What he's really describing is how he gets away from distractions and puts himself in an environment conducive to working. Regarding the former, I wrote about and linked to many of the essays and some of the research dealing with distraction problems in this post and talk about some of my environmental cues, including equipment, in this one.
When you can prevent useless distractions, then you're really ready to go. Of course, I'm posting this on/., which shows me to be something of a hypocrite, but I think the point still a useful one.
Atmosphere or equipment. In my case, I like a quiet spot, an Aeron, and a Model M keyboard. Ridiculous? Maybe, even probably. But they help me get in the zone to work much more than, say, music, which I mostly find irritating.
The people rounded up and the population in those cities, were routinely told they're being merely deported to some other province, and encouraged to take whatever they think they'll need in a new home. (Incidentally, that ended up as loot for the nazis.)
New histories reveal that the Nazi Regime deliberately insinuated knowledge of the Final Solution, devilishly making Germans complicit in the crime and binding them, with guilt and dread, to their leaders.
The situation is far more complex than you think, and the knowledge of the German population greater than your post implies. As the article states regarding the many books it reviews:
Most striking is these books' consensus: despite their authors' different aims and methods, and despite their contending interpretations of a host of questions, they all agree that, contrary to claims made after the war, the German people had wide-ranging and often detailed knowledge of the murder of the Jews.
None of the authors uses that conclusion to render easy moral judgments, nor to argue that the population fervently embraced the regime's lethal anti-Semitism
In other words, the German population did know quite a bit, and a vast genocide bureaucracy existed. The article argues that this knowledge drove the Germans to keep fighting after it was obvious they had lost; to cite one representative quote, "as a soldier who had witnessed the massacre of a village of Jews on the Eastern Front put it, "God forbid we lose the war. If revenge comes upon us, we'll have a rough time." "
Have you read Paul Graham's essays? All of them? If not, you should: he discusses the pros and cons of CS grad school in more depth than/. contents can. When you're done with that, check out Joel on Software.
If you're not willing to read most of both sites, I'd say that your answer regarding CS grad school should be "no." Any form of grad school requires an enormous amount of reading, and the amount you should do in preparation ought to in part tell you whether you should go.
No it isn't. Modern Fiction Studies is a technical (English) journal; the WSJ is a general newspaper written to the 10th -12th grade reading level. Its news stories don't require esoteric knowledge or deep background to comprehend; their stories are designed to be self-contained. Take a look at two of today's page one stories: Detroit's Troubles Lure World of Bidders and U.S., Europe Are an Ocean Apart on Human Toll of Joblessness.
Neither is particularly technical. Both summarize their main contents towards the beginning of the story ("Foreign bidders are lining up to pick off parts of General Motors Corp. as the contraction of the U.S. auto industry sets the stage for a global reshuffling.").
What is unique about the WSJ is that a) it doesn't use wire service copy and b) writes "deeper" stories that eschew "fire department pulls cat from tree" headlines for "an in-depth look at changes in the firehouse surrounding the Assistance to Firefighters Grant Program" or something like it. People pay for the WSJ because they can't get its stories anywhere else, but that doesn't mean it's a technical journal.
You don't hear people crying about the dying pottery business. Business models change. Society evolves.
Pots aren't essential to functioning democracies, justice systems, and politicians. Newspapers are because their oversight probably reduces corruption and increases transparency. Pots, on the other hand, don't have these qualities, and that's why your analogy is flawed.
Granted, newspapers might be superseded by bloggers serving the same or similar functions, but it's not obvious that bloggers will have the wherewithal to withstand lawsuits, demand accountability, nurture book writers, and the like.
Young American college students (I take night classes, so their ages range between 18 and 50 in my class) are awful. They lack the most basic respect, which they display by talking shit about any teachers they don't like as soon as the teacher turns away. Many send and receive text messages on their cellphones all the time despite clear instructions that forbid doing so. Many act like not understanding something is the teacher's fault for not being able to explain things right, at which point they give up entirely and sigh audibly.
Without being a jerk, I would observe that part of the problem might be the cohort you're observing, since most students with anything going for them academically and intellectually will attend four-year colleges and universities straight out of high school rather than community colleges. Although it's possible to receive an excellent education at them and lousy educations at four-year schools (see the book Beer and Circus: How Big-Time Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education for more), by and large there's a reasonably strong correlation between school ranking and achievement of the students within.
If you were at, say, the University of Chicago rather than a community college, you'd be getting a very different experience.
They are less willing to buy the top-end because there's no reason to.
In addition, virtually everyone who wants a computer has one already--meaning that each additional computer bought for a random person has diminishing marginal utility. Take a look at this post regarding computers per capita, and you'll notice that the U.S. is approaching 1:1. And if you don't have a computer by now, you probably won't make much use of one.
There was a time when I absolutely had to have the latest and greatest just to get things done. Now, my ome and work PCs are years old and are running CPUs that were low-budget even when brand new.
Or maybe now you're older, less susceptible to marketing, and play fewer games that crush the exponential edge of hardware. In other words, perhaps now you have more perspective than you did during the time when you had to have the latest and greatest.
And so will paper in offices, and toilet paper, and cities, and and workplaces, and anything except our personal entertainment pods.
The problem is, he assumes that classrooms are just places where the prof broadcasts, you receive, and then you leave. In bad classrooms that's true, and if they go the way of the dodo, the world might be a better place.
But if he's going to argue that classrooms will be different, I'd agree: the 500 personal lecture hall that feels more like a train station, as discussed in Murray Sperber's Beer and Circus, is probably an anachronism. But the classroom where one exchanges ideas, responds to other students, and the like is still very much necessary, and perhaps even more necessary than ever because it's a place free of distraction, at least relatively speaking. I would expect the value of intellectual jazz to go up, not down, thanks to podcasts and what nots.
Finally, I'm reminded of something Paul Graham wrote in Cities and Ambition:
When you talk about cities in the sense we are, what you're really talking about is collections of people. For a long time cities were the only large collections of people, so you could use the two ideas interchangeably. But we can see how much things are changing from the examples I've mentioned. New York is a classic great city. But Cambridge is just part of a city, and Silicon Valley is not even that. (San Jose is not, as it sometimes claims, the capital of Silicon Valley. It's just 178 square miles at one end of it.)
Maybe the Internet will change things further. Maybe one day the most important community you belong to will be a virtual one, and it won't matter where you live physically. But I wouldn't bet on it. The physical world is very high bandwidth, and some of the ways cities send you messages are quite subtle.
(Emphasis added.)
The ultimate high bandwidth experience isn't going away by 2020.
But I'd say my best writing space in general is at home, in a quiet room--I use this one, and in a place without distractions. I suspect that those who call planes their best hacking space do so because they don't have the Internet to distract them--which can be a major problem, which I discuss in some detail here.
To me, the people playing with their laptops in coffee shops are nuts: they're so prone to distraction that I doubt they can get anything done effectively.
No, not because of piracy which was there since day one. But because of many many good games were already released are all are still playable. New games and ideas have to compete with huge existing catalog.
Incidentally, what you're describing here is the book market: in English, virtually everything published since 1800 is still readable. Granted, most 19th Century books aren't of much interest to anyone, but a few are, and many, many used copies of books wander about the globe. (Gabriel Zaid wrote some about the literary plenitude/plethora in So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance, which I describe in the post at the link).
You can see more on the subject at the bottom of this post, which links here:
Exact data on how the used book market is eroding the market for new books is hard to come by but the consensus is -- it ain't helping.
The Wall Street Journal predicted in 2005: "While the market's size is still modest -- about $600 million, or 2.8% of the $21 billion that readers spent on consumer books in 2004 -- it is growing at 25% annually. Jeff Hayes, group director for InfoTrends Research Group, suggests that it could reach $2.25 billion in U.S. sales by 2010, or 9.4% of a projected $23.9 billion in consumer book sales."
Amazon, Abe Books, and the like make buying and selling used books easier than ever. Many good books have been released and are still readable. The internet makes coordinating the exchange of them easy. Hence, part of the problem the publishing industry faces today: competition from its old stock. Computer games, welcome to the world of books.
Most people aren't savvy enough to understand how to copy and paste mp3 files to a USB storage device, or how to buy music online without using itunes (or even rip a CD without itunes).
And many of us who are savvy enough simply don't give a shit about whether we can, but rather care about what makes our lives easier. That's what Creative & Co. have missed WRT the iPod and what many of the anti-Mac crowd have too. The latter imply that any Mac users are vacuous freshmen who like shiny cases and emo bands while ignoring that, for many tasks, OS X is easier to use and maintain even for those knowledgeable enough to struggle successfully with Windows.
To be fair, this is only the second time you've seen Unicomp mentioned, as I note in this comment. In addition, I wrote the post that/. first linked to, and I have nothing to do with Unicomp, as browsing the site at that link will probably demonstrate, aside from liking their keyboard. And NPR is well-known for its objectivity; if you've got more than innuendo behind your snark, I'd love to hear about it.
I was about to make exactly this point: Apple's laptop hardware is nice, yes, and its desktop hardware leaves much to be desired in terms of price/performance, but the real major reason I bought an iMac is software. Beat Apple at consumer operating systems and you've beaten Apple.
Rick: How can you close me up? On what grounds?
Captain Renault: I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
[a croupier hands Renault a pile of money]
Croupier: Your winnings, sir.
Captain Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much.
Since last I wrote about the Stimulus Bill in Brush the Dirt Off Your Shoulders: What to Do While Waiting, the House has passed its version and the bill is staggering through the Senate. It's amusing to watch various senators say, like Captain Renault in my favorite movie, Casablanca, that they are "shocked, shocked to find pork in the Stimulus Bill." Just as there is likely to be gambling at Rick's Café Américain, one is likely to find more than a few curious items in the largest spending bill ever considered by Congress.
This seems to have been written by someone not very familiar with Grants.gov, the major federal system for distributing funding announcements and requests for proposals (RFPs), through which an enormous amount of money is spent every year. The system is opaque in terms of searching and features; for example, all federal programs are supposed to be listed on it, but some--like the massive Assistance to Firefighters Grant Program--aren't, as described in further detail here.
These kinds of shenanigans and incompetence aren't unusual, but most people don't notice them most of the time. More occur throughout Grant Writing Confidential, which you can find at the links. The stimulus hoopla just makes these kinds of issues more prominent than they usually are, because who's going to read the Federal Register and use Grants.gov often enough to understand the problems and publicize them? No one, unless you're getting paid to do it.
People have been using this excuse for years to write bloated, crappy software.
I see this argument occasionally on/. and always find it more than a bit puzzling: if software that you think is "bloated" continues to be used (and to be sold to people willing to pay for it), then it must be of more value to its users than whatever hypothetical small and beautiful software that you're imagining. In fact, Joel Spolsky wrote a pretty good article called Bloatware and the 80/20 myth attacking the very line of thinking you're espousing.
Sure a lot of apps can be moved to a web interface. A lot of carpentry can also be done with a hacksaw. The question isn't "Can it be done?" but rather "Is this the best tool for the job?".
Computers aren't like physical objects--they're vastly more configurable. Most users seem to value convenience and ease-of-use above all other attributes, and the way they've embraced webmail shows it. I'm not one of them, but that's the way users are going. Their definition of "best" is different than your definition of best.
Those all might true, but so what? The advantages outweigh the disadvantages, and web apps are improving all the time. Paul Graham already wrote about the issue in The Other Road Ahead, and Joel Spolsky wrote about them in How Microsoft Lost the API War. He enumerates problems and things that, at the time of the article, you couldn't do with web apps:
Create a fast drawing program
Build a real-time spell checker with wavy red underlines
Warn users that they are going to lose their work if they hit the close box of the browser
Update a small part of the display based on a change that the user makes without a full roundtrip to the server
Create a fast keyboard-driven interface that doesn't require the mouse
Let people continue working when they are not connected to the Internet
These are not all big issues. Some of them will be solved very soon by witty Javascript developers. Two new web applications, Gmail and Oddpost, both email apps, do a really decent job of working around or completely solving some of these issues. And users don't seem to care about the little UI glitches and slowness of web interfaces. Almost all the normal people I know are perfectly happy with web-based email, for some reason, no matter how much I try to convince them that the rich client is, uh, richer.
And these issues shrink all the time. I agree with Joel regarding rich clients--I use Mail.app for e-mail, but virtually no one else I know does. Photoshop and Final Cut Pro aren't moving to the web anytime in the short to medium term, but other apps will, and it's hard to see this guy's ideas mattering. Sure, they might be true, but the web is still more convenient. For me, it's become a central repository for book and other commentary in the form of The Story's Story and write about grant writing at Grant Writing Confidential. Yeah, I write my posts in Textmate, but most people don't--and most people aren't going to buy and install Textmate.
How about you devote all the energy, time, and effort that you would have put into doing yet another ill-advised sequel or remake into writing something ORIGINAL?
The New Yorker answers that, as I discuss in a blog post on Why are so many movies awful?. The New Yorker story isn't easily excerpted, but it is very much worth reading.
Slashdot Mirror
When you can prevent useless distractions, then you're really ready to go. Of course, I'm posting this on /., which shows me to be something of a hypocrite, but I think the point still a useful one.
FYI--the link to the Aeron page is broken; it should be here. Apologies!
Atmosphere or equipment. In my case, I like a quiet spot, an Aeron, and a Model M keyboard. Ridiculous? Maybe, even probably. But they help me get in the zone to work much more than, say, music, which I mostly find irritating.
This isn't really true. Consider "Hitler's Co-Conspirators" in The Atlantic:
The situation is far more complex than you think, and the knowledge of the German population greater than your post implies. As the article states regarding the many books it reviews:
In other words, the German population did know quite a bit, and a vast genocide bureaucracy existed. The article argues that this knowledge drove the Germans to keep fighting after it was obvious they had lost; to cite one representative quote, "as a soldier who had witnessed the massacre of a village of Jews on the Eastern Front put it, "God forbid we lose the war. If revenge comes upon us, we'll have a rough time." "
If you're not willing to read most of both sites, I'd say that your answer regarding CS grad school should be "no." Any form of grad school requires an enormous amount of reading, and the amount you should do in preparation ought to in part tell you whether you should go.
No it isn't. Modern Fiction Studies is a technical (English) journal; the WSJ is a general newspaper written to the 10th -12th grade reading level. Its news stories don't require esoteric knowledge or deep background to comprehend; their stories are designed to be self-contained. Take a look at two of today's page one stories: Detroit's Troubles Lure World of Bidders and U.S., Europe Are an Ocean Apart on Human Toll of Joblessness.
Neither is particularly technical. Both summarize their main contents towards the beginning of the story ("Foreign bidders are lining up to pick off parts of General Motors Corp. as the contraction of the U.S. auto industry sets the stage for a global reshuffling.").
What is unique about the WSJ is that a) it doesn't use wire service copy and b) writes "deeper" stories that eschew "fire department pulls cat from tree" headlines for "an in-depth look at changes in the firehouse surrounding the Assistance to Firefighters Grant Program" or something like it. People pay for the WSJ because they can't get its stories anywhere else, but that doesn't mean it's a technical journal.
Pots aren't essential to functioning democracies, justice systems, and politicians. Newspapers are because their oversight probably reduces corruption and increases transparency. Pots, on the other hand, don't have these qualities, and that's why your analogy is flawed.
Granted, newspapers might be superseded by bloggers serving the same or similar functions, but it's not obvious that bloggers will have the wherewithal to withstand lawsuits, demand accountability, nurture book writers, and the like.
Given the source of one's check, I'm not sure I'd want to work for a newspaper.
Without being a jerk, I would observe that part of the problem might be the cohort you're observing, since most students with anything going for them academically and intellectually will attend four-year colleges and universities straight out of high school rather than community colleges. Although it's possible to receive an excellent education at them and lousy educations at four-year schools (see the book Beer and Circus: How Big-Time Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education for more), by and large there's a reasonably strong correlation between school ranking and achievement of the students within.
If you were at, say, the University of Chicago rather than a community college, you'd be getting a very different experience.
Be wary of some of the wireless providers, because they seem to impose even more restrictions on Internet usage than wired providers.
In addition, virtually everyone who wants a computer has one already--meaning that each additional computer bought for a random person has diminishing marginal utility. Take a look at this post regarding computers per capita, and you'll notice that the U.S. is approaching 1:1. And if you don't have a computer by now, you probably won't make much use of one.
Or maybe now you're older, less susceptible to marketing, and play fewer games that crush the exponential edge of hardware. In other words, perhaps now you have more perspective than you did during the time when you had to have the latest and greatest.
The problem is, he assumes that classrooms are just places where the prof broadcasts, you receive, and then you leave. In bad classrooms that's true, and if they go the way of the dodo, the world might be a better place.
But if he's going to argue that classrooms will be different, I'd agree: the 500 personal lecture hall that feels more like a train station, as discussed in Murray Sperber's Beer and Circus , is probably an anachronism. But the classroom where one exchanges ideas, responds to other students, and the like is still very much necessary, and perhaps even more necessary than ever because it's a place free of distraction, at least relatively speaking. I would expect the value of intellectual jazz to go up, not down, thanks to podcasts and what nots.
Finally, I'm reminded of something Paul Graham wrote in Cities and Ambition:
(Emphasis added.)
The ultimate high bandwidth experience isn't going away by 2020.
To me, the people playing with their laptops in coffee shops are nuts: they're so prone to distraction that I doubt they can get anything done effectively.
Incidentally, what you're describing here is the book market: in English, virtually everything published since 1800 is still readable. Granted, most 19th Century books aren't of much interest to anyone, but a few are, and many, many used copies of books wander about the globe. (Gabriel Zaid wrote some about the literary plenitude/plethora in So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance, which I describe in the post at the link).
You can see more on the subject at the bottom of this post, which links here:
Amazon, Abe Books, and the like make buying and selling used books easier than ever. Many good books have been released and are still readable. The internet makes coordinating the exchange of them easy. Hence, part of the problem the publishing industry faces today: competition from its old stock. Computer games, welcome to the world of books.
And many of us who are savvy enough simply don't give a shit about whether we can, but rather care about what makes our lives easier. That's what Creative & Co. have missed WRT the iPod and what many of the anti-Mac crowd have too. The latter imply that any Mac users are vacuous freshmen who like shiny cases and emo bands while ignoring that, for many tasks, OS X is easier to use and maintain even for those knowledgeable enough to struggle successfully with Windows.
To be fair, this is only the second time you've seen Unicomp mentioned, as I note in this comment. In addition, I wrote the post that /. first linked to, and I have nothing to do with Unicomp, as browsing the site at that link will probably demonstrate, aside from liking their keyboard. And NPR is well-known for its objectivity; if you've got more than innuendo behind your snark, I'd love to hear about it.
I have no idea how good the Day Keyboard is, having never used it, but it's often mentioned in these posts.
I was about to make exactly this point: Apple's laptop hardware is nice, yes, and its desktop hardware leaves much to be desired in terms of price/performance, but the real major reason I bought an iMac is software. Beat Apple at consumer operating systems and you've beaten Apple.
You're not the first one to express such sentiments regarding recent actions either. See our post Looking at the Stimulus Bill from a Grant Writer's Perspective:
If that's not enough, check out a post that has the intentionally long and obtuse title, A Primer on False Notes, Close Reading, and The Economic Development Administration's (EDA) American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) Program, or, How to Seize the Money in 42 Easy Steps, which explains recent EDA announcements and why some are merely announcements of announcements, as if one is inviting someone to receive an invitation.
These kinds of shenanigans and incompetence aren't unusual, but most people don't notice them most of the time. More occur throughout Grant Writing Confidential, which you can find at the links. The stimulus hoopla just makes these kinds of issues more prominent than they usually are, because who's going to read the Federal Register and use Grants.gov often enough to understand the problems and publicize them? No one, unless you're getting paid to do it.
Low transparency is the norm, not the exception.
I see this argument occasionally on /. and always find it more than a bit puzzling: if software that you think is "bloated" continues to be used (and to be sold to people willing to pay for it), then it must be of more value to its users than whatever hypothetical small and beautiful software that you're imagining. In fact, Joel Spolsky wrote a pretty good article called Bloatware and the 80/20 myth attacking the very line of thinking you're espousing.
Computers aren't like physical objects--they're vastly more configurable. Most users seem to value convenience and ease-of-use above all other attributes, and the way they've embraced webmail shows it. I'm not one of them, but that's the way users are going. Their definition of "best" is different than your definition of best.
And these issues shrink all the time. I agree with Joel regarding rich clients--I use Mail.app for e-mail, but virtually no one else I know does. Photoshop and Final Cut Pro aren't moving to the web anytime in the short to medium term, but other apps will, and it's hard to see this guy's ideas mattering. Sure, they might be true, but the web is still more convenient. For me, it's become a central repository for book and other commentary in the form of The Story's Story and write about grant writing at Grant Writing Confidential. Yeah, I write my posts in Textmate, but most people don't--and most people aren't going to buy and install Textmate.
The New Yorker answers that, as I discuss in a blog post on Why are so many movies awful?. The New Yorker story isn't easily excerpted, but it is very much worth reading.