perhaps you should consider exactly why it is that you think IRC is the best means of communication. Seriously? You think IRC is the best means of communication? No wonder I have so much trouble communicating with someone by going up them and talking to them in person. I should try using IRC next time. Communication always works so much better when there's no pesky voice inflections or body language to deal with,
I don't know if you're being dense on purpose or not, but it should've been pretty obvious that we were talking about communication over the internet and not int he real world.
Even so, communication has a tendency to work better over the network than in the real world for many people. I'm not one of those guys as I'm pretty extrovert (and obviously you too) - but many MANY people prefer email or instant messenging to either face-to-face conversation or telephone calls.
and when there's things like network lag or netsplits. I find I always get my point across when the other person sees half of my message 5 minutes later, and then I disappear in the netsplit before getting the rest of my thought out. You're right, IRC is the best.
One of the _Really Good Things_ about IRC is that you just have an IRC client attached to your screen somewhere, and attach to that screen wherever you are. It's rather okay to have a local challen for yourself and your main friends - where you just chat on and off when you have time - not necessarily needing anyone to reply immediately.
More instant than email. Less nagging than other IM programs.
Anyone who knows me knows that I haven't used windows since 1999. I simply can't stand the system, nor can I stand the corporation behind it.
However. I'm also interested in computer security.
It _MAKES SENSE_ to block stuff that has been observed in automated worms. It's a simple solution. It's not something that will make all systems invulnerable - but it _MAKES SENSE_. It's a quickfix. A quickfix that works.
This is only "censorship" insofar that it actually prevents stupid automated worms to spread. It's a defensie measure. Not a perfect one, but one.
Oh, and patching the holes. Sure. You can patch the holes. Then everyone has to update.. should we try to protect, or should we ignore those that do not upgrade their systems? The cynic in me tells me : "Let them be cracked". The humanitarian in my tells me: "Well, think of the victims of the DDOS attacks from the botnets of previously-vulnerable people".
I'm dead tired of _idiots_ who thinks that any preventative measure is evil! censorship! bad!
Microsoft is simply trying to help in this case. If you do not like it, use another IM service. Like Yahoo!.. or IRC for that matter. Heck. PLEASE go back to IRC. It's still the best means of communication there is.
So, please you censorship-screaming morons:
SHUT UP! STOP USING THEIR SERVICE IF YOU DO NOT LIKE IT. THEY ARE TRYING TO DO THE RIGHT THING IN THIS INSTANCE !
*phew*. Now I have to go wash my brain. I've just defended satan.
Let's get this straight...you have been playing around with operating systems and different applications at work rather that, you know, "doing work".
Let me get this straight. You think learning more about computing is a.. waste of time?
I can't stand people like you. If you want to be a sysadmin, fine. Quit and do it.
I can't stand people like you. People who think that people should do only one thing and not learn about other things. People with a variety of skills tend to be more productive.
Go and try and do this work properly. Put in your business case for a different OS and do the sums on how much it will cost your business. Explain where you will save money....sure, you save on the licence fess but there are plenty of other costs.
There are also plenty of gains. People get to fiddle with things they actually care about. In addition to doing work. They learn new skills. They gain more knowledge. If they do this out of free will instead of it being forced upon them - they learn quite a lot. This is a net win.
What you seem to not realize is that some people may do the changeover without actually putting extra demand on the infrastructure. This guy doesn't need any extra support from the IT department. That means he won't cost anyone anything.
Train your admins, train your support staff, train your users, organize the deployment and upgrades of the OS but minimise user's downtime, make sure all the third party peripherals work such as all the printers and scanners, not to mention all the different desktop hardware in use, make sure you have drivers for everything, oh and the big thing, exec don't like risk so to allay their fears you will have to pay a third party company that supports your chosen linux distro in the case you have a problem. Ouch...there goes your license cost savings.
No, there you go out on an extremist limb and lose all credibility. If the users who do not require extra help change over, they gain extra knowledge in doing so. This is a loss in the very short turn. It's cost-neutral in the short term, and a gain in the medium to long turn.
Arguing that everyone should change over at once is insanity. Both if you go from XP -> Vista, or XP -> Linux. If those think they can manage on their own go over to linux (or vista) when they want to - it won't cost anything extra. It probably won't even affect productivity as most people have a little extra time now and then when they can do this.
As long as you don't force people to adapt to something new, but they do it out of their own free will - you do not lose anything. You do, however, gain knowledge and experience which will help your company in the long run.
Yes, I'm sure. I'm also sure that I was the one that first discovered it, reported it to kuro5hin, to alt.religion.scientology, and attempted to report it to slashdot (but someone got their article accepted instead of mine ).
So, they did force xenu.net to be delisted by google. Google luckily changed hearts, probably due to the enourmous amounts of attention that was generated here, on kuro5hin, and all over the internet. In addition to hating the idea of letting themselves be censored in such a way. It was also one of the first time google linked that some searches were excluded - linking to chillingeffects.
They've attempted to force comments off slashdot. They've forced xenu.net to be delisted from google. They're going after people who publish the OTIII "documents". They're abusing the DMCA.
Please tell me this wasn't another traditional to metric conversion problem...
What's this "traditional" you're talking about? Metric is the tradition in most of the world. But I agree. Let's hope it's not "idiotic US substandards" vs "rest of the world" conversion problems _this_ time.
I've worked with computers for quite a lot of years. The installation usually goes this way:
Put "Favorite Distro of the year" into CD tray and do a default install with my partitioning scheme (1-2 hours). Do the security patch routine (30 minutes) Change mouse behaviour to "Focus follows mouse" (2 minutes) Change panel behaviour in KDE to 'auto hide' (30 sek).. and then now and then when I see that I miss an application - install it with apt-get or yast or whatever the tool of the day is... and I'll probably fetch my.bashrc from somewhere.
The King of Thailand is the only exception, and I think you'll find that in any country who has a King or Queen. Do not insult the King of Jordan and expect the Jordanians to grant you any sympathy, despite being unusually friendly people otherwise.
We in Norway have King and Queen. We also have a Crown Prince and a Crown Princess.
I haven't seen too many people insulting the King, except that he should really learn how to speak before doing his annual new years speak on the TV - but you'll get plenty of insults when it comes to the Crown Prince and the Crown Princess. Especially the last one..
And nobody would scold you for critizing the King, Queen or the monarchy here in Norway:P
Have you ever wondered, how cell phones became such a nuscience to americans but not to any one else, and why countries like sweeden now control the cell phone market.
I'm norwegian.
I wonder what the fsck you're smoking.
I dread the day cellphones will be allowed on flights. It's annoying. It's _damn_ annoying. It's a fucking huge nuisance.
That you haven't discovered it yet doesn't mean that all other scandinavians share your idiotic view.
Said computer really wants a HD-DVD player... only reason I don't care to buy an HD-DVD player is that it's useless for me until someone breaks the encryption thorougly and implements it in mplayer. Until then, I don't have a use for it.
Fair use community includes me. Not hackers, not pirates. People like me - who want to play their stuff on their computer.
Um, how does this make him the "Father of the Internet"?
I wondered the same thing - it's Vint Cerf that is the "Father of the Internet" - and it has been that has had that honor bestowed on him for years and years.:) Of course, Robert Kahn was the co-inventor of TCP/IP, but Vinton Cerf has always been the one mentioned with that title.
Just ranting because I'm kind of sick of hyperbole.
Yeah, a friend of mine said it was hyperbole when I mentioned Vinton Cerf as the father of the internet - back in '98. And he had been known as that for years already then.:P
To put it this way. Vint Cerf is the father of the Internet in the same way that Oppenheimer was father of the Atomic Bomb.
People living in Tokyo or Tehran might not share your sentiment.
Not when you rip only parts of what I said out of the context of this entire thread - which is the DOOMSDAY clock. Doomsday for all the world. I was comparing the fear of terrorists knocking down a few buildings to the fear of the entire city being leveled - not to mention all major cities.. at the same time.
Tokyo certainly is under threat from NK. Teheran isn't. Israel wouldn't nuke Teheran, as they would know the response of the entire middle east - and the entire world.
I was with you up until there. You were born in '79? I was born ten years earlier, so I spent the '80s as a teenager.
I've got a pretty good memory from 1985 and onwards. I started following the news around then.
I remember having a few (just a few) nightmares about being roasted in a nuclear fire.
I don't remember any nightmares, but I do remember reading quite a bit about the Hydrogen bomb, and calculating how far away the Big Bastards of Hydrogen bombs would have to be without me being torched. SS-18 SATAN, wasn't that the big bad Soviet nuke?
Then again, after the Challenger disaster, the next morning I woke up with tears streaming down my face.
People just two years younger than me do not remember neither the Challenger disaster nor the Palme murder in Stockholm/Sweden (I'm in Oslo/Norway). I remember both very, very well.
This is good. It's a break for all of us who do not use windows, but receive the same crap. It's a break for all of us who hate HTML email. It's a break for all of us who don't need a webpage in our email.
Let's look at the positively good things about this:
- Increased security (less monoculture is good).
- Increased diversity (more rendering methods means that people have to adapt to support more stuff, probably minimalistic - which is good).
- Hopefully less stupid HTML mail.
- Hopefully the title "email designer" will never be used again.
All in all - womnderfull news!:)
I remember the 80s. This doomsday clock sucks.
on
Doomsday Clock To Advance
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I only remember the 80s.
I remember, vividly, how my parents thought me that it was a cold war between the US and the Soviet Union.
I remember the retorics. I remember the fear. I remember how I was told that we could be destroyed by nuclear weapons.
I remember MAD.
I was born in 1979.
People born just 5 or 6 years later than me - do not remember this. They have never experienced the cold war. They can't remember it. They can't even understand the doomsday clock, the fear, the MAD uncertainty.
I was 10 years old. I helped chop the Berlin wall down. Physically.
People, just 5 years younger than me - don't understand what it was all about. They don't remember... and I'm still young.
Now, this article is about the doomsday clock moving forward. From 17 minutes to midnight. Heh.. I don't have words for the stupidity. The world is relatively safe. The major disaster and major fear we have is from islamic terrorists sending a couple of planes into a building or two. A BUILDING OR TWO! THATS IT! Eighteen years ago we were afraid that New York as a whole would be anhilated in a few minutes. ALL of it. Not just a building or two on manhattan.
And these guys want to move the hands forward on a clock of global doom. Right.
It was right in the 80s. It's not right anymore. Move it backwards three or four hours, and it might be right. This way - it's just ridiculous.
And that, is by law. Consumer electronics, including mobile phones, have a 5 year warranty on fixing 'production errors'. Any equipment that fails before that time - without the consumer having done something stupid like dropped it into the water - is considered a production error.
Apple is having quite a bit of trouble with the government for trying to ignore that law.:)
Seriously. Good riddance. SOAP is a mess. Google has gone the XMLRPC way, and they're providing access via that.
This isn't google being evil. This is google removing a piece of completely unnecessary junk from their offerings. SOAP should never have seen the light of day, and google is now making sure that they do their part of burying it.
But don't teach them C. Teach them a language that focuses on how to structure programs without bogging them down with memory management, pointers, etc, etc. A firm understanding of OO would also be much more useful and much easier to grasp.
Oh! How I disagree!
It's the low level stuff that is fun to learn. When I was in High School - I was programming in pascal with inline assembler. It was fun. It was _Great_ fun. I always wanted someone to teach me C.
Object Oriented programming don't teach people the nitty gritty details of things - and it's the nitty gritty details that is the most fun to learn. At least it was for me when I was in high school. Learning Java would be like learning Visual Basic - not a lot of fun.
Yes, they thought us Visual Basic in high school. Ugh.
It's the leader article. Unfortunately it's subscription only, but I think it's fair use to snip the last paragraph, which Bill seems to have taken to heart, and repost it here:
"The second danger lies in the vanity of philanthropists. They often like the notion that their foundations will live on after them, carrying their name down from generation unto generation. But, after the founder has died, foundations tend to become sclerotic and directionless--the fiefs of administrators who have lost sight of the original aims. So if you aim to be a truly philanthropic philanthropist, spend your money fast: do as much good as you can when you're alive, and let posterity go hang."
I think we can conclude that Bill reads the Economist.:p
Slashdot Mirror
perhaps you should consider exactly why it is that you think IRC is the best means of communication. Seriously? You think IRC is the best means of communication? No wonder I have so much trouble communicating with someone by going up them and talking to them in person. I should try using IRC next time. Communication always works so much better when there's no pesky voice inflections or body language to deal with,
I don't know if you're being dense on purpose or not, but it should've been pretty obvious that we were talking about communication over the internet and not int he real world.
Even so, communication has a tendency to work better over the network than in the real world for many people. I'm not one of those guys as I'm pretty extrovert (and obviously you too) - but many MANY people prefer email or instant messenging to either face-to-face conversation or telephone calls.
and when there's things like network lag or netsplits. I find I always get my point across when the other person sees half of my message 5 minutes later, and then I disappear in the netsplit before getting the rest of my thought out. You're right, IRC is the best.
One of the _Really Good Things_ about IRC is that you just have an IRC client attached to your screen somewhere, and attach to that screen wherever you are. It's rather okay to have a local challen for yourself and your main friends - where you just chat on and off when you have time - not necessarily needing anyone to reply immediately.
More instant than email. Less nagging than other IM programs.
Anyone who knows me knows that I haven't used windows since 1999. I simply can't stand the system, nor can I stand the corporation behind it.
.. should we try to protect, or should we ignore those that do not upgrade their systems? The cynic in me tells me : "Let them be cracked". The humanitarian in my tells me: "Well, think of the victims of the DDOS attacks from the botnets of previously-vulnerable people".
.. or IRC for that matter. Heck. PLEASE go back to IRC. It's still the best means of communication there is.
However. I'm also interested in computer security.
It _MAKES SENSE_ to block stuff that has been observed in automated worms. It's a simple solution. It's not something that will make all systems invulnerable - but it _MAKES SENSE_. It's a quickfix. A quickfix that works.
This is only "censorship" insofar that it actually prevents stupid automated worms to spread. It's a defensie measure. Not a perfect one, but one.
Oh, and patching the holes. Sure. You can patch the holes. Then everyone has to update
I'm dead tired of _idiots_ who thinks that any preventative measure is evil! censorship! bad!
Microsoft is simply trying to help in this case. If you do not like it, use another IM service. Like Yahoo!
So, please you censorship-screaming morons:
SHUT UP! STOP USING THEIR SERVICE IF YOU DO NOT LIKE IT. THEY ARE TRYING TO DO THE RIGHT THING IN THIS INSTANCE !
*phew*. Now I have to go wash my brain. I've just defended satan.
Let's get this straight...you have been playing around with operating systems and different applications at work rather that, you know, "doing work".
.. waste of time?
Let me get this straight. You think learning more about computing is a
I can't stand people like you. If you want to be a sysadmin, fine. Quit and do it.
I can't stand people like you. People who think that people should do only one thing and not learn about other things. People with a variety of skills tend to be more productive.
Go and try and do this work properly. Put in your business case for a different OS and do the sums on how much it will cost your business. Explain where you will save money....sure, you save on the licence fess but there are plenty of other costs.
There are also plenty of gains. People get to fiddle with things they actually care about. In addition to doing work. They learn new skills. They gain more knowledge. If they do this out of free will instead of it being forced upon them - they learn quite a lot. This is a net win.
What you seem to not realize is that some people may do the changeover without actually putting extra demand on the infrastructure. This guy doesn't need any extra support from the IT department. That means he won't cost anyone anything.
Train your admins, train your support staff, train your users, organize the deployment and upgrades of the OS but minimise user's downtime, make sure all the third party peripherals work such as all the printers and scanners, not to mention all the different desktop hardware in use, make sure you have drivers for everything, oh and the big thing, exec don't like risk so to allay their fears you will have to pay a third party company that supports your chosen linux distro in the case you have a problem. Ouch...there goes your license cost savings.
No, there you go out on an extremist limb and lose all credibility. If the users who do not require extra help change over, they gain extra knowledge in doing so. This is a loss in the very short turn. It's cost-neutral in the short term, and a gain in the medium to long turn.
Arguing that everyone should change over at once is insanity. Both if you go from XP -> Vista, or XP -> Linux. If those think they can manage on their own go over to linux (or vista) when they want to - it won't cost anything extra. It probably won't even affect productivity as most people have a little extra time now and then when they can do this.
As long as you don't force people to adapt to something new, but they do it out of their own free will - you do not lose anything. You do, however, gain knowledge and experience which will help your company in the long run.
The two games that should top any such list is of course the two classics.
Ultima 7 "The Black Gate"
Ultima 7 "The Serpent Island"
Other games are games such as X-Wing, Tie-Fighter, Red Baron (the early one, 1991ish, I guess), Speedball 2, and loads of others.
Yes, I'm sure. I'm also sure that I was the one that first discovered it, reported it to kuro5hin, to alt.religion.scientology, and attempted to report it to slashdot (but someone got their article accepted instead of mine ).
4 53200&tid=991 41250
Here are the links:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/03/21/0
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/03/22/0
So, they did force xenu.net to be delisted by google. Google luckily changed hearts, probably due to the enourmous amounts of attention that was generated here, on kuro5hin, and all over the internet. In addition to hating the idea of letting themselves be censored in such a way. It was also one of the first time google linked that some searches were excluded - linking to chillingeffects.
You're obviously new here. Slashdot and the Co$ are old buddies.
3 49237d =99
http://slashdot.org/yro/01/03/16/1256226.shtml
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/10/1
http://slashdot.org/yro/02/03/21/0453200.shtml?ti
They've attempted to force comments off slashdot. They've forced xenu.net to be delisted from google. They're going after people who publish the OTIII "documents". They're abusing the DMCA.
That's why this is on slashdot.
Not to be rude or anything... but cryptome has been around for some years, and should be well known in geek circles.
:)
Your UserID (805747) suggests to me that you haven't been around for long.. maybe you should read up a bit on cryptome?
I think I'll wait until I can be a cimmerian. :)
My thoughts exactly. I started looking for my copy of Snow Crash when I read tis article.
I'm suddenly getting interested in trying out Second Life, not having been interested at all before.
This is just Cool(TM).
Please tell me this wasn't another traditional to metric conversion problem...
What's this "traditional" you're talking about? Metric is the tradition in most of the world. But I agree. Let's hope it's not "idiotic US substandards" vs "rest of the world" conversion problems _this_ time.
I've worked with computers for quite a lot of years. The installation usually goes this way:
.. and then now and then when I see that I miss an application - install it with apt-get or yast or whatever the tool of the day is. .. and I'll probably fetch my .bashrc from somewhere.
.. 1.5-3 hours.
Put "Favorite Distro of the year" into CD tray and do a default install with my partitioning scheme (1-2 hours).
Do the security patch routine (30 minutes)
Change mouse behaviour to "Focus follows mouse" (2 minutes)
Change panel behaviour in KDE to 'auto hide' (30 sek)
So.. I'm set to go in about
The King of Thailand is the only exception, and I think you'll find that in any country who has a King or Queen. Do not insult the King of Jordan and expect the Jordanians to grant you any sympathy, despite being unusually friendly people otherwise.
:P
We in Norway have King and Queen. We also have a Crown Prince and a Crown Princess.
I haven't seen too many people insulting the King, except that he should really learn how to speak before doing his annual new years speak on the TV - but you'll get plenty of insults when it comes to the Crown Prince and the Crown Princess. Especially the last one..
And nobody would scold you for critizing the King, Queen or the monarchy here in Norway
Have you ever wondered, how cell phones became such a nuscience to americans but not to any one else, and why countries like sweeden now control the cell phone market.
I'm norwegian.
I wonder what the fsck you're smoking.
I dread the day cellphones will be allowed on flights. It's annoying. It's _damn_ annoying. It's a fucking huge nuisance.
That you haven't discovered it yet doesn't mean that all other scandinavians share your idiotic view.
First .. how long is a mile? In real units?
.. how much is a gallon? In real units?
Then
When are 'merkins going to start using proper units?
I don't have a regular television.
.. only reason I don't care to buy an HD-DVD player is that it's useless for me until someone breaks the encryption thorougly and implements it in mplayer. Until then, I don't have a use for it.
I have a computer with a big screen.
I run linux on said computer.
Said computer has a DVD player.
Said computer really wants a HD-DVD player.
Fair use community includes me. Not hackers, not pirates. People like me - who want to play their stuff on their computer.
Um, how does this make him the "Father of the Internet"?
:) Of course, Robert Kahn was the co-inventor of TCP/IP, but Vinton Cerf has always been the one mentioned with that title.
:P
I wondered the same thing - it's Vint Cerf that is the "Father of the Internet" - and it has been that has had that honor bestowed on him for years and years.
Just ranting because I'm kind of sick of hyperbole.
Yeah, a friend of mine said it was hyperbole when I mentioned Vinton Cerf as the father of the internet - back in '98. And he had been known as that for years already then.
To put it this way. Vint Cerf is the father of the Internet in the same way that Oppenheimer was father of the Atomic Bomb.
People living in Tokyo or Tehran might not share your sentiment.
Not when you rip only parts of what I said out of the context of this entire thread - which is the DOOMSDAY clock. Doomsday for all the world. I was comparing the fear of terrorists knocking down a few buildings to the fear of the entire city being leveled - not to mention all major cities.. at the same time.
Tokyo certainly is under threat from NK. Teheran isn't. Israel wouldn't nuke Teheran, as they would know the response of the entire middle east - and the entire world.
I was with you up until there. You were born in '79? I was born ten years earlier, so I spent the '80s as a teenager.
I've got a pretty good memory from 1985 and onwards. I started following the news around then.
I remember having a few (just a few) nightmares about being roasted in a nuclear fire.
I don't remember any nightmares, but I do remember reading quite a bit about the Hydrogen bomb, and calculating how far away the Big Bastards of Hydrogen bombs would have to be without me being torched. SS-18 SATAN, wasn't that the big bad Soviet nuke?
Then again, after the Challenger disaster, the next morning I woke up with tears streaming down my face.
People just two years younger than me do not remember neither the Challenger disaster nor the Palme murder in Stockholm/Sweden (I'm in Oslo/Norway). I remember both very, very well.
This is good. It's a break for all of us who do not use windows, but receive the same crap. It's a break for all of us who hate HTML email. It's a break for all of us who don't need a webpage in our email.
:)
Let's look at the positively good things about this:
- Increased security (less monoculture is good).
- Increased diversity (more rendering methods means that people have to adapt to support more stuff, probably minimalistic - which is good).
- Hopefully less stupid HTML mail.
- Hopefully the title "email designer" will never be used again.
All in all - womnderfull news!
I only remember the 80s.
.. and I'm still young.
.. I don't have words for the stupidity. The world is relatively safe. The major disaster and major fear we have is from islamic terrorists sending a couple of planes into a building or two. A BUILDING OR TWO! THATS IT! Eighteen years ago we were afraid that New York as a whole would be anhilated in a few minutes. ALL of it. Not just a building or two on manhattan.
I remember, vividly, how my parents thought me that it was a cold war between the US and the Soviet Union.
I remember the retorics. I remember the fear. I remember how I was told that we could be destroyed by nuclear weapons.
I remember MAD.
I was born in 1979.
People born just 5 or 6 years later than me - do not remember this. They have never experienced the cold war. They can't remember it. They can't even understand the doomsday clock, the fear, the MAD uncertainty.
I was 10 years old. I helped chop the Berlin wall down. Physically.
People, just 5 years younger than me - don't understand what it was all about. They don't remember.
Now, this article is about the doomsday clock moving forward. From 17 minutes to midnight. Heh
And these guys want to move the hands forward on a clock of global doom. Right.
It was right in the 80s. It's not right anymore. Move it backwards three or four hours, and it might be right. This way - it's just ridiculous.
Real world KB = 1,024 bytes.
Real world MB = 1,048,576 bytes.
No.
Real world KB = 1,000 bytes
Real world KiB = 1,024 bytes
Real world MB = 1,000,000 bytes
Real World MiB = 1,048,576 bytes
Read up on the standard, boy. Heck, even ls supports --si to be correct.
And that, is by law. Consumer electronics, including mobile phones, have a 5 year warranty on fixing 'production errors'. Any equipment that fails before that time - without the consumer having done something stupid like dropped it into the water - is considered a production error.
:)
Apple is having quite a bit of trouble with the government for trying to ignore that law.
Seriously. Good riddance. SOAP is a mess. Google has gone the XMLRPC way, and they're providing access via that.
This isn't google being evil. This is google removing a piece of completely unnecessary junk from their offerings. SOAP should never have seen the light of day, and google is now making sure that they do their part of burying it.
But don't teach them C. Teach them a language that focuses on how to structure programs without bogging them down with memory management, pointers, etc, etc. A firm understanding of OO would also be much more useful and much easier to grasp.
Oh! How I disagree!
It's the low level stuff that is fun to learn. When I was in High School - I was programming in pascal with inline assembler. It was fun. It was _Great_ fun. I always wanted someone to teach me C.
Object Oriented programming don't teach people the nitty gritty details of things - and it's the nitty gritty details that is the most fun to learn. At least it was for me when I was in high school. Learning Java would be like learning Visual Basic - not a lot of fun.
Yes, they thought us Visual Basic in high school. Ugh.
I used to agree with you, until I read an excellent article in The Economist which changed my perspective. If you take a look at:
= 20060701
:p
http://www.economist.com/printedition/index.cfm?d
It's the leader article. Unfortunately it's subscription only, but I think it's fair use to snip the last paragraph, which Bill seems to have taken to heart, and repost it here:
"The second danger lies in the vanity of philanthropists. They often like the notion that their foundations will live on after them, carrying their name down from generation unto generation. But, after the founder has died, foundations tend to become sclerotic and directionless--the fiefs of administrators who have lost sight of the original aims. So if you aim to be a truly philanthropic philanthropist, spend your money fast: do as much good as you can when you're alive, and let posterity go hang."
I think we can conclude that Bill reads the Economist.