Gotta love the irony... the RIAA members spent a couple of decades pumping out filthy rap trash as mainstream "entertainment" which encouraged people to break the law in more ways than I ever thought possible. Now, when they need it the most, they can't get anyone to obey the law! Instant karma got 'em!
I am not sure about the premise here. Do real programmers, the hackers in the old sense, like the "geek culture" of today? I can't say that I like it, or even pay attention to it. Geeks seem to be more into buying gadgets as soon as they come out and playing games than actually using and understanding software design and computer science the way the real hackers of old did. Do modern geeks produce anything like Emacs, LISP, UNIX, etc? Or do they just buy products? (I'm not sure exactly what the definition of "stupid" is, anyway.) If this is true, then even getting rid of male geek culture probably wouldn't increase the total number of programmers, since they are not contributing towards it in the first place. Maybe I don't know what a geek is. Do the creators of Linux, Python, Ruby, etc (where the real innovation is) call themselves geeks?
And wouldn't it be a survival mechanism to alienate people smarter than you so they don't compete in your arena? Sounds like survival of the fittest at work.
I think the original article should be tagged as funny, because it uses scanty evidence to draw grandiose conclusions using an invalid method of drawing causal inferences from a correlation. In today's world, most people who didn't use the Internet for a week would be fired. But this is what passes for journalism these days -- if you have the words "internet" and "sex" in the same article, that's all that really counts. Although Stat 101 must not be a required class in journalism majors in college, because many many journalists use the invalid method. The book "Innumeracy" is one of the few must-reads ever published.
(Sorry, this turns into a rant:) I wonder what percentage of readers -- 80% ? -- will not be in IT any longer by 2011, and what percentage will remember this prediction? If I'm not mistaken, Gartner is primarily a business to business research firm. If I was paying them dump trucks of money to say obvious things like this, I would question myself. I mean, by 2011 you know 80% of applications will use SAX or some open-source XML parser. Wondering if the report was bogus or not, I decided to break with tradition & read the article. These people have a grasp of the obvious: "You've got to know what's in your organization." They suggest four steps that are somewhat blindingly obvious. The first is to use software the fits the purpose. Then use mature software. (I don't have any statistics in front of me, but wouldn't Gartner also do a report saying some new technology is the best thing that ever happened?) The third factor is a buzzword, your "technology adoption profile" -- I don't know what that means, but it sounds important. Is there a UML diagram for that? The fourth factor is whether the software is 24/7 mission critical. Since earlier in the article the advice is not to throw out Windows for Linux, I can't quite harmonize them. So I'm just kind of in a daze at the vacuity of this stuff. The Gartner guy actually describes the motives of IBM for supporting Linux. (Can he back this up with research? Does he have quotes from IBM management proving that his ascribed motive is correct? Gartner is a research firm, right?) So that this stuff is being reported as "news" is mind-boggling. That this stuff is being done at all is mind-boggling. What happened to real reporting, anyway? Printing some quotes from a talk is not reporting. Why don't they ask what percentage of application development plans to use open-source components in the immediate future, or an open-source middleware and presentation layer stack? Why don't they ask why 20% would not be using open source by 2011, when the number of all-Microsoft shops that use the.NET stack (C#, SQL Server, ASP.NET) is most likely going to remain significantly higher than that. What is the definition of using open source, anyway, here? A Perl script in a unit test? Firefox and Apache? An XML parser? The quality of news reporting is getting pretty grim.
Most Americans probably couldn't go a week without driving or using a telephone, either. The Internet is part of our life ecosystem now and a source for information and work. To go from there to drawing grandiose conclusions is to forget the maxim of statistics, correlation doesn't imply causation. If I didn't use the Internet for a week, I wouldn't have a job.
Okay... so what is this? The "news" article had no details at all. Have they open-sourced SmartSuite? If you throw out the stupid third paragraph which has no meaningful information, and cull the meaningful information from the first two paragraphs, the story says "document, spreadsheet and presentation software in a group of tools" which doesn't tell you what these are - are they re-branding OpenOffice like StarOffice does? And it will be "called Lotus Symphony" -- is this a Lotus product? Are they open sourcing SmartSuite with Lotus 1-2-3 like I've been dreaming for years? Is this brand-new software technology IBM has developed? I want to know more!
It's not that it's been cracked, but why do this in the first place? Make people mad who use Linux which Apple isn't about to support anyway -- I mean, these are people who might buy iPods and MacBooks in the future, and doing this won't help Apple's cause any.
Glancing through the news and some of the e-mails, the good news is the best way not to be implicated in any of this is to be an old fogy -- I don't think any media mentioned in these e-mails is from the previous century. Apparently us old geezers who like 1980s and 1970s music get a free pass.
The best analogy I can come up with is that software creators (whatever you want to call them) are like baseball players. In major-league baseball, there is a shortage of talent. There is NOT a shortage of players. No MLB team has ever had trouble suiting up 25 guys for a game, or finding 5 starting pitchers. But finding players who produce results is difficult, and there aren't that many of them that lead a team to the World Series. These are the guys who make big bucks as free agents, get traded for, etc. Software is the same way. The toolsmiths, the people who can create software that produces results, are in big demand and already have jobs and aren't available because they're locked up in a long-term contract with a good employer, and they're probably making the tools other people use. The so-called AAAA players are a dime a dozen - they are lights out at AAA and have nothing to prove there, but when they're called up to the majors they get their heads beaten in by MLB talent. They have two-digit ERAs or hit under.200. These are the coders who take a "Learn C# in 24 hours" course. In baseball, there are only so many Cy Young caliber pitchers in any era, so there's a fixed quantity of them. You can't make more. Good toolsmiths are the same way. At least that's my reflection after a decade and a half or more in the computer field. This is why there is both a talent shortage and a glut of people at the same time. When teams (employers) talk about a talent shortage, they're talking about hiring a Roger Clemens or John Smoltz, and when there's a glut of people, there's a glut of Buddy Carlyles and Mat Redmans. I do not mean this in a bad way, or to put anyone down for their ability. It's just a fact.
I'm surprised that there isn't a WP keyboard mode for Open Office that someone in some place like a law office (still using 5.1 for DOS well into the 2000s!) demanded and hired someone to hack up for them. Maybe there is and I haven't found it -- took me weeks to discover how to turn on eye-saving white letters on a navy background in Open Office. (Hint to maintainters - it's one click in Office 2000! That option is there for a reason, people use it.) The larger question is retraining users. I have seen users moving from Office 95 to 97 to 2000 (haven't used anything since then) and the small changes were not only annoying, but difficult for users who have learned the software. The #1 thing I remember hearing was "why did they change it?" when some new feature screwed everything up and I had to go in and disable it so the new feature would not mess them up. Microsoft couldn't get bullets and numbering to be comprehensible and work right in three versions! So I was stunned when I saw MS threw out a DECADE OF USER INTERFACE CONSISTENCY for the ribbon stuff. I can't believe they don't know that users are trained to use a program, and changes don't work because the training has to start over. There is a REASON why WP 5.1 was an industry standard spanning three decades, and is probably still in use today. People learned it, were productive in it, and didn't want to change. This is OO's biggest benefit and the reason it could be successful. KEEP THE INTERFACE CONSISTENT! If OO doesn't change, and is consistent for a decade or more, and people learn it, and it's open source so some marketing department can't change it for no good reason, it can become the new industry standard because businesses don't want to retrain people every time a new version comes out and people don't want to be retrained. This is where open source can learn from other people's mistakes and not make them.
IBM should release Lotus 1-2-3 as open source. It was once the de facto industry standard and there plenty of people who remember it. It is one of the most well-documented application programs ever, and its @ functions are still cloned to this day. It ran on all platforms from DOS to Windows to UNIX. The WKx (WK4, WK3, etc) file format is very well documented and an industry standard. I'm not sure IBM even remembers they own 1-2-3's source, since they got it with their purchase of Lotus to get the groupware stuff that was all the rage in 94 or 95 before the Internet took off. If IBM released 1-2-3 as open source, and maybe used their 35 Chinese developers to update it a little, it would be the new industry standard plus GPLed so no one could ever take it away from us again. I imagine a few months after the open source 1-2-3 was released, people would have trouble remembering there ever was an Excel.
I've certainly noticed this. Many times a job description will have a set of skills, but something totally off-the-wall tacked on. Like a J2EE developer familiar with Solaris, but also needs to know ColdFusion. Or a low-level UNIX systems programmer, ASP.net experience helpful. And so on. I wonder if they do it just to create a set of requirements no one can fill?
What a "column oriented database" (never heard that term before) sounds like is IBM's old IMS, which grouped columns together (they didn't call them columns because relational databases didn't exist back then) to make it easy to process all of the same fields for all records in the table (they didn't call it a table). For example, you could iterate through all the phone numbers for every record. Mike Murach's company still sells a book on IMS DB (two volumes, but you only need part one) if you're interested in the power of this approach. IMS was designed in the days when config files were coded in assembler and assembled into a program because of efficiency constraints, so it is major ugly to code in. Basically, IMS was a framework (again, they didn't use that name) which loaded your assembled file definitions and ran against them. The IMS query language was so bizarre it's worth looking at if you've never seen it just to see something that bizarre. (And I mean bizarre, such as a space being part of the relational operator -- you have to code a space if you use a one-byte operator like "> " instead of a two-byte one like ">="!) If someone could dust this off and make it work in a more modern way, it would be one of the most remarkable comebacks in computer history. With modern partitioning for relational databases, and the fact that you'd have to have some sort of query language, I don't think this could replace general-purpose RDBMSes, but it could be a good extension to them some day.
Why do Haskell, Erlang, Prolog, etc abandon the clean, easy-to-understand syntax of LISP? I was reading "Beautiful Code" and saw some Haskell and it looked like a mess just visually to the naked eye. A while back I tried to install a package written in Erlang and thought it was kind of ugly too. I wonder why the FP side of the universe hasn't stuck with the simple, clear syntax of LISP. The structured/OO side of the universe has standardized on C syntax (C, C++, C#, Java, Perl, etc etc etc) which may be quirky (like LISP is) but is standard and anyone who knows one can follow along code in the other. I know Common LISP and Scheme, but was so baffled by Haskell I wondered if the syntax was serious or a FP equivalent of INTERCAL. Some of these FP languages are incredibly marginal because they're inscrutable even if you've had some background in functional programming with LISP.
Why should GWT be on my radar screen?
on
GWT in Action
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Does the book - or somewhere else - address why GWT ought to be on my tla radar screen? Does it work with Apache, or just J2EE containers? Is it open source? I know I could find that out by, um, googling the information, but if the book is meant to evangelize the tla, I would have expected it to concentrate more on why I should use GWT and in which situations, not how to build a tic-tac-toe game.
Saying "piracy" cuts into sales ignores the fact that a whole lot of file sharing involves music the record companies won't sell anyone for any price. What about all the hundreds of b-sides, remixes, demos, etc that are not in print? That was what I mainly used Napster for, grabbing digitized copies of music I used to have on LP and cassette that was never put on CD, or was once on CD singles but was out of print by the time I wanted to purchase it. The most disappointing thing about iTunes to me is it's just the same old stuff already on CDs. Why don't the record companies open their archives and put out of print music online? It would cost them almost nothing to have digital copies available to download.
The adventure source is a great find. I've been looking for the Scheme source tarball from the 1986-1987 period (i.e. when SICP was still new) for over a year, with no success. The changelog is online, and shows the work that was done in that period, but none of the tarballs still exists. Anyone have a Scheme distribution tarball from late 1987? I would like to run the code from that time along with the book to do screen captures, etc for something I'm working on.
Why would anyone steal laptops that are supposed to be so cheap they're going to be everywhere? Won't they be so plentiful and such a commodity that they'll be cheap as dirt and every family will have several? Why would anyone want to steal them? George Orwell's thought police invent a secret, non-root daemon to control theft on every single one of these? What else can it do? It can't be to deter theft, because the history of these things shows they're usually cracked before the thing is officially released. I will be following this story to see what the real reason for including this "feature" is. Keylogger? Censorship? Backdoor for totalitarian governments? The stated reason for theft seems spurious.
This essay seems to be fixed on featured articles and big entries. To me the real advantage of wikipedia seems to be the huge number of small, concise leaf articles that aren't featured, and maybe rarely accessed, but provide a short, in-depth punch about a particular topic, typically an obscure one. You can look up obscure topics like the Dry Tourgas or As Easy As and get the gist. Typically, small articles are written by an expert and ignored in terms of editing, but very useful for research. If you type certain strings into google, you get the wikipedia entry and not much else worthwhile. Wikipedia is sort of a common repository of knowledge. I'd rather have an article written by someone who knows something about an obscure topic than nothing. No one can grasp or deal with the entirety of wikipedia. There's too much there. But if you need to look up something obscure, you can go directly to that article.
What bothers me the most is all the web sites which clone wikipedia articles and add advertising. Ususually a google hit for a wikipedia entry turns up three or four other sites that just include the wikipedia article. This poisons the search engine, crowding out other hits. There ought to be a GPL version for wikipedia that allows people to mirror it only for nonprofit purposes. Down with leeches!
I am also extremely curious about which schools provide a worthwhile master's degree in computer science. I've thought about going after this from time to time, because I've had a lot of informal exposure to compiler theory, file processing, operating systems, etc over the years but have never had anything formal and don't have the official degree.
If anyone has any real-world experiences with schools that have an online master's degree in computer science, please share your experiences. It's hard sometimes to even tell the schools from the commission-based referral services based on their web sites, and hard to know if schools are worthwhile or not.
Little things mean a lot: Most online education I've seen seems to be based on ActiveX controls in IE/Windows only - surely advanced degrees are compatible with Linux?
"How are they going to know when the CD was purchased ?" -- sure, and how would the RIAA know ANY CD had been legally purchased if they accused you of piracy? No one saves receipts for disposeable items like that. Could you prove to the RIAA that you legally own all the CDs you have?
Slashdot Mirror
Gotta love the irony ... the RIAA members spent a couple of decades pumping out filthy rap trash as mainstream "entertainment" which encouraged people to break the law in more ways than I ever thought possible. Now, when they need it the most, they can't get anyone to obey the law! Instant karma got 'em!
I am not sure about the premise here. Do real programmers, the hackers in the old sense, like the "geek culture" of today? I can't say that I like it, or even pay attention to it. Geeks seem to be more into buying gadgets as soon as they come out and playing games than actually using and understanding software design and computer science the way the real hackers of old did. Do modern geeks produce anything like Emacs, LISP, UNIX, etc? Or do they just buy products? (I'm not sure exactly what the definition of "stupid" is, anyway.) If this is true, then even getting rid of male geek culture probably wouldn't increase the total number of programmers, since they are not contributing towards it in the first place. Maybe I don't know what a geek is. Do the creators of Linux, Python, Ruby, etc (where the real innovation is) call themselves geeks?
And wouldn't it be a survival mechanism to alienate people smarter than you so they don't compete in your arena? Sounds like survival of the fittest at work.
I think the original article should be tagged as funny, because it uses scanty evidence to draw grandiose conclusions using an invalid method of drawing causal inferences from a correlation. In today's world, most people who didn't use the Internet for a week would be fired. But this is what passes for journalism these days -- if you have the words "internet" and "sex" in the same article, that's all that really counts. Although Stat 101 must not be a required class in journalism majors in college, because many many journalists use the invalid method. The book "Innumeracy" is one of the few must-reads ever published.
(Sorry, this turns into a rant:) I wonder what percentage of readers -- 80% ? -- will not be in IT any longer by 2011, and what percentage will remember this prediction? If I'm not mistaken, Gartner is primarily a business to business research firm. If I was paying them dump trucks of money to say obvious things like this, I would question myself. I mean, by 2011 you know 80% of applications will use SAX or some open-source XML parser. Wondering if the report was bogus or not, I decided to break with tradition & read the article. These people have a grasp of the obvious: "You've got to know what's in your organization." They suggest four steps that are somewhat blindingly obvious. The first is to use software the fits the purpose. Then use mature software. (I don't have any statistics in front of me, but wouldn't Gartner also do a report saying some new technology is the best thing that ever happened?) The third factor is a buzzword, your "technology adoption profile" -- I don't know what that means, but it sounds important. Is there a UML diagram for that? The fourth factor is whether the software is 24/7 mission critical. Since earlier in the article the advice is not to throw out Windows for Linux, I can't quite harmonize them. So I'm just kind of in a daze at the vacuity of this stuff. The Gartner guy actually describes the motives of IBM for supporting Linux. (Can he back this up with research? Does he have quotes from IBM management proving that his ascribed motive is correct? Gartner is a research firm, right?) So that this stuff is being reported as "news" is mind-boggling. That this stuff is being done at all is mind-boggling. What happened to real reporting, anyway? Printing some quotes from a talk is not reporting. Why don't they ask what percentage of application development plans to use open-source components in the immediate future, or an open-source middleware and presentation layer stack? Why don't they ask why 20% would not be using open source by 2011, when the number of all-Microsoft shops that use the .NET stack (C#, SQL Server, ASP.NET) is most likely going to remain significantly higher than that. What is the definition of using open source, anyway, here? A Perl script in a unit test? Firefox and Apache? An XML parser? The quality of news reporting is getting pretty grim.
I am worried that the soon-to-be-unemployed forces of both SCO and MediaDefender will get together somehow and form a new venture.
Most Americans probably couldn't go a week without driving or using a telephone, either. The Internet is part of our life ecosystem now and a source for information and work. To go from there to drawing grandiose conclusions is to forget the maxim of statistics, correlation doesn't imply causation. If I didn't use the Internet for a week, I wouldn't have a job.
I'd be really curious to know what licensing issues there were in SmartSuite - I thought IBM completely bought out Lotus.
Okay ... so what is this? The "news" article had no details at all. Have they open-sourced SmartSuite? If you throw out the stupid third paragraph which has no meaningful information, and cull the meaningful information from the first two paragraphs, the story says "document, spreadsheet and presentation software in a group of tools" which doesn't tell you what these are - are they re-branding OpenOffice like StarOffice does? And it will be "called Lotus Symphony" -- is this a Lotus product? Are they open sourcing SmartSuite with Lotus 1-2-3 like I've been dreaming for years? Is this brand-new software technology IBM has developed? I want to know more!
It's not that it's been cracked, but why do this in the first place? Make people mad who use Linux which Apple isn't about to support anyway -- I mean, these are people who might buy iPods and MacBooks in the future, and doing this won't help Apple's cause any.
Glancing through the news and some of the e-mails, the good news is the best way not to be implicated in any of this is to be an old fogy -- I don't think any media mentioned in these e-mails is from the previous century. Apparently us old geezers who like 1980s and 1970s music get a free pass.
The best analogy I can come up with is that software creators (whatever you want to call them) are like baseball players. In major-league baseball, there is a shortage of talent. There is NOT a shortage of players. No MLB team has ever had trouble suiting up 25 guys for a game, or finding 5 starting pitchers. But finding players who produce results is difficult, and there aren't that many of them that lead a team to the World Series. These are the guys who make big bucks as free agents, get traded for, etc. Software is the same way. The toolsmiths, the people who can create software that produces results, are in big demand and already have jobs and aren't available because they're locked up in a long-term contract with a good employer, and they're probably making the tools other people use. The so-called AAAA players are a dime a dozen - they are lights out at AAA and have nothing to prove there, but when they're called up to the majors they get their heads beaten in by MLB talent. They have two-digit ERAs or hit under .200. These are the coders who take a "Learn C# in 24 hours" course. In baseball, there are only so many Cy Young caliber pitchers in any era, so there's a fixed quantity of them. You can't make more. Good toolsmiths are the same way. At least that's my reflection after a decade and a half or more in the computer field. This is why there is both a talent shortage and a glut of people at the same time. When teams (employers) talk about a talent shortage, they're talking about hiring a Roger Clemens or John Smoltz, and when there's a glut of people, there's a glut of Buddy Carlyles and Mat Redmans. I do not mean this in a bad way, or to put anyone down for their ability. It's just a fact.
I'm surprised that there isn't a WP keyboard mode for Open Office that someone in some place like a law office (still using 5.1 for DOS well into the 2000s!) demanded and hired someone to hack up for them. Maybe there is and I haven't found it -- took me weeks to discover how to turn on eye-saving white letters on a navy background in Open Office. (Hint to maintainters - it's one click in Office 2000! That option is there for a reason, people use it.) The larger question is retraining users. I have seen users moving from Office 95 to 97 to 2000 (haven't used anything since then) and the small changes were not only annoying, but difficult for users who have learned the software. The #1 thing I remember hearing was "why did they change it?" when some new feature screwed everything up and I had to go in and disable it so the new feature would not mess them up. Microsoft couldn't get bullets and numbering to be comprehensible and work right in three versions! So I was stunned when I saw MS threw out a DECADE OF USER INTERFACE CONSISTENCY for the ribbon stuff. I can't believe they don't know that users are trained to use a program, and changes don't work because the training has to start over. There is a REASON why WP 5.1 was an industry standard spanning three decades, and is probably still in use today. People learned it, were productive in it, and didn't want to change. This is OO's biggest benefit and the reason it could be successful. KEEP THE INTERFACE CONSISTENT! If OO doesn't change, and is consistent for a decade or more, and people learn it, and it's open source so some marketing department can't change it for no good reason, it can become the new industry standard because businesses don't want to retrain people every time a new version comes out and people don't want to be retrained. This is where open source can learn from other people's mistakes and not make them.
IBM should release Lotus 1-2-3 as open source. It was once the de facto industry standard and there plenty of people who remember it. It is one of the most well-documented application programs ever, and its @ functions are still cloned to this day. It ran on all platforms from DOS to Windows to UNIX. The WKx (WK4, WK3, etc) file format is very well documented and an industry standard. I'm not sure IBM even remembers they own 1-2-3's source, since they got it with their purchase of Lotus to get the groupware stuff that was all the rage in 94 or 95 before the Internet took off. If IBM released 1-2-3 as open source, and maybe used their 35 Chinese developers to update it a little, it would be the new industry standard plus GPLed so no one could ever take it away from us again. I imagine a few months after the open source 1-2-3 was released, people would have trouble remembering there ever was an Excel.
I've certainly noticed this. Many times a job description will have a set of skills, but something totally off-the-wall tacked on. Like a J2EE developer familiar with Solaris, but also needs to know ColdFusion. Or a low-level UNIX systems programmer, ASP.net experience helpful. And so on. I wonder if they do it just to create a set of requirements no one can fill?
What a "column oriented database" (never heard that term before) sounds like is IBM's old IMS, which grouped columns together (they didn't call them columns because relational databases didn't exist back then) to make it easy to process all of the same fields for all records in the table (they didn't call it a table). For example, you could iterate through all the phone numbers for every record. Mike Murach's company still sells a book on IMS DB (two volumes, but you only need part one) if you're interested in the power of this approach. IMS was designed in the days when config files were coded in assembler and assembled into a program because of efficiency constraints, so it is major ugly to code in. Basically, IMS was a framework (again, they didn't use that name) which loaded your assembled file definitions and ran against them. The IMS query language was so bizarre it's worth looking at if you've never seen it just to see something that bizarre. (And I mean bizarre, such as a space being part of the relational operator -- you have to code a space if you use a one-byte operator like "> " instead of a two-byte one like ">="!) If someone could dust this off and make it work in a more modern way, it would be one of the most remarkable comebacks in computer history. With modern partitioning for relational databases, and the fact that you'd have to have some sort of query language, I don't think this could replace general-purpose RDBMSes, but it could be a good extension to them some day.
Why do Haskell, Erlang, Prolog, etc abandon the clean, easy-to-understand syntax of LISP? I was reading "Beautiful Code" and saw some Haskell and it looked like a mess just visually to the naked eye. A while back I tried to install a package written in Erlang and thought it was kind of ugly too. I wonder why the FP side of the universe hasn't stuck with the simple, clear syntax of LISP. The structured/OO side of the universe has standardized on C syntax (C, C++, C#, Java, Perl, etc etc etc) which may be quirky (like LISP is) but is standard and anyone who knows one can follow along code in the other. I know Common LISP and Scheme, but was so baffled by Haskell I wondered if the syntax was serious or a FP equivalent of INTERCAL. Some of these FP languages are incredibly marginal because they're inscrutable even if you've had some background in functional programming with LISP.
Does the book - or somewhere else - address why GWT ought to be on my tla radar screen? Does it work with Apache, or just J2EE containers? Is it open source? I know I could find that out by, um, googling the information, but if the book is meant to evangelize the tla, I would have expected it to concentrate more on why I should use GWT and in which situations, not how to build a tic-tac-toe game.
Saying "piracy" cuts into sales ignores the fact that a whole lot of file sharing involves music the record companies won't sell anyone for any price. What about all the hundreds of b-sides, remixes, demos, etc that are not in print? That was what I mainly used Napster for, grabbing digitized copies of music I used to have on LP and cassette that was never put on CD, or was once on CD singles but was out of print by the time I wanted to purchase it. The most disappointing thing about iTunes to me is it's just the same old stuff already on CDs. Why don't the record companies open their archives and put out of print music online? It would cost them almost nothing to have digital copies available to download.
The adventure source is a great find. I've been looking for the Scheme source tarball from the 1986-1987 period (i.e. when SICP was still new) for over a year, with no success. The changelog is online, and shows the work that was done in that period, but none of the tarballs still exists. Anyone have a Scheme distribution tarball from late 1987? I would like to run the code from that time along with the book to do screen captures, etc for something I'm working on.
Why would anyone steal laptops that are supposed to be so cheap they're going to be everywhere? Won't they be so plentiful and such a commodity that they'll be cheap as dirt and every family will have several? Why would anyone want to steal them? George Orwell's thought police invent a secret, non-root daemon to control theft on every single one of these? What else can it do? It can't be to deter theft, because the history of these things shows they're usually cracked before the thing is officially released. I will be following this story to see what the real reason for including this "feature" is. Keylogger? Censorship? Backdoor for totalitarian governments? The stated reason for theft seems spurious.
There was a glut of dark fiber the last time this came up! Is this another imaginary crisis meant to scare people?
This essay seems to be fixed on featured articles and big entries. To me the real advantage of wikipedia seems to be the huge number of small, concise leaf articles that aren't featured, and maybe rarely accessed, but provide a short, in-depth punch about a particular topic, typically an obscure one. You can look up obscure topics like the Dry Tourgas or As Easy As and get the gist. Typically, small articles are written by an expert and ignored in terms of editing, but very useful for research. If you type certain strings into google, you get the wikipedia entry and not much else worthwhile. Wikipedia is sort of a common repository of knowledge. I'd rather have an article written by someone who knows something about an obscure topic than nothing. No one can grasp or deal with the entirety of wikipedia. There's too much there. But if you need to look up something obscure, you can go directly to that article.
What bothers me the most is all the web sites which clone wikipedia articles and add advertising. Ususually a google hit for a wikipedia entry turns up three or four other sites that just include the wikipedia article. This poisons the search engine, crowding out other hits. There ought to be a GPL version for wikipedia that allows people to mirror it only for nonprofit purposes. Down with leeches!
I am also extremely curious about which schools provide a worthwhile master's degree in computer science. I've thought about going after this from time to time, because I've had a lot of informal exposure to compiler theory, file processing, operating systems, etc over the years but have never had anything formal and don't have the official degree.
If anyone has any real-world experiences with schools that have an online master's degree in computer science, please share your experiences. It's hard sometimes to even tell the schools from the commission-based referral services based on their web sites, and hard to know if schools are worthwhile or not.
Little things mean a lot: Most online education I've seen seems to be based on ActiveX controls in IE/Windows only - surely advanced degrees are compatible with Linux?
Do you mean the Gates whose foundation promotes worldwide population control? Heart in the right place?
"How are they going to know when the CD was purchased ?" -- sure, and how would the RIAA know ANY CD had been legally purchased if they accused you of piracy? No one saves receipts for disposeable items like that. Could you prove to the RIAA that you legally own all the CDs you have?