There's a huge amount of good work in the last 25 years. People who are interested in ideas will either read popular science, or science fiction. Here's a few recommendations.
Popular science:
"Fermat's last theorem" by Simon Singh An interesting history of mathematics.
"Guns, germs and steel" by Jared Diamond
A history of society to date, explaining in detail why some people did well and invaded others instead of vice-versa.
As for science fiction, well...
"Snow crash" by Neal Stevenson Created the metaverse which inspired Second Life, and really opened up a genre.
"Consider Phlebas" by Iain Banks The first of his Culture novels, sets the scene for a utopian future where human and machine intelligence coexist.
These barely skim the surface, but I'd rather not spend all day posting on slashdot.
...and Apple has really come to the table with Time Machine, making backup happen for the masses. Perhaps its reasonable to assume that if our computer crashes, we lose one hour worth of non-recoverable work. That's the promise if you use Time Machine with default settings.
They could do better by making mirroring standard in desktops, but in laptops they're probably on the money. They could do better by perhaps using zfs for block level backups rather than file level, but what they have now is far better than nothing.
They're just a reflection on what people are betting now. Perhaps the demographic of the betters themselves is not representative. It reflects their best information right now. In any case, you expect it to keep changing right until the close of bets. If last bets don't stop until immediately before each state election, it will be pretty accurate by then =)
But shuffling around who pays for what, doesn't fix anything. All that indirection can accomplish, is create opportunities and incentives for irresponsibility and fraud. You can't have billions of dollars filtered through the government without having a lot of it disappear, and you can't have government encode how it will be spent, without removing human judgement.
When billions of dollars flows through private companies instead, you can be sure that a lot disappears, for example into marketing. It's clear that for health care, there is some correct level of government intervention in the market. Shuffling around who pays what could actually improve the situation for everyone. It should be done regularly, in search of the minimum administrative cost in providing health care.
For home users, it would let you simply plug a new drive in your Mac, press a button, and have it just add space to your main drive. You wouldn't need to specifically setup a RAID. No resizing. No "external drive" if you don't want it that way. Just buy a drive, plug it in, and it's all handled for you.
I'm not sure you'd want it to work this way for external drives. Will they be available at crucial parts of boot time when some important files are striped across them? Even if they are, you're basically unable to ever remove the external drive again. If there's a problem with the drive, all your data is lost. Probably the way these drives work now is better. Maybe mirroring onto an external drive would work ok, but it would then be an undesirable write bottleneck.
Before there was AJAX, there was Asynchronous New Thing Holding Ransom All Xml (ANTHRAX). That had all sorts of people worried about the sustainability of their business models.
I can't help but feel that sooner or later someone will come up with a real package manager for windows which makes installing quality open source software just a matter of a few clicks, as it is in Linux.
Once this happens, and the appropriate compatibility layers abound and are used widely, people on Windows will begin to depend on open source apps regularly, simply because they are the ones which are easily available and do the job. Then, windows itself will be irrelevant; just another platform.
An ugly change coming? It's been here for a while, and it certainly peaked with the Howard government's encouragement of xenophobia and treatment of asylum seekers. Fortunately, the Rudd government has swung the pendulum back somewhat, for now.
Back in my undergrad degree we had a subject on Java. Now we also took Haskell, Prolog, C beforehand. At the time, I really didn't get Java, and resented having to learn it.
It's cleaned up a lot since then, but I think what I didn't like was having OO design shoved down my throat. Some things just work well as functions, some things as objects. I've always liked mixing and matching. Without functions as first class objects, you end up having to build BlahFactoryFactories for things. I remember a good post on how Java limits your language here: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns.html.
That said, I've since programmed in Java again for work, and have found it a pleasure. I now really appreciate strong unicode support, and the excellent refactoring tools for it in Eclipse.
Need code that you KNOW has no errors aside from logic errors on the part of the programmer? Use Ada.
That's really where Ada fits. You can do very little wrong without the compiler screaming at you and then failing to compile. Like as in, things that cause C "warnings" cause Ada to fail compilation until you fix it.
The same can be said about Mercury, a functional/logical programming language. The style of programming is different to C/C++/Java, but it makes it much hard to make mistakes.
1. Small, simple associative arrays. foreach helps too. I've found IronPython at least can do that:
arr = Hashtable()
arr['foo'] = 'bar'
How about:
arr = {}
arr['foo'] = 'bar'
or
arr = {'foo': 'bar'}
2. Small, simple, self-contained regular expressions, with variable replacement. I haven't seen another language yet that can do this in one command:
$str =~ s/(foo|bar)/$arr{$1}/g;
Does one line or two matter?
for key, rep in y.iteritems(): x = re.sub(key, rep, x)
3. Small, simple standard I/O. Many languages write to STDOUT easily. Few read from STDIN *or* a file this easily:
I'm not even sure what Python offers over the dozens of other languages that preceded it.
Easier to code, easier to read, easier to maintain.
You type a lot less code to get things done, due to a mixture of dynamic typing, significant whitespace and a huge number of well designed, readable, high-level libraries. You pay a potential performance hit for all the sweet abstraction, but you worry about lower level optimisations in the rare applications/places where it matters. In practice this saves a huge amount of time.
What's more, the basic paradigm is actually the same as the C/C++/Java set, so it's very easy to learn if you're working from these languages. One thing I agree with in the article is that people are extremely resistant to taking up a new programming paradigm, for example a functional or logical programming approach.
Isn't this just a reflection of the style of government in the US? There seems to be a strong emphasis on small government, and then relying on private philanthropy to keep other things running.
The risk is that your masterpiece sits in a cupboard for the rest of your life. Someone who chooses this model really wants to contribute their work to the community, they want it to be used and they (potentially) want the respect which comes from running a strong project. Supposing you don't get the money you hope for in a small time frame, would you really rather protect your project until it's obsolete (or inflation catches up to your fixed price) rather than releasing it?
The only time I've run into it was Travis Oliphant's manual for numpy (or was it numeric python), and it really bugged me then. I wonder if it worked for him, or whether other people just wrote and released their own supporting material, to the point where the residual value of his work was too low for people to buy it.
I like the spirit of ransomware, but I think it needs some tweaking. For software, authors should acknowledge that the value of their work decreases over time, since someone else will reinvent the wheel or clone your work if you make things too onerous. If you haven't reached your money threshold within say 2 years, chances are you never will. Even that may be generous. Time limits are needed.
It also could use an independent arbiter, perhaps a NPO, which holds the source in escrow and can independently verify that money donated is measured and accounted for. That kind of transparency would make it more satisfying to purchase the product.
If an IQ test requires cultural knowledge, then I guess you'd better be up front about who you expect it to be applicable for. Not that we really expect those sort of standards for an online IQ test.
Would it give them more profit though? Offering lower-priced systems would undercut their more expensive offerings, and they'd have to compete with other vendors (like Dell) who are already heavily geared towards that end of the market.
Presumably you're unable to deploy 40,000 laptops in Peru without backing or support from either other NGOs or the Peruvian government. He simply said that there was only one staff member dedicated to deployment. Perhaps their job was to coordinate a much larger pool of non-OLPC staff and volunteers. Without knowing the scale of OLPC staffing or the support from Peru they got, it's difficult to determine if this situation was really so poorly managed.
Maybe the bandwidth concern is really a concern for reputation. To use Ask Slashdot to get developers and advertise a specific project is a little crass. He's being polite, and trying not to abuse the system.
Perhaps the best response is that having only one distro (or app) is extremely risky, and the wars raged to control its direction could be insane. The current state of development seems wasteful, but it's quite reasonable as a decentralized evolutionary strategy.
Healthy competition is a good thing, and keeps this form of development from stagnating. Even if Linux one day dominates on the desktop, there will be enough competition from within the community to keep things vibrant.
If he has a bios password, he might need to get a service techie to reset the bios for him first.
If there's more later that he needs access to, well, people often reuse passwords. There might then be a good case for taking the time to crack his root and user passwords to access other things (e.g. an online account not made in his real name). I'd also check his email for web-site subscriptions; he may reuse one or more passwords between sites too, and some will send it back in plaintext email.
For my wife, TV is a very high priority, at least for particular shows. It's how she unwinds after work, and (sometimes) a fun way to socialise with friends. For me, when I sit in front of one for more than 2 mins, I start to get twitchy, almost like I can see the minutes of my life dripping down the drain.
Maybe about 10 years ago I started feeling like that. It actually can make unwinding together difficult for my wife and I since we both need different things. For me, I need something mentally active but different to my work to unwind.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a huge amount of good work in the last 25 years. People who are interested in ideas will either read popular science, or science fiction. Here's a few recommendations.
Popular science:
An interesting history of mathematics.
A history of society to date, explaining in detail why some people did well and invaded others instead of vice-versa.
As for science fiction, well...
Created the metaverse which inspired Second Life, and really opened up a genre.
The first of his Culture novels, sets the scene for a utopian future where human and machine intelligence coexist.
These barely skim the surface, but I'd rather not spend all day posting on slashdot.
Many things seem obvious... after a study has shown them to be likely.
...and Apple has really come to the table with Time Machine, making backup happen for the masses. Perhaps its reasonable to assume that if our computer crashes, we lose one hour worth of non-recoverable work. That's the promise if you use Time Machine with default settings.
They could do better by making mirroring standard in desktops, but in laptops they're probably on the money. They could do better by perhaps using zfs for block level backups rather than file level, but what they have now is far better than nothing.
They're just a reflection on what people are betting now. Perhaps the demographic of the betters themselves is not representative. It reflects their best information right now. In any case, you expect it to keep changing right until the close of bets. If last bets don't stop until immediately before each state election, it will be pretty accurate by then =)
But shuffling around who pays for what, doesn't fix anything. All that indirection can accomplish, is create opportunities and incentives for irresponsibility and fraud. You can't have billions of dollars filtered through the government without having a lot of it disappear, and you can't have government encode how it will be spent, without removing human judgement.
When billions of dollars flows through private companies instead, you can be sure that a lot disappears, for example into marketing. It's clear that for health care, there is some correct level of government intervention in the market. Shuffling around who pays what could actually improve the situation for everyone. It should be done regularly, in search of the minimum administrative cost in providing health care.
For home users, it would let you simply plug a new drive in your Mac, press a button, and have it just add space to your main drive. You wouldn't need to specifically setup a RAID. No resizing. No "external drive" if you don't want it that way. Just buy a drive, plug it in, and it's all handled for you.
I'm not sure you'd want it to work this way for external drives. Will they be available at crucial parts of boot time when some important files are striped across them? Even if they are, you're basically unable to ever remove the external drive again. If there's a problem with the drive, all your data is lost. Probably the way these drives work now is better. Maybe mirroring onto an external drive would work ok, but it would then be an undesirable write bottleneck.
Before there was AJAX, there was Asynchronous New Thing Holding Ransom All Xml (ANTHRAX). That had all sorts of people worried about the sustainability of their business models.
If Google would step up and add support for this larger community distribution in its Google Pack, then it could really get the attention it deserves.
I can't help but feel that sooner or later someone will come up with a real package manager for windows which makes installing quality open source software just a matter of a few clicks, as it is in Linux.
Once this happens, and the appropriate compatibility layers abound and are used widely, people on Windows will begin to depend on open source apps regularly, simply because they are the ones which are easily available and do the job. Then, windows itself will be irrelevant; just another platform.
An ugly change coming? It's been here for a while, and it certainly peaked with the Howard government's encouragement of xenophobia and treatment of asylum seekers. Fortunately, the Rudd government has swung the pendulum back somewhat, for now.
Back in my undergrad degree we had a subject on Java. Now we also took Haskell, Prolog, C beforehand. At the time, I really didn't get Java, and resented having to learn it.
It's cleaned up a lot since then, but I think what I didn't like was having OO design shoved down my throat. Some things just work well as functions, some things as objects. I've always liked mixing and matching. Without functions as first class objects, you end up having to build BlahFactoryFactories for things. I remember a good post on how Java limits your language here: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns.html.
That said, I've since programmed in Java again for work, and have found it a pleasure. I now really appreciate strong unicode support, and the excellent refactoring tools for it in Eclipse.
The same can be said about Mercury, a functional/logical programming language. The style of programming is different to C/C++/Java, but it makes it much hard to make mistakes.
arr = Hashtable()
arr['foo'] = 'bar'
How about:
arr = {}
arr['foo'] = 'bar'
or
arr = {'foo': 'bar'} 2. Small, simple, self-contained regular expressions, with variable replacement. I haven't seen another language yet that can do this in one command: $str =~ s/(foo|bar)/$arr{$1}/g;Does one line or two matter?
for key, rep in y.iteritems(): x = re.sub(key, rep, x)
3. Small, simple standard I/O. Many languages write to STDOUT easily. Few read from STDIN *or* a file this easily:"while(<>) { &foobar $_; }"
Fewer still let you slurp STDIN, too:"{local $/; $_ = <>;}"
How about
for line in sys.stdin: do_stuff(line)
or
input = sys.stdin.read()
Which is more readable?
Easier to code, easier to read, easier to maintain.
You type a lot less code to get things done, due to a mixture of dynamic typing, significant whitespace and a huge number of well designed, readable, high-level libraries. You pay a potential performance hit for all the sweet abstraction, but you worry about lower level optimisations in the rare applications/places where it matters. In practice this saves a huge amount of time.
What's more, the basic paradigm is actually the same as the C/C++/Java set, so it's very easy to learn if you're working from these languages. One thing I agree with in the article is that people are extremely resistant to taking up a new programming paradigm, for example a functional or logical programming approach.
Isn't this just a reflection of the style of government in the US? There seems to be a strong emphasis on small government, and then relying on private philanthropy to keep other things running.
The risk is that your masterpiece sits in a cupboard for the rest of your life. Someone who chooses this model really wants to contribute their work to the community, they want it to be used and they (potentially) want the respect which comes from running a strong project. Supposing you don't get the money you hope for in a small time frame, would you really rather protect your project until it's obsolete (or inflation catches up to your fixed price) rather than releasing it?
The only time I've run into it was Travis Oliphant's manual for numpy (or was it numeric python), and it really bugged me then. I wonder if it worked for him, or whether other people just wrote and released their own supporting material, to the point where the residual value of his work was too low for people to buy it.
I like the spirit of ransomware, but I think it needs some tweaking. For software, authors should acknowledge that the value of their work decreases over time, since someone else will reinvent the wheel or clone your work if you make things too onerous. If you haven't reached your money threshold within say 2 years, chances are you never will. Even that may be generous. Time limits are needed.
It also could use an independent arbiter, perhaps a NPO, which holds the source in escrow and can independently verify that money donated is measured and accounted for. That kind of transparency would make it more satisfying to purchase the product.
If an IQ test requires cultural knowledge, then I guess you'd better be up front about who you expect it to be applicable for. Not that we really expect those sort of standards for an online IQ test.
Would it give them more profit though? Offering lower-priced systems would undercut their more expensive offerings, and they'd have to compete with other vendors (like Dell) who are already heavily geared towards that end of the market.
Presumably you're unable to deploy 40,000 laptops in Peru without backing or support from either other NGOs or the Peruvian government. He simply said that there was only one staff member dedicated to deployment. Perhaps their job was to coordinate a much larger pool of non-OLPC staff and volunteers. Without knowing the scale of OLPC staffing or the support from Peru they got, it's difficult to determine if this situation was really so poorly managed.
Maybe the bandwidth concern is really a concern for reputation. To use Ask Slashdot to get developers and advertise a specific project is a little crass. He's being polite, and trying not to abuse the system.
Perhaps the best response is that having only one distro (or app) is extremely risky, and the wars raged to control its direction could be insane. The current state of development seems wasteful, but it's quite reasonable as a decentralized evolutionary strategy.
Healthy competition is a good thing, and keeps this form of development from stagnating. Even if Linux one day dominates on the desktop, there will be enough competition from within the community to keep things vibrant.
If he has a bios password, he might need to get a service techie to reset the bios for him first.
If there's more later that he needs access to, well, people often reuse passwords. There might then be a good case for taking the time to crack his root and user passwords to access other things (e.g. an online account not made in his real name). I'd also check his email for web-site subscriptions; he may reuse one or more passwords between sites too, and some will send it back in plaintext email.
For my wife, TV is a very high priority, at least for particular shows. It's how she unwinds after work, and (sometimes) a fun way to socialise with friends. For me, when I sit in front of one for more than 2 mins, I start to get twitchy, almost like I can see the minutes of my life dripping down the drain.
Maybe about 10 years ago I started feeling like that. It actually can make unwinding together difficult for my wife and I since we both need different things. For me, I need something mentally active but different to my work to unwind.