The "other way" may be basically the same, except faster and more reliably without any awareness of what you've actually done. Plus it has a huge head start in development on the "conscious" version.

When I put it that way it sounds like a "mature black-box library vs. home-grown kludge" situation. However, I think a more common analogy is "specialized hardware vs. software simulation." (Sorry, I don't do cars.)

Be that as it may, I was describing Martin Luther King, Jr. Whatever loss, misery, and devastation he left behind him in his personal life, I think he comes off pretty well if you take a larger view.

Even worse, the popularity of Asperger's as a self-diagnosis among geeks prevents them from getting a better grasp on their problems. Many other causes can produce similar symptoms, and even when a diagnosis of Asperger's is accurate, it isn't the last word on a person's mental health. An Aspie can have other psychological problems.

For instance, I had long thought I might be an Aspie, and when I ended up in therapy, I waited to see if my therapist mentioned it. (On my first visit, I spotted a couple of books about Asperger's on her bookshelf, so I figured she would be a good check on my self-diagnosis.) After several visits she did mention that my description of my childhood experiences sounded like I could have Asperger's, and she knew an authority on Asperger's who could screen me. At the time, my health insurance wouldn't cover the screening (a couple thousand bucks,) so I basically asked, is the screening worth it? She said it would be interesting to have a more expert opinion on whether it was really Asperger's, but:

1. My current level of functioning didn't support a diagnosis, so the diagnosis would be retrospective.
2. My problems were at most indirectly related to Asperger's, in that I was deeply formed by my early social difficulties, whatever caused them.
3. Asperger's would be one factor among several traumatic influences in my childhood.
4. There was no particular question about my current condition that would be cleared up by a diagnosis of Asperger's.
5. All in all, the course of my therapy would be minimally affected by a diagnosis of Asperger's.

This from a therapist who had books about Asperger's on her shelf and who suggested I get screened for it without any prompting on my part. Clearly she was interested in Asperger's and knowledgable about it. She just didn't think it was that important for my further development.

Contrast that with the many geeks who (without any professional diagnosis) use Asperger's to wholly define their past experience and future potential.

As someone who manifested many Asperger's symptoms as a child, I remember thinking all the time, "It would be obviously better if everyone did X, but they don't, because they're stupid." And you know what? None of my insights did anybody a damn bit of good. Aspies are great at pushing forward some fields (such as computing,) but they fail badly at fields that require influencing other people. RMS is only a partial exception to this.

One example: Aspies are more ethically daring basically because they don't recognize a lot of the small-scale pain they cause. It's easy for them to see the social big picture because they don't see the social small picture. They don't hesitate to call for large changes because they don't understand the cost of the social and cultural disruption that large changes cause, or they dismiss them as irrelevant. Calling for change doesn't make it happen. You need people who can make changes happen by hacking the culture. For instance, Ghandi came up with a theory of nonviolent resistance that meshed perfectly with Hindu culture, while at the same time making it open to all Indians. Then Martin Luther King, Jr. adapted ideas from Ghandi and elsewhere to a completely different cultural context.

An Aspie in MLK's place would have said, "Look, these Indian guys totally kicked ass with this approach, and I know we're black and Christian but we just need to forget about that because this stuff FUCKING WORKS. I mean, this is so OBVIOUS and I can't believe you guys are getting hung up on the fact that these ideas seem a little alien. They make perfect sense in a Hindu context, and if you're interested in that I can recommend some scriptures. If you're not going to bother understanding it, then just SHUT THE HELL UP and let the smart people talk. What the hell is wrong with you fucking dickhead morons? I give up. I can't make it any more obvious than I already have. Why don't you just go and play basketball and be cool and have sex and all that stuff that's so much more important than the FREEDOM OF OUR RACE. Idiots."

Aspie-type people make valuable contributions to society (and I have to believe this or I'd just off myself) but Aspies are impotent in the face of many important problems. Sometimes the right guy for the job is someone who is really unattractive from a geeky point of view -- like a slick, charismatic, self-aggrandizing, womanizing minister.

A guy with a technical degree who goes straight into management is not a technical guy. He will start out as naive about technical issues as the average green hire and go downhill from there. We need people with ten years' technical experience moving into management.

SWT's performance varie depending on the toolkit used to implement it. Unfortunately, the GTK+ implementation is notoriously slow, and nobody outside IBM knows whether a Qt version will ever be released.

It's simpler to use something already built and tested, with known strengths and weaknesses, multiple mostly-compatible implementations available, tool support, and plenty of books and trained personnel to choose from, than to use a much simpler solution that is less well understood, or worse, one that I have to design and implement myself.

Or, to put it another way, why do the Chinese and Indians do business with each other in English when Esperanto would suffice?

Don't judge based on this article. The author's "young guys playing fast and loose" vs. "stuffy but reliable old guys" way of explaining things misses the point. Either he's a bad writer, or he doesn't know what he's talking about. A much better treatment can be found here.

Thanks for the tips. I'll take a look at lazy-lock. I don't know if the font-locking code even terminates on the problem files and don't have the patience to find out, so caching wouldn't help.

Just out of curiosity, since you're well-qualified to prognosticate, what do you foresee for Emacs? Will a more modern Lisp-based editor eventually displace Emacs, or will Emacs continue to eat its young until something totally different kills it?

What I meant by "RAM is cheap" is that on modern systems you'll only start swapping under pathological circumstances. The GP poster was worried that running two jobs concurrently would turn the disk into a bottleneck. His objection was framed around jobs with heavy disk I/O, but I also wanted to address the question of swapping, which was a valid a concern back in the days when switching from task #1 to task #2 could mean swapping in a bunch of code and data for task #2. These days, #2's code and data would be in memory somewhere, a much quicker trip than disk.

That seems to be the case to me, too. It's the applications that drop the ball. Emacs can get hung opening a large .cpp file if the macros confuse the parser used by the syntax highlighter. Why isn't that done in a separate thread so I can make my changes and close the file while the syntax highlighter flails in the background?

Short answer: only one thing I mentioned involved disk I/O, RAM is cheap, and application frameworks typically limit the number of jobs being run at one time.

If there's really a performance need to serialize tasks involving disk I/O, then go ahead and serialize them. Eclipse, the application framework I'm most familiar with, makes this straightforward: just define a scheduling policy that allows only one job to run at a time and apply that policy to all your disk I/O jobs. Other jobs will continue to be scheduled and run according to the default policy or whatever other policy you specify -- might as well get some work done while you're waiting for the I/O to complete.

Yeah, I agree. There are a few rare types of software that are naturally parallel or deal with concurrency out of necessity, such as GUI applications, server applications, data-crunching jobs, and device drivers, but basically every other kind of software is naturally single-threaded.

Wait....

Sarcasm aside, few computations are naturally parallelizable, but desktop and server applications carry out many computations that can be run concurrently. For a long time it was normal (and usually harmless) to serialize them, but these days it's a waste of hardware. In a complex GUI application, for example, it's probably fine to use single-threaded serial algorithms to sort tables, load graphics, parse data, and check for updates, but you had better make sure those jobs can run in parallel, or the user will be twiddling his thumbs waiting for a table to be sorted while his quad-core CPU is "pegged" at 25% crunching on a different dataset. Or worse: he sits waiting for a table to be sorted while his CPU is at 0% because the application is trying to download data from a server.

Your example of building construction is actually a good example in favor of concurrency. Construction is like a complex computation made of smaller computations that have complicated interdependencies. A bunch of different teams (like cores) work on the building at the same time. While one set of workers is assembling steel into the frame, another set of workers is delivering more steel for them to use. Can you imagine how long it would take if these tasks weren't concurrent? Of course, you have to be very careful in coordinating them. You can't have the construction site filled up with raw materials that you don't need yet, and you don't want the delivery drivers sitting idle while the construction workers are waiting for girders. I'm sure the complete problem is complex beyond my imagination. By what point during construction do need your gas, electric, and sewage permits? Will it cause a logistical clusterfuck (contention) if there are plumbers and eletricians working on the same floor at the same time? And so on ad infinitum. Yet the complexity and inevitable waste (people showing up for work that can't be done yet, for example) is well worth having a building up in months instead of years.

False ideas don't require personal vulnerabilities. Any attempt to engage with the world produces false ideas, because we are ignorant and fallible beings.

Personal wisdom and enlightenment can reduce one's vulnerability to manipulation, but it does not answer political questions. It can tell me why I'm scared, but if my fear is based on the prospect of an undesirable outcome, spiritual wisdom cannot tell me whether the outcome is plausible or likely. Even if you reject fear as a basis for thought and action, you will still find yourself agreeing with it quite often. For instance, assuming you have not yet achieved perfect enlightenment, you are probably scared of injecting heroin. You were manipulated into this fear by information and media provided by people who want you to be scared of injecting heroin. Spiritual wisdom allows you to realize that you are scared and manipulated, but it does not answer the question of whether or not it is a good idea to inject heroin.

In general, there's no way to dodge the necessity of examining everything on its merits, and no way to get out of the catch-22 that all the information you consume is produced, directly or indirectly, by people who care about what you do and believe. Rejecting all self-interested manipulation would mean rejecting almost all human interaction. It would certainly make it impossible to learn anything about politics. As for fear, you can reject fear, but you can't simply say, "Fear is on one side of the issue, so I must be on the other." The presence of fear is informative, but it is not that informative.

To go back to the example at hand, wisdom cannot advise me to ignore the issue, nor can it resolve the issue one way or the other. After all, the bogeyman prospect is a story of how the current legal system is vulnerable to exploitation and how that will affect American business. Wisdom helps, but not the kind of wisdom you're talking about. The issue must be approached by seeking information, reading opposing viewpoints, and discussing it.

You're wrong about the user interface. Remember how everyone complained, "I don't mind the iPhone as a product, but I can't stand how people who own them are constantly taking them out and playing with them just to show them off?" That's what I thought, too, until I got one and started pulling it out to read news on the web every time I had to wait in line for a few seconds. It was a completely new experience after years of button and stylus phones. Other devices made it possible many years ago, but the iPhone was the first device that made it pleasant enough that large numbers of people actually bothered.

Anecdotal evidence: I had a Nokia n800, which I thought was a really neat device, but it never seemed worth the hassle. I carried it on and off for several weeks, and then it started gathering dust. I didn't use any mobile device's browser (neither the n800 nor the ones in my various phones) more than once a month until I got my iPhone, then suddenly I was browsing the web away from home several times a day. The difference was usability (especially one-handed usability) and the slim form factor.

By now some slick, usable Blackberries are on the market, but I bet they account for a small percentage of RIM's subscribers. You have a point about tethering, but there's a difference between a handful of traveling businessmen tethering when they don't have any other option and a bunch of young people watching YouTube all day and not even bothering to look for wifi.

I think you missed the fact that I was disagreeing with you in the explanation of people's behavior. People have little imagination, and for most people, almost any impulse takes them in the direction of conformity. They can find group identity and ready-made identities on the right or on the left, through worship of corporations or enmity to them. (But you know that already.)

What the corporations are doing is slightly more subtle than just offering an opportunity for conformism. Their reasoning even allows people who distrust corporations to believe that trusting corporations over consumers is the least bad option.