celticjames

Before anyone else seriously critiques this article, it is a parody. It is posted to a blog called "paroday" purportedly written by "Graham Paulo". Read "Microsoft is dead" (http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html) by Paul Graham for the target of the parody.

Have you been to Mississauga? It's urban sprawl gone mad. It's one of the most bland, characterless strip mall excuses for a city in North America. The books may be balanced, but it's a joyless wasteland of big box stores and cookie cutter urban development.

Maybe in the future we will all have our own certificate authorities.

Anyone care to compare this to Xmarks for me? I've been using Xmarks because it also supports syncing between Firefox, IE, Safari, and Chrome. What advantage do I get from Weave?

It's really important to know at the start of the semester what projects will be wanted and needed. Students may have their own ideas for what they want to do, but it's so much easier to get the ear of a developer when you are working on something they want. This is critical if you need to get something committed.

Another commenter mentioned Google Summer of Code. The projects that are successful for gsoc are the ones where students and mentors did a lot of talking about what the community wants before submitting a proposal.

I worked with David on the Mozilla Education project. Here's my two cents.

It's easy to put out the call for volunteers. It's hard to cope with the deluge of people who want to help.

Code bases are complex and/or large in any meaningful project. Even skilled programmers may take time to get up to speed. Core developers have limited time available to answer questions. (People don't scale.)

For someone working outside of a classroom, this may be fine. They aren't on a schedule and can claw their way into a community over time.

But if you plan to unleash a classroom of students on an open source project, what you really need is an instructor who operates at or near the level of a core contributor to that project. The instructor is the one who bears the overhead of scaling up developer time by funneling student questions into a high signal to noise stream.

Mozilla is a bit unusual in that they actual pay someone (David) to do that.

I know instructors have attempted to replicate this model with other large open source projects, but it hasn't been a success. Attempts I know of to work with openoffice or the Eclipse Foundation didn't really go anywhere. RedHat/Fedora might be a good place to look. Try to get in touch with Greg De Koenigsberg there.

The financial incentives for downloading Joel Fuhrman's book from btjunkie are great!

How effective is hand sanitizer compared to hand washing? Is hand sanitizer more likely to be used than hand washing? Does the introduction of hand sanitizer reduce infection more than hand washing? It's always more useful to compare to a baseline or a standard practice.

When I saw the character in the wheelchair I immediately thought of the Poul Anderson story "Call me Joe": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_me_Joe I haven't heard anything about Poul Anderson being credited as the inspiration for this story.

That would make a good iPhone app.

Rather than virtualization, I'd prefer to see something like WINE. You would think that Microsoft would be able to write translation layer without the overhead of a virtual machine.

This seems like a gross misunderstanding of Richard Dawkins's argument. The neo-darminist claim is that all genes are inherently selfish. In order for a gene to survive, that gene must have a phenotypic effect that maximizes the survival of the gene. Because natural selection occurs at the level of the gene, altruistic genes disappear from the gene pool. So I don't know what the scientist quoted in the article could possibly mean when he says he has discovered the selfish gene. (I hope it is not necessary to point out on this forum that selfish genes have nothing to do with the selfishness or altruism of an individual organism. Selfish genes can produce altruistic people if that's the phenotypic effect that helps them survive.)

I don't think cubism can represented in 3D models this way. Cubism is a way to represent an object from many perspectives on a 2D plane. That's why the faces of cubist subjects have both a profile and frontal view. This artist really needs to find a 4D subject to represent in 3D. That would be closer to the spirit of cubism.

Blogger is the new Hotmail.

I really like dreamhost as a webhosting service, and I am sure they are honest as a domain registrar, but if you are looking purely in terms of domain registration and are handling the webhosting elsewhere, I'd say dyndns.org is one of the best. They have a great feature set for domain management.

How does this work out for open source delevopers: "Microsoft is providing a covenant not to sue open source developers for development or non-commercial distribution of implementations of these protocols."

Open source != non-commercial. RedHat, Novell, etc... can and do sell open source solutions that provide interoperability with Microsoft products. It seems to me that this is a move to make Microsoft protocols the de facto standard while still wielding the power to sue competitors who use them.

The religions by language breakdown is not terribly revealing, but the opposite, languages by religion, is very interesting.

Atheist like Python, C, C++ and Java. A very practical toolkit. Most of the major large religions, Christian, Muslim and Hindu also seem to favour widely used languages. Buddhist ranks Lisp very highly. Jewish coders like web languages like PHP, Perl and Javascript. Pagan's must all be running Apache servers, because Perl, PHP and Python dominate. Unitarians, true to there reputation, go for an eclectic mix that includes oddities like Groovy, D and LOGO. I think people's deepest held beliefs about how the world works does seem to lead them towards certain languages more than others.