Slashdot Mirror

"Most people want leaders that act as a substitute for their own super-egos, which lead them personally."

Interesting thought, but it ignores the acceleration of addictiveness coming from technology and marketing...
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html

While your comment got me thinking (a la Graham's What We Can't Say), I also notice that 'daughter' is conspicuously absent from your response.

... so, be careful what you let it amplify.

On addiction and technology and overcoming it:
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

(Technology can also be used to broadly suppress things, too, as a variation on amplification...)

It's maybe more like this?
http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X
http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html

I think you are thinking of "Beating the Averages" by Paul Graham. Your summary of the essay is really not doing it justice...

This is recommended reading for anyone interested in programming.

I willingly admit that my summary isn't doing it justice. However, I could not remember the details, nor did I have enough information to find the proper essay and refresh myself on the details. Thus, I stuck to details that I was sure of, and quite vague about what I was not sure of. Thus, a vague description with enough specifics that 10 people can bang the link over my head. ;)

I think you are thinking of "Beating the Averages" by Paul Graham. Your summary of the essay is really not doing it justice...

This is recommended reading for anyone interested in programming.

I willingly admit that my summary isn't doing it justice. However, I could not remember the details, nor did I have enough information to find the proper essay and refresh myself on the details. Thus, I stuck to details that I was sure of, and quite vague about what I was not sure of. Thus, a vague description with enough specifics that 10 people can bang the link over my head. ;)

I think you might be referring to Paul Graham's essay, "Beating the Averages." Here.

"Sometimes, in desperation, competitors would try to introduce features that we didn't have. But with Lisp our development cycle was so fast that we could sometimes duplicate a new feature within a day or two of a competitor announcing it in a press release. By the time journalists covering the press release got round to calling us, we would have the new feature too."

Check out Paul Graham's "Beating the averages", it may be what you are looking for. http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

I remember reading about someone working on a webpage offering various services...

That was Paul Graham, working on the Yahoo Store.

Beating the Averages

I think you are thinking of "Beating the Averages" by Paul Graham. Your summary of the essay is really not doing it justice...

This is recommended reading for anyone interested in programming.

I think you are thinking of "Beating the Averages" by Paul Graham. Your summary of the essay is really not doing it justice...

This is recommended reading for anyone interested in programming.

Is this the essay you remember?

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

I don't think most people can write web code faster in lisp than PHP, unless you restrict yourself to a very tiny problem space. PHP has its issues (like a pretty broken language development community, meaning no offense to Rasmus himself) but it does allow incredibly rapid web development. In his essay, Graham says two lisp experts were better off using lisp for web development than using C++ or perl, and gives very good reasons why. But personally I suspect the real difference between Graham and his competitors was well motivated talent, which is not something you can shoehorn into a Dilbertesque corporate culture. Yeah, sure, languages do matter, but not as much as raw programming ability does.

I know it's not .NET in particular, but it certainly applies: What Languages Fix. The problem that C# was invented to fix? Java is controlled by Sun. Same goes for .NET vs. JVM.

I was reading somewhere that someone with a similar problem implemented a 5 minute delay before he could connect to the internet. The delay filtered out the times he went online just for procrastination, or just "because it was there". I find a lot of times I open a browser because I'm waiting for some long-running process (like 25 seconds) and my mind wanders. Even if I had a 60 second delay, I'd probably do that a lot less.

Similarly, Paul Graham said he uses two computers - one for coding and one that sits across the room connected to the internet. He has to physically get up and move to go online, so it has to be worth doing it. That's enough to block out the procrastination type stuff. More Reading.

This story feels a bit like one of those "suits are making a comeback!" stories.

Now, PR people do understand this, and they do sometimes drop hit pieces. But the natural defense mechanism is that there are people who actively follow this stuff and look for those kinds of shenanigans. For example, here's a story that accuses the Obama administration of feeding a story to the WaPo. When PR people try to stir up a story, it's very easy to be caught out, so that naturally limits them to dropping a few hints.

The article is over five years old, but I think it still is quite applicable today: The Submarine. The trick seems to be having awareness of this manipulation, looking for it, and being able to communicate those findings. Politics breeds that kind of watchdog (especially in the current environment). But I don't think you'll find it in every arena on every issue.

That's not to say your view lacks insight. I suspect there is a lot of news that is news because it was in the news - especially within tech. But I also suspect that simply leaves tech news wide open to manipulation either by priming the pump or providing information to feed the cycle beneficial to your message. And unlike the political arena, tech watchdogs rarely become the news which greatly reduces the effectiveness of uncovering manipulation.

Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens' main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. They also need to keep them fed, and as far as possible prevent them from killing one another. Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what I've read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it.

In outline, it was the same at the schools I went to. The most important thing was to stay on the premises. While there, the authorities fed you, prevented overt violence, and made some effort to teach you something. But beyond that they didn't want to have too much to do with the kids. Like prison wardens, the teachers mostly left us to ourselves. And, like prisoners, the culture we created was barbaric.

from "Why Nerds are Unpopular"

imagine that, you do something bad, and you get put somewhere you don't like.

The nerve of our society.

from "Why Nerds are Unpopular"

GREAT read!

Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens' main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. They also need to keep them fed, and as far as possible prevent them from killing one another. Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what I've read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it.

In outline, it was the same at the schools I went to. The most important thing was to stay on the premises. While there, the authorities fed you, prevented overt violence, and made some effort to teach you something. But beyond that they didn't want to have too much to do with the kids. Like prison wardens, the teachers mostly left us to ourselves. And, like prisoners, the culture we created was barbaric.

from "Why Nerds are Unpopular"

Uh.. The news you choose to report on (and what you choose to leave out), the tone of the articles, the sources you choose to cite, the things you present as "facts." The list of things that bias affects, deliberately or subconsciously, is manifold.

News is an excellent propaganda medium. Just ask Walter Cronkite about the Tet offensive, or maybe look at how the suit is back

You can't help but think that this is the way all programming will be done in the future.

Every decade or so, someone comes up with "visual programming" or a "programming system that anyone can use" and claims it will make programmers obsolete or some such other nonsense. Yet here we are, in 2011, still programming in C (and assembly), and I can't name a single successful "visual" programming environment. The reasons are legion; I'm not going to rehash them here (especially since others have), but I can tell you a good place to start would be to read some of Paul Graham's writings or really anyone who has actually designed a programming language or studied CS or CS history. As a quick hint, there is a reason film didn't make books obsolete.

When people talk about such features, I wonder:

Why not LISP? (Or Scheme)

The classic quote of course is that every languge environment expands to implement LISP badly, so why not just start with the real deal?

You can just implement any language features you desire by yourself.

And if you say that corporate programmers can't handle LISP, what makes you think that they can handle closures, lamda expressions, and the rest?

The fact is, I think the legions of corporate programmers cannot handle advanced language features. They're better off being verbose.

But the line of reasoning employed against Java and for advanced language features (make the language more powerful, and code more terse) can be used continually until you end up with Scheme.

By the way, How to Design Programs is a great programming book using Scheme.

As someone with experience in the subject, what traits do you think the system programming language of the future needs?

Actually, I don't think I'm all that qualified; I've never written my own OS. But looking at people that have (Torvalds, Tannenbaum, Ritchie, et al), I would have to say that a programming language that wants to be used for OS implementation will have to displace C. That is, it needs to have the power of C (low-level HW access at a minimum), but also have that something little extra that gives it an advantage. The more expressive and succint you can make a language, the more powerful it will probably be.

Oh, and never write a programming language for someone else to use; make sure any software you write is something you would want to use, otherwise it will probably suck.

Fine, so we can argue over whether Windows "will" go anywhere in the near future, but you can't deny that it DID. Written in C.

And I can list a dozen or more OSes written in C, despite the various attempts over the years to write a "better" OS in a "better" language. And that's just open source OSes.

There's a quote that talks about most successful programming languages having been created by the authors for their own use, whereas most programming language failures were created for others to use. C was created by its authors for their own use.

A couple years ago a venture capitalist friend told me about a new startup he was involved with. It sounded promising. But the next time I talked to him, he said they'd decided to build their software on Windows NT, and had just hired a very experienced NT developer to be their chief technical officer. When I heard this, I thought, these guys are doomed. One, the CTO couldn't be a first rate hacker, because to become an eminent NT developer he would have had to use NT voluntarily, multiple times, and I couldn't imagine a great hacker doing that; and two, even if he was good, he'd have a hard time hiring anyone good to work for him if the project had to be built on NT.

from Great Hackers by Paul Graham.

The Java/C++ model of O-O pretty much forces side effects and object mutation on you.

Other models of O-O exist. CMU is using "O-O" as shorthand for "pedestrian, non-academic coding".

Which has some degree of truth, but is also academic snobbery.

If they wanted to advance the conversation without flamebait, they could have labeled their stuff as "modern O-O" or "O-O without mutation" so they could not look like they were throwing out the useful aspects of O-O.

Thanks for posting this story. This issue doesn't affect me, as I don't use EA forums, but it is still something that I find completely unacceptable. I've bought (yes, with money) every RPG Bioware ever released for the PC (and I think I also have a copy of Shattered Steel), but combined with the emphasis on DLC (which requires logging in) in recent titles, this means I will not be buying (or pirating) DA2.

(Apologies for all the parentheses. I'm in the middle of On Lisp.)

"On the other hand, not eating your veggies just affects your own health."

Well, are you saying being vegetable deficient (or eating too much sugar and refined starch etc.) does not put everyone else's health at risk as well, by the same argument you use for promoting vaccination, if such an eating style compromises someone's immune system?

Example:
    http://www.google.com/search?q=immune+system+vegetables
    http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/587037/best_fruits_and_vegetables_to_help.html
"Regularly eating fresh fruits and vegetables is the natural way to boost your immune system."

I'm not saying whether that applies to you. That is just a general fact about health. And even the most casual glance at US Americans shows almost all are vegetable deficient.

I personally am not angry with you whatever you eat or why; you just sounded angry about the vaccination issue. I'm just asking you, if that anger exists and is justified, is it legitimate to consider such anger applicable for other contexts?

It's OK to be angry, even healthy; it's what we do with the anger that matters.
    http://pbskids.org/rogers/songLyricsWhatDoYouDo.html

Should I get angry when I see someone drive up to a fast food restaurant?

It would seem to me that if a person is not eating well, and then that person's immune system can't fight off infection well because that person is vegetable deficient by a lifestyle choice or unwillingness to break out of a "pleasure trap", then that person is creating a health hazard for other people?

Of course, not many people know about pleasure traps or how to break out of them, so the issue of willfullness is questionable, and in this society, the whole society essentially makes it hard to eat well:
    http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
    http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
    http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html
"These two senses are already quite far apart. Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly."

With that said, I can see your point about the issue of what public figures say as opposed to what private individuals do, which is indeed a very good point I can agree with.

Geez, people are so religious about their languages. As stated earlier, I personally am not sure where I stand on the debate, but I am aware of it because I've heard it thrown around for the last 30 years or so whenever LISP was mentioned. I suppose it goes back to the origins of the language. John McCarthy invented LISP as an excecise in mathematics to describe an alternate implementation of a Turing machine. He was actually surprised when one of his students was able to implement it on a real machine. I've heard it said that programming in LISP is not really programming, but rather doing math.

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

Today's dialects (Scheme, CLisp, Clojure, etc) are not the same as the original lisp. No of this in anyway diminishes the import of LISP as many of the concepts it pioneered are part of most modern languages today (if-then-else, recursion, functional programming, lambda calculus, etc).

My personal experience indicates that like so many things, social life is a matter of training, experience and desire. The people who have one actually make the effort and put the time into it, and unsurprisingly, get results. I'm fairly certain that geeks simply consider other things more important.

This is consistent with Paul Graham's essay Why Nerds are Unpopular: Why don't smart kids make themselves popular? If they're so smart, why don't they figure out how popularity works and beat the system, just as they do for standardized tests? ... The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be popular. ... Of course I wanted to be popular. But in fact I didn't, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart.

How would you know if it suited your needs without knowing what it is? That, was my point, not if it was the panacea for data storage.

That is a fair point, but my point was this: If my needs (or paranoias) are beyond this service, then I gain nothing by knowing about it. Except maybe to advise others who might be looking for such a service.

Sorry if I was harsh. I was a bit tired at the time, and put off by your misapprehension of my writing. I can see that Dropbox has its place, and I will readily own that code-oriented version control does feel like overkill with static collections of files like photos. :c)

Hum. So now hopefully we're on the same page, and can have a more constructive conversation.

It is an interesting service. The fact that they don't provide more concise information about their service rubs me the wrong way, but by this point I do know what the service does (mostly from reading the thread here), and it would be a shame to write off a company for not meeting my expectations. My main reservation in using the service is, in fact, the business of plopping a slew of personal files on someone else's server, particularly one with a TOS that has clauses like Dropbox does. But using TrueCrypt ought to resolve most of that, so maybe when I have time to play with both of them, I will give it a go.

It's an infinitely more simple solution for me to save an RFC I'm working on at work in my Dropbox, and open the same file from home than it is for me to lug a laptop around, or copy it to a USB drive, or VPN in, or RDP in, or whatever other TLA you want to use to get access to it at home.

Fixed that for you. ;c)

If you want to use a hammer, use a hammer. But don't shit on a screwdriver for not being a hammer.

I was going to try to compose some witty play on, "When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." But I think I have something more constructive. It's just a thought I had; I'm not trying to drive a point home any more, just developing ideas. Maybe you'll have an opinion on it?

I was reading "Beating the Averages" earlier today; it is an essay by Paul Graham, about his experience developing Viaweb. (Viaweb was his product as a first-mover in the online store genre of services. Viaweb was eventually purchased by Yahoo to become Yahoo Store.) He talks about what it means for one language to be more powerful than another.

He makes this interesting inductive argument about the relative power of programming languages. That is, there is an ordering '>' where for languages A and B, a person who is very familiar with both languages can say, 'B>A', meaning, "B is more powerful than A." The metric he seems to use is something like this: If a person uses B and knows the features of A, they might say, "How can you get anything done in A? It doesn't have feature x."

He claims that you should usually use the most powerful language for the job. The article is in the context of a dotcom startup, so he basically defines power as productivity in development (speed in adding features, that kind of thing). However, he acknowledges that for certain problems (simple throwaway programs, specialized number crunching, and other particular applications) a certain language may be more appropriate, even if it is less powerful by the normal metric. (For instance, FORTRAN might be better for number crunching than many languages that provide better tools for development.)

Crap. This is getting long. Where was I going with this? Oh, yeah. I view version control systems as more powerful than Dropbox. But many people don't need the advanced features of a system like git or subversion. Moreover, they are just likely to get in the way of someone who doesn't care. It is also nice in certain contexts

Scratch that, name me one

Yahoo Store.

(That's not necessarily a recommendation)

The "Piece of official paper" is more than a certification that you are a capable person in your profession, formal education is a requirement in most professional fields.

Would you hire the services of a "drop out" medic? A drop out dentist? A drop out lawyer? It seems to me that "drop out" stars are more of the exception than the rule and they tend to be confined to certain fields.

Dropping out of collage seems reasonable for developers because Software Development is an craft a trade, not a profession. Same goes for entrepreneurs, chancing upon a successful idea is not a formal profession. And believe me, it was chance.

Many successful ideas seem obvious in hindsight but they weren't so obvious back when they were conceived. And when you factor in the rate of failed enterprises you see that being an entrepreneur is a bad career choice. It just seem good because you only hear about the lucky ones not the unlucky ones who chased the wrong ideas.

Investors, on the other hand. Professional investors like Paul Graham of Y combinator. They love entrepreneurs. They may drop them like a hot potato if their ideas don't fly, but they love to attract young entrepreneurs because en mass, they are a good investment, even though only 1 in 10 succeeds, they get to cash in with the lucky ones and shrug off the cost of the unlucky ones like a snake shed their dead skin, then dance on top of these crushed dreams while rising their precious boys like trophies for the world to see.

Ok I got a little dramatic there but my point is:
a) Distrust people who make a career out of founding start-ups when they tell you to drop out of collage to raise a start-up.
b) I know you *just know* your idea is pure gold. The other 9 guys thinks so too. The rich guy saying he believes on you know doesn't actually mean *you* you, more like you, the concept. I don't mean to stop you but...
c) His backup plan are the other 9 start-ups, what's *your* back up plan? Like a football player, you need a secure career.
d) Secure -well paid- jobs are in the professional fields. Those fields need education.
e) Unless you're a a programmer, or a model, or a photographer, etc.

Don't listen to this asshole. Don't drop out of college..

Remember when you refactored a 500-line program to 300? How about to 100? Harder or easier?

The same applies to hardware. What looks simple on the outside is very, very, very hard to come up with.

Look cursorily over an Apple product, like the MacBook Air, and you won't see anything mindbendingly "innovative." What? It's rather plain. No fancy flowers laser-etched into the chassis. Quite the opposite. It's even out-austerizes Bauhas in its austerity.

Or the iPhone. What? It has, like, zero buttons on its face, and I am surprised to find any, by what I know about Steve Jobs.

And what is one thing I know about Steve? I've never met him, but I know that he's like me: a Minimalist. Steve Jobs's minimalism is the reason (insert your needed jack here) is not on the side of the MacBook. It was his minimalism that took away the floppy disk drive from the Mac in 2000 (when I bought it, and sorely needed it). His minimalism dates back to the early Macs and that's why there was not a separate numeric keypad on the early Macs. It's because Jobs hates buttons. Because Jobs is a minimalist. Understand that, and you understand his design decisions a lot more.

But that would just get you to understand Jobs, and Jobs is just one person at Apple (albeit the CEO). But that's just it. The second thing about Apple that's different from most companies is the CEO's involvement in design. Jobs is a micromanager. Google it and I'm sure you can find the articles I've read about Jobs's specifiicity about the colors of those candy-colored iMacs, or about the exact brightness of the lights at the latest Apple Expo. He is an employee's worst nightmare about micromanagement --- except for the fact that he happens to be a smart person. I mean just in general, of course, but also as a designer. He just is. I don't know why, but Steve Jobs is a good Designer. He just is, mainly because (A) he's smart, and (B) he likes it. I honestly believe that he cares slightly more about Design than about Money. That is, given the choice between between being richer with a mediocre product line or poorer with a superb, awesome, spectacular, well-designed product line, he would choose to be the poorer. Why? Because as any artist knows, the pleasure of looking at your superior product is more satisfying than money. This does not apply to all people, but artistic people really do derive more joy from making good things than by making money.

I think it is, in part, happenstance, that Apple is successful. It just so happens that people like the iPhone. After all, the Mac OS 7 was better than Windows way back then, but people bought Windows. Why are they paying Apple more now? I don't know. Maybe the oddity was back then, and the normal is now. Good design wins. Back then, it didn't for freakish, once-in-a-long-time circumstances.

More about good design: Taste for Makers, by Paul Graham.

I love PR articles like this one. This is the kind of piece that future researchers can than use as a reference - since it appeared in a reputable newspaper, it's "proof" that such services are "coming back". Ultimately the companies offering this service are made to appear more legitimate to potential investors and partners -- even though readig the article shows no actual evidence of a "comeback" for deep packet inspection beyond the fact that a couple of companies are trying to get it moving. cf "Suits are back!"

Want to be like Hamming? Here's how:
In summary, I claim that some of the reasons why so many people who have greatness within their grasp don't succeed are:
        * they don't work on important problems,
        * they don't become emotionally involved,
        * they don't try and change what is difficult to some other situation which is easily done but is still important,
        * and they keep giving themselves alibis why they don't.
        * They keep saying that it is a matter of luck.
I've told you how easy it is; furthermore I've told you how to reform. Therefore, go forth and become great scientists!

Source: http://paulgraham.com/hamming.html

We don't make the entire physical world child-friendly; we build playgrounds and schools and other kid-specific places for them so they can enjoy themselves safely, and adults can do the wide variety of things that adults do everywhere else that eight-year-olds probably shouldn't.

Actually... outside of the bedroom (or whereever you prefer to do it), what do adults do that kids should be excluded from?

Work? Kids can flip burgers, punch prices into a cash register and make change, put crates in a truck. Maybe you shouldn't let them near the hard drugs (doctor), your client's confidential data (lawyer) or your company's unreleased designs (EEngineer) or code (developer). Maybe kids don't benefit in great amounts from seeing knowledge-intensive work if they don't have enough background knowledge.

But I think exposing kids to the adult world and showing them what it is peoeple (er, adults) do for a living would teach kids a lot about the world; let them intern where applicable. A large dose of primary experience is probably good for their education. Why don't school do that?

One answer, according to Paul Graham, is that the real (not stated) purpose of school is to keep kids off the street: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

Another answer, by John Taylor Gatto, is that school is deliberately meant to hinder us, see http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html /Off-topic (But I can sustain the karma burn)

Spoken like a true Blub programmer. Trying to go from a programming language that has true lexical closures like Ruby to a language like Java which doesn't is extremely painful. You get used to being able to write code that uses higher-order functions (and hence closures) to get stuff done.

Its not harder than a OO lang. However finding good help *is* harder. One reason i had to pick java over the many languages I have used was its reasonably easy to find people who know it. Not so much for Scheme or Haskell.

Then again, having worked for Ericsson (Erlang), the quality of the applicants when you look for a Haskell (etc.) programmer will often blow you away. And since good programmers out perform bad ones by at least 10 to 1, the choice may not be as obivous as you'd think at first. Obl. Paul Graham reference.

I find it amazing that, contrary to popular belief, the 21st century started in 1958.
Seriously, guys, who in their right mind believes there have been no major advances in programming languages since Lisp?

Some quite notable hackers believe that everything since LISP has simply reinvented the wheel. The more I study programming languages, the more I'm inclined to believe them.

I find it amazing that, contrary to popular belief, the 21st century started in 1958.
Seriously, guys, who in their right mind believes there have been no major advances in programming languages since Lisp?

Some quite notable hackers believe that everything since LISP has simply reinvented the wheel. The more I study programming languages, the more I'm inclined to believe them.

I find it amazing that, contrary to popular belief, the 21st century started in 1958.
Seriously, guys, who in their right mind believes there have been no major advances in programming languages since Lisp?

Some quite notable hackers believe that everything since LISP has simply reinvented the wheel. The more I study programming languages, the more I'm inclined to believe them.

Microsoft ( thankfully ) is dead.

Yours In Novosibirsk,
K. Trout

A lot of people are bitching about C++ here; whether it's sour grapes over its success, a lack of understanding of the language, a lack of discipline to work in such a low level language, or honest criticisms, one thing has to be remembered: C++ was created to solve problems because its creator thought he could make a better language. One of my favorite ways to compare languages is What Languages Fix. It's a good, short read, but I'll spoil you and let you know that C++ was created to fix the problem of C being too low level. This implies many things, not the least of which is that Stroustrup wanted to leverage C's popularity, and of course that limited his options when designing C++. You'll also notice in that essay that Java was created to fix the problem of C++ being a kludge. And of course, C# was created for no other reason than Microsoft doesn't control Java ;)

The point I was making is that the reason the article's logic, what rsborg called "a leap of faith," is so poor is that twitter needs to be seen as something more than just a bunch of twits - that the article may even be the result of pay-for-play to promote the company as something more important and valuable than it really is.

It's like saying "Suits are back!"

Funny thing, your oddly moderated woooosh! of a post would fit in twitter's 140 character limit.

"Visual Basic suggests words while a coder types, highlights syntax errors and makes bug hunts easier by jumping straight to the problematic code - even when the error is one of logic rather than letters."

For all the Visual Basic fanz: In case you've been living in President-VICE Cheney's spider-hole,
Visual Basic is DEAD because Microsoft Is Dead.

I hope this dispels the idea of debugging in this infamous AND dead language.

Yours In Moscow,
K. Trout

In the article "what happened to Yahoo" http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html you said

There's not much we can learn from Yahoo's first fatal flaw. It's probably too much to hope any company could avoid being damaged by depending on a bogus source of revenue.

At the risk of saying the obvious if Yahoo had been looking to please the consumer, and solve a problem that they were having (in regards to finding information on the internet) they could have avoided bogus sources of revenue. Media companies have a split business model where consumers (the people buying the goods) and customers (those providing the revenue, the advertiser) are different groups. Perhaps they should have looked at pleasing the consumer, as there is no business if the media company has no eye balls to distribute adverts to.

Regards Omar

I can't post the replies as I have only just asked permission.

Please buy Microsoft and end its misery. Paul Graham
has noted that Microsoft is dead. Your purchase would end a monopoly that the U.S. Justice Department should have ended.

You will be a GNU hero with your Microsoft purchase. I would be willing to manage this purchase for you for the lump sum payment of Euro 50,000,000. I look forward to our meeting.

Thank you for your consideration.

Yours In Astrakhan,
Kilgore Trout, C.I.O.

Video on computer has won.

Paul Graham has an interesting essay on TV versus the computer for video.

The networks are queued to get the benefits of their lobbyists. Google MIGHT not get all the market share they think they can get.

Yours In Akademgorodok,
Kilgore Trout