seclorum

This is a subject that is very dear to me, so I will try not to rant about it.

There are a couple of things "wrong" with the way we teach kids computers today.

Our educators are in the hands of the masters of consumers. When a new technology comes out, we all abandon the current stuff, and engage in the upgrade cycle. Repeat until generations have no clue any more about what the old ways were.

This is an absolute falsehood pushed upon society by those who wish to control the consumer base. It is consumption destroying education, plain and simple.

The point is this: Every C64 that was ever produced - heck, every 8-bit computer, ever - STILL WORKS, or can be MADE TO WORK in the area of computer education.

It is absolutely arbitrary that computers get old. Every machine that was ever made, is still just as useful as it ever was - the difference is, the user walked away (because they are consumers not users).

I have a large collection of 'antique' computers in my midst: C64, Atari, Oric, Atmos, Telestrat, MSX, heck .. even a BeBox and an SGI O2. All are still working, all are still quite capable of engaging a young mind in the exercise of exploration and discovery that makes a good developer.

And, my 3 year old and 6 year old kids LOVE THEM. They absolutely LOVE the old sprites, the old simple ways. The 6-year old takes immense joy out of typing:

    10 PING
    20 WAIT 15
    30 EXPLODE
    40 WAIT 50
    50 GOTO 10

The 3 year old absolutely loves that he can turn the machine off and on, and off and on, and off and on .. and it will still work. Can't do that with Daddy's workstation!

So the point is, parents: disconnect your kids from the consumer trap. Give them old computers to learn computing on. Everything they will ever learn, WILL STILL BE VALUABLE TODAY when they 'grow up and get a bigger computer' - the reason is, because computers still work, fundamentally, the same way.

I predict my 6 year old will be hacking in assembly by the time he is 10 - just like his Dad did. And thats what made me the developer I am today.

(BTW: yes, I also have rPi's, Beagleboards, and so on.. when they're ready, they'll be available to the kids to hack on. But if the kids can't do their own low-level programming by the time they get the rPi dusted off, I will be very surprised..)

EDIT: Another thing that is 'wrong' with computers today, imho, is the decoupling of development from use. Again, our computers have been turned into consumption platforms - the moment that Microsoft removed the developer tools from being part of the base OS image, computers started to lose a lot of value. Any OS that doesn't ship with a way of building apps for it, inherently included by design, isn't an Operating System - its a Consumer Capture System.

Do everything you can to get development tools back into the OS, people. It is more important than the desire to reduce the effect of having 'too many smart developers out there'..

Can a very minimal gcc be written which would be capable of bootstrapping the entire gcc compiler?

Yes. In fact, this is how gcc is built - in stages. First stage: build a compiler that can build the compiler. Recompile the compiler with the newly built compiler. Do it again. Repeat until completion. ;)

Take the new iPhone 5C. Turn it over. Look at the position of the Apple logo, and the "iPhone" brand.

Put the case on it. Turn it over, look at the position of the Apple logo, and the "iPhone" brand.

Hint: It looks like crap.

That sort of detail wouldn't have escaped Steve Jobs.

I was impressed by his lack of interest in Harry Potter, as I consider it a pox on modern culture, but saddened by his lack of interest in music. To each, their own .. but I hope he discovers something frivolous and trivial, whether its music or trashy fiction, at some point in his life to enjoy. Genius without frivolity is often a fast road to torture and anguish, a fact that wouldn't be true if it weren't for the fact of the existence of both music, and trashy fiction, in perpetuity ..

He needs to get help starting a hackerspace.

http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/

There is no better way to treat Genius than to let it propagate, and no better way to propagate knowledge, socially, than a hacker space. Sure, he could try to go to school - and he should - but getting others involved in his hacker projects is a lot more achievable.

Every time I see these Venus pictures, I think about all the dull, lifeless, empty places on Earth that a spacecraft could land in, and lead us to conclude that there's nothing of any interest there.

Of course, I trust the scientists, but its sure fun to think we landed in some Venutian-preserved national park, where no Venutian dare go, for fear of incurring a trespassing ticket or two..

Read the article. The Archeological record is there for your interest.

You didn't post any evidence, but lots of theory, whereas there is plenty of evidence that the human species does indeed manage to survive .. in spite of ones best efforts.

A good sign that its being managed.

Actually, its a view supported by evidence, whereas your view is supported by .. superstition, scientifically described but nevertheless: still superstition.

We managed to survive. We'll continue to manage to survive: if we manage.

Welcome to logical positivism. :P

We've already demonstrated that we can bend physical laws to our needs, or have you missed that point in your rush to cast away any faith in the human species' ability to manage its resources? Because: managing our resources is what makes the difference, entirely, between extinction and survival, and we've been doing precisely that for 200,000 years so far.

Remind me, with science: When were we humans last wiped out, again?

.. okay, fine: then you go and see how we've managed our resources in .. oh, lets just take - The Whole of Europe - and compare.

Just because some humans 'are stupid' doesn't mean all humans are. There is a lot of evidence that we, who choose to manage, will outlive those who choose to be stupid. 200,000 years of it, in fact.

(Stupidity might be contagious; the point is though: so is intelligence.)

Past performance doesn't guarantee future returns.

You might want to consult the factual record of tens of thousands of years of farmers on that particular point of view. ;) You are right that it doesn't guarantee anything, except to those who carefully apply scientific principles to their management of resources, folks otherwise known as 'farmers'.

he standard of living should also be considered. Given that we can support 9 billion people, will each of them be as well off compared to if we were instead supporting half that?

For at least the last 200 years, the standard of living of hundreds of millions of people has been raised, again and again, over and over. So I'd say, if we can manage it, this trend will continue. I think thats the point of the article: there are no environmental reasons, at all, why we couldn't manage to sustain life on Earth, indefinitely.

(There are only psychological reasons. A fact proven, nearly, by a lot of the responses in this thread ..)

What I know of the Pirate Party is that they are suffering for their own collective weakness and inability to organize.

It is a fallacy that 'safety in (representative) numbers' is a way to organize a movement; big social movements need leaders who are able to demonstrate the cause, and Liquid Democracy dilutes this fact as much as it can - not because its proponents want to be successful, but because the idea of a benign leadership is abhorrent to those who want 'no leaders'.

Like it or not, we live in a world where nothing gets done if it depends on a committee to do it. This is a very difficult thing for the Pirate Party to deal with; since almost everything the Party tries to do must conform to the rules of consensus implied by the Liquid Democracy policies.

The Pirate Party's leadership is hamstrung by the requirement to get approval for everything, from their masses. Everything.

Eventually, the same thing will happen to the Pirate Party that happened to Socialism: its proponents will learn that capitalisation is very important to getting new ideas propagated among the masses. So far, the PP does not represent much of great value to the individual, and it has a very difficult time even agreeing, internally, on how to create any such value to sell to the people..

Its a projection of Malthusian ethics: "Humans are stupid".

Actually the point of this article is: "Evidence suggests that despite what we think: Humans are smart".

The main failure of this article is that it assumes that social problems are outside biology and that they are easy to solve.

The main point of this article is that the archeological record proves that this is the case. 200,000 years of evidence suggests that, in spite of our superstitions, we humans are capable of managing our resources and replenishing the world from which we derive our sustenance.

Are you sure you're not just harboring a fixed superstition on the subject, which has just been challenged?

Fixed ideas being challenged is exactly what science - not superstition - is all about.

The point of the article is we wouldn't be here today at all if we hadn't been able to manage our resources. The science demonstrates this, over and over: land re-use is the key to it. The same area of land, supporting increasingly larger and larger populations, demonstrates that in fact we can manage our population growth, and have done so for 200,000 years.

But what does your superstition have to do with this? Malthusian theories super-posit that we will perish, but the archeological record demonstrates that we are capable, as a species of dealing with this.

Because you don't know that you can just cut the data wires in a cheap USB cable, and want to be 'protected' by a cool hipster toy that'll sit in your laptop/phone baggie until you're at some party and can shout in triump when someone plugs in their phone 'just to charge': "NO, USE MY USB CONDOM!!"

EDIT: if this thing actually had some diagnostic LED's that would show you that the 'power port' was trying to do something nefarious on the data lines, it'd be a lot more useful than an ultra-cheap snipped cable imho ..

Doesn't work for me:

    $ npm start

    > coder-base@0.0.1 start     /Users/seclorum/hak/coder/coder-base
    > node server.js

    no certificate found. generating self signed cert.
    WARNING: unhandled exception: Error: ENOENT, no such file or directory 'certs/server.key'

Growing up in a remote Australia desert beach, I spent a lot of time playing with creatures like this (among many others) and I have come to love them with a great deal of passion.

If you're ever in a situation where you want to play with an octopus, but are having a hard time getting its attention, remember this trick: take a gold coin out of your pocket, shine it in the sun, and use it to the lure the octopus into your domain. I've yet to meet an octopus I can't convince to play with me for a while, for the cost of an Australian gold coin or two.

Another thing that I love about these creatures is that they are intensely playful. I once watched an octopus playing with the sandfish around his hole .. he dangled an old crayfish head, long since hollowed out, at the end of a long string-like tentacle, luring the stupid little fish into his lair .. I watched him for hours, just lazily casting it out, bringing it back .. it didn't seem like he was fishing (although he'd have been quite capable of it) but more like just entertaining himself by watching the stupid little fish fall for the trick, over and over again ..

Lovely creatures. Be nice to them, you might make a reef friend. (Watch out for the blue-rings, though, you don't want to play with them too much, heh heh..)

Yikes, what a terrible name for this thing. How do you pronounce it? Lets break it down:

Option 1: "Gr-II-P" .. gripe. Yeah, I ride my gripe around.

Option 2: "Gr-AY-p" .. yeah, I'm gonna just get on the grape.

Option 3: "Gr-EE-p" .. just gonna 'greep' (creep) around the streets, yo..

Option 4: "Gr-E-p" .. okay, this might just work for me. ;)

Option 5: "Grey-P" .. My pee is grey, my pee is grey!

Seriously, greyp-bikes folks, please re-consider your awful, awful brand statement.

.. or, take over a project that was done by a competent developer who knew what they were doing and were able to communicate that knowledge through their codebase to anyone else who might pick up the project later on - which is the real #1 Trait of a great developer, whatever technologies they're using ..

Yeah, I agree with you: 'just because' .. the author of the article doesn't know anything about protocol buffers, node.js and Cassandra. Probably because those things are 'too new' and 'not proven' technologies - to him.

But if I had to take over a project from someone, to maintain it, I'd MUCH RATHER have it be done using those technologies than MySQL and Sinatra. Yikes!

I recently had to make a bid on a project that would give the users the ability to share their works, produced in an embedded environment, with their communities - a "Cloud" for the users. I designed the system architecture of the embedded system to be as self-maintainable as possible, and as simple as possible. Since its an embedded OS environment that the users would be using, instead of writing code I integrated such tools as git, and designed a system topology that would allow the user to be shielded from all the git hassle, while still getting a push-button experience.

I lost the gig to someone who decided that it would be better to re-invent "topography ordering" (his words) in a custom MySQL+PHP application, and when I was given an opportunity to challenge his design, I said "great, you're going to re-invent Git, poorly".

He spent the rest of the day "pissed that you compared his project to .. GitHub", which is what he thought I meant when I said "git". Nope, I said "git", I mean "git" - not 'github'. He actually didn't know how to use git.

Either way, off they go .. re-inventing the DAG with MySQL+PHP in an embedded environment, when they could've just wrapped the feature in a git script ... yikes++!

So this article just demonstrates to me that there are a lot of blow-hards out there who just don't get why its so important to apply the NIH principle to themselves, not just others ..

> they are highly regarded by the analysts.

I'm seeing an attack vector ..

C64 wasn't the only basic. GW-BASIC on the Oric-1/Atmos machines, for example, did save a byte if you used ? instead of PRINT.

Well, you can make gas-powered quadcopters at the DIY level, and as far as satellite-guided is concerned, umm: yes.

We have that in the DIY/FOSS drone-builder world. Start here: http://ardupilot.org/

The human proclivity towards cult behaviour is what I'm talking about. The UK Royals have no real function other than to promote the English personality, as a cultural artifact, to their subjects. In that regard, it functions as a cult, one of the most effective in the world, for promulgating collective reality.

This, after all, is how wars get started.

Edit: the dire circumstances being, of course, WW3 - the subject of the Queens' speech.

I think that the dependency of the English people on their Matriarch for comfort and compassion is a sign of ill-health, personally, as a society. I find it repugnant that in a time of dire circumstances, the dependency on cult figures is still a resolute component of the human social experience. Until we do away with such crutches, we'll always have the very threat of war upon us ..