The kid will get more fun doing simple web pages that he can see results in right away (important to get that positive feedback going, or he'll go back to his psp or wii or xbox or whatever). html+javascript gives him that, plus you don't need anything to start except a web browser and a text editor, - not even a web server.

Perhaps even more importantly, he'll be able to show his friends and his friends will understand what he's done. They might even think it's cool.

A tiny console app will not have the same effect.

What obnoxious pricks some people are who think that we are somehow more or less a part of nature than any other dumb animal. Our tool usage, inventiveness, resource gathering and exploitation, sexuality, cruelty, and civilizations are all perfectly natural behavior for the critter we are.

For most of civilized history, you are correct. Natural selection was still busy selecting for the local maxima of reproductive success - despite our outwardly civilized appearance.

However, we're very close to rooting the whole set-up. No other species has a welfare state! No other species remodels the entire Earth to suit them! No other species has become capable of directly modifying their own genetic structure! We're getting better all the time at subverting the natural order of things.

Yet, that's probably a good thing. Natural does not always mean good. In the wild, natural selection is a cruel executioner. Most infants die before adulthood. Many adult die of disease or malnutrition. Even fewer of these adult actually have offspring. And only a elite handfull become, in the fullness of time, the common ancestor of the whole species.

"Natural" is exactly the opposite experience we should wish for our children and for each other.

Simon

There are a couple of things that might prevent this:

1. The sneakernet
2. Wifi-net.

The Sneakernet

Disk capacity is now so large that now you can carry terrabytes of data around with you in your backpack. It will be quite feasible in a few years to transport every top twenty game, music album and movie for the last five decades in a single backpack. This amount of data is so large and so easily duplicated that it would be almost impossible to stop.

Unlike packets, that go through certain "choke-points" the sneakernet really is a peer to peer network where each node is created equal. Even if they won the battle to censor the Internet, it would be no use.

The Wifi-net

There is another peer to peer network being created right under our own noses!

How long it is before people realise that we can chain our wifi access points together to make a shadownet. An Internet that isn't run by big business but individual access points relaying traffic to each other? How on earth do you even start to control that kind of network.

I find that the attitude "This system is rubbish, we need a rewrite" is the surest sign of a junior developer. Everyone who has read anything about the history of building software systems know that this attitude will only lead to failure.

ALSA is a classic example of the second system effect. They took something that worked but had some limitations and replaced it with an absolute monster that doesn't really work, even today.

It is often the case that the most important work in making a great application is the most dull. Desktop Linux projects have a lot to learn in this respect.

Can we stop letting hypsters and random pointy-haired bosses define the language we use in our field?

I know "sprint" is meant to conjure up images of panting programmers tired after 3-4 days of grueling labour; togeether, they stand there at the end of the sprint feeling triumphant for winning the race and standing proud with the little, tiny, piece of the system they've built together.

However, to me at least, the term just sounds monumentally stupid. It's one of those "smoke and mirrors" kind of business words, where you re-label all the terminology everyone already uses to make it sound like you're doing something new and exciting. It's the kind of newsspeak that allows business people to find each other. Am I the only person who cringes when they hear the term "Scrum Master?"

I have a very useful "time box." It's called a week. It lasts seven days, two of which I rest in. It's quite a useful timebox because it is constant across all development teams, everywhere in the world! Fancy that.

I've often wondered if we converted all our power generation to wind, whether we'd replace global warming with rapid global cooling? After all, wind is really just presure differentials caused by asymmetric heating.

Is there a chance that by trying to save the planet, we replace a disaster that turns half the world in to a desert with a disaster that places northern Europe under a kilometer of ice?

Simon

Except that wiht a parasail, if the boat's engine fails you fall safely to earth.

If the engine fails for the jet pack, you smack in to the water at 100mph.

I know which one I'd rather ride!

99.9% of database claim to follow the relational model.

The rest have scalability problems that 99.9% of developers will never see throughout their entire careers.

So the answer is a simple, emphatic, no.

Google "capture the consumer surplus."

All will be revealed.

Given that Microsoft has had a massive PR success with Windows 7 beta, why not just let anyone and everyone download it?

A bigger BETA test is better for Microsoft. More people using the Windows 7 beta means that more more bugs will be reported, it will lead to more positive press about the product and that will probably translate to more sales.

So I'll ask the question: Why kill downloads of the beta?

What purpose does it serve other than disenfranchising people who are hearing about Windows 7 through their geek friends?

They should do! It would win votes!

That's the problem here. People don't want liberty they want safety.

It's not just a problem in America but in the whole of the western world.

I'm not sure how it can be fixed other than through the horror of a brutal dictatorship or two.

Maybe that's what we need to rediscover the value of liberty.

You forgot Rule 3.

Rule 3: If you can't perform a backup with the a given service don't use that service.

And it's at that point, you realise the "cloud" is vendor lock-in by another name.

Hold on a second. A theorem is code. You can write out a theorem as a set of inference rules operating on expressions. The chain of expressions eventually arrives at a given result with a given provable property.

Before someone belches: "Halting problem." I very much doubt that the halting problem has any impact on our ability to do this. The theorems are designed by humans not algorithms, all the program does is check that the conclusion really does follow from the premise.

What's to stop us creating an open source library of theorems based upon given sets of axioms that can be verified automatically with a theorem prover? Then the computer can verify a result, all the way from the basic assumptions of Peano's axioms to the dizzying heights of Fermat's last theorem in a fraction of a second.

Think of it is the Test Driven Development of mathematics. It's not enough to just write the theorem and hope for the best, you have to actually show it works like you anticipated on computer before it can be published.

We can fix the quality problem and I believe we can do so elegantly.

Simon

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001198.html

Give the person who actually wrote the article the ad revenue rather than this bottom feeding scum.