Just from the way he wrote and described how things developed, he just always seems to be trying to prove to everyone what a genius he was.
Not one to want to speak ill of the dead, but I had had the prospect of a meeting with Raskin in the late '80s hyped and came away from it disappointed by what I saw as his lack of recognition of the strengths of the interface paradigm which he seems to have wanted to take more than his share of the credit for over the years.
Given the experiences and reflections that the intervening years have allowed, I have come to suspect that the real difference between Raskin's view and others was a difference that still divides and confuses today. While the weight of marketing made "ease of use" a synonym for "ease of learning", Raskin's notion of ease of use was closer to "ease of trained use".
In the early days it was inevitable that ease of learning would win, and it is certainly the side I found myself on. But now in a more mature industry we are going to be stuck with the cost of the lack of attention to ease of trained use long into the future.
Based on that one meeting, I still find it hard to juxtapose Raskin and "elegant design", having been dragged back to typography 101 by our early explorations of the potentials of PostScript.
what ever happened to actually being good at a game?
If a kick skews off the side of your foot, your opponent will remind you what a bad player you are, but if you do something good he'll tell you how good your mother was.
Even while the politically correct lobby tries to restrict what can be said, mostly it's just a tactic to distract and quite often it backfires.
Playing started as a rehersal for living and has inflated into an easy escape from living. But what hasn't?
Nah, rape is a property crime, or at least it was in its original conception when it unambiguously meant forced penetration of a vagina by an erect penis and anything else was "indecency". There were even good, though rarely well explained, reasons to treat rape so defined as being particularly horrific in view of its diminution of the female's sense of empowerment.
Unfortunately idle legislators have long been on a muddying binge so now if some young adult being pestered by exhuberant pre-teens in a swimming pool happens to playfully deal with one with less than perfect care as to where their hand might grab, they can find themselves accused of "statuatory rape".
It really diminishes the whole magnitude of a word which once described a crime that may have almost deserved the kind of punishments now being used to subsidise the for-profit incarceration industry, to say nothing of the glut of clueless lawyers and cops. Your taxes at work!
birds in general have their origins traced back to dinosaur-era reptiles. That's a pretty huge developmental shift between humanity and bird.
There are some things our natural anthropocentrism encourages us to leave out of Evolution 101:
For viable species, selection favours those most efficient at doing what they do, which is unlikely to favour innovation except in times of stress.
While there are well known examples of convergent evolution, there are a lot more examples of the loss of ancestral function in descendant clades.
Of the millions of species descended from the last common ancestor (LCA) of birds and mammals, homo sapiens sapiens is but one and thus clearly atypical.*
While behaviour does not fossilise well, it is conceivable that the LCA learnt some behaviours by imitating its parents, though a comparable level of active nurturing evolved independently in eusocial insects. Early developmental pathways tend to be much more strongly conserved than other characteristics over evolutionary time.
Cockatoos... develop intelligence of many sorts, though of a more social nature.
I was unable to identify any qualitative difference between the lunchtime chatter in the cafeteria at my alma mater and the chatter of a flock of corellas roosting in red gums by the Wimmera River at Dimboola.
it also seems to make the possibility of intelligent life outside our known observed environments seem less unlikely too - especially if it can develop in so seemingly independant circumstances, despite a somewhat shared environment.
We also keep forgetting that orcas and elephants have very strong claims to being the other most intelligent mammals, but their bodily size and consequent food consumption has made it impossible for them to form populations on the scale needed to support our kind of culture. The cockatoos might well be a better model, particularly if we concede that evolution may have been more concerned with improving brain function per gram in flying critters.
It may be relevant that "singing" appears to be one of the commoner examples of convergent evolution. I guess I've put off writing my "singing ape hypothesis" far too long already.
*This may also be taken as evidence that "intelligence" is overrated.
While DNA may provide a much more accessible accurate trace than the fossil record of the details of the HSS diaspora, the method used to extrapolate dates from the genetic data is much less precise than geological techinques.
So it should be a fairly safe assumption that the bottleneck around the time of y-Adam was due to Toba and that date should be -74K rather than -60K.
This is pretty much consistent with the correction needed to match their -40K "out of Africa" date with recent best estimates of earlier than -50K for Australian megafaunal extinction, though those dates have more margin for error than the Toba date.
Given the accumulation evidence that much of the diaspora was likely coastal with short sea legs and the suggestion that most of the modern population of Africa was reseeded by returnees from the Indian Ocean basin, Tim Flannery's hypothesis in The Future Eaters that the opportunity the first arrivals in Australia found to overexploit the megafauna had a species-wide cultural impact.
The offspring would have a very difficult time competing with older, more experienced, and physically fit ancestors despite the small genetic advantages the offspring might have.
This sounds like a short description of what humanity has been doing to itself starting mostly in the West after WWII and more recently spreading much more widely. And there is no shortage of those wanting to push this to its logical conclusion and extend individuals' lives indefinitely.
Looked at from that perspective, economic orthodoxy can be seen as counter evolutionary, concentrating most of the assets in the hands of those who are starting to feel too tired and too mortal to take any risks changing the system.
At least the young can still try to fight back by throwing more raw energy at their objectives, but the blockade maintained by my fellow boomers means the young have to expend so much energy just to stay in the game that they have little capacity left to drive competitive change.
This is costing somebody a funny point, but as somebody who did read the NKS book from cover to cover, including the copious notes, I can't let this popular but blatantly false rumour be repeated again unchallenged.
If Wolfram did anything that might be questionable it was largely cutting himself off from others who were working in the same areas for the decade he was predominantly focused on the research that went into the book. Yet it's obvious he wasn't expecting it to take more than ten years when he started and it obviously got to a point where getting it finished and out there became his dominant motivation.
Sure, he doesn't get everything right, and he makes some leaps that aren't all that convincing, but those faults are only a tiny fraction of the totality.
To me one of the most impressive things was the way he presented the background stories to all the key topics. Those I know a bit about were accurate enough that I can only presume the others were to.
The book is the way it is largely because he convinced himself that he was onto something significant that others had missed. However that something was certainly not, as neophites seem to assume, the general field of cellular automata, but rather his "Principle of Computational Equivalence"--an ambitious claim which he felt could only be presented in the context of substantial research.
If they can't get into the terminal, they can't get access to the baggage handling systems, or the ticketing systems, or the rest of the basic infrastructure needed to operate.
None of those systems are really needed to operate domestic flights, but, as in so many other areas of supposedly modern society, the expertise that once existed in how to do that has gone missing to such an extent that it has become excluded from their universe of possibility.
My point on security was that post-9-11 preoccupations have locked in "must follow procedures" even more strongly, no matter at what the cost. I'm as much concerned by the seeming lack of public reaction to the inflexibility as I am by the inflexibility itself.
Somewhere deep down there is/was an Australian tradition of coping, of finding a way, so it's even sadder here that the nanny state is now in such ascendancy.
On Monday this was demonstrated in no uncertain terms as faced with an evacuated terminal, a bank up of empty Virgin Blue aeroplanes on one side and a bank up of intending travellers on the other, nobody had a wit to try to find a way to get the passengers onto their planes by a route which bypassed the terminal.
Virgin seem to have already forgotten that it is still only two and a half years since they moved out of the hastily developed "domestic express" terminal into the south section of the main terminal left vacant in the interim after the collapse of Ansett.
There are older ways to get people on planes and still with sufficient security.
But when somebody flies the security scare, just like the kiddy porn scare, it seems like signs of intelligent life disappear in more than just Australia.
Now if only we could penalise the mass media for propagating deliberate political lies with the same vigour as we want to use to force ISPs to censor their clients.
Nearly nine months old already, my most recent Slashdot journal entry was about Longhorn FUD.
The secret I may never learn is how to form such opinions when the world is ready for them rather than long before anybody else is interested.
Then I move on to something else nobody much is ready for and lose the motivation to follow up on what for me is already yesterday's news.
Before you write off this post as self-indulgent, you might at least recognise that at least it isn't self-serving, though it has been a demanding week.
John's funeral at least provided a chance to catch up with a colleague whose big picture analysis is as good as any and who was open to parallels between Longhorn and Apple of the mid '90s, though he still sees the next five years as particularly uncertain times.
This kind of research is slowly undermining the legal fiction of eye witness testimony.
If in order to commit something to long term memory you need to reactivate relevant synapses after an interval measured in minutes, then the reactivation will surely be compromised by whatever rationalisation you have managed to do in the interim.
If I recall correctly, there have been controlled experiments done in which a stooge managed to readily convince witnesses that certain details of an event where quite different to what had actually happened.
one possibility is that very long term memories are illusory
I know it can feel introspectively that our oldest memories are really memories of memories of memories, because certainly the ones we most often bring to mind ourselves are ones we have remembered from time to time. Yet on vacation recently I was reminded by my brother of an allergic reaction I experienced almost 40 years ago which I'm sure I had not thought about for at least 25 years, yet the memory was still there once reactivated.
More telling, visiting an elderly friend in hospital, he introduced me to the wife of the patient opposite who had stroke-related dementia. They were immigrants and he had spoken both English and another major "second" language fluently before his disability, but now can only use his birth language, which is a lonely way to exist in an English-speaking hospital.
Even my mother, who had a very slight stroke a couple of years ago, now starts many more conversations about things from her childhood than about the last third of her life in the house where she still lives reasonably independently in a community where she played a very active role for most of those years.
So I felt Sejnowski's idea sounded sensible when I first read it. However I don't see it as being inconsistent with the SciAm article linked here. To form something more permanent in the intracellular matrix around a synapse, most likely you are still going to need to start with some special protein finding its way to that particular synapse.
And we still need a credible story as to how one or several persistently strengthened synapses actually encode one of the countless details we accumulate in a life time in all their contextual detail.
As for the rest of you, if you want to know why "old timer" is usually preceded by "bitter"...
If you can keep an open mind long enough to see that utopia is the definitive oxymoron, continue to celebrate all that has been, is and will be great, and allow sadness but not distress at details that might have been better, then you know not only that life has been very good to you, but that it will likely continue to be great for many to come.
Of course we can strive to make it better. I still want to help make our collaborative conversations better, but by building on the potential that the Web has proven and not by reverting to Ted's nor anybody else's earlier ideas, not even my own.
Boris Smeds should be a serious contender for the physics prize.
Better somebody who applies real physics to detecting and solving a problem and thus turning around the otherwise doomed delivery of irreplaceable data, than the plague of theoreticians who lack the courage to look outside the shadow cast by overrated hundred year old suppositions and the false god of mathematical elegance.
That is "Right" with a capital "R". I'm in the final chapter of The Blank Slate which has been my train reading over quite a few weekends. It's a couple of years since I read Johnson and Wolfram.
Pinker says some useful stuff, especially the notion that we are each the product of the dynamics of our youthful peer groups much more than of anything else apart from our genes. But he also sometimes goes beyond reason to defend some very temporary fashions of the new Right when a real grasp of the deeper implications of emergence might have helped him think more clearly.
The real argument is discrete versus continuous and the real answer which neither side wants to hear is "both", as it is to the parent poster's attempt to set up an opposition between elemental emergence and functionsl structure.
Kelly told more of the people story
on
Emergence
·
· Score: 1
But the world changed while he was writing Out of Control largely due to the exaggerated importance placed on Mitchell, Hraber and Crutchfield's 1993 paper which cast aspersions on Langton's lambda and implicitly on the whole notion of "border of order--edge of chaos".
Wolfram's reunification of his own old Class 3 and Class 4 under his more recent Principle of Computational Equivalence goes even further in a direction I'd rather see us retreat from.
I actually read the book by Johnson reviewed here for contrast while I was wading through Wolfram's tome. Emergence now sits among a very small pile of books I keep on my desk in case I need to refer to them. A New Kind of Science also sits on my desk, but mainly to elevate my iBook, especially since Wolfram made the whole book I available online. I had to grab Out of Control off the living room bookshelf, but it still ranks as my favourite from the '90s.
I was gonna mention half your list before I saw it.
Some of the guys from the initial Mac development team set a standard that may never have been matched for internalising a complex code base.
But the Mac's very survival owed a lot to Quark who have done more to get print content computerised than any, depite being a difficult company.
Wolfram too doesn't do much to endear himself to list makers, but if you actually look at his programming as a body of work, he has no peers.
Of course I agree with other popular suggestions like Knuth, Wall and Engelbart, so maybe they'd be better trying to go from 40 to 100 rather than 40 to 20.
Games aren't my department, but the genre has had enuf influence to include 20% games programmers, starting with Crowther and Woods.
I've been playing with an idea for a while that commerical confidentiality should only be facilitated (by the usual legal fictions) within business units or equivalent non-corporate lowest-level common-purpose associations. Full transparency could be made mandatory at all higher levels of aggregation, with full whistleblower protection.
Might level the playing field out a little.
Growth by acquisition is illusory.
As for why corporations are needed at all, it is mostly tied up with their successful roles in (i) fostering a sense of personal identity in, and (ii) redistributing income to, the plebs. That is not something we would want to turn off overnight.
It's been pretty impressive for a first attempt, even to somebody like me who has had the privilege of sitting in on the preparations for OSDC and who has been there and done that in another life time.
Damian's participation is certainly an asset, and he is far from the only open source notable for whom it's a home town show, not that we have been short of visitors from afar either.
In two days, we have had no no shows on the speaker front, no doubt reflecting the efforts of the papers committee which also produced a 325 page book of proceedings with all papers reviewed or refereed. All sessions across the three parallel streams have also run very close to schedule.
Highlights are way too many to mention but if you want to know more, or want to check back later to see our plans for 2005, visit OSDC's website.
25 - Not started (getting it listed is half the work half the time)
30 - Activity started
35 - Work in progress
40 - Ready for team review
55 - Team review done and ready for client review
85 - Completed and signoffs completed.
And that last 85% optimistically assumes that the client had a clue what they required and the team had a clue how to deliver those requirements. In way too many projects, either installation or initial use blows enough holes in the fantasy that it becomes best to regard it as having been a prototype.
For a moment I'd almost forgotten why Steve Vamos's name was so familiar, but finally recalled it was from his earlier terms as head of Apple Oz and of Apple Asia-Pacific.
If he had been a career M$ie would have almost needed to have moved in when Linda Graham handed over the reins to have gotten onto my radar. The otherwise wonderful Linda originally introduced M$ to Oz through an agency deal with her at first all-girl company, the oxymoronically named Wiser-M$.
That was long before even the hard to forget morning when Bill became a billionaire and Linda managed to convince him to come to breakfast with a few locals who shared his then early interest in the possibilities of CD-ROM. He admitted not having expected anybody in Oz to be interested in that subject and was basically visiting to deliver his standard pitch to a trade show after they had listed overnight on the other side of the rock.
You must've been modded by guys from the blue states or even overseas like me who realise it is Slashdot that is funny enough to ROTFLOAO, or at least/.'s effects.
Getting back to XServe clusters, what really interested me was that some under $1 million made the list. I reckon there might be a business plan or three there.
Yeah, adults tend to react badly when they get caught out by a silly joke, though they are mostly just as easy to trick, maybe moreso if they have come to take life too seriously.
But I have great difficulty thinking of any human being as an "opportunity" for anything more than voluntary collaboration. Likewise for most living critters. Guess that's why my wealth isn't measured in dollars.
There's another "just so" evolutionary explanation that suggests that young males stay small and soft longer so that dominant males will not see them as threatening while the youngsters learn what they might need to survive as adults.
If that were true, attraction to prepubescent males might only be slightly displaced from attraction to reproductive age females.
Attraction to prepubescent females may have more problems and be are hard to separate from traditional notions of females as property to be protected.
Slashdot Mirror
Given the experiences and reflections that the intervening years have allowed, I have come to suspect that the real difference between Raskin's view and others was a difference that still divides and confuses today. While the weight of marketing made "ease of use" a synonym for "ease of learning", Raskin's notion of ease of use was closer to "ease of trained use".
In the early days it was inevitable that ease of learning would win, and it is certainly the side I found myself on. But now in a more mature industry we are going to be stuck with the cost of the lack of attention to ease of trained use long into the future.
Based on that one meeting, I still find it hard to juxtapose Raskin and "elegant design", having been dragged back to typography 101 by our early explorations of the potentials of PostScript.
what ever happened to actually being good at a game?
If a kick skews off the side of your foot, your opponent will remind you what a bad player you are, but if you do something good he'll tell you how good your mother was.
Even while the politically correct lobby tries to restrict what can be said, mostly it's just a tactic to distract and quite often it backfires.
Playing started as a rehersal for living and has inflated into an easy escape from living. But what hasn't?
I try to think of purchasing things in terms of how much time they cost, instead of how much money.
Guess "how much time they cost" explains your fetish for big houses.
I hope you have the luck to grow old enough that you come to appreciate that others' time is also more valuable than their money.
I thought rapists were sex offenders...?
Nah, rape is a property crime, or at least it was in its original conception when it unambiguously meant forced penetration of a vagina by an erect penis and anything else was "indecency". There were even good, though rarely well explained, reasons to treat rape so defined as being particularly horrific in view of its diminution of the female's sense of empowerment.
Unfortunately idle legislators have long been on a muddying binge so now if some young adult being pestered by exhuberant pre-teens in a swimming pool happens to playfully deal with one with less than perfect care as to where their hand might grab, they can find themselves accused of "statuatory rape".
It really diminishes the whole magnitude of a word which once described a crime that may have almost deserved the kind of punishments now being used to subsidise the for-profit incarceration industry, to say nothing of the glut of clueless lawyers and cops. Your taxes at work!
- For viable species, selection favours those most efficient at doing what they do, which is unlikely to favour innovation except in times of stress.
- While there are well known examples of convergent evolution, there are a lot more examples of the loss of ancestral function in descendant clades.
- Of the millions of species descended from the last common ancestor (LCA) of birds and mammals, homo sapiens sapiens is but one and thus clearly atypical.*
While behaviour does not fossilise well, it is conceivable that the LCA learnt some behaviours by imitating its parents, though a comparable level of active nurturing evolved independently in eusocial insects. Early developmental pathways tend to be much more strongly conserved than other characteristics over evolutionary time.I was unable to identify any qualitative difference between the lunchtime chatter in the cafeteria at my alma mater and the chatter of a flock of corellas roosting in red gums by the Wimmera River at Dimboola.We also keep forgetting that orcas and elephants have very strong claims to being the other most intelligent mammals, but their bodily size and consequent food consumption has made it impossible for them to form populations on the scale needed to support our kind of culture. The cockatoos might well be a better model, particularly if we concede that evolution may have been more concerned with improving brain function per gram in flying critters.It may be relevant that "singing" appears to be one of the commoner examples of convergent evolution. I guess I've put off writing my "singing ape hypothesis" far too long already.
*This may also be taken as evidence that "intelligence" is overrated.
While DNA may provide a much more accessible accurate trace than the fossil record of the details of the HSS diaspora, the method used to extrapolate dates from the genetic data is much less precise than geological techinques.
So it should be a fairly safe assumption that the bottleneck around the time of y-Adam was due to Toba and that date should be -74K rather than -60K.
This is pretty much consistent with the correction needed to match their -40K "out of Africa" date with recent best estimates of earlier than -50K for Australian megafaunal extinction, though those dates have more margin for error than the Toba date.
Given the accumulation evidence that much of the diaspora was likely coastal with short sea legs and the suggestion that most of the modern population of Africa was reseeded by returnees from the Indian Ocean basin, Tim Flannery's hypothesis in The Future Eaters that the opportunity the first arrivals in Australia found to overexploit the megafauna had a species-wide cultural impact.
Looked at from that perspective, economic orthodoxy can be seen as counter evolutionary, concentrating most of the assets in the hands of those who are starting to feel too tired and too mortal to take any risks changing the system.
At least the young can still try to fight back by throwing more raw energy at their objectives, but the blockade maintained by my fellow boomers means the young have to expend so much energy just to stay in the game that they have little capacity left to drive competitive change.
This is costing somebody a funny point, but as somebody who did read the NKS book from cover to cover, including the copious notes, I can't let this popular but blatantly false rumour be repeated again unchallenged.
If Wolfram did anything that might be questionable it was largely cutting himself off from others who were working in the same areas for the decade he was predominantly focused on the research that went into the book. Yet it's obvious he wasn't expecting it to take more than ten years when he started and it obviously got to a point where getting it finished and out there became his dominant motivation.
Sure, he doesn't get everything right, and he makes some leaps that aren't all that convincing, but those faults are only a tiny fraction of the totality.
To me one of the most impressive things was the way he presented the background stories to all the key topics. Those I know a bit about were accurate enough that I can only presume the others were to.
The book is the way it is largely because he convinced himself that he was onto something significant that others had missed. However that something was certainly not, as neophites seem to assume, the general field of cellular automata, but rather his "Principle of Computational Equivalence"--an ambitious claim which he felt could only be presented in the context of substantial research.
My point on security was that post-9-11 preoccupations have locked in "must follow procedures" even more strongly, no matter at what the cost. I'm as much concerned by the seeming lack of public reaction to the inflexibility as I am by the inflexibility itself.
Somewhere deep down there is/was an Australian tradition of coping, of finding a way, so it's even sadder here that the nanny state is now in such ascendancy.
Virgin seem to have already forgotten that it is still only two and a half years since they moved out of the hastily developed "domestic express" terminal into the south section of the main terminal left vacant in the interim after the collapse of Ansett.
There are older ways to get people on planes and still with sufficient security.
But when somebody flies the security scare, just like the kiddy porn scare, it seems like signs of intelligent life disappear in more than just Australia.
Now if only we could penalise the mass media for propagating deliberate political lies with the same vigour as we want to use to force ISPs to censor their clients.
Nearly nine months old already, my most recent Slashdot journal entry was about Longhorn FUD.
The secret I may never learn is how to form such opinions when the world is ready for them rather than long before anybody else is interested.
Then I move on to something else nobody much is ready for and lose the motivation to follow up on what for me is already yesterday's news.
Before you write off this post as self-indulgent, you might at least recognise that at least it isn't self-serving, though it has been a demanding week.
John's funeral at least provided a chance to catch up with a colleague whose big picture analysis is as good as any and who was open to parallels between Longhorn and Apple of the mid '90s, though he still sees the next five years as particularly uncertain times.
This kind of research is slowly undermining the legal fiction of eye witness testimony.
If in order to commit something to long term memory you need to reactivate relevant synapses after an interval measured in minutes, then the reactivation will surely be compromised by whatever rationalisation you have managed to do in the interim.
If I recall correctly, there have been controlled experiments done in which a stooge managed to readily convince witnesses that certain details of an event where quite different to what had actually happened.
More telling, visiting an elderly friend in hospital, he introduced me to the wife of the patient opposite who had stroke-related dementia. They were immigrants and he had spoken both English and another major "second" language fluently before his disability, but now can only use his birth language, which is a lonely way to exist in an English-speaking hospital.
Even my mother, who had a very slight stroke a couple of years ago, now starts many more conversations about things from her childhood than about the last third of her life in the house where she still lives reasonably independently in a community where she played a very active role for most of those years.
So I felt Sejnowski's idea sounded sensible when I first read it. However I don't see it as being inconsistent with the SciAm article linked here. To form something more permanent in the intracellular matrix around a synapse, most likely you are still going to need to start with some special protein finding its way to that particular synapse.
And we still need a credible story as to how one or several persistently strengthened synapses actually encode one of the countless details we accumulate in a life time in all their contextual detail.
Of course we can strive to make it better. I still want to help make our collaborative conversations better, but by building on the potential that the Web has proven and not by reverting to Ted's nor anybody else's earlier ideas, not even my own.
Boris Smeds should be a serious contender for the physics prize.
Better somebody who applies real physics to detecting and solving a problem and thus turning around the otherwise doomed delivery of irreplaceable data, than the plague of theoreticians who lack the courage to look outside the shadow cast by overrated hundred year old suppositions and the false god of mathematical elegance.
That is "Right" with a capital "R". I'm in the final chapter of The Blank Slate which has been my train reading over quite a few weekends. It's a couple of years since I read Johnson and Wolfram.
Pinker says some useful stuff, especially the notion that we are each the product of the dynamics of our youthful peer groups much more than of anything else apart from our genes. But he also sometimes goes beyond reason to defend some very temporary fashions of the new Right when a real grasp of the deeper implications of emergence might have helped him think more clearly.
The real argument is discrete versus continuous and the real answer which neither side wants to hear is "both", as it is to the parent poster's attempt to set up an opposition between elemental emergence and functionsl structure.
But the world changed while he was writing Out of Control largely due to the exaggerated importance placed on Mitchell, Hraber and Crutchfield's 1993 paper which cast aspersions on Langton's lambda and implicitly on the whole notion of "border of order--edge of chaos".
Wolfram's reunification of his own old Class 3 and Class 4 under his more recent Principle of Computational Equivalence goes even further in a direction I'd rather see us retreat from.
I actually read the book by Johnson reviewed here for contrast while I was wading through Wolfram's tome. Emergence now sits among a very small pile of books I keep on my desk in case I need to refer to them. A New Kind of Science also sits on my desk, but mainly to elevate my iBook, especially since Wolfram made the whole book I available online. I had to grab Out of Control off the living room bookshelf, but it still ranks as my favourite from the '90s.
I was gonna mention half your list before I saw it.
Some of the guys from the initial Mac development team set a standard that may never have been matched for internalising a complex code base.
But the Mac's very survival owed a lot to Quark who have done more to get print content computerised than any, depite being a difficult company.
Wolfram too doesn't do much to endear himself to list makers, but if you actually look at his programming as a body of work, he has no peers.
Of course I agree with other popular suggestions like Knuth, Wall and Engelbart, so maybe they'd be better trying to go from 40 to 100 rather than 40 to 20.
Games aren't my department, but the genre has had enuf influence to include 20% games programmers, starting with Crowther and Woods.
I've been playing with an idea for a while that commerical confidentiality should only be facilitated (by the usual legal fictions) within business units or equivalent non-corporate lowest-level common-purpose associations. Full transparency could be made mandatory at all higher levels of aggregation, with full whistleblower protection.
Might level the playing field out a little.
Growth by acquisition is illusory.
As for why corporations are needed at all, it is mostly tied up with their successful roles in (i) fostering a sense of personal identity in, and (ii) redistributing income to, the plebs. That is not something we would want to turn off overnight.
It's been pretty impressive for a first attempt, even to somebody like me who has had the privilege of sitting in on the preparations for OSDC and who has been there and done that in another life time.
Damian's participation is certainly an asset, and he is far from the only open source notable for whom it's a home town show, not that we have been short of visitors from afar either.
In two days, we have had no no shows on the speaker front, no doubt reflecting the efforts of the papers committee which also produced a 325 page book of proceedings with all papers reviewed or refereed. All sessions across the three parallel streams have also run very close to schedule.
Highlights are way too many to mention but if you want to know more, or want to check back later to see our plans for 2005, visit OSDC's website.
- 25 - Not started (getting it listed is half the work half the time)
- 30 - Activity started
- 35 - Work in progress
- 40 - Ready for team review
- 55 - Team review done and ready for client review
- 85 - Completed and signoffs completed.
And that last 85% optimistically assumes that the client had a clue what they required and the team had a clue how to deliver those requirements. In way too many projects, either installation or initial use blows enough holes in the fantasy that it becomes best to regard it as having been a prototype.For a moment I'd almost forgotten why Steve Vamos's name was so familiar, but finally recalled it was from his earlier terms as head of Apple Oz and of Apple Asia-Pacific.
If he had been a career M$ie would have almost needed to have moved in when Linda Graham handed over the reins to have gotten onto my radar. The otherwise wonderful Linda originally introduced M$ to Oz through an agency deal with her at first all-girl company, the oxymoronically named Wiser-M$.
That was long before even the hard to forget morning when Bill became a billionaire and Linda managed to convince him to come to breakfast with a few locals who shared his then early interest in the possibilities of CD-ROM. He admitted not having expected anybody in Oz to be interested in that subject and was basically visiting to deliver his standard pitch to a trade show after they had listed overnight on the other side of the rock.
Only mods from the red states think sex is funny.
/.'s effects.
You must've been modded by guys from the blue states or even overseas like me who realise it is Slashdot that is funny enough to ROTFLOAO, or at least
Getting back to XServe clusters, what really interested me was that some under $1 million made the list. I reckon there might be a business plan or three there.
Yeah, adults tend to react badly when they get caught out by a silly joke, though they are mostly just as easy to trick, maybe moreso if they have come to take life too seriously.
But I have great difficulty thinking of any human being as an "opportunity" for anything more than voluntary collaboration. Likewise for most living critters. Guess that's why my wealth isn't measured in dollars.
There's another "just so" evolutionary explanation that suggests that young males stay small and soft longer so that dominant males will not see them as threatening while the youngsters learn what they might need to survive as adults.
If that were true, attraction to prepubescent males might only be slightly displaced from attraction to reproductive age females.
Attraction to prepubescent females may have more problems and be are hard to separate from traditional notions of females as property to be protected.