How sad is this?

Don’t call yourself a programmer: “Programmer” sounds like “anomalously high-cost peon who types some mumbo-jumbo into some other mumbo-jumbo.”  If you call yourself a programmer, someone is already working on a way to get you fired.

Whatever happened to the profession of computer programmer/analyst? The guy who understood enough about computers, computability and algorithms to actually save you money by suggesting a better solution (better being faster, cheaper, less consuming of whatever resources cost you a lot of money, etc)?

How many are rolling in their graves today?

Ritchie was a huge influence on computers and computer science as I was entering the field. The Unix operating system, the language C, so much.

It’s quite interesting to visit Ritchies home page at Murray Hill. From that page, I love this old picture of Dennis & Ken Thompson

Like Dennis Ritchie, I missed this when it happened. McCarthy pioneered LISP, a language I profoundly hated when I studied it, but it’s influences on computing and AI were profound.

BBC Technology News Obituary

The issue before the court was whether links to content should be viewed as republication of that content for the purposes of defamation law.

The decision, essentially, was no. Just linking to content is not republishing content.

There’s more …. liability could still be raised as an issue if the link repeated the defamatory content, included an endorsement of it, or was a deliberate act to make the information more readily available.

The last one sounds a bit weak to me, all links are a deliberate act, and they always make the information more readily available, so I’m a bit puzzled by that one.

So recently, when it asked me to upgrade,  I did. What a mistake.

None of my favorite plugins work with it. It disabled them all and as far as I can tell, there’s no update on the horizon for them. It looks for all the world like a beta-test version. Had I wanted to beta-test it (and there are some products I’ve done that for), I would have downloaded the beta test version. But this one looks raw and untested.

Why the rush to get it out the door?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPyl2tOaKxM

Check out the subtitles.

Papert suggested, amongst other things, that many children are bored with school and bored with being talked down to by educators. Since this had been my experience through much of school up until university, the book struck a chord with me. It came out at a time when I was at a cross-roads in my life. I wasn’t very pleased with the formal education I had received and I spent a lot of time thinking about how we educate our children. Papert held out some hope that we might break a couple of important ruts I felt our education system had gotten into.

Papert also suggested that personal computers would become so inexpensive and ubuiquitous that little children would have them, and spend some time suggesting how we might best accomplish that. Personal computers were, at the time, only for geeks like me (I built one myself, from components) and were unknown by (and unusable for) the non-geek.

And then I heard nothing more about Papert, his LOGO turtles or any of that.  For years.

Until 2 Christmases ago … when I stumbled across a WiFi robotic toy with vision, touch and sound sensors. Made by Lego, it’s their “Mindstorms” line. It’s amazing (and quite expensive for a child, which kind of misses the point). You can see it here: http://www.legomindstorms.com/ I nearly bought myself one, until my wife pointed out that the dog would probably pick a fight with it, and the dog would likely win.

It turns out, Papert hasn’t been idle all this time, just moving in circles that don’t touch me. He wrote a book called The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap. You can read about it here:  http://worldwideworkshop.org/programs/past-programs/connected-family/connected-family

When I went to kindergarden, I was 5. I could already read. My teachers were upset because they felt it was their place to teach me to read and my parents, not being trained educators, couldn’t do as good a job as they could. I can still read now, so my parents can’t have done all that bad a job.

My grandson is now 3 1/2. He uses a computer regularly to play various kinds of eye-hand co-ordination games. He can type on a special kids keyboard.He’s way more advanced than I was at 5 when I got to kindergarten and my parents received their reprimand.

My grandson will be 4 around next Christmas. Maybe he’ll be getting one of these under the tree. Or should I say “we”?

Some early clippings and pictures of the original LOGO turtles can be found here: http://cyberneticzoo.com/?p=1711

It’s a nice feature, except for the small problem that pages it was offering to translate were already in English.

It seems Google had decided, somehow, that my native language was Spanish. I’m not sure where it got this from, but it’s wrong.

So I told it my native language was English, and it went away.

Until the next time I restarted the browser. At which point it started doing it again.

Once again my native language was Spanish. So I changed it back to English and, for good measure, told it never to translate pages that are already in English.

So we co-existed peacefully for an hour or so, until I closed my browser and reopened it. It again started offering to translate English pages for me. Sure enough, it thought I was a Spanish speaker again. I turned that back to English, told it never to translate from English again, and for good measure, turned the entire feature off.

Would you care to guess what happened next?

The next time I started my browser, it gratuitously offered to translate from English again. No amount of turning this feature off worked.

So I uninstalled it instead!

Google has more than 10,000 employees worldwide. A significant number of them are programmers and IT support staff. Impressive, isn’t it?

If the world were a village of 1000 people:

584 would be Asians

123 would be Africans

95 would be East and West Europeans

84 Latin Americans

55 Soviets (still including for the moment Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, etc.)

52 North Americans

6 Australians and New Zealanders

The people of the village would have considerable difficulty communicating:

165 people would speak Mandarin

86 would speak English

83 Hindi/Urdu

64 Spanish

58 Russian

37 Arabic

That list accounts for the mother-tongues of only half the villagers. The other half speak (in descending order of frequency) Bengali, Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, German, French, and 200 other languages.

In the village there would be:

300 Christians (183 Catholics, 84 Protestants, 33 Orthodox)

175 Moslems

128 Hindus

55 Buddhists

47 Animists

210 all other religons (including atheists)

via State of the Village Report.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates pitched a new form of capitalism on Thursday that would help better serve the neglected poor  in a speech to company bosses assembled in Davos.

He posited that capitalism worked because people were motivated by self-interest to create wealth, but the system did not reflect the other key driver of human behaviour: the desire to help others.

This could be overcome if companies made more philanthropic gestures and gained recognition from the public for doing so. They could also work at stretching their activities to serve neglected and seemingly unattractive markets.

“The challenge here is to design a system including profit and recognition to do more for the poor,” he said, calling for a new form of “creative capitalism.”

via Harness capitalism to help the poor, urges Bill Gates – Yahoo! Canada Finance.

(I must admit to being a bit confused by the timing of this item. It came out in January but it only being reported on now by Yahoo)

I think he makes a point that has been made, from time to time, by others, including Bill Clinton and Jean Cretien.

There is a widening gap between rich and poor, in North America and around the world. Oh, and the middle class is being gutted. Historically, a large gap has led to global unrest, often global violence. World wars, civil wars. This time we’re seeing terrorism on a level that was never seen previously, but it’s still violent unrest.

Mostly the decisions that contribute to this gap, this disparity, are made by nations, but with the increasing power of corporations, especially multi-nationals, there are decisions that can be made by non-elected individuals that might contribute, at least somewhat, to a solution.