Those numbers sound like complete bullshit to me. My first book, The Definitive Guide to the Xen Hypervisor, was a hardback printed on nice paper. It's 300 pages and the RRP is $49.99. That means that the price that the publisher charges retailers is $25. The publisher needs to sell 3,000 to make a sufficiently large profit to justify the up-front investment in paying me an advance, getting the printing done, and so on.
My next book, Cocoa Programming Developer's Handbook, was a 900 page paperback printed on quite thin paper, with a RRP of $60. That means that, at $30/copy, after selling 3,000 copies (and including paying me my royalty, paying one-off costs like copyediting) the publisher is making a reasonable profit.
If you're selling 10-50k then you're raking in cash at $50/copy RRP.
So true! It's a shame that learning Logo certainly doesn't give you any transferrable skills. No language that I've used since has had variables, loops, subroutines, and no environment has used vector graphics. The geometry that I learned from Logo has been completely useless too.
At the end, it's a question of energy. Stars are big. If you're accustomed to the scale of a planet, they're really big. You could transmute all of the hydrogen in Jupiter into more useful elements, but the energy required would be huge. The sort of energy that you'd get from... a star. And if you're going to the effort of tapping a star's energy at that level, then you may as well skim off the elements too. Additionally, if you're capable of inducing gravity, then a star is a pretty good place to perform transmutation of elements. Collect the heaviest ones together somewhere, and they'll be bombarded with neutrons from the surrounding reactions. I wouldn't be surprised if you could get pretty much any elements you wanted 'just' by creating a pool of lithium inside a star and keeping it contained.
While I agree with the contention that the simplest explanation is likely the right one
Why would you agree with something so nonsensical? And why would you state such a belief in the context of Occam's Razor, which says nothing of the kind. Occam's Razor says that, if a model works without one of its factors, then it is safe to remove that factor. It's a rule about logic, not about science. If you start with a set of axioms and develop a system, then there are an infinite number of axioms that you can add without changing the validity of any of your interred rules, but adding these does not gain you anything.
An example of its application in science is the idea of guided evolution. One model suggests that species change via random mutations. Another model suggests that these changes are not random, that they're guided by a higher power in such a way that is indistinguishable from random change. Occam does not say that the second hypothesis is wrong, merely that it adds nothing useful to the model. You could also add another factor to that saying that it's guided by a higher power who makes decisions based on what an angel tells him. You could go on adding extra layers to this hypothesis forever, without altering the predictions that are made. You can, therefore, save yourself some mental effort by ignoring the factors that are irrelevant.
That doesn't mean that the first theory is 'right', or true, it just means that it's simpler and equally useful.
Surely the main pockets of poorly educated people in Britain are not in the countryside but in inner cities?
They are in both. My mother used to teach in North Devon. Lots of the children that she taught were the offspring of people who had left school at 16 or maybe 18 and been unemployed for their entire lives. Teaching children who live in an environment where learning is not valued is very challenging.
I did make it into university (actually, I had more trouble making it out again - after my PhD and a postdoc, I eventually managed to escape from academia, although they occasionally persuade me to return for a bit), but in school, including A-Level, all of my textbooks were provided by the school. Most textbooks for this age range were under £10. I still have a few of my textbooks (the school sold old ones off sometimes, or gave them away if they were switching to a new textbook the following year), so I just checked online for the cost of the new versions of them. The most expensive one was £12.60, most were in the £5-10 range. My mother was a teacher when I was at school, so I was constantly aware of the price of textbooks, because it was a significant factor in her school's total budget. At $100, they'd have been bankrupt within a year. At £5, they were struggling to find money to replace the ones that wore out.
University textbooks are more expensive, but that's no more relevant when discussing something aimed at schools than saying that cars are more expensive. They're a different product for a different market. School textbooks are there to give you a reference for the course and to be handed back at the end of the year. University textbooks are meant to be a reference that you will continue to refer to after graduation, if you stay within the field. School textbooks generally cover material that's been known for a long time, whereas university textbooks are expected to cover the latest research (at least, the ones worth buying).
Are you confusing Apple and Acorn, or did Acorn release some computers that I missed? I remember the Atom, Electron, BBC Models A and B, BBC Master, and Archimedes, before they started on the A-number naming scheme, but I don't recall any with a fruit-based name.
There's also Squeak, but I think LOGO is much better, especially for 2nd graders
I wouldn't give them Squeak by itself, but Squeak eToys is probably better for teaching programming than Logo (although Logo is better for teaching geometry). With eToys, you can do things like draw a picture of a car, and then animate it based on rules, such as 'turn left if the colour under this pixel (which is an object) is lighter than the colour under this pixel' and have it follow tracks around the screen.
Yup, Logo was the second language that I learned when I was 7. The really great thing about it was that it came with an environment that could drive a turtle. Seeing stuff on the screen was okay, but seeing the computer control things in the real world was a whole new level of exciting to a small child (well, to me, at least).
I started learning to program aged 7, so it's definitely not to young to get an idea of what is involved. My school also had Capsela for children to play with, which forms a better analogy for modern modular programming than lego. Each capsule contains a set of gears (or something like a motor) and you can connect them together in a variety of ways. Low-level programming is analogous to building the individual capsules out of the individual gears, high-level programming to assembling them.
Seriously? Not sure how it works in the US, but in the UK, schools by textbooks, pupils don't, and if the school had to pay $100 for each textbook then they'd blow their entire annual budget on textbooks before they even thought about hiring teachers...
If you've only just realised that, you've never met a Mensa member before. It's a club for people who define themselves by their intelligence, yet are so insecure about said intelligence that they require affirmation by membership of a club that is `exclusive' to people who manage to get a rather mediocre score on a fairly trivial test.
It wasn't a dominos pizza, but I did have a pizza when I was in Japan. Well, it was called a pizza. It was a circle of Japanese bread, with mushrooms on top and an egg in the middle. It was nice, but I know Italians who would never speak to you again for describing it as a pizza...
Those exist, but on OS X they control movement on the page (jump to start / end of scroll view) not the line. On a laptop, they're also typically accessed via a modifier or in an inconvenient place to reach on the keyboard. That's not the point though. A good UI is consistent. If you have a text field, and it doesn't behave in the same way as every other text field in the system then you'd better have a damn good reason for this. It's like having a button that you have to hover over with the mouse and press space. It may work, but it destroys motor memory, because rather than just thinking 'I want to go to the start of this text field' and your spine controlling your hands to hit the button that always does that, you have to think 'I want to go to the start of the text field, now what kind of text field is this? Ah, it's the Google one, so I have to press this combination of buttons.'
I generally subscribe to the idea that if something is good, it will become popular all on it's own.
I'm trying to think of a single instance in the history of computing where quality and popularity have been correlated. Popularity and marketing budget, sure. Popularity and vendor lock-in, absolutely. Cost and quality, quite a few times. Popularity and quality? Give me another few minutes and I may come up with an example.
The word privilege literally means 'private law'. The ruling classes, the historical equivalent of the modern corporation, used to have their own private security and law enforcement. Private entities did raid homes, confiscate belongings, and incarcerate people, before the state decided that it should have a monopoly on this behaviour. When the government does it, you have the right to a fair trial and so on. When a private company or individual does it, you have no rights.
That's one reason, I doubt it's the main reason. It's cheaper to produce things in China for many reasons, mainly labour.
You'd be surprised. Labour is cheap in China, but it's also a very small part of the total cost. Foxconn is now moving towards using robotic factories instead of employing cheap labour, which makes the differential even lower. On the other hand, being able to dump your waste in the nearest river, instead of containing it and paying for it to be processed is a significant cost.
The difference is that nowhere else has the insane zoning system that seems popular in the USA. For some reason, suburbs in the USA end up being almost 100% residential. If you want to work or shop, you have to go out of them, and because of their size you typically need to drive. In most of the rest of the world, suburbs are a mixture of houses, small shops, and offices. They're places were were villages before the cities grew and absorbed them. You can do a lot of your shopping without having to get in a car, and a lot of people (although, of course, not everyone) can walk to work.
One is the optional semi-colon and required indent rules
Go doesn't have required indent rules, it has required brace positioning. I don't like this - it seems like a feature that's added for compiler writers, not for programmers, but it's not so bad.
And the Go-routines are interesting, but they should have studied up on erlang message passing
Erlang was inspired by CSP - it even uses CSP symbols for its message passing - but Erlang's actor model is harder to reason about in the common case than CSP, and it's easier to implement the actor model on top of CSP than implement CSP on top of actor model parallelism. Go provides a very nice CSP implementation. You can even implement Erlang's actor model on it quite trivially by giving the spawned goroutine the receive end of an interface{} channel and giving the send end (equivalent to the PID in Erlang) to other goroutines. Doing the opposite (implementing CSP in Erlang) requires you to spawn a forwarding process that maintains a map of possible receivers and handles forwarding messages to them, using some ugly hacks.
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Ask an economist?
Those numbers sound like complete bullshit to me. My first book, The Definitive Guide to the Xen Hypervisor, was a hardback printed on nice paper. It's 300 pages and the RRP is $49.99. That means that the price that the publisher charges retailers is $25. The publisher needs to sell 3,000 to make a sufficiently large profit to justify the up-front investment in paying me an advance, getting the printing done, and so on.
My next book, Cocoa Programming Developer's Handbook, was a 900 page paperback printed on quite thin paper, with a RRP of $60. That means that, at $30/copy, after selling 3,000 copies (and including paying me my royalty, paying one-off costs like copyediting) the publisher is making a reasonable profit.
If you're selling 10-50k then you're raking in cash at $50/copy RRP.
Community colleges make school-age children pay for university-level textbooks?
So true! It's a shame that learning Logo certainly doesn't give you any transferrable skills. No language that I've used since has had variables, loops, subroutines, and no environment has used vector graphics. The geometry that I learned from Logo has been completely useless too.
The milky way is a disc (as your quote says). It's only 1,000 light years thick, so 3,500 light years is quite a long way away from the galaxy.
At the end, it's a question of energy. Stars are big. If you're accustomed to the scale of a planet, they're really big. You could transmute all of the hydrogen in Jupiter into more useful elements, but the energy required would be huge. The sort of energy that you'd get from... a star. And if you're going to the effort of tapping a star's energy at that level, then you may as well skim off the elements too. Additionally, if you're capable of inducing gravity, then a star is a pretty good place to perform transmutation of elements. Collect the heaviest ones together somewhere, and they'll be bombarded with neutrons from the surrounding reactions. I wouldn't be surprised if you could get pretty much any elements you wanted 'just' by creating a pool of lithium inside a star and keeping it contained.
While I agree with the contention that the simplest explanation is likely the right one
Why would you agree with something so nonsensical? And why would you state such a belief in the context of Occam's Razor, which says nothing of the kind. Occam's Razor says that, if a model works without one of its factors, then it is safe to remove that factor. It's a rule about logic, not about science. If you start with a set of axioms and develop a system, then there are an infinite number of axioms that you can add without changing the validity of any of your interred rules, but adding these does not gain you anything.
An example of its application in science is the idea of guided evolution. One model suggests that species change via random mutations. Another model suggests that these changes are not random, that they're guided by a higher power in such a way that is indistinguishable from random change. Occam does not say that the second hypothesis is wrong, merely that it adds nothing useful to the model. You could also add another factor to that saying that it's guided by a higher power who makes decisions based on what an angel tells him. You could go on adding extra layers to this hypothesis forever, without altering the predictions that are made. You can, therefore, save yourself some mental effort by ignoring the factors that are irrelevant.
That doesn't mean that the first theory is 'right', or true, it just means that it's simpler and equally useful.
Surely the main pockets of poorly educated people in Britain are not in the countryside but in inner cities?
They are in both. My mother used to teach in North Devon. Lots of the children that she taught were the offspring of people who had left school at 16 or maybe 18 and been unemployed for their entire lives. Teaching children who live in an environment where learning is not valued is very challenging.
I did make it into university (actually, I had more trouble making it out again - after my PhD and a postdoc, I eventually managed to escape from academia, although they occasionally persuade me to return for a bit), but in school, including A-Level, all of my textbooks were provided by the school. Most textbooks for this age range were under £10. I still have a few of my textbooks (the school sold old ones off sometimes, or gave them away if they were switching to a new textbook the following year), so I just checked online for the cost of the new versions of them. The most expensive one was £12.60, most were in the £5-10 range. My mother was a teacher when I was at school, so I was constantly aware of the price of textbooks, because it was a significant factor in her school's total budget. At $100, they'd have been bankrupt within a year. At £5, they were struggling to find money to replace the ones that wore out.
University textbooks are more expensive, but that's no more relevant when discussing something aimed at schools than saying that cars are more expensive. They're a different product for a different market. School textbooks are there to give you a reference for the course and to be handed back at the end of the year. University textbooks are meant to be a reference that you will continue to refer to after graduation, if you stay within the field. School textbooks generally cover material that's been known for a long time, whereas university textbooks are expected to cover the latest research (at least, the ones worth buying).
Fruit-based name.
Are you confusing Apple and Acorn, or did Acorn release some computers that I missed? I remember the Atom, Electron, BBC Models A and B, BBC Master, and Archimedes, before they started on the A-number naming scheme, but I don't recall any with a fruit-based name.
How is the cost of university textbooks even remotely relevant when discussing a computer aimed at schools?
There's also Squeak, but I think LOGO is much better, especially for 2nd graders
I wouldn't give them Squeak by itself, but Squeak eToys is probably better for teaching programming than Logo (although Logo is better for teaching geometry). With eToys, you can do things like draw a picture of a car, and then animate it based on rules, such as 'turn left if the colour under this pixel (which is an object) is lighter than the colour under this pixel' and have it follow tracks around the screen.
Yup, Logo was the second language that I learned when I was 7. The really great thing about it was that it came with an environment that could drive a turtle. Seeing stuff on the screen was okay, but seeing the computer control things in the real world was a whole new level of exciting to a small child (well, to me, at least).
I started learning to program aged 7, so it's definitely not to young to get an idea of what is involved. My school also had Capsela for children to play with, which forms a better analogy for modern modular programming than lego. Each capsule contains a set of gears (or something like a motor) and you can connect them together in a variety of ways. Low-level programming is analogous to building the individual capsules out of the individual gears, high-level programming to assembling them.
Seriously? Not sure how it works in the US, but in the UK, schools by textbooks, pupils don't, and if the school had to pay $100 for each textbook then they'd blow their entire annual budget on textbooks before they even thought about hiring teachers...
or that Mensa has really low standards
If you've only just realised that, you've never met a Mensa member before. It's a club for people who define themselves by their intelligence, yet are so insecure about said intelligence that they require affirmation by membership of a club that is `exclusive' to people who manage to get a rather mediocre score on a fairly trivial test.
It wasn't a dominos pizza, but I did have a pizza when I was in Japan. Well, it was called a pizza. It was a circle of Japanese bread, with mushrooms on top and an egg in the middle. It was nice, but I know Italians who would never speak to you again for describing it as a pizza...
Those exist, but on OS X they control movement on the page (jump to start / end of scroll view) not the line. On a laptop, they're also typically accessed via a modifier or in an inconvenient place to reach on the keyboard. That's not the point though. A good UI is consistent. If you have a text field, and it doesn't behave in the same way as every other text field in the system then you'd better have a damn good reason for this. It's like having a button that you have to hover over with the mouse and press space. It may work, but it destroys motor memory, because rather than just thinking 'I want to go to the start of this text field' and your spine controlling your hands to hit the button that always does that, you have to think 'I want to go to the start of the text field, now what kind of text field is this? Ah, it's the Google one, so I have to press this combination of buttons.'
I generally subscribe to the idea that if something is good, it will become popular all on it's own.
I'm trying to think of a single instance in the history of computing where quality and popularity have been correlated. Popularity and marketing budget, sure. Popularity and vendor lock-in, absolutely. Cost and quality, quite a few times. Popularity and quality? Give me another few minutes and I may come up with an example.
And the USA used to be part of the British Empire. We don't want it back though...
The word privilege literally means 'private law'. The ruling classes, the historical equivalent of the modern corporation, used to have their own private security and law enforcement. Private entities did raid homes, confiscate belongings, and incarcerate people, before the state decided that it should have a monopoly on this behaviour. When the government does it, you have the right to a fair trial and so on. When a private company or individual does it, you have no rights.
That's one reason, I doubt it's the main reason. It's cheaper to produce things in China for many reasons, mainly labour.
You'd be surprised. Labour is cheap in China, but it's also a very small part of the total cost. Foxconn is now moving towards using robotic factories instead of employing cheap labour, which makes the differential even lower. On the other hand, being able to dump your waste in the nearest river, instead of containing it and paying for it to be processed is a significant cost.
The difference is that nowhere else has the insane zoning system that seems popular in the USA. For some reason, suburbs in the USA end up being almost 100% residential. If you want to work or shop, you have to go out of them, and because of their size you typically need to drive. In most of the rest of the world, suburbs are a mixture of houses, small shops, and offices. They're places were were villages before the cities grew and absorbed them. You can do a lot of your shopping without having to get in a car, and a lot of people (although, of course, not everyone) can walk to work.
That garbage collection really screws up anything with realtime involved
I'm sure David F Bacon, who wrote an realtime GC for Java for embedded applications almost a decade ago, will be fascinated to hear that.
One is the optional semi-colon and required indent rules
Go doesn't have required indent rules, it has required brace positioning. I don't like this - it seems like a feature that's added for compiler writers, not for programmers, but it's not so bad.
And the Go-routines are interesting, but they should have studied up on erlang message passing
Erlang was inspired by CSP - it even uses CSP symbols for its message passing - but Erlang's actor model is harder to reason about in the common case than CSP, and it's easier to implement the actor model on top of CSP than implement CSP on top of actor model parallelism. Go provides a very nice CSP implementation. You can even implement Erlang's actor model on it quite trivially by giving the spawned goroutine the receive end of an interface{} channel and giving the send end (equivalent to the PID in Erlang) to other goroutines. Doing the opposite (implementing CSP in Erlang) requires you to spawn a forwarding process that maintains a map of possible receivers and handles forwarding messages to them, using some ugly hacks.