I'm sure this isn't quite what you're looking for, but you could try using a Palm Pilot with something like LispMe - a Scheme implementation. There's a link to animated GIFs on that page which show LispMe code being used to draw graphs, using expressions like:
Functional languages have already had quite a strong impact on mainstream languages, but only indirectly. Your professor is absolutely right about how long it takes for programming ideas to hit the mainstream. Java is the first example of a mainstream language which allows some of what Smalltalk enabled back around 1972.
However, Java focuses almost exclusively on strongly-typed object-orientiation as its primary concept. It completely ignores two related features which make Smalltalk powerful: code blocks and closures. These Smalltalk features were actually derived from LISP, which at the time (1972) could only be called a proto-functional language. The first truly functional language was probably Scheme, in 1975.
Because the functional ideas inherent in LISP were not fully developed at the time Smalltalk was created, the conceptual emphasis in Smalltalk was on object-orientation, derived from Simula. If Smalltalk had been able to draw from Scheme instead of LISP, there's a strong chance that it would have had a more functional bent, which might have affected the languages which were influenced by Smalltalk.
Instead, Scheme came along just a little too late to directly influence the mainstream. Only recently have we started to see functional features appearing in mainstream languages. PERL and Javascript both support lambda-calculus-compliant closures, and first-class procedures, which are fully realized incarnations of the original concepts on which Smalltalk's somewhat limited code blocks and closures were based. Python has also recently moved in this direction.
I predict that functional features will slowly be adopted by most mainstream languages over the next decade or two. Java will be the last new mainstream language that's completely non-functional (pun intended). The power of these functional capabilities is too great for language designers to ignore.
Note that I'm not saying that current functional languages will become mainstream languages. Rather, just as mainstream languages have absorbed object-oriented concepts, they will also absorb functional concepts.
Anyone writing a language today who isn't familiar with Scheme, Haskell, and ML may as well throw in the towel right now. Unless they plan to invent the next great paradigm, they will not succeed. I think it's impossible, in 2001, to write a language without taking functional concepts into account. (Of course I'm reminded of Tanenbaum telling Torvalds that writing a monolithic OS kernel in 1991 was a fundamentally bad idea...)
The problem is the leadership. Until fairly recently, AIDS education was virtually nonexistent, due to a complex set of cultural beliefs, e.g. "AIDS education encourages promiscuity". President Mbeki has also famously questioned the link between HIV and AIDS, even invoking the US CIA as a co-conspirator in a global conspiracy.
Now Mbeki wants to blame the drug companies. Regardless of the moral issues of drug company pricing strategies, South Africa's problems will not be solved until its leadership faces them head on and stops trying to allocate blame and make excuses. Lack of leadership on this issue is the major reason that 1 in 9 South Africans are infected with HIV, and 1 in 5 pregnant women in Soweto township are HIV positive.
Thabo Mbeki is a big part of the problem. It's a pity that the African National Congress (ANC) couldn't find a more worthy successor to Nelson Mandela.
If you think that all available developer jobs are listed on job web sites, well, there's a bigger world out there. The job web sites are good for "coding grunt" jobs, but if you're looking to play in the $150K-250K/year league, you're not going to find many of those jobs there, because that kind of developer doesn't typically get hired off the street - it usually involves more networking, word of mouth, or specialist agencies.
I do architecture & design work, and some of the projects I've worked on have been implemented in Smalltalk. It's used especially in situations where the requirements are very complex. Most business programming is brain dead - some basic accounting, workflow/groupware/document management, and the rest is just tailoring to individual requirements.
But in some areas of things like financial services, where the requirements can get truly complex and require math PhD's to develop the specs, languages like Smalltalk (and Scheme et al) can come into their own. In these systems, the problem domain is such that the last thing you want to have to worry about is the sort of infrastructure detail that lower-level languages like C++, Java, or PERL force you to deal with in developing large, complex systems.
Anyway, the real reason to learn Smalltalk is to learn what object-oriented programming is supposed to be like. C++ and Java, which I'm intimately familiar with, are pale imitations that make significant compromises which dilute OO in a pervasive way, limiting the degree to which pure OO concepts can be applied. Perl isn't worth a mention when it comes to OO - sure it can do it, but not in a way that you'd want to use in large, complex systems. Python is a bit better, and Ruby seems even better, but they still don't quite achieve the level that Smalltalk does.
Even though I don't develop in Smalltalk day-to-day, it's an important language to have gotten your head around, if you're interested in expanding your skill as a developer.
Financial statements won't give you the level of detail you're asking for. The Consolidated Statements of Operations shows how Red Hat's revenue breaks down in terms of Subscription, Services, and Web. That seems to indicate an annualized total revenue of around $80m. The rest is presumably from investments and such, but I didn't try to track it down.
> telecos fighting back on 'infringement
> of the telecos business.'
That's so last millenium!;)
The Economist magazine's March 24th issue had this to say about VOIP and the telcos:
"VOIP's change of fortune came in 2000 when, one by one, the large telephone carriers started to replace parts of their traditional infrastructure with various types of IP-based multi-service networks. The irony is that the new-style carriers that helped create the IP telephony business when it was still a niche activity for PC hobbyists have found the going tough and are facing a shake-out. Meanwhile, VOIP is thriving within the traditional telcos that tried to stifle it."
The article goes on to talk about telco IP penetration in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Asia is "adopting [IP] telephony faster than anywhere else. China already generates more VOIP traffic than any other country except America. In Japan, 12% of all international calls go over IP networks."
The home page clearly states: "indiscriminate automated downloads from this site are not permitted", so it seems likely that someone on your section of the @HOME network attempted such a download. The blockage would thus be neither casual or accidental.
It would be nice of them to explain this more politely at the top of the page, before launching into an anti-robot diatribe, but there's no reason to take the page personally unless you're responsible for an automated download attempt.
The contradiction of the techno idolatry and the hedgemonc morality of the society amazes me.
Those two things are inextricably linked: techno idolatry ("toys") are a distraction, a way for people to soothe themselves, in the same way that a pacifier/dummy soothes a baby, by changing the focus of its attention. The more constrained a society is - whether it's Japan or the puritan-rooted U.S. - the more people turn to distractions, since their culture can't provide sufficient nurture for their spirits.
In addition to the "public web" of pages that we all surf, the web has been jumped on as a platform for development of applications for businesses - intranets and extranets. This requires real programmability. You're asking for a content & presentation model designed to do nothing but render static content, but that would limit the current usefulness and future of the web.
As for the "people who find HTML confusing enough already", in my experience, they mostly use products that allow them to avoid dealing with HTML.
Re:Not Everybody Learns Well in the Classroom!
on
Open Courses at MIT
·
· Score: 1
I agree with most of what you said in this message, but this point is BS. Such students - and I was often one of them, depending on the lecturer - can and do skip lectures and read the books and do well. I know I did that often as an undergrad.
Er... because you did that, that's true of all highly intelligent students? I see... Was Logic one of the lectures that you used to skip?;)
Saying "the books are there, go read them" is a kind of "let them eat cake" argument. If the entire system is oriented towards delivering information through lectures, students who don't do well in lectures aren't given much guidance or support - they're left to fend for themselves, which you apparently did in some cases. That's what I'm suggesting needs to change.
As much as anything else, offering options to students would help them realize that one size isn't supposed to fit all. Finding that the entire structure in which you're supposed to receive your education doesn't suit you tends to make you question why you're there at all.
Anyway, I'm glad to hear you're being proactive about this kind of thing. Back when I went to university, if/. had existed then, you can bet none of my professors would have heard of it, let alone be reading it.
...do not necessarily need to be 'productized' (although much of the don't-use-windows rhetoric around here is founded in the idea of Linux as a product).
I have a response to this too.;)
Linux is already a real and valuable product, being used for example in servers, and various custom embedded applications - the Tivo consumer digitial video recorder is a nice example. It's also being used to drive parallel supercomputers used in big, serious research applications, a role which otherwise would have to be filled by expensive commercial OSes on proprietary hardware. So Linux's future as a "product" seems assured - the fact that it has already succeeded in displacing competitors at every level, from small embedded devices to giant number crunchers, highlights one of its unique strengths, and a flexibility that any commercial competitor will be hard-pressed to match.
The only real open question is Linux's ability to be a product for users who require a desktop OS. Even here, Linux is being used in environments such as schools, for example, where X terminals running Linux make for affordable workstations for students (search on "K12Linux" for more info). It's also being used as an OS for products like graphics workstations; it's the
default OS for network computers like the ThinkNIC; and it's used in other situations where the user interface provided to the user is constrained in some way.
Many of the companies using Linux in these various ways are also contributing to its further development. Under these circumstances, I think it's quite likely that Linux's viability on the mainstream desktop will grow, probably quite fast. The amount of intellectual capital that is being targeted at Linux right now is unprecedented, and the pace of change since, for example, the beginning of the Gnome project has been impressive.
Because of standardization around things like TCP/IP and other Unix-heritage protocols and standards, basic OS functions have become commoditized, even on Windows. Linux excels at providing this functionality, so can easily compete with Windows at this level.
However, other functionality, in particular desktop GUIs and their APIs, are not commoditized in the sense of being standardized and therefore interchangeable. HTML is the first widely used, non-proprietary standard display model. I'm sure it won't be the last, and the future of desktops may lie in the direction of its successors. But even without that, Linux use on the desktop can only grow with time.
Re:Not Everybody Learns Well in the Classroom!
on
Open Courses at MIT
·
· Score: 2
I don't disagree with much of what you've said - my original post was obviously somewhat in vent/rant mode.
But the scenario you described: "thrown into that format, they would drift away or fail miserably", also applies perfectly to those who may be extremely bright but don't adapt well to the lecture format. So what the current system does, in effect, is discriminate against a minority group, for the very reason that they are a minority - since if we were a majority, you can bet the system would be skewed towards us, and the rest would just be remedial education.
The systems in use need to become more flexible - a wider variety of options need to be made available to students. I wasn't really arguing for the complete abandonment of lectures, and I certainly wasn't arguing that the online format should be used to the exclusion of all else - I think that would be a very bad idea. But less blind reliance on the lecture format is needed, along with recognition of and at least some support for the spectrum of requirements of students. I know at this point you're thinking "does this guy know how many graduates we have to churn out every year?" or something along those lines. But are lectures as a primary form of communication really the most efficient use of the lecturer's time? I'm not suggesting changing or improving things will be easy, but it's encouraging to see an institution like MIT trying new things.
I think the lecture format is a kind of crutch - easily repeatable and relatively undemanding for all concerned (no offense intended - I'm not trying to diminish what educators of all kinds do, this is more about systemic issues). It's also an easy model to use for almost any number of students, i.e. it's fairly scalable. It doesn't require any experimentation - it's well tested, and works with an acceptable percentage of students.
But just because we have a system that's good enough for many people, doesn't mean it can't and shouldn't be improved. Unfortunately, it's very entrenched, the institutions using it tend to be rather conservative, and how to change it isn't obvious, so improvements aren't likely to be easy. Plenty of creativity, experimentation, and risk-taking will be required. My hope is that the changes required to accomodate online education will trigger other changes, ultimately creating a new, more inclusive balance in a system that's been relatively static for quite some time.
I suspect the benefit to society as a whole could be quite great - as it is, some of the most valuable human capital is being squandered. The negative effects of being put through an unsuitable education system can be high. Then again, I can't help wondering whether this isn't all just an unconscious (or conscious) social balance mechanism, in which those who have the potential to be most dangerous and disruptive to society and the status quo are neutralized or at least hobbled.
Meanwhile on Windows, you've got a single model, COM.
Now, tell me why a platform with maybe at best a 2% desktop marketshare needs 4 different ways of component embedding and a platform with 90% marketshare can get away with one.
Microsoft's COM itself is not too bad as a substrate, which may explain why Mozilla chose to emulate the COM model with XPCOM. However, the actual embedding of user-interface components within Windows applications depends on ActiveX, a broad collection of COM interfaces, and implementations thereof, which integrate with the underlying Windows API (Win32).
Almost anyone who has done any development with ActiveX should be able to tell you that this is not the ultimate component embedding model. Nor, for that matter, is Win32 the ultimate OS API. I should add that these are both serious understatements.
I think it's far more likely that future user interfaces will use a model more along the lines of HTML or Display Postscript, i.e. a more client/server based approach, although clearly neither of those two technologies in their current form can fully address the problem.
It's incredibly unlikely that Microsoft will be the one to provide the next rational component model - its entire history demonstrates that it doesn't have what it takes to truly innovate, no matter how many of its billions it throws at people researching Bayes networks and first order phase transitions.
If anything, Microsoft's ability to innovate is probably declining as market forces begin to work against it - IOW, it may have peaked. Perhaps its research division will eventually begin paying off in the way that IBM's does, but so far there's no indication that it will do so in the software arena.
So, while I don't happen to think Gnome or KDE will be the future of components either, I do think that the future is far more likely to come from an unexpected direction than from Microsoft. HTML and the web are a perfect example of this; Java is another, with Microsoft now vaporing.NET to catch up.
The bottom line is that we're not at a stage where it's technically valid to say "OK, all the user interface development problems have been solved and we can all standardize on one thing". We need alternatives, and there's no place better to try out different approaches than on a free, open OS that doesn't restrict competition and innovation with a closed API.
Not Everybody Learns Well in the Classroom!
on
Open Courses at MIT
·
· Score: 5
I, and I'm sure thousands of others, will second that. Finally, there are alternatives to the traditional teaching methods geared towards the lowest common denominator. It's only natural that the sheep will complain, though, since they don't understand and don't know how to take full advantage.
Why is it that the lowest bandwidth communications channel that humans have - the auditory channel - is used as a primary channel for delivering educational information? The whole concept of a "lecture" amazes me - one person stands and effectively reads from notes (no matter how well he's memorized them over the years) while N people sit and write down what he's saying. This has to be some kind of strange sociobiologically-rooted phenomenon related to herding behavior, but do we really need it nowadays? I'm not saying there shouldn't be face-to-face communication and Q&A's, but "lectures"? Maybe once every now and then, when someone like Martin Luther King Jr. or Abraham Lincoln has something to say, but other than that...
The same thing happens in government - I was watching the music copyright hearings on CSPAN, with people like Don Henley and the RIAA testifying. Sen. Hatch starts out warning about how little time they have, after which all those testifying each in turn proceed to read their prepared speech. Sheesh! And people wonder why government is slow and inefficient???
If it weren't for some of the obligatory silliness surrounding Squant, it could be taken as fact, since there allegedly really are some women who do see a fourth primary color. This story was posted on/. a while back.
Truth is as strange as fiction, just with a less whimsical name?
If you ever want to see the outermost circle of hell, a place where no hope exists, go down to
your local INS waiting room.
Been there, done that! To the point where for a while, I just avoided it, and let my visa lapse. Of course that didn't help matters any!
I eventually figured out that, at least for me, the sanest way to deal with the U.S. government is through lawyers. It took me a while - years! - to figure that out, coming from a somewhat different culture.
The problem is that the funniest stuff on/. is always generated not by the editors, but by the participants, in reaction to real stories.
Forcing comedy is like the government issuing an edict: "This material is intended to be funny. Under section 314(d) of the Lighthearted Material Act, under penalty of imprisonment, you are now required to laugh."
I will say, though, I enjoyed the Python/Perl merger. I still think it would be a good idea!!!
ESR is saying that the behaviors were successful on average ("instinct's way to steer us towards behaviors that were on average successful for our ancestors"), which is perfectly valid. A particular behavior won't necessarily have the same results every time; however, if on average a behavior gets a desired result, that behavior is likely to be propagated. Hence ESR's perfectly correct use of the word "average" here.
> yeah, you just keep waiting for that to happen:)
It already did happen, back around 1980, when the price dropped from around $700/oz; and again in around 1986, when it dropped again from around $400 to $300.
These drops don't reflect any change in gold's utility to the industrial market, or even its value as jewellery; they merely reflect the fact that gold is no longer considered the ultimate repository of wealth it once was. It took some time, after gold-backed currencies, especially the US dollar, went off the gold standard, for the market as a whole to realize what this meant for the long-term value of gold. To some extent, that process is still underway, as witnessed by the gold-bugs here arguing why gold has some special worth. The price of gold will drop more - perhaps by as much as 75% over the long term, and in real terms (inflation adjusted), it will drop even more.
As the other reply pointed out, you do indeed get to be a legal resident if you marry a U.S. citizen.
A lot of people seem to think this is some kind of evil loophole, and it certainly does get abused. But, how do you think an American citizen would react if they were to find that they were effectively prohibited from marrying someone from another country?
It seems to me there's about as much likelihood - and maybe less - of this law ever changing, as there is of private gun ownership being made illegal. Both go to very basic issues of citizen freedom.
I should have defined what I meant by intrinsic. As you point out, gold has useful industrial uses. As long as that continues to be the case (which of course is also subject to change), gold has what I was referring to as intrinsic value. However, the premium placed on gold because of its perceived value for non-tangible purposes such as you refer to when you say "I dunno about you, I'd still want a few ounces of gold, even if I couldn't sell it or trade it", I do not consider to be intrinsic, since it is subject to irrational prejudices that have more to do with psychology than utility. As for me, you'd have to explain to me why I would want a few ounces if I couldn't sell it or trade it, unless I were planning to fabricate some PCB edge connectors...
As for the intrinsic value of paper money and stocks, we should distinguish between different risks. I've been referring to the risk of the commodity used as a value store losing its perceived value. When you say "abstractions such as shares in a company do not have intrinsic value", I think you miss the point. The abstraction entitles you legally to something with intrinsic value - an ownership interest in a company's assets and profits. Certainly, if the legal system that underlies this abstraction breaks down, you have nothing - just as you would if Dubai decided to nationalize e-gold's holdings, for example.
So the benefit you claim gold has is that it might retain its value even when other systems and mediums of exchange break down. I respect your paranoia, but frankly, if we get to that point, whether I have a pile of gold in my garage probably isn't going to make a difference. At that point, if I really needed gold, I'd just go and find someone who had some and steal it - I mean, we're talking about the breakdown of civilization here, and I won't be pussyfooting around!
As they might say in a cheesy beer commercial: I am my own gold.
This is the reason Unix was invented! Back when the main user interface was a teletype, restricting commands to two or three characters, no matter how cryptic (ls, mv, vi, cat, etc) seemed like a good idea.
Now we've come full circle - bad handwriting recognition on a tiny input screen has once again given the arcane *nix command set a new lease on life.
Slashdot Mirror
(plot (lambda (x) (+ (sin x)(cos (* x x)))) -10 10 -2 2)
However, Java focuses almost exclusively on strongly-typed object-orientiation as its primary concept. It completely ignores two related features which make Smalltalk powerful: code blocks and closures. These Smalltalk features were actually derived from LISP, which at the time (1972) could only be called a proto-functional language. The first truly functional language was probably Scheme, in 1975.
Because the functional ideas inherent in LISP were not fully developed at the time Smalltalk was created, the conceptual emphasis in Smalltalk was on object-orientation, derived from Simula. If Smalltalk had been able to draw from Scheme instead of LISP, there's a strong chance that it would have had a more functional bent, which might have affected the languages which were influenced by Smalltalk.
Instead, Scheme came along just a little too late to directly influence the mainstream. Only recently have we started to see functional features appearing in mainstream languages. PERL and Javascript both support lambda-calculus-compliant closures, and first-class procedures, which are fully realized incarnations of the original concepts on which Smalltalk's somewhat limited code blocks and closures were based. Python has also recently moved in this direction.
I predict that functional features will slowly be adopted by most mainstream languages over the next decade or two. Java will be the last new mainstream language that's completely non-functional (pun intended). The power of these functional capabilities is too great for language designers to ignore.
Note that I'm not saying that current functional languages will become mainstream languages. Rather, just as mainstream languages have absorbed object-oriented concepts, they will also absorb functional concepts.
Anyone writing a language today who isn't familiar with Scheme, Haskell, and ML may as well throw in the towel right now. Unless they plan to invent the next great paradigm, they will not succeed. I think it's impossible, in 2001, to write a language without taking functional concepts into account. (Of course I'm reminded of Tanenbaum telling Torvalds that writing a monolithic OS kernel in 1991 was a fundamentally bad idea...)
Now Mbeki wants to blame the drug companies. Regardless of the moral issues of drug company pricing strategies, South Africa's problems will not be solved until its leadership faces them head on and stops trying to allocate blame and make excuses. Lack of leadership on this issue is the major reason that 1 in 9 South Africans are infected with HIV, and 1 in 5 pregnant women in Soweto township are HIV positive.
Thabo Mbeki is a big part of the problem. It's a pity that the African National Congress (ANC) couldn't find a more worthy successor to Nelson Mandela.
I do architecture & design work, and some of the projects I've worked on have been implemented in Smalltalk. It's used especially in situations where the requirements are very complex. Most business programming is brain dead - some basic accounting, workflow/groupware/document management, and the rest is just tailoring to individual requirements.
But in some areas of things like financial services, where the requirements can get truly complex and require math PhD's to develop the specs, languages like Smalltalk (and Scheme et al) can come into their own. In these systems, the problem domain is such that the last thing you want to have to worry about is the sort of infrastructure detail that lower-level languages like C++, Java, or PERL force you to deal with in developing large, complex systems.
Anyway, the real reason to learn Smalltalk is to learn what object-oriented programming is supposed to be like. C++ and Java, which I'm intimately familiar with, are pale imitations that make significant compromises which dilute OO in a pervasive way, limiting the degree to which pure OO concepts can be applied. Perl isn't worth a mention when it comes to OO - sure it can do it, but not in a way that you'd want to use in large, complex systems. Python is a bit better, and Ruby seems even better, but they still don't quite achieve the level that Smalltalk does.
Even though I don't develop in Smalltalk day-to-day, it's an important language to have gotten your head around, if you're interested in expanding your skill as a developer.
Thanks for explaining this!
Financial statements won't give you the level of detail you're asking for. The Consolidated Statements of Operations shows how Red Hat's revenue breaks down in terms of Subscription, Services, and Web. That seems to indicate an annualized total revenue of around $80m. The rest is presumably from investments and such, but I didn't try to track it down.
I know, many of the forty-somethings I work with have the same problem...
> of the telecos business.'
That's so last millenium! ;)
The Economist magazine's March 24th issue had this to say about VOIP and the telcos:
"VOIP's change of fortune came in 2000 when, one by one, the large telephone carriers started to replace parts of their traditional infrastructure with various types of IP-based multi-service networks. The irony is that the new-style carriers that helped create the IP telephony business when it was still a niche activity for PC hobbyists have found the going tough and are facing a shake-out. Meanwhile, VOIP is thriving within the traditional telcos that tried to stifle it."
The article goes on to talk about telco IP penetration in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Asia is "adopting [IP] telephony faster than anywhere else. China already generates more VOIP traffic than any other country except America. In Japan, 12% of all international calls go over IP networks."
It would be nice of them to explain this more politely at the top of the page, before launching into an anti-robot diatribe, but there's no reason to take the page personally unless you're responsible for an automated download attempt.
Those two things are inextricably linked: techno idolatry ("toys") are a distraction, a way for people to soothe themselves, in the same way that a pacifier/dummy soothes a baby, by changing the focus of its attention. The more constrained a society is - whether it's Japan or the puritan-rooted U.S. - the more people turn to distractions, since their culture can't provide sufficient nurture for their spirits.
As for the "people who find HTML confusing enough already", in my experience, they mostly use products that allow them to avoid dealing with HTML.
Nice try Bill! We're on to you!
Er... because you did that, that's true of all highly intelligent students? I see... Was Logic one of the lectures that you used to skip? ;)
Saying "the books are there, go read them" is a kind of "let them eat cake" argument. If the entire system is oriented towards delivering information through lectures, students who don't do well in lectures aren't given much guidance or support - they're left to fend for themselves, which you apparently did in some cases. That's what I'm suggesting needs to change.
As much as anything else, offering options to students would help them realize that one size isn't supposed to fit all. Finding that the entire structure in which you're supposed to receive your education doesn't suit you tends to make you question why you're there at all.
Anyway, I'm glad to hear you're being proactive about this kind of thing. Back when I went to university, if /. had existed then, you can bet none of my professors would have heard of it, let alone be reading it.
I have a response to this too. ;)
Linux is already a real and valuable product, being used for example in servers, and various custom embedded applications - the Tivo consumer digitial video recorder is a nice example. It's also being used to drive parallel supercomputers used in big, serious research applications, a role which otherwise would have to be filled by expensive commercial OSes on proprietary hardware. So Linux's future as a "product" seems assured - the fact that it has already succeeded in displacing competitors at every level, from small embedded devices to giant number crunchers, highlights one of its unique strengths, and a flexibility that any commercial competitor will be hard-pressed to match.
The only real open question is Linux's ability to be a product for users who require a desktop OS. Even here, Linux is being used in environments such as schools, for example, where X terminals running Linux make for affordable workstations for students (search on "K12Linux" for more info). It's also being used as an OS for products like graphics workstations; it's the default OS for network computers like the ThinkNIC; and it's used in other situations where the user interface provided to the user is constrained in some way.
Many of the companies using Linux in these various ways are also contributing to its further development. Under these circumstances, I think it's quite likely that Linux's viability on the mainstream desktop will grow, probably quite fast. The amount of intellectual capital that is being targeted at Linux right now is unprecedented, and the pace of change since, for example, the beginning of the Gnome project has been impressive.
Because of standardization around things like TCP/IP and other Unix-heritage protocols and standards, basic OS functions have become commoditized, even on Windows. Linux excels at providing this functionality, so can easily compete with Windows at this level.
However, other functionality, in particular desktop GUIs and their APIs, are not commoditized in the sense of being standardized and therefore interchangeable. HTML is the first widely used, non-proprietary standard display model. I'm sure it won't be the last, and the future of desktops may lie in the direction of its successors. But even without that, Linux use on the desktop can only grow with time.
But the scenario you described: "thrown into that format, they would drift away or fail miserably", also applies perfectly to those who may be extremely bright but don't adapt well to the lecture format. So what the current system does, in effect, is discriminate against a minority group, for the very reason that they are a minority - since if we were a majority, you can bet the system would be skewed towards us, and the rest would just be remedial education.
The systems in use need to become more flexible - a wider variety of options need to be made available to students. I wasn't really arguing for the complete abandonment of lectures, and I certainly wasn't arguing that the online format should be used to the exclusion of all else - I think that would be a very bad idea. But less blind reliance on the lecture format is needed, along with recognition of and at least some support for the spectrum of requirements of students. I know at this point you're thinking "does this guy know how many graduates we have to churn out every year?" or something along those lines. But are lectures as a primary form of communication really the most efficient use of the lecturer's time? I'm not suggesting changing or improving things will be easy, but it's encouraging to see an institution like MIT trying new things.
I think the lecture format is a kind of crutch - easily repeatable and relatively undemanding for all concerned (no offense intended - I'm not trying to diminish what educators of all kinds do, this is more about systemic issues). It's also an easy model to use for almost any number of students, i.e. it's fairly scalable. It doesn't require any experimentation - it's well tested, and works with an acceptable percentage of students.
But just because we have a system that's good enough for many people, doesn't mean it can't and shouldn't be improved. Unfortunately, it's very entrenched, the institutions using it tend to be rather conservative, and how to change it isn't obvious, so improvements aren't likely to be easy. Plenty of creativity, experimentation, and risk-taking will be required. My hope is that the changes required to accomodate online education will trigger other changes, ultimately creating a new, more inclusive balance in a system that's been relatively static for quite some time.
I suspect the benefit to society as a whole could be quite great - as it is, some of the most valuable human capital is being squandered. The negative effects of being put through an unsuitable education system can be high. Then again, I can't help wondering whether this isn't all just an unconscious (or conscious) social balance mechanism, in which those who have the potential to be most dangerous and disruptive to society and the status quo are neutralized or at least hobbled.
"The nail that sticks up gets hammered down."
Microsoft's COM itself is not too bad as a substrate, which may explain why Mozilla chose to emulate the COM model with XPCOM. However, the actual embedding of user-interface components within Windows applications depends on ActiveX, a broad collection of COM interfaces, and implementations thereof, which integrate with the underlying Windows API (Win32).
Almost anyone who has done any development with ActiveX should be able to tell you that this is not the ultimate component embedding model. Nor, for that matter, is Win32 the ultimate OS API. I should add that these are both serious understatements.
I think it's far more likely that future user interfaces will use a model more along the lines of HTML or Display Postscript, i.e. a more client/server based approach, although clearly neither of those two technologies in their current form can fully address the problem.
It's incredibly unlikely that Microsoft will be the one to provide the next rational component model - its entire history demonstrates that it doesn't have what it takes to truly innovate, no matter how many of its billions it throws at people researching Bayes networks and first order phase transitions.
If anything, Microsoft's ability to innovate is probably declining as market forces begin to work against it - IOW, it may have peaked. Perhaps its research division will eventually begin paying off in the way that IBM's does, but so far there's no indication that it will do so in the software arena.
So, while I don't happen to think Gnome or KDE will be the future of components either, I do think that the future is far more likely to come from an unexpected direction than from Microsoft. HTML and the web are a perfect example of this; Java is another, with Microsoft now vaporing .NET to catch up.
The bottom line is that we're not at a stage where it's technically valid to say "OK, all the user interface development problems have been solved and we can all standardize on one thing". We need alternatives, and there's no place better to try out different approaches than on a free, open OS that doesn't restrict competition and innovation with a closed API.
Why is it that the lowest bandwidth communications channel that humans have - the auditory channel - is used as a primary channel for delivering educational information? The whole concept of a "lecture" amazes me - one person stands and effectively reads from notes (no matter how well he's memorized them over the years) while N people sit and write down what he's saying. This has to be some kind of strange sociobiologically-rooted phenomenon related to herding behavior, but do we really need it nowadays? I'm not saying there shouldn't be face-to-face communication and Q&A's, but "lectures"? Maybe once every now and then, when someone like Martin Luther King Jr. or Abraham Lincoln has something to say, but other than that...
The same thing happens in government - I was watching the music copyright hearings on CSPAN, with people like Don Henley and the RIAA testifying. Sen. Hatch starts out warning about how little time they have, after which all those testifying each in turn proceed to read their prepared speech. Sheesh! And people wonder why government is slow and inefficient???
</RANT>
Truth is as strange as fiction, just with a less whimsical name?
Been there, done that! To the point where for a while, I just avoided it, and let my visa lapse. Of course that didn't help matters any!
I eventually figured out that, at least for me, the sanest way to deal with the U.S. government is through lawyers. It took me a while - years! - to figure that out, coming from a somewhat different culture.
Forcing comedy is like the government issuing an edict: "This material is intended to be funny. Under section 314(d) of the Lighthearted Material Act, under penalty of imprisonment, you are now required to laugh."
I will say, though, I enjoyed the Python/Perl merger. I still think it would be a good idea!!!
ESR is saying that the behaviors were successful on average ("instinct's way to steer us towards behaviors that were on average successful for our ancestors"), which is perfectly valid. A particular behavior won't necessarily have the same results every time; however, if on average a behavior gets a desired result, that behavior is likely to be propagated. Hence ESR's perfectly correct use of the word "average" here.
It already did happen, back around 1980, when the price dropped from around $700/oz; and again in around 1986, when it dropped again from around $400 to $300.
These drops don't reflect any change in gold's utility to the industrial market, or even its value as jewellery; they merely reflect the fact that gold is no longer considered the ultimate repository of wealth it once was. It took some time, after gold-backed currencies, especially the US dollar, went off the gold standard, for the market as a whole to realize what this meant for the long-term value of gold. To some extent, that process is still underway, as witnessed by the gold-bugs here arguing why gold has some special worth. The price of gold will drop more - perhaps by as much as 75% over the long term, and in real terms (inflation adjusted), it will drop even more.
A lot of people seem to think this is some kind of evil loophole, and it certainly does get abused. But, how do you think an American citizen would react if they were to find that they were effectively prohibited from marrying someone from another country?
It seems to me there's about as much likelihood - and maybe less - of this law ever changing, as there is of private gun ownership being made illegal. Both go to very basic issues of citizen freedom.
As for the intrinsic value of paper money and stocks, we should distinguish between different risks. I've been referring to the risk of the commodity used as a value store losing its perceived value. When you say "abstractions such as shares in a company do not have intrinsic value", I think you miss the point. The abstraction entitles you legally to something with intrinsic value - an ownership interest in a company's assets and profits. Certainly, if the legal system that underlies this abstraction breaks down, you have nothing - just as you would if Dubai decided to nationalize e-gold's holdings, for example.
So the benefit you claim gold has is that it might retain its value even when other systems and mediums of exchange break down. I respect your paranoia, but frankly, if we get to that point, whether I have a pile of gold in my garage probably isn't going to make a difference. At that point, if I really needed gold, I'd just go and find someone who had some and steal it - I mean, we're talking about the breakdown of civilization here, and I won't be pussyfooting around!
As they might say in a cheesy beer commercial: I am my own gold.
Now we've come full circle - bad handwriting recognition on a tiny input screen has once again given the arcane *nix command set a new lease on life.
Ain't progress grand!!