Move or build an ISP in your town, running the fiber cable yourself.
Yay for the internet! It lets you work from anywhere, and lets you buy stuff even when there are no shops around.
Well, as long as you live in a big city with lots of offices and shops.
I've been saving up, so I went with cheap internet -- I'm on 56k, and I'd forgotten what it's like. It's also a congested, poorly managed network. It's a real eye-opener, and it's a valuable lesson for someone who's developing a web app that he wants to be widely accessible....
Bundling means collective negotiation and economies of scale. Unbundling would probably end up in higher prices for everybody. In theory, then, I am in favour of bundling. In practice, in the UK at least, it's a fantastic con, because the main provider is Sky (satellite TV) and they bundle their own channels into every package. Setanta Sports went bust because they needed to outbid Sky Sports for various high-profile leagues. Meanwhile, everyone sho bought Setanta was paying for several Sky Sports channels anyway, because Sky bundled them together. Practically no-one had Setanta without also having Sky Sports....
I would dispute this. People with enthusiasm for their craft regard money as secondary or unimportant. (Yes, even in the materialistic USA, this is true.) Exception: If you actually need the money, but then the decision is forced.
Even so, we all desire recognition, and recognition means seniority. A pat on the back from someone 20 years younger than you who knows less than you and makes twice as much money as you seems somewhat patronising....
Yes, this is the basic premise of Agile.
Basically the story here is that Valve has adopted Agile, just that no one has called it what it is yet.
The problem with agile development is perfectly demonstrated by your use of a capital A. Why a capital? It's not a tradename, it's not a place. People think of agile development as a set of rules and try to codify it as such, when the whole premise of agile development defies any formalisation.
And yet people think of it as a "thing", which leads to an inevitable imposition of self-style over group-style. "I do agile, therefore agile is what I do."
If Valve defined themselves as "Agile", not only would people make fat jokes about the Big Boss, but they'd also get people arguing about doing "Agile" wrong. So they do "Valve" instead.
Does a major shareholder who is paying everyone's salary get a larger vote than the new hire?
Shareholders don't pay anyone's salary. Investors pay initial salaries, but once the company is running, it's the company that's paying the salary, not the investor. And when the original investor sells his stake to another party, that's a shareholder who has never put a penny into your company.
Consider the IPOs of Google and Facebook. The companies were both up and running with a mature and relatively complete infrastructure. People weren't "investing" in the companies -- their money wasn't going into company coffers to pay the wages of the workers or to ramp up production of a new wonder-gadget. No, they were simply buying a stake off someone else.
These were money transfers that generated no wealth, no development and no innovation -- they just made the previous holders richer.
'course, I'm also of a mind that unless the company is sufficiently large enough (e.g. Fortune 500-sized), middle managers shouldn't even exist.
Then you should have the vertical sync checked on your mind, because middle-management is a discipline that was pretty much invented for the large enterprise, where senior managers cannot possibly directly manage the tens of thousands of subordinates that they have under them.
There have never been more video gamers in history than there are today.
And yet there are fewer "celebrity" coders now than in the 90s, and fewer than in the 80s.
Compare with animation. The only names I can think of in animation are Max Fleischer, William Hanna, Joseph Barbara, and Chuck whatsisname that did Tom and Jerry. Excluding voice actors, do you think anyone in the general public will be able to quote the name of anyone involved in the production of the Toy Story films, the Incredibles, the Lion King... anything. It's a technical team production and nobody gets any visibility. Just like modern gaming.
In the old days, the dog-like creatures were classified in three groups: canis (domestic dogs), vulpus (foxes), lupus (wolf). The old line was that dogs and wolves were very different things. The consideration of the wolf as the forefather of the modern dog is a very modern thing, based on DNA analysis. It's now so widely accepted that lupus is now a subspecies of canis, so we have "canis lupus" and "canis familiaris".
Species do not make up their minds to evolve into X
You are right on that statement, however, the statement that wolves evolved into domestic dogs is not entirely true. For a population to fully evolve into a new species, the ability to of the new species to interbreed and produce fertile offspring with the original species must be lost. Domestic dogs can freely breed with wolves and produce fertile offspring, so they have not completely evolved into separate species.
Did the previous poster state anywhere that X was a new species, rather than simply a new subspecies?
Why? History doesn't suggest this is the case. There have always been a few noteworthy names in computers that people could quote. As a child I could name a few: Jeff Miner, Andy Braybrook, Mike Singleton etc, although I could name more of the guys who wrote the soundtracks for games. In fact, I believe that there are actually fewer individuals you could name in todays gaming scene than in the home-computer scene of the 80s. Games are now a team effort, and the only names that people can quote have all been on the scene for over a decade (Meier, Carmack, Romero, Newell), cos they started back when one man could make a notable contribution.
p>The basics should be taught in C, or Fortran, or Pascal, or some other procedural language. Let them write a copy routine for their 2000-element arrays. Let them muck with pointers and segfault. They won't learn why they should abstract if they don't experience, even if indirectly, why they shouldn't. And they certainly won't enjoy programming if they're busy managing parentheses or stuck figuring out what design pattern they should use.
Yeah, good idea. And let's not let them use a saw in woodwork until they've made one for themselves. Sorry, I started C at university, and while it's a great language, it's hard to conceptualise what you're doing with all those doubly-linked list items when your brain's completely occupied by the process of making the list in the first place.
"Digital literacy" doesn't need to be Computer Science. It doesn't need to go beyond process-thinking and algorithms. Programming is more than enough for schoolkids, and those that want to do CS can do it at university.
The guy who's going to create the big important app of the future doesn't need school to teach him how to program. He taught himself at home before he arrived in ninth grade. It'll be university before the level of the teaching catches up with what he already knows.
School needs to teach mainstream topics. Things that are likely to be useful. Most people are going to end up word processing in their lives. A very small percentage are going to end up coding anything.* And they don't need schools to get them started.
My dad's a retired school teacher. His philosophy was always that he had to truly understand something before teaching it, and he could only do that by breaking it down into its component concepts. I'm now an English teacher, and I do the same thing. The difference is that I've got a degree in computer science. This means that I was trained how to break things down to this level; I was trained to think about all the variables and possible side-effects of a given decision. I was trained to do what he had to teach himself to do.
And unlike him, I can't kid myself on that my model is correct -- I plug my rules into Python to test whether I've failed to account for certain cases. In doing this I've formalised my understanding of various features of English and improved myself tremendously as a teacher.
But not everyone wants to be a teacher, so let's look at standard corporate stuff.
I spent the best part of a decade in corporate IT, and at various times, I fed back on errors in corporate policy documents, pointing out that it didn't say strictly what was intended. The bosses told me I was just being pedantic, and that everyone knew what it meant. It was always depressing to be proved right a year or so down the line when someone told me off for following the intended procedure rather than the written procedure.
Programming is a very powerful tool for teaching the abstract skills involved in process-based planning -- skills that are poorly served by every other school subject, but are central to any technical career (particularly engineering) or working successfully in a business that is to big for everyone in the company to know each other.
Basically, even if the laws of physics changed and broke every computer in the world 10 years from now, teaching programming in the interim would still have great benefits to society.
Ultimately LaTeX, Libre Office or even the dreaded MS Office are just tools. Teach the theory behind the tools first.
A good tool should encourage the correct workflow, and if it does. you can learn the theory through practice. Libre Office, Word and every other WYSIWYG tool encourage bad workflow from the moment the window opens. I learned word processing on a BBC Micro (a 6502-powered computer) and it was not WYSIWYG. It wasn't LaTeX, by a long stretch, but it was write, markup, preview. Some of the markup you did as you went (italics and suchlike), but "write first, mark up later" was very much the only sensible way to use the software.
How sad it is to discover someone young enough and ignorant enough to not know who Dave Winer is.
I'm well into my 30s and a computer science grad, and I'd never heard of Winer before today. Looking at his WP entry, I see no reason why I should have....
The reality is that most humans already know as many humans as they are capable of keeping track of, and those people aren't important to us often enough to really make an impression. I do have a couple more game developers for your list, though: Peter Molyneux, and Richard Garriott. A lot of people actually know who they are and what they've done. Part of that is that these are people who have deliberately cultivated a small amount of fame, where most nerds shrink from it.
But does your average schoolkid know these guys, or is it just the 25-45 crowd? Cos people who're famous with us aren't going to impress kids that don't know them from Adam (Ant)....
The moral of the story is that attempts to create "obvious" applications lead to hacks and logic abuse. Train you users, train your users, train your users.
1. Anyone who has an MSOffice site license or gets laptops from a large corporate account (with MSO preinstalled) will stick with MSOffice until there is a major change in the computing environment because they have a solution that works and they've already committed to the financial cost.
Yup, and that major change in environment is NOW, although Google have blinded themselves to it. Windows 8 tries to merge the mobile and desktop experience, but no-one uses Windows Phone. But plenty of people use Android and Android tablets.
If a decent LibreOffice port was available for Android, people would start using LibreOffice on Android, and from there it would migrate to the desktop.
Sadly, Google's so obsessed with these silly Chromebooks that they keep refusing to develop a decent netbook Android environment.
Exactly. Google is squandering the opportunity to use Android to crush Windows, by instead focusing on these stupid "what do you mean you can't afford a 24/7 4G internet connection" toys.
Microsoft wants to converge the desktop and mobile experience. The most popular mobile OS is Android. Android on ARM laptops has the potential to be the final Windows killer. Google should be making Droidbooks.
Google is also squandering the opportunity to use Android to cruch Office, because if they put a team together to port LibreOffice to Android, suddenly every Android tablet user would have it as their office suite of choice, and they'd start installing it on their PCs too. Which would help prepare the ground for a corporate migration to Droidbooks.
Modern economics is all just made up as we go along. Ever increasing house prices? Sure, why not! High risk loans? Yeah, no problem. It we break a million almost-definite-to-default loans into a million tiny little pieces, there's absolutely no risk!
And many claim it was modern economics that sh@t all over democracy at the last UK general election. Minority government? Oh no, that would be bad for our credit rating, so the LibDems signed up to government that they (and more notably their voters) didn't believe in.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but Coursera's a revolution that there's no going back from.
Translation: all those scripts, refreshes and document.writes()s mean that the browser back button doesn't work....
Move or build an ISP in your town, running the fiber cable yourself.
Yay for the internet! It lets you work from anywhere, and lets you buy stuff even when there are no shops around.
Well, as long as you live in a big city with lots of offices and shops.
I've been saving up, so I went with cheap internet -- I'm on 56k, and I'd forgotten what it's like. It's also a congested, poorly managed network. It's a real eye-opener, and it's a valuable lesson for someone who's developing a web app that he wants to be widely accessible....
Broadcast is still a more efficient use of bandwidth than near-infinite unicasting....
Bundling means collective negotiation and economies of scale. Unbundling would probably end up in higher prices for everybody. In theory, then, I am in favour of bundling. In practice, in the UK at least, it's a fantastic con, because the main provider is Sky (satellite TV) and they bundle their own channels into every package. Setanta Sports went bust because they needed to outbid Sky Sports for various high-profile leagues. Meanwhile, everyone sho bought Setanta was paying for several Sky Sports channels anyway, because Sky bundled them together. Practically no-one had Setanta without also having Sky Sports....
I would dispute this. People with enthusiasm for their craft regard money as secondary or unimportant. (Yes, even in the materialistic USA, this is true.) Exception: If you actually need the money, but then the decision is forced.
Even so, we all desire recognition, and recognition means seniority. A pat on the back from someone 20 years younger than you who knows less than you and makes twice as much money as you seems somewhat patronising....
Yes, this is the basic premise of Agile. Basically the story here is that Valve has adopted Agile, just that no one has called it what it is yet.
The problem with agile development is perfectly demonstrated by your use of a capital A. Why a capital? It's not a tradename, it's not a place. People think of agile development as a set of rules and try to codify it as such, when the whole premise of agile development defies any formalisation.
And yet people think of it as a "thing", which leads to an inevitable imposition of self-style over group-style. "I do agile, therefore agile is what I do."
If Valve defined themselves as "Agile", not only would people make fat jokes about the Big Boss, but they'd also get people arguing about doing "Agile" wrong. So they do "Valve" instead.
When Microsoft upgrades Windows, they need to wire in backwards compability, so that as much old software will run as possible.
When they Upgrade Office, they need to wire in backwards compatibility, so that it will open every document in your archives.
But you probably won't be able to run Half-Life 2 under the Half-Life 3 engine. No-body needs it to.
Does a major shareholder who is paying everyone's salary get a larger vote than the new hire?
Shareholders don't pay anyone's salary. Investors pay initial salaries, but once the company is running, it's the company that's paying the salary, not the investor. And when the original investor sells his stake to another party, that's a shareholder who has never put a penny into your company.
Consider the IPOs of Google and Facebook. The companies were both up and running with a mature and relatively complete infrastructure. People weren't "investing" in the companies -- their money wasn't going into company coffers to pay the wages of the workers or to ramp up production of a new wonder-gadget. No, they were simply buying a stake off someone else.
These were money transfers that generated no wealth, no development and no innovation -- they just made the previous holders richer.
'course, I'm also of a mind that unless the company is sufficiently large enough (e.g. Fortune 500-sized), middle managers shouldn't even exist.
Then you should have the vertical sync checked on your mind, because middle-management is a discipline that was pretty much invented for the large enterprise, where senior managers cannot possibly directly manage the tens of thousands of subordinates that they have under them.
Why? History doesn't suggest this is the case.
There have never been more video gamers in history than there are today.
And yet there are fewer "celebrity" coders now than in the 90s, and fewer than in the 80s.
Compare with animation. The only names I can think of in animation are Max Fleischer, William Hanna, Joseph Barbara, and Chuck whatsisname that did Tom and Jerry. Excluding voice actors, do you think anyone in the general public will be able to quote the name of anyone involved in the production of the Toy Story films, the Incredibles, the Lion King... anything. It's a technical team production and nobody gets any visibility. Just like modern gaming.
In the old days, the dog-like creatures were classified in three groups: canis (domestic dogs), vulpus (foxes), lupus (wolf). The old line was that dogs and wolves were very different things. The consideration of the wolf as the forefather of the modern dog is a very modern thing, based on DNA analysis. It's now so widely accepted that lupus is now a subspecies of canis, so we have "canis lupus" and "canis familiaris".
Ah, well let me introduce you to my best friend: Mr Edward Strawman. Whenever I want to make myself look important, I have an argument with him....
Species do not make up their minds to evolve into X
You are right on that statement, however, the statement that wolves evolved into domestic dogs is not entirely true. For a population to fully evolve into a new species, the ability to of the new species to interbreed and produce fertile offspring with the original species must be lost. Domestic dogs can freely breed with wolves and produce fertile offspring, so they have not completely evolved into separate species.
Did the previous poster state anywhere that X was a new species, rather than simply a new subspecies?
Why? History doesn't suggest this is the case. There have always been a few noteworthy names in computers that people could quote. As a child I could name a few: Jeff Miner, Andy Braybrook, Mike Singleton etc, although I could name more of the guys who wrote the soundtracks for games. In fact, I believe that there are actually fewer individuals you could name in todays gaming scene than in the home-computer scene of the 80s. Games are now a team effort, and the only names that people can quote have all been on the scene for over a decade (Meier, Carmack, Romero, Newell), cos they started back when one man could make a notable contribution.
p>The basics should be taught in C, or Fortran, or Pascal, or some other procedural language. Let them write a copy routine for their 2000-element arrays. Let them muck with pointers and segfault. They won't learn why they should abstract if they don't experience, even if indirectly, why they shouldn't. And they certainly won't enjoy programming if they're busy managing parentheses or stuck figuring out what design pattern they should use.
Yeah, good idea. And let's not let them use a saw in woodwork until they've made one for themselves. Sorry, I started C at university, and while it's a great language, it's hard to conceptualise what you're doing with all those doubly-linked list items when your brain's completely occupied by the process of making the list in the first place.
"Digital literacy" doesn't need to be Computer Science. It doesn't need to go beyond process-thinking and algorithms. Programming is more than enough for schoolkids, and those that want to do CS can do it at university.
The guy who's going to create the big important app of the future doesn't need school to teach him how to program. He taught himself at home before he arrived in ninth grade. It'll be university before the level of the teaching catches up with what he already knows.
School needs to teach mainstream topics. Things that are likely to be useful. Most people are going to end up word processing in their lives. A very small percentage are going to end up coding anything.* And they don't need schools to get them started.
My dad's a retired school teacher. His philosophy was always that he had to truly understand something before teaching it, and he could only do that by breaking it down into its component concepts. I'm now an English teacher, and I do the same thing. The difference is that I've got a degree in computer science. This means that I was trained how to break things down to this level; I was trained to think about all the variables and possible side-effects of a given decision. I was trained to do what he had to teach himself to do.
And unlike him, I can't kid myself on that my model is correct -- I plug my rules into Python to test whether I've failed to account for certain cases. In doing this I've formalised my understanding of various features of English and improved myself tremendously as a teacher.
But not everyone wants to be a teacher, so let's look at standard corporate stuff.
I spent the best part of a decade in corporate IT, and at various times, I fed back on errors in corporate policy documents, pointing out that it didn't say strictly what was intended. The bosses told me I was just being pedantic, and that everyone knew what it meant. It was always depressing to be proved right a year or so down the line when someone told me off for following the intended procedure rather than the written procedure.
Programming is a very powerful tool for teaching the abstract skills involved in process-based planning -- skills that are poorly served by every other school subject, but are central to any technical career (particularly engineering) or working successfully in a business that is to big for everyone in the company to know each other.
Basically, even if the laws of physics changed and broke every computer in the world 10 years from now, teaching programming in the interim would still have great benefits to society.
Ultimately LaTeX, Libre Office or even the dreaded MS Office are just tools. Teach the theory behind the tools first.
A good tool should encourage the correct workflow, and if it does. you can learn the theory through practice. Libre Office, Word and every other WYSIWYG tool encourage bad workflow from the moment the window opens. I learned word processing on a BBC Micro (a 6502-powered computer) and it was not WYSIWYG. It wasn't LaTeX, by a long stretch, but it was write, markup, preview. Some of the markup you did as you went (italics and suchlike), but "write first, mark up later" was very much the only sensible way to use the software.
How sad it is to discover someone young enough and ignorant enough to not know who Dave Winer is.
I'm well into my 30s and a computer science grad, and I'd never heard of Winer before today. Looking at his WP entry, I see no reason why I should have....
The reality is that most humans already know as many humans as they are capable of keeping track of, and those people aren't important to us often enough to really make an impression. I do have a couple more game developers for your list, though: Peter Molyneux, and Richard Garriott. A lot of people actually know who they are and what they've done. Part of that is that these are people who have deliberately cultivated a small amount of fame, where most nerds shrink from it.
But does your average schoolkid know these guys, or is it just the 25-45 crowd? Cos people who're famous with us aren't going to impress kids that don't know them from Adam (Ant)....
The moral of the story is that attempts to create "obvious" applications lead to hacks and logic abuse. Train you users, train your users, train your users.
1. Anyone who has an MSOffice site license or gets laptops from a large corporate account (with MSO preinstalled) will stick with MSOffice until there is a major change in the computing environment because they have a solution that works and they've already committed to the financial cost.
Yup, and that major change in environment is NOW, although Google have blinded themselves to it. Windows 8 tries to merge the mobile and desktop experience, but no-one uses Windows Phone. But plenty of people use Android and Android tablets.
If a decent LibreOffice port was available for Android, people would start using LibreOffice on Android, and from there it would migrate to the desktop.
Sadly, Google's so obsessed with these silly Chromebooks that they keep refusing to develop a decent netbook Android environment.
Exactly. Google is squandering the opportunity to use Android to crush Windows, by instead focusing on these stupid "what do you mean you can't afford a 24/7 4G internet connection" toys.
Microsoft wants to converge the desktop and mobile experience. The most popular mobile OS is Android. Android on ARM laptops has the potential to be the final Windows killer. Google should be making Droidbooks.
Google is also squandering the opportunity to use Android to cruch Office, because if they put a team together to port LibreOffice to Android, suddenly every Android tablet user would have it as their office suite of choice, and they'd start installing it on their PCs too. Which would help prepare the ground for a corporate migration to Droidbooks.
My sick doesn't usually come off very easily. It takes a fair bit of soap and a heck of a lot of scrubbing.
Modern economics is all just made up as we go along. Ever increasing house prices? Sure, why not! High risk loans? Yeah, no problem. It we break a million almost-definite-to-default loans into a million tiny little pieces, there's absolutely no risk!
And many claim it was modern economics that sh@t all over democracy at the last UK general election. Minority government? Oh no, that would be bad for our credit rating, so the LibDems signed up to government that they (and more notably their voters) didn't believe in.
Yeah, but wouldn't (for example) Einstein's degree certificate be quite a status symbol?