p_nathan

Well said. The bulk of my recent code is simply not available for public use.

They have paid the price already. You pay the libraries cost either directly or through your taxes.

She's popular to the tune of 800 free downloads per week and 10 sales per week.

Anecdotally, one of the ISVs over on Programmers.stackexchange had a piracy problem; when he started detecting pirated software and reminding the user to buy, not steal, his sales numbers directly went up.

I think this idea that downloading IP for free is ok is really wrong. If you want something, you should pay the price for it, whether the price be fixed or negotiated. IP piracy is theft.

Why set up one gun when you can set up six? More firepower always wins, right?

Also, hoghide is incredibly tough.

The article does not say anything about web controlled guns being illegal. In 25+ states, cyber hunting is banned.

The article headline is definitely in error, not just misleading.

I'm not saying anything about innate ability. Just as a lawyer gains 'legal lenses' as they work through law school, so do programmers gain 'software lenses'.

When considering programmer to be "anyone who writes some code", I agree.

But when considering programmer to be someone who is comfortable:

- operating on multiple planes of abstraction

- using recursion/pointers

- 'seeing' the concepts embodied under computer languages

- 'seeing' the code flow

Then, yes, the programmer does think differently. Because it's his job to think this way to communicate correctly to the computer. Not that it's unattainable by someone outside of the field, but by the act of becoming competent, it changes the one coming in.

If it's important enough to be committed, it's important enough to be remembered.

The right kind of advertising is pretty awesome, because it provides value for me. Right now, Stack Overflow and Amazon have the best ads out there, IMO. SO took a while to get decent ads too.

I watched some stuff on Hulu the other day. Fancy cars, teeth whitening commercials, drugs I don't ever anticipate using, and other useless stuff to me was marketed at me. That's just not a good ad model I think. I would love to see some really new and interesting products - not Another Car|Soda|Beer commercial.

Old Spice Guy was a pretty striking ad series. I don't know that it resonated with me, but it sure is memorable!

I think - supposing that Mrs. Chua was grossly misrepresented, which seems a bit likely - that the WSJ owes her a public apology and the opportunity for a rebuttal piece.

Perl does not have the sex appeal of Ruby or Python right now.

That's a shame, but that's the way it is.

Piano has assorted benefits, sure. But I'm not convinced that it's worth making a major investment into unless you're focused on being a professional musician.

Regarding the WSJ essay - my perspective is that what Chua's kids are going through is barbaric and will not generate well-educated, Renaissance-esque people.

There is tremendous value in learning and discipline, and my observation of American schools makes me think that American schools are pretty weaksauce in the discipline and focus department. I don't think anyone out there denies that.

To pick at a particular example of Chua - music. I am better-suited than some others to look at this, since I myself - and my sister - spent time learning music as children and into our college years.

Mrs Chua! Your kids do well in violin and piano. And only violin and piano. Why violin and piano? Is the trumpet - a fine instrument! - beneath them? Or the viola, an underappreciated sibling to the violin? Perhaps it was simply too blue-collar to consider such an instrument as the guitar and its fine heritage in baroque European works. Or perhaps your children's true ability would have been in the drums. But, no, alas. It was the high-brow, well-respected violin and piano you chose for them. How simple it is to say, "ah, these are the respected instruments, the instruments bringing good face to us". Mrs. Chua, you have deeply restricted your children's musical activities. You really should not have done that. There is no call to regulate and legislate play like that. You should have let them explore their own mind, their own heart. They are Human beings too, and their perspective should be taken into account for their play. If they sought after being a professional musician, then there would have been time for focus, and much of it. Focus is the hallmark of a professional! But play is something else.

That is well said.

I was chatting with a friend who is studying education for her PhD about the article. We were unimpressed by Chua's approach and think it's quite too extreme.

What about when Gorillas are doing the marketing?

I rummaged up the numbers from the BLS this fall for unemployment vs. education over the past 10 years. They came out to something like this:

No HS degree: > 10% unemployment

HS/some college: 7-9% unemployment

Associates: 5-7%

Bachelors+: 4%

Seasonal fluctuations drop dramatically as education levels go up.

I have heard anecdotally that Masters+ is 2%, but the BLS did not provide data there.

The BLS did not quantify the jobs (e.g., the MA in English working as a barista qualifies as employed).

My conclusion is this: the data recommends a degree for employment, statistically speaking.

Back when I finished my undergrad in '06, the general perspective I ran into was, "oh, you didn't do open source. shame. don't call us back".

I spent my time trying to do well in school, not contribute unpaid work to open source.

You can avoid somewhat of that with some considered keymappings.

For instance, I remap Control to Alt a ton in emacs. It's very easy for me to thumb-key instead of pinky-key. YMMV, depending on keyboard and hand-size.

Disagree. With the move towards electronic articles, one needs a login to access the computers at the library or to read the articles.

Sorry. :(

As a counterpoint, I'd like to say that it makes a lot of sense to retain some level of control of servers you are renting. You want to avoid your cloud becoming a botnet cloud (what would that be, a virus cloud? O.o).

If you have your own admins keeping things up to date and polished, it removes (1) some grief from the customer and (2) allows you to rest more comfortably knowing your admin (theoretically) knows what he's doing.

The author points out that for conventional electric devices, there is no input from the electric company. True. But, if one puts in an industrial facility, the electric company starts caring, because the loads can not be simply ignored (c.f. inductive/reactive loads). That has analogies to the cloud.

There are decided advantages for the customer to have full control, there are decided advantages for the vendor to have full control.

I'm not sure of the origins of the zenny/ascetic minimalist idea either, but it certainly is present, and not a figment of my imagination (http://cultofless.com/ is an example, so is http://www.farbeyondthestars.com/minimalist-freedom-how-to-l...). And that's really the sort of thing I am talking about. It's not immoral to have stuff, and I feel this "stuff is immoral" vibe floating around from some proponents of Minimalism). Some stuff is worth keeping, and lives that deal in physical things simply need physical stuff. Be prepared, as the Boy Scouts say.

Less shirts helps your mind? Really? Really? Not even close to convinced.

There are a ton of thunguses in one's life that can be ditched to remove the maintenance of. There's a lot of validity in that particular concept.

But when one wants to develop a fuller life than virtually living - things become useful towards that goal. Let me give some examples.

* Musical instruments. iPad instruments just don't cut it.

* Older books. There are a ton of out-of-print and hard-to-find books that just aren't online, especially in the non-tech fields.

* Gardening requires tools.

* Any variant of a construction trade requires tools.

* Travelling longer distances in a place without a densely connected public transport requires (bike | car | skateboard | etc), which requires maintenance tools.

* Cooking & baking requires a multitude of tools; hosting people for dinner requires kitchenware.

* Offline gaming usually requires game boards & misc accouterments.

I could go on, but those examples are from my own life. The existence of a monk is simply not pragmatically livable for people who fancy dealing with the physical. I like some of Christopher Alexander's writings as he searched for a pattern language in architecture. He considered highly complex systems where people engaged in their environment and lived and hypothesized the idea of the "Quality without a Name", and he had this to say about it, "It is a subtle kind of freedom from inner contradictions". What I see the Minimalism people striving for is this freedom, and they are seeking this freedom by removing as many pieces from the system as they can so that the contradictions go away. I - obviously - don't think that this is the complete solution.

While environments and ourselves do mutually shape each other, I believe that a complete solution is to work towards being consistent and uncontradictory with the things we have both in our heads and outside of them. Sometimes that's getting rid of things, sometimes that's adding things, and other times that's simply changing things around.

Well, that's my 0.02c anyway.

(edit1: formatting)

Bill Gates is, in my mind, a phenomenal businessman who also evidently was a pretty hotshot coder before MS got rolling.

I see Gate's/Microsoft's genius as being able to bring a usable computer into every household. Of course there are other factors, but, man, it's impressive what Microsoft helped bring about. Think of it! We live in a SF world today, and Microsoft, for all their flaws, helped it come to pass.

The Brits often have such a way with words. Bless them.

A chap named Brooks wrote an article a long time ago that went by the name "No Silver Bullet".

Sorta sad how the world keeps looking for the silver bullet to slay the vampires of software. You'd think by now we'd know...

Syntax helps frame thought. I wrote a comment on this topic over on the StackExchange just the other day. http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/30135/does-sy...

I don't know of any larger-business CEOs besides Jobs who dresses casually. Certainly the execs(mid-size company) in my company always have a suit on in public/semi-public appearances.

Could you cite your assertions please?

Partial Baloney!

Fast food joints could be mechanized. I have a scheme for a nearly fully automated department (grocery/walmart/etc) chain. It would take capital and engineering, but it's a solved problem.

There's sort of the "Computer Science" vs. "Software Engineering" difference going on there.