You can hack some neat code wherever you are, too. To make great stuff, you don't need a a trademarked sign out front that the Wall Street Times says is a really hot investment opportunity.

Paul Graham has written a good deal about this (and his essays are well worth reading, IMHO). His writing has some stuff that I don't like much -- he's a bit elitist, kind of Orson Scott Card. He tends to push the idea of starting a company to get bought out (which he did, and then griped about what Yahoo did to his company). He gets incredibly defensive about Lisp. However, reading his essays is like reading a solid string of +5, Insightfuls on Slashdot.

I too initially thought "What's the big deal, it's just JavaScript". But I'm now actually reading the "Ajax in Action" book, and it looks like there is something to it. It's not so much about the tools you use (which are indeed JavaScript and CSS pretty much), it's more about the architectural view of the application, where you think of the browser hosting your application rather than content and the server produces data rather than content and how Ajax coding is not just get-the-javascript-to-work-and-move-on like in the old days, but rather not unlike any other language, requiring same level of discipline.

Anyhow, the book explains it better, I recommend it.

I must say I am quite surprised to see this article on slashdot, mostly because I just had an interview with Rural Sourcing and was given a job offer. A whopping $27,000. I'm sorry but I quickly sent a polite email saying, "No thanks." I made more than that my sophomore year working at SAS.

The driving reason for declining their offer is that I just do not believe they will be able to keep smart graduates in Greenville, NC at that rate. There are just too many jobs on the east coast for IT workers. They are basically trying to hire my entire graduating class since I seriously doubt they will be about to coerce kids from coming from anywhere else.

On my second interview I was invited to their job site where I was shown the master plan for upgrading their cube-farm. They want to have 45 employees by next summer and 100 by Dec 2006! They have 12 now. I think they would be best to take a look at http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html and consider hiring people based on need. If they had fewer employees they could offer better wages and have a ghost of a chance of keeping smart people in Eastern North Carolina. There's plenty of great evidence showing that smart programmers can consistently be 10 times more productive than average programmers. Here's just one link http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.h tml Just one bad hire can kill a team and it really takes a good programmer to know a good programmer. It's safe to say their manager (named "Buddy") is not a programmer. He's a great guy and moderately buzzword-compliant, but he's not a programmer.

I am graduating from ECU (the university mentioned in the Wired Articles) this Decemeber and I believe that our program (although practically unheard of) is very competitive. Plenty of our graduates go on to be successfull just like other schools and some of our graduates find out that by not taking their career into their own hands they have effectively received a degree in Common Sense(tm). I'm afraid that Rural Sourcing's idea of trying to grab every graduate from ECU is going to be a disaster. The smart ones will go other places, the ones who have NO CHOICE will stay in Greenville and work at Rural Sourcing.

Read the article after reading this: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Isn't it very convenient that Digg needs techie posters and Wired picks it up ? Digg effect indeed - how come they didn't mention even a single site ?
I'm skeptical - with such an eye-catching headline, the motive seems to be to get slashdot crowd to defect.
Maybe I'm paranoid - but I suspect the motives of the article aren't totally altruistic either.

"... Help-desk staff were named as the worst
  offenders, followed by those working in
  technology start-ups, many of whom had
  continued to wear T-shirts to work as a
  consequence of the casual web culture
  of the '90s. ..." [1]

  `... More than 150 tech professionals
  attended a corporate fashion show in
  Sydney last night as organisers
  officially dubbed the industry "the
  worst dressed" in Australia. ... Short
  sleeved shirts, man-made fibres and the
  wrong coloured socks were some of the
  most common fashion faux-pas cited by
  corporate stylist, Melanie Moss, who
  hosted the event. ...` [2]

I reflect on this dressed in running shorts, Oxford blue shirt, vendorware tee shirt & black socks at my terminal. It`s a constant bone of contention to my better half who says I should dress a bit smarter. But I digress. I read an article a couple of months ago that confirmed my choice of dress.

It was by Kathy Sierra [3], who managed snare a ringside seat at the internal Amazon developers conference featuring Paul Graham [4]. This the only reference to this talk I have found. It goes something like this.... dignity is deadly ...

  `... When you evolve out of start-up
  mode and start worrying about being
  professional and dignified, you only
  lose capabilities. You don't add
  anything... you only take away. Dignity
  is deadly. ...` [5]

Reference:

[1], [2] Louisa Horn, `IT workers dubbed ``worst dressed``:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2005/11/17/11320169 09640.html?oneclick=true
[Accessed Friday, 18 November 2005]

[3] Dignity is deadly, `Kathy Sierra comments on Paul Graham talk to Amazon developers why worring about clothes, dress & unessentials detracts from startup based companies.`:
http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_us ers/2005/09/dignity_is_dead.html
[Accessed Friday, 18 November 2005]

[4] Paul Graham, `Paul Grahams website`:
http://www.paulgraham.com/bio.html
[Accessed Friday, 18 November 2005]

[5] Dignity is deadly, Kathy Sierras take on Paul Grahams comments. Ibid.

I've seen a number of articles to this effect lately. (anyone remember this?) I wonder if this is a case of PR at it again

Translation: I work for a PR firm and I would really like you to buy more different clothes so my employer will get more money. Be a good consumer and buy a real shirt, not a polyester one. Then the firm will be happy, and you will perhaps get laid!

Seriously, Paul Graham has an essay about this (sort of) here: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

"Suits make a corporate comeback," says the New York Times. Why does this sound familiar? Maybe because the suit was also back in February, September 2004, June 2004, March 2004, September 2003, November 2002, April 2002, and February 2002.

Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to. One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.

"C - The programming language programmers' programming language."

Not to flame, but Lisp is the programmable programming language. It can be written in itself. http://paulgraham.com/chameleon.html

I can't vouch for the other sites you mentioned, but Orbitz is considerably more than just skinning some static data feeds, and moreover isn't that mainframe-dependent these days. Check out this article by Paul Graham for more information. The pricing engine they use is by ITA Software, and it's actually quite complicated and compute-intensive.

Too bad, should have started him in Scheme or LISP.

http://paulgraham.com/vcsqueeze.html

It's about Venture Capital firms feeling pressure from many different sides, one of those is open source.

i seem to remember reading about how the guys that do orbitz don't use a database, they use a GINORMOUS custom lisp data access shizzle

I just skimmed through most of the irate postings to this thread and can't help but shake my head... seriously, I'm not being facitious. When are geeks going to learn that it is 'hype' that is partly responsible for a healthy chunk of a company's profit margins. Hype is also what drove the dotcom gold rush, but the reasons for the final bursting of the bubble in 2000/2001 are a lot more complicated (read some of Paul Graham's musings on the subject matter) and should not be simply attributed to 'irrational exuberance.'
The same people lamenting about this 'undeserved' hype are the first ones complaining that we're all being outsourced and that it's almost impossible to raise funding for an IT startup these days. So, here's a company that somehow coaxed a VC out of $16 Million (which in turn will create jobs for people like YOU!) and you're bitching and moaning acrimoniously about how you guys did that 4 years ago. If you are really sooooo smart, then go out there and grab a piece of the action! VCs are sitting on huge portfolio funds right now and have no clue what to do with them (well, almost ;-) - no wonder we're all getting outsourced, we're simply too clever for our own good! I personally prefer to lose a few IQ points for a mansion on a lake, a bitch red Ferrari, and some more digits in my bank account...

... and some CEO's need to grow up, I'll be off to buy a nano, which works without the "help from the open source community" (who are mostly kids, mind you).

My guess is this article is just some paid (and poor quality) PR. Read this to learn more about how these articles end up published.

C# and Objective C are modest improvements in opening up software, but we probably still need more than that.

The urge to look corporate-- sleek, commanding, prudent, yet with just a touch of hubris on your well-cut sleeve-- is an unexpected development in a time of business disgrace.

I expect that the people who pay newspapers to run their "stories" will also be paying congress to prevent bloggers from discussing politics. So that the NoiseMachine can continue to deceive America with their agitprop.

The final blow to local papers will be when local goverments stop posting official notices in those papers. That is where a significant source of income for the papers comes from. Unless you are that newspaper in Newark(?) who is getting something like $100,000/year to publish only news approved by the city council and mayor's office.

It's still an early stage startup so a lot of the specifics are up in the air. As of right now I am setting up a system with it's own custom DRM that works with several video formats, a fast secure scalable backed, and a simple integrated player that works on Windows and OS X. I am more interested in getting the cost of distribution down than working with content suppliers right now. IMO focusing on a single market this early is a bad idea, if you make the right technology and you can sell it to independent films AND Hollywood AND Bollywood AND blogers ect.

For now I want to focus on selling / renting high quality video on line, but as the costs goes down I plan on being flexible enough to try out other approaches. At some point I will add video blogs. And yes I know most blogs suck, but if it's cheep enough we can run adds for any content or let them pay for the cost of distributing their own video's. Yes, you get a lot of junk blogs, but you also get people like Paul Gram, father of the modern spam filter, to provide interesting content such as "What you can't say" http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html. Heck, once things are set up we might setup an interface for school plays, (It's a hassle and lot's of people get riped off on these right now, so it's a good market to get into) but the goal is to have a good interface and then add on these features in a natural fashion rather than focusing on one and getting stuck.

PS: Yes, the goal is to make a tun of money, but the way to do it is to make a service that people like to use. If you have any ideas or want more info please email "J KIRBY JOBS" at H O T M A I L (.com). AKA jki_______mail.com

The point is that I don't think mere ideas are worth anything at all in a capitalist sense. Did it cost you anything to have an idea? No. All the value is in the implementation. And FYI, I'm not really even a big fan of capitalism. I think "intellectual property" will one day make capitalism as unworkable as communism (for different reasons). The screwed up patent system is just one symptom. But I digress...

FWIW, Paul Graham recently published an essay on the exact same idea.

Hmmm... interesting. I've never heard that division before; it sounds pretty much like an HLL/low-level language distinction.

I tend to avoid such divisions when I'm speaking to others. It is far too easy to fall into the the Blub paradox. You tend to evaluate programming languages by going down the power scale from whatever you've learned, and therefore fail to recognize that there's a range up from what you've learned. If somebody generates a brilliant new language that has the potential to make programming simple, and you use this scale, then you'll only think it's as powerful as the most powerful language you've used.

That said, when I'm learning new languages, I do tend to use a similar idea internally. But this is only for a loose thought process about how to get things done in the language, and isn't meant to judge the language's merits... otherwise, I risk not evaluating merits that the language has that I haven't encountered.

That said, my scale also includes an entry with first-class functions and lexical closures, an entry for the "doesn't support recursion" languages (Fortran 77, early BASIC, etc), an entry for syntactic (as opposed to lexical) macros, and an entry for first-class classes (like Java, Objective C, and Smalltalk). A no-prize to the first person who guesses my language of choice.

I deliberately didn't order those reasonably, since I don't think that it's a good idea to think of these as an ordering. Instead, you can use them to help gauge the character of a language.

I know I shouldn't reply to a troll, but on the off chance that anyone's interested, Paul Graham wrote an essay on the unpopularity of nerds.

Learn Scheme or learn computing using Scheme. Or learn to appreciate art and still get something done.

Nirvana.

It doesn't have to be a video game; I suggest Arc.

Hindsight.

At the time, the obviousness of being able to target an industry-standard, pervasive platform, just wasn't obvious. There simply wasn't such a platform with many megabytes of memory, many gigabytes of disk, processors which could handle hundreds of millions of operations a second, and so forth.

There were interpreted Lisps on a variety of platforms that were in common use. There were a handful of compiled Lisps. Most notably, MacLisp in ITS (and later on other OSes on PDP-10s), which was so popular at MIT's AI lab that enough was developed in it that performance became a key issue.

At the time it made sense to investigate hand-building a machine that would be an optimal target for a compiled Lisp, especially in that it would make known optimization techniques easier, and would welcome rather than tolerate large garbage-collected heaps.

Nowadays, Scheme textbooks like the excellent SICP: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (or, say, The Schematics of Computation) introduce compiler-writing and target an implementation of a virtual machine. These VMs are directly analogous to the actual CADR hardware. On modern fast computers, they run faster than the actual processor hardware in the physical CADR. Running a VM with performances down in the 1/double-digit or 1/triple-digit of physical processors would have been intolerable back then.

There were always people working on targetting mass-produced general-purpose hardware, it's just that there was a lot of learning to be done about how to optimize things.

Lots of that work was done in the context of the amazing T project. The T compiler was a massive watershed development for Lisp compilation, as it implemented or introduced such things as efficient lexical scoping; simplifying the code through transformation until you were left with operations on only as many variables as you have registers; lambda-lifting; CPS-transformation; dramatically improved copying garbage collection; "pseudo-hardware typing". A number of other innovations directly stem from these.

One look at this is Olin Shivers writing about his memories of the T project.

Nowadays, with these techniques, and others learned since, compiling Lisp to practically any modern processor is straightforward. Modern Lisp and Scheme compilers generate either efficient and fast native code, or portable C (to the extent that it should work on any 32 or 64 bit platform gcc supports).

There remain some implementations that target a tight purpose-written VM, like CLISP or Scheme48 does. There are some implementation that target other VMs, particularly the Java one, compiling into JVM bytecodes or Java as an intermediate language.

The cheapness and reasonable speed of VMs, the efficiencies of compilers targeting C, assembly, or native machine code, and the tightness of runtime environments supporting type-handling and garbage collection, are such that practically nobody would seriously think about building hardware dedicated to supporting Lisp like languages.

With the benefit of hindsight, you are completely right.

The two points you raise, prior to T, would have been thought of as somewhere between funny and insane.

T was ca. 1982.

The CADR Lisp Machine was started ca. 1975 and documented in AI memo 528 in 1979.

Lisplike-compiled-language-favourable hardware chugged along until the early 1990s, when they collectively could no longer compete with the performance (never mind the price) of implementations compiling for x86, SPARC, Alpha, and a few other popular workstation instruction sets.

http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html

hackers... ...use their office as a place to think in. And if you're a technology company, their thoughts are your product. So making hackers work in a noisy, distracting environment is like having a paint factory where the air is full of soot.

The New York Times article is just a PR article for the E-HealthKey. The article reminded me of an essay by Paul Graham, The Submarine.

Well, how about adding object-oriented programming to a language which previously did not include it?

Multiple pre-CLOS object-oriented extensions to Lisp were written using heavy-duty macrology.

How about adding Prolog-style logic programming to a language which previously did not include it?

You can do so in Lisp, and macros are the best tool for the job.

How about adding an English-like syntax for defining common looping constructs? Lisp's infamous LOOP macro could be and was developed by *users* who didn't have to wait for some language implementor to do it for them.

How about a whole book's worth of code?

What about allowing simple application-oriented forms to declare and define multiple associated functions and data structures?

The basic fact is that Lisp programmers f*cking INVENTED the use of closures in programming, and they STILL PREFER MACROS by a large margin to implement control structures. Do you think they all are brainwashed, or stupid amnesiacs, or what? Does learning "defmacro" somehow block all memory of "lambda"? If it were just a matter of "good closure syntax", we'd use defmacro to define a nicer syntax and use it. But the plain fact is that the syntax is superficial---the expressive power is fundamental.

The code transformations possible greatly outnumber the total number of closures it is reasonable to ask a higher-order-function user to pass it. Furthermore, forcing the use of closures means the user of your utility has to jump through more hoops to use it, and makes your design more complicated.

Here's something from guys who do lots of transactions in a safe language -- perhaps you've heard of Orbitz? If you'll notice, they manage memory so that they avoid GCs whenever possible.

My original point was more about things like sshd -- there's just not a good reason for that to be written in an unsafe language. It defeats the whole purpose of your "secure" shell if a buffer/heap overflow allows someone to compromise your whole box.

Normally the code that needs optimizing is a small part -- you make that go fast and you can achieve your goals.

Paul Grahm wrote a similar essay almost 2 1/2 years ago. http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html

Not just FUD, high-quality journalism: The Submarine by Paul Graham.

...is that if you want to make money, it is useless to target the PC. The PC is dead as a target when it comes to commercial application development.

He isn't trying to replace your PC, he's trying to explain why companies just aren't developing PC software anymore.

All the revenue-generating applications these days are on the Internet. (Games are one of the big exceptions, but even PC games these days have to use the Internet in some way to be commercially viable.)

Paul Graham has been saying the same thing for some time. And I think they’re right!

accoriding to paul graham, big companies can't do product development.

Looks like somebody needs to read a few essays by Paul Graham.

In Lisp, source filters never break.
Never.

Norvig was one of the technical reviewers for HOP, and asked in one of his reports why I spent so little space in the book discussing source code generation. I think only a Lisp expert would have asked that. Source code generation is unreliable and inadvisable in every language except Lisp.

"You can't describe pornographic acts while in a school playground."

That's the first time I heard that limitation. Presumably kids can talk about what they want to do with some other person on said playground. Parents can describe the act of reproduction to their children. Teachers can describe STD's and the acts that can spread them. Adults can talk about such things to other adults, but random adults can't talk about such things with random children.

I think it's a reasonable precedent but it's got to be a vary fine line and closely tied in with intent. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html makes you wonder if some group is fighting for power and using this for cover or if most people just find the idea inherently disturbing. I guess if I had kids I could get behind the "think of the children mindset" but from what I can recall it was a transition from not caring about such things to constantly thinking about them at which point I don't see when talking about such things would cause harm.

I don't know but it seems like a lot of this stuff is the dieing gasps of organized religion as it becomes irrelevant in our diverse society. I find it funny that religion has gone from a dominant position in the Middle Ages to the wiping boy of the Republican Party. After all other than the "right to life" issue what are they spending their time on?

Sounds like that mindset can go hand in hand with Lisp:)

http://paulgraham.com/lisp.html

Do Xtremers have any particular choice of language?

I remember an essay by Paul Graham: "The Submarine", where he discusses the effect of PR firms on journalism in general. Extrapolating from Graham's article, it seems like an honest blog by someone genuinely interested in scientific topics might be a better place to get good science news than mainstream media. Heck, in many of the science articles here on /. it seems that some of the comments make for better science reporting than the articles themselves.

Would that this hadn't already happened. Yahoo! Stores was rewritten from highly-sophisticated Lisp to C++. And it shows...

``When your Real Product needs some Real Power years from now, will you be happy with whatever language decision you made?''

I would say that Ruby is at least as good a bet as C# there. There may be a lot of libraries for C#, but Ruby is definitely the more concise and flexible language, and it's almost trivial to extend with C code if you need extra speed or low-level OS functionality.

I don't have first hand experience with ASP.NET or Rails, but from the comments I hear, ASP.NET is not awfully intuitive nor flexible, whereas Rails seems to be blowing other frameworks out of the water these days.

``Competition based on speed can be rather stupid.''

Yes. Like any other assessment based on a single metric. But in the market place, being able to develop features more rapidly than the competition is a definite win. See also Paul Graham's essay Beating the Averages.

Well, for one thing various governments have given communism quite a bad name. People tend to equate it with totalitarianism.

This is because communism implies some level of totalitarianism, and totalitarianism implies some level of communism. The difference is only in why they behave as they do.

Communism starts with wanting everyone to be equals and manages that by making everything public owned. This means those that want to do something that is not publicly owned, or even publicly approved, must be smacked down in a totalitarian manner.

Totalitarianism starts with the government being a control freak that wants its fingers in everything. Thus everything you do economically needs government approval, and you end up with companies run identically as they would under a communistic regime, to the point that all companies must run equally bureaucratically as to be indistinguishable from each other in terms of real choice for their customers.

Not directly related to the topic on hand, read Paul Graham's latest essay "Inequality and Risk" for some nifty insights: http://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html

Hardly a small problem -- in fact, VCs everywhere have been desperately looking for someone to fill this niche. That it's an established player, PayPal, that makes it first to the scene is understandable, but something entrepreneurs should put down as a missed opportunity. For context, the issue of micropayments was addressed by two other /. favorites, Business 2.0: http://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/print/0,1 7925,1096807,00.html/ and Paul Graham: http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html/ Back to the drawing board...doh!

Ask Paul Graham.

It is a bit worse than that. You can take a story that reads neutral and read it either way to make up for your own personal bias.

For example saw a story on Bush visiting huricane victims. He was walking around shaking hands handing out food. Walking up to people and saying 'hey you get anything to eat yet?'. Yet some people spin this as an ignorant boob, other spin this exact same story as a great leader. Yet it was neither. It was a dude walking around saying 'hey go get something to eat its free!'.

Video games are another example of not media bias but ratings at work. The media stations have their own set of rattings they adhear to. Numbers came in this week we are down half a point. Need better stories. Their advert dollars are tied directly to how good their ratings are.

As someone else said in here 'if it bleeds it leads'.

Also many reporters are, well sorta, lazy. For a good example of how 'news' works read this
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html Even the vaunted NPR does this sort of junk.

Hi,

I think Paul Grahams sums up why Ada never made it and why C did:

http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html

Scroll down to Point 4 "Hackability"

I tend to agree with him - a language can try to save you from yoursolf too much. Also, a language can get you burned without much effort.

It's a question of whether you want to learn to do things the safe way and know when you are going to the edge or if you want the language to hold your hand but also be there to spank you if you are trying something that it considers out of bounds.

If it is possible to make yourself into a great hacker, the way to do it may be to make the following deal with yourself: you never have to work on boring projects (unless your family will starve otherwise), and in return, you'll never allow yourself to do a half-assed job.

If it is possible to make yourself into a great hacker, the way to do it may be to make the following deal with yourself: you never have to work on boring projects (unless your family will starve otherwise), and in return, you'll never allow yourself to do a half-assed job.

(For a contrasting point of view, see Paul Graham's essay on Great Hackers.)

I'm inclined to agree that hacking is a state of mind. But it seems that only a certain kind of temperment is drawn to cultivate that state of mind. In practical terms, therefore, personality matters greatly.

From long observation, I would have to say that most people don't know -- and don't want to know -- how things work. In fact, many people have developed quite elaborate defenses against knowing, strange though it may seem to the hacker mind. These people will claim that they don't have time, or that it's risky, or that it's more cost-effective to pay someone else, or that they don't see why it all has to be so hard, et cetera. Hackers seem notably disinclined to raise such objections.

I'm not sure that hackers, as a group, are naturally drawn to rigor and formalism any more than the general population, but most of them seem at least willing to go there if the situation calls for it. Hackers might prefer to immediately start prying the covers off stuff, but if that doesn't work, the more committed ones tend to have no problem reading manuals, circuit diagrams, or assembler code if that's what it takes.

Hackers seem to be well represented by the Myers-Briggs INTJ and INTP personality types. On the other hand, this combination (introverted, intuitive, thinker) is rare in the general population. Most people wouldn't dream of taking the covers off a new piece of gear. To them, it would be far safer not to know than to risk voiding the warranty.

My point is that neither position is objectively more correct than the other. It's a question of what you subjectively value. So yes, I suppose that anyone could, in principle, learn to think like a hacker. After all, it's not like there's any secret to what's involved. And we live in a highly technological era, where it would seem to make excellent sense to cultivate that way of thinking. But I don't see it happening.

Paul Graham had something interesting to say about that at OSCON this year. Here's a snippet:

"The basic idea behind office hours is that if you can't make people work, you can at least prevent them from having fun. If employees have to be in the building a certain number of hours a day, and are forbidden to do non-work things while there, then they must be working. In theory. In practice they spend a lot of their time in a no-man's land, where they're neither working nor having fun.

"If you could measure how much work people did, many companies wouldn't need any fixed workday. You could just say: this is what you have to do. Do it whenever you like, wherever you like. If your work requires you to talk to other people in the company, then you may need to be here a certain amount. Otherwise we don't care."

The secret to finding other press hits from a given pitch is to realize that they all started from the same document back at the PR firm. Search for a few key phrases and the names of the clients and the experts, and you'll turn up other variants of this story.