I don't know if OpenOffice will run on the Google Chrome OS. I thought Google said Chrome OS will not use a traditional X server to underpin the GUI, and I thought OpenOffice for Linux (and the open source BSDs) requires X.
But even if OpenOffice does run on Chrome OS, Google apps still has the convenience advantages I mentioned: you can use it on almost any web-enabled PC or laptop, your documents are accessible from any machine, and you get bug fixes, security fixes, and upgrades automatically.
I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting that a web application can replace AutoCAD, or for that matter Crysis or Grand Theft Auto 4 or whatever.
Compared to Linux, Google OS will offer: 1. The Google brand name, which is instantly recognizable to millions of people that have never heard of Linux. 2. (Supposedly) An extremely fast system start-up time, better than many or maybe even most Linux distributions that offer X and a Window Manager. 3. Massive marketing muscle, something the Linux community lacks. 4. The resources to put tens of thousands of developer man-hours into making their product easy to use and visually pretty, something Microsoft has but Linux does not. (Don't get me wrong, there is plenty of beautiful UI 5. The negotiating power to get many OEMs to offer their OS pre-installed on PCs and to have those PCs displayed prominently at retail stores and websites.
Compared to Microsoft, Google OS will offer: 1. The Google brand name, which has a far more generally positive image for the public than Microsoft. 2. A faster start up time. 3. A free price.
With all of those factors in their corner, I still expect Google Chrome OS to end up with less of the total market than Apple, let alone Microsoft. But competition never hurts.
Google Apps lacks hordes of features an advanced user can get from Microsoft Office, or for that matter Open Office or iWork. But your PC arrives in the box compatible with Google Apps. You can access it from any computer that has web access without installing anything. And when Google fixes a bug or updates features, you get the fix immediately. Free never hurts, either.
Judging by the growing success of web-based applications, I would say that tens of millions of PC users value low price, easy access, instant upgrades, and easy portability over the richer features and superior performance of native applications.
Having said that, I think Google Chrome OS will have a real shot at gaining some netbook market share but not much chance at the home full desktop/laptop market. If you buy a full machine, you want to play games - and unless Google is also secretly tossing tens of thousands of developer man-hours at the Wine project, that's not going to happen.
I honestly didn't know that. After I posted my comment, I saw a few comments indicating that Chinese WoW players don't pay the American price. Too bad Slashdot does not allow you to correct your previous comments.
Nevertheless, I think my main point still stands: Blizzard can afford a far larger advertising budget than Free Realms.
When you have over 10 million users paying $15 per month each in World of Warcraft, you can afford a staggering advertising budget with plenty of room to spare.
The article doesn't make it clear how many of Free Realms players actually use the micro-transactions or what the average monthly revenue per player is. I'm sure they aren't pulling in the $150 million plus per month that Blizzard does.
On point 2, I made the full switch myself. Posting from Debian. But at small company where I work, I'm the only semi-competent Linux user in the office. I can't sell the other developers and the non-IT staff on a Linux server yet. But I can, and have, got them to accept a Linux server for an internal wiki and a file server. I'm trying to move Linux into the company in places where it fits. A full switch would be an impossible sell.
So is starvation, exposure, cancer, crime, war, Parkinson's Disease, Alzheimer's Disease, Multiple Sclerosis, and a host of other problems. If you don't give in to what they require (getting food, shelter, police protection, military defense, and the appropriate medical treatments), you're in trouble - every bit as much trouble as you have with tax delinquency.
When you figure out how to make your citizens, including children, people who are diseased and injured through no fault of their own, and the elderly, free from starvation, exposure, criminals, foreign threats, and diseases without using taxation to fund it all, you let me know.
Have you forgotten why Open Source Software became popular?
Proprietary software vendors have lots of incentives to abuse their customers. They use undocumented file formats because interoperability between their products and the competition facilitates changing vendors. They focus a lot on visual bells and whistles to sell the product, but a lot less on keeping prices as low as possible for users. And of course, they tend to use Digital Rights Management (DRM) to prevent buyers from installing the software more than their purchase agreement permits. (Whether you like or dislike DRM, maintaining a database of product keys and purchase information for all of your proprietary software so you can install everything properly is a royal fucking pain.) If something breaks, you have to file a bug report and hope the vendor has the ability and the resources to fix it. If the price of the next upgrade is too high, you face a crippling decision whether to pay the high price or impose severe delays on your own production as you port your data to a new software from another vendor.
Open source software is free. File formats are documented, and there's nothing to lose with interoperability between different open source programs. Visual bells and whistles tend to be lacking, but you can usually get a pretty honest assessment of full features and limitations. No DRM - install wherever you want, as often as you want. No upgrade prices. If you find a bug you need fixed, you can try to fix it yourself, ask the community for help, or hire a consultant who has nothing to do with the OSS project to fix it. As a developer, I have learned so much reading through open source code and I would not have the same opportunities working on proprietary code marketed against competing proprietary products.
You're effectively arguing that the inefficiencies of proprietary software created lots of extra jobs that OSS takes away. You're probably right. And it would be dishonest of me to judge whether the tradeoff is worthwhile - I might feel differently if I was someone who lost a great job writing proprietary applications because of an OSS product. But OSS definitely does give a lot to both end users and developers in return for what it takes away.
has no other purpose but to enable a proprietary VM to work with the kernel (correct me if I'm wrong). If I'm right, I see no reason why it should ever be included in it.
I'll give you two reasons:
1. Because the driver itself is now free, code in the driver is now free, and people can modify it and use it and learn from it as they see fit. An awful lot of open source code is valuable because it allows developers working on other projects to learn from it, even if they never use that actual code directly.
2. Because in hundreds of businesses, possibly thousands or tens of thousands, it's easier to sell the people not already comfortable with a totally free software environment on a mixed proprietary and free environment than it is to sell them on dumping absolutely everything they have and starting from nothing with free software. Like it or not, we're not going to convince the world at large to ditch proprietary software in one giant step. The move is going to be gradual, and interoperability between free software and proprietary software is essential to the process.
When the government pushed for the stimulus, they said outright that it would take years for the full effects to be felt. Whether you hate Obama or not, he said earlier this year that the Stimulus Package would take a long time to have any effect. Now it's 5 months later, and it's a failure?
It may well be a failure, but it's a year too early to tell.
Whereas that 30% that gets taxed must get burnt in an oven somewhere, right?
No, instead it helps people who wouldn't otherwise get an education, so they can get a job and add value to the economy and maybe buy something from you.
Instead it helps people who can't afford the medical care they need, so they can get back to work instead of being too sick. That adds value to the economy too.
Instead it covers the costs of roads, and air traffic controllers, and FCC, and FDA, so that commerce in the country can work properly and goods and services can be transported, which ultimately benefits you.
Instead it covers the cost of fire departments, which protect your property, and police, which protect your person. It pays for the military and the military veterans.
I'm far from thrilled with the current government in the United States. But the assertion that letting the rich spend their own money their own way is always best for everyone involved by a wide margin is total nonsense. Certainly you deserve most of what you earned. But you earned it conducting commerce in a market regulated and protected by you government, doing business with people educated by your government, and protected from foreign and domestic threats and natural disasters by agencies funded and run by your government. You do owe a debt to society, and your tax dollars do get spent in ways that stimulate the economy about as much as your own spending stimulates it.
It would be different if the standardization committee was working on some tiny new language that 98% of the Slashdot population - let alone the world at large - had never encountered. This is C++, still one of the most commonly used programming languages in the world.
The committee would be stupid to move too quickly. Their biggest job right now is simply not to break the stuff that already works. I'm not saying C++ is already mostly great, just that changing it too much will make moving from older versions to C++0x harder.
Care to hazard a guess as to how complex those 5.NET and Java applications are compared to a web-browser or Office Suite?
To make the comparison fair, you should be measuring Firefox against a more or less even-featured competing web browser written entirely in.NET or Java, running the same websites. Likewise for comparing against OpenOffice. I don't think either item exists yet.
I'm not saying Firefox and OpenOffice are especially lean applications. They definitely do seem like resource hogs. But the most logical explanation for the lack of proprietary or open source Java and.NET web browsers and office suites to compete with them is that they flat out can't do it.
Anything that moves us away from non-renewable energy sources and imported resources to domestic energy production is good. But we have to consider costs and space.
For instance, the Nevada Solar One solar thermal power plant cost about $266 million to build, covers 400 acres of land, and generates about 129 GWh per year. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevada_Solar_One
The US used over 22 quadrillion BTU of coal power in 2005 http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/solar.renewables/page/trends/table1.html which converts to about 6450 TWh so if we wanted to replace coal use with Solar Thermal Plants, that's 6450 TWh/129 GWh = 50000 copies of Nevada Solar One at a cost of $13 trillion and covering 30,000 square miles of land. Solar isn't exactly a quick fix either.
The US uses about 1.1 billion tons of coal per year ( http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/coal/page/special/feature.html ), or a minimum of (http://www.reade.com/Particle_Briefings/spec_gra2.html - assuming solid anthracite, the densest form of coal) 35 billion cubic feet of coal per year. Total US spent nuclear fuel by the year 2015 is projected to be about 75,000 metric tons, or 82,500 US tons ( http://www.sdi.gov/lc_nucle.htm )
So getting about 50% of our electrical power from coal per year requires us to burn over a cubic half mile of coal.
I think it's clear that nuclear is the winner here.
(Off topic). I always liked the saying, "atheism is a religion the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby". Also, people often interpret agnosticism to mean "I don't know whether a God exists", which is indecisive. But the real meaning of agnostic is "It is not possible to know for certain that God does or does not exist", and that's a decisive assertion.
I learned C++ years ago from a very simple book (which was perfect for my newbie self) that walked you through new, cout, struct, pointers, etc.... but didn't mention STL at all. I haven't used the language professionally in four years and I would probably hang myself if I read much of my old code.
Can you or anyone suggest a good introduction to C++ that includes a very solid introduction to STL and/or Boost? I especially prefer books that have sample exercises with each section, I think that's an enormous help to learning. But I'll consider anything. Thanks.
If you need real-time control of your code, or fast startup, or low memory use, or high performance in general, C blows Java out of the water hard enough to put it in orbit.
But there are thousands of cases where Java code can replace C code, and I haven't seen a VM segfault or VM bug in Java ever. Too much memory use? Sure - although that's always been the result of sloppy developers, who can just as easily put the equivalent of while (true) { malloc(5000); } in their C app. Java VM segfault? Never.
The trade-off for all those parenthesis is metaprogramming. Writing C code that changes other C programs is possible but not easy and rarely useful. Because LISP (and the subset of LISP called Scheme) syntax is so simple, it's very easy to write code that takes other LISP and Scheme programs and modifies them.
Honestly, I'm not working on any projects where I think that feature would come in handy. But it's definitely a technical edge that LISP offers and a lot of other languages don't.
If you arrived at a college course "Introduction to Ancient Mayan" and the professor announced that starting 10 minutes into the first day, every spoken and written word in the course had to be in Ancient Mayan, most people would drop out or fail the class. Only a few people with spectacular innate linguistic talent would succeed
If the professor made the introduction to the language more gradual, a significantly higher portion of his students would handle the transition. Many would still be unable to handle it, but not as many as if there was a hard switch to pure Mayan a few minutes into the first class.
That's exactly the problem with most instruction in computer science. Most of the students in a Computer Science 101 course have some raw talent in math and maybe some amateur programming under their belt. It's realistic to expect that many can never be skilled software developers and designers. But many others who could do fine with a good introduction to the field will fall behind because the professor hits day one and takes off like a rocket.
Again, this is a subject near and dear to my heart because I struggled like crazy to barely past my first few courses, and now I have many tens of thousands of lines of code in production and generally good performance reviews from both other developers and the QA team.
This idea that computer science programs should weed out tons of people in the first years is ludicrous. Way back in the ancient 1990s, I started a college computer science program with no previous exposure to computers. I passed my first two courses by copying code from two friends who had home computers and introductory programming courses in their high school. After that, I was caught up enough not to need any help from anyone else. At graduation, my average in computing courses was equal to theirs.
Now, it's intuitive to most of the people on Slashdot that a lot of networking, system administration, programming concepts, and programming languages can be self-taught for a teenager. But just because it's intuitive to us doesn't mean every teen in all of the schools across the US (or the rest of the world) has exposure to the same concepts. Entry level computer science classes should be demanding, but they should bring everyone in the class into the field at the ground floor and give everyone plenty of time to get up to speed.
The idea that "you either get it, or you don't, there's no middle of the road" is ridiculous. It might take some people three times as long as others to get the foundation they need. But once they have it, they'll do fine and they'll learn new materials as quickly as most of their colleagues.
So we average people are just supposed to accept anyone that comes along and proclaims that they are brilliant, and then do everything they say?
I'm not knocking Theo. I'm sure he really is exceptionally bright. But we should be working on raising the average intelligence, not encouraging people to blindly follow anyone that appears to be substantially brighter than they are.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if OpenOffice will run on the Google Chrome OS. I thought Google said Chrome OS will not use a traditional X server to underpin the GUI, and I thought OpenOffice for Linux (and the open source BSDs) requires X.
But even if OpenOffice does run on Chrome OS, Google apps still has the convenience advantages I mentioned: you can use it on almost any web-enabled PC or laptop, your documents are accessible from any machine, and you get bug fixes, security fixes, and upgrades automatically.
I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting that a web application can replace AutoCAD, or for that matter Crysis or Grand Theft Auto 4 or whatever.
Compared to Linux, Google OS will offer:
1. The Google brand name, which is instantly recognizable to millions of people that have never heard of Linux.
2. (Supposedly) An extremely fast system start-up time, better than many or maybe even most Linux distributions that offer X and a Window Manager.
3. Massive marketing muscle, something the Linux community lacks.
4. The resources to put tens of thousands of developer man-hours into making their product easy to use and visually pretty, something Microsoft has but Linux does not. (Don't get me wrong, there is plenty of beautiful UI
5. The negotiating power to get many OEMs to offer their OS pre-installed on PCs and to have those PCs displayed prominently at retail stores and websites.
Compared to Microsoft, Google OS will offer:
1. The Google brand name, which has a far more generally positive image for the public than Microsoft.
2. A faster start up time.
3. A free price.
With all of those factors in their corner, I still expect Google Chrome OS to end up with less of the total market than Apple, let alone Microsoft. But competition never hurts.
Google Apps lacks hordes of features an advanced user can get from Microsoft Office, or for that matter Open Office or iWork. But your PC arrives in the box compatible with Google Apps. You can access it from any computer that has web access without installing anything. And when Google fixes a bug or updates features, you get the fix immediately. Free never hurts, either.
Judging by the growing success of web-based applications, I would say that tens of millions of PC users value low price, easy access, instant upgrades, and easy portability over the richer features and superior performance of native applications.
Having said that, I think Google Chrome OS will have a real shot at gaining some netbook market share but not much chance at the home full desktop/laptop market. If you buy a full machine, you want to play games - and unless Google is also secretly tossing tens of thousands of developer man-hours at the Wine project, that's not going to happen.
I honestly didn't know that. After I posted my comment, I saw a few comments indicating that Chinese WoW players don't pay the American price. Too bad Slashdot does not allow you to correct your previous comments.
Nevertheless, I think my main point still stands: Blizzard can afford a far larger advertising budget than Free Realms.
Christ, are you two paid advertisers?
When you have over 10 million users paying $15 per month each in World of Warcraft, you can afford a staggering advertising budget with plenty of room to spare.
The article doesn't make it clear how many of Free Realms players actually use the micro-transactions or what the average monthly revenue per player is. I'm sure they aren't pulling in the $150 million plus per month that Blizzard does.
On point 2, I made the full switch myself. Posting from Debian. But at small company where I work, I'm the only semi-competent Linux user in the office. I can't sell the other developers and the non-IT staff on a Linux server yet. But I can, and have, got them to accept a Linux server for an internal wiki and a file server. I'm trying to move Linux into the company in places where it fits. A full switch would be an impossible sell.
Taxation is a form of coercion.
So is starvation, exposure, cancer, crime, war, Parkinson's Disease, Alzheimer's Disease, Multiple Sclerosis, and a host of other problems. If you don't give in to what they require (getting food, shelter, police protection, military defense, and the appropriate medical treatments), you're in trouble - every bit as much trouble as you have with tax delinquency.
When you figure out how to make your citizens, including children, people who are diseased and injured through no fault of their own, and the elderly, free from starvation, exposure, criminals, foreign threats, and diseases without using taxation to fund it all, you let me know.
Have you forgotten why Open Source Software became popular?
Proprietary software vendors have lots of incentives to abuse their customers. They use undocumented file formats because interoperability between their products and the competition facilitates changing vendors. They focus a lot on visual bells and whistles to sell the product, but a lot less on keeping prices as low as possible for users. And of course, they tend to use Digital Rights Management (DRM) to prevent buyers from installing the software more than their purchase agreement permits. (Whether you like or dislike DRM, maintaining a database of product keys and purchase information for all of your proprietary software so you can install everything properly is a royal fucking pain.) If something breaks, you have to file a bug report and hope the vendor has the ability and the resources to fix it. If the price of the next upgrade is too high, you face a crippling decision whether to pay the high price or impose severe delays on your own production as you port your data to a new software from another vendor.
Open source software is free. File formats are documented, and there's nothing to lose with interoperability between different open source programs. Visual bells and whistles tend to be lacking, but you can usually get a pretty honest assessment of full features and limitations. No DRM - install wherever you want, as often as you want. No upgrade prices. If you find a bug you need fixed, you can try to fix it yourself, ask the community for help, or hire a consultant who has nothing to do with the OSS project to fix it. As a developer, I have learned so much reading through open source code and I would not have the same opportunities working on proprietary code marketed against competing proprietary products.
You're effectively arguing that the inefficiencies of proprietary software created lots of extra jobs that OSS takes away. You're probably right. And it would be dishonest of me to judge whether the tradeoff is worthwhile - I might feel differently if I was someone who lost a great job writing proprietary applications because of an OSS product. But OSS definitely does give a lot to both end users and developers in return for what it takes away.
has no other purpose but to enable a proprietary VM to work with the kernel (correct me if I'm wrong). If I'm right, I see no reason why it should ever be included in it.
I'll give you two reasons:
1. Because the driver itself is now free, code in the driver is now free, and people can modify it and use it and learn from it as they see fit. An awful lot of open source code is valuable because it allows developers working on other projects to learn from it, even if they never use that actual code directly.
2. Because in hundreds of businesses, possibly thousands or tens of thousands, it's easier to sell the people not already comfortable with a totally free software environment on a mixed proprietary and free environment than it is to sell them on dumping absolutely everything they have and starting from nothing with free software. Like it or not, we're not going to convince the world at large to ditch proprietary software in one giant step. The move is going to be gradual, and interoperability between free software and proprietary software is essential to the process.
When the government pushed for the stimulus, they said outright that it would take years for the full effects to be felt. Whether you hate Obama or not, he said earlier this year that the Stimulus Package would take a long time to have any effect. Now it's 5 months later, and it's a failure?
It may well be a failure, but it's a year too early to tell.
Whereas that 30% that gets taxed must get burnt in an oven somewhere, right?
No, instead it helps people who wouldn't otherwise get an education, so they can get a job and add value to the economy and maybe buy something from you.
Instead it helps people who can't afford the medical care they need, so they can get back to work instead of being too sick. That adds value to the economy too.
Instead it covers the costs of roads, and air traffic controllers, and FCC, and FDA, so that commerce in the country can work properly and goods and services can be transported, which ultimately benefits you.
Instead it covers the cost of fire departments, which protect your property, and police, which protect your person. It pays for the military and the military veterans.
I'm far from thrilled with the current government in the United States. But the assertion that letting the rich spend their own money their own way is always best for everyone involved by a wide margin is total nonsense. Certainly you deserve most of what you earned. But you earned it conducting commerce in a market regulated and protected by you government, doing business with people educated by your government, and protected from foreign and domestic threats and natural disasters by agencies funded and run by your government. You do owe a debt to society, and your tax dollars do get spent in ways that stimulate the economy about as much as your own spending stimulates it.
It would be different if the standardization committee was working on some tiny new language that 98% of the Slashdot population - let alone the world at large - had never encountered. This is C++, still one of the most commonly used programming languages in the world.
The committee would be stupid to move too quickly. Their biggest job right now is simply not to break the stuff that already works. I'm not saying C++ is already mostly great, just that changing it too much will make moving from older versions to C++0x harder.
Care to hazard a guess as to how complex those 5 .NET and Java applications are compared to a web-browser or Office Suite?
.NET or Java, running the same websites. Likewise for comparing against OpenOffice. I don't think either item exists yet.
.NET web browsers and office suites to compete with them is that they flat out can't do it.
To make the comparison fair, you should be measuring Firefox against a more or less even-featured competing web browser written entirely in
I'm not saying Firefox and OpenOffice are especially lean applications. They definitely do seem like resource hogs. But the most logical explanation for the lack of proprietary or open source Java and
Anything that moves us away from non-renewable energy sources and imported resources to domestic energy production is good. But we have to consider costs and space.
For instance, the Nevada Solar One solar thermal power plant cost about $266 million to build, covers 400 acres of land, and generates about 129 GWh per year. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevada_Solar_One
The US used over 22 quadrillion BTU of coal power in 2005 http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/solar.renewables/page/trends/table1.html which converts to about 6450 TWh so if we wanted to replace coal use with Solar Thermal Plants, that's 6450 TWh/129 GWh = 50000 copies of Nevada Solar One at a cost of $13 trillion and covering 30,000 square miles of land. Solar isn't exactly a quick fix either.
Thanks for the list. The books are on my Amazon Wishlist and the pages are bookmarked. I already have Eclipse, my regular job is Java development.
The US uses about 1.1 billion tons of coal per year ( http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/coal/page/special/feature.html ), or a minimum of (http://www.reade.com/Particle_Briefings/spec_gra2.html - assuming solid anthracite, the densest form of coal) 35 billion cubic feet of coal per year. Total US spent nuclear fuel by the year 2015 is projected to be about 75,000 metric tons, or 82,500 US tons ( http://www.sdi.gov/lc_nucle.htm )
So getting about 50% of our electrical power from coal per year requires us to burn over a cubic half mile of coal.
I think it's clear that nuclear is the winner here.
(Off topic). I always liked the saying, "atheism is a religion the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby". Also, people often interpret agnosticism to mean "I don't know whether a God exists", which is indecisive. But the real meaning of agnostic is "It is not possible to know for certain that God does or does not exist", and that's a decisive assertion.
I learned C++ years ago from a very simple book (which was perfect for my newbie self) that walked you through new, cout, struct, pointers, etc.... but didn't mention STL at all. I haven't used the language professionally in four years and I would probably hang myself if I read much of my old code.
Can you or anyone suggest a good introduction to C++ that includes a very solid introduction to STL and/or Boost? I especially prefer books that have sample exercises with each section, I think that's an enormous help to learning. But I'll consider anything. Thanks.
If you need real-time control of your code, or fast startup, or low memory use, or high performance in general, C blows Java out of the water hard enough to put it in orbit.
But there are thousands of cases where Java code can replace C code, and I haven't seen a VM segfault or VM bug in Java ever. Too much memory use? Sure - although that's always been the result of sloppy developers, who can just as easily put the equivalent of while (true) { malloc(5000); } in their C app. Java VM segfault? Never.
The trade-off for all those parenthesis is metaprogramming. Writing C code that changes other C programs is possible but not easy and rarely useful. Because LISP (and the subset of LISP called Scheme) syntax is so simple, it's very easy to write code that takes other LISP and Scheme programs and modifies them.
Honestly, I'm not working on any projects where I think that feature would come in handy. But it's definitely a technical edge that LISP offers and a lot of other languages don't.
I still disagree.
If you arrived at a college course "Introduction to Ancient Mayan" and the professor announced that starting 10 minutes into the first day, every spoken and written word in the course had to be in Ancient Mayan, most people would drop out or fail the class. Only a few people with spectacular innate linguistic talent would succeed
If the professor made the introduction to the language more gradual, a significantly higher portion of his students would handle the transition. Many would still be unable to handle it, but not as many as if there was a hard switch to pure Mayan a few minutes into the first class.
That's exactly the problem with most instruction in computer science. Most of the students in a Computer Science 101 course have some raw talent in math and maybe some amateur programming under their belt. It's realistic to expect that many can never be skilled software developers and designers. But many others who could do fine with a good introduction to the field will fall behind because the professor hits day one and takes off like a rocket.
Again, this is a subject near and dear to my heart because I struggled like crazy to barely past my first few courses, and now I have many tens of thousands of lines of code in production and generally good performance reviews from both other developers and the QA team.
Thanks. It's an interesting idea, although I don't know how easy it would be to generalize it to other open source projects.
This idea that computer science programs should weed out tons of people in the first years is ludicrous. Way back in the ancient 1990s, I started a college computer science program with no previous exposure to computers. I passed my first two courses by copying code from two friends who had home computers and introductory programming courses in their high school. After that, I was caught up enough not to need any help from anyone else. At graduation, my average in computing courses was equal to theirs.
Now, it's intuitive to most of the people on Slashdot that a lot of networking, system administration, programming concepts, and programming languages can be self-taught for a teenager. But just because it's intuitive to us doesn't mean every teen in all of the schools across the US (or the rest of the world) has exposure to the same concepts. Entry level computer science classes should be demanding, but they should bring everyone in the class into the field at the ground floor and give everyone plenty of time to get up to speed.
The idea that "you either get it, or you don't, there's no middle of the road" is ridiculous. It might take some people three times as long as others to get the foundation they need. But once they have it, they'll do fine and they'll learn new materials as quickly as most of their colleagues.
So we average people are just supposed to accept anyone that comes along and proclaims that they are brilliant, and then do everything they say?
I'm not knocking Theo. I'm sure he really is exceptionally bright. But we should be working on raising the average intelligence, not encouraging people to blindly follow anyone that appears to be substantially brighter than they are.