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I use 'engineer' because I do other things than programming (my job title is 'Technical Specialist'). Programming, systems administartion, writing processes for the software and reviewing architectural designs.

Everything I do pretty much falls into either software or electrical (hardware) engineering, at a higher or lower level depending on the job. I don't think of mechanical and structural engineers as having a monopoly on the term.
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This lament applies to ALL the subjects in school, not just math. The problem is you just can't teach the joy of each one of these subjects to each of the students.

Some students will enjoy certain subjects and just 'get it'. But most won't, and I do not think there is any to teach it. You just can't.

So you teach what you can: at least they can read, even if they don't understand literature. Same for math: at least they can manipulate the symbols.

And the proof of the problem is the "new math". It tries very hard to do what he is saying and it's been a failure. At the end of it students don't know how to do math.

Except for those students who excel at math - but they would excel at it no matter how it was taught.
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The benchmark is faulty but nonetheless informative.
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Vignette's CMS has offered this functionality for years in the commercial enterprise space, and Adobe/Macromedia Contribute has offered this functionality for years in the commercial consumer space.
This is good news for everyone. As the iPhone OS takes off, Google and Nokia will be free to create a strong contender to this.
I'd love to give Silverlight a test run, but I can't develop content for it on my Mac...
"Not to mention that "build to flip" companies simply suck."

That's a slight generalization. Also you can actually do both - build to be profitable long term, and also build to be attractive in terms of acquisitions.
it's hard when ubuntu role model is windows, implicitly by promoting it to convert windows user to linux, explicitly by making some apps look and feel similar to windows

the role model should be osx ... i'll wait the day when i see tutorials about 'how changing my osx desktop to feel & look like Ubuntu'
GPS data is as close to "free" as you can get. It's a one-way satellite-to-earth transmission; bandwidth speeds are huge, and the size of the data transferred is minimal.

Consider the number of free satellite TV broadcasts. Take into account the sheer size of the hi-def audio/video feeds. Compare that to a latitude/longitude packet sent from a GPS satellite.... see what I mean?
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Presumably you have to be logged in to be able to comment, so it seems easier to just remember what every user has read.
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You're right. NoScript was blocking googleapis.
Old news but this is something worth duping.
Even deeper: The American free-market libertarians pulled a coup when they were able to redefine, in public discourse, what it means to have 'liberty' (compare the definition of 'libertarian' ca. 1900 Europe and ca. 2000's USA).
I think one problem is a lot of people seem to like to call themselves philosophers because they then think that they can just think things without having to motivate or argue for them and usually accompany that with the normal bullshit argument that science doesn't explain everything(hey noone said it does and obviously there are loads of things to discover left, we just said it does a better job of explaining things than any other system of thought). However that's not what philosophy is, rather it is about arguing and thinking about stuff that can't be verified by experiments, it doesn't mean you can just say blahaba, that is mysticism.

However I think there is great value in philosophy and everyone obviously does it more or less in their lives without studying at university.

As far as hackers go:

It has value for science, discussing the scientific method and clearing up expressions so that we can argue clearly and logically without fallacies.

It has value for AI and robotics in discussing the morals of inventing intelligent/conscious systems and discussing if it is even possible or not.
I took "orientalist" to be a pejorative in line with Edward Said's Orientalism -- i.e., accusing its target of attitudes shaped by Western imperialism. It's not really correct to use it this way, since "Orientalist" already has the meaning you describe, but I've seen it a handful of times in an idea-suppressing context.
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It depends on how well you write your code.

Also I think in general hackers should learn to read code. To reverse engineer. To understand what is going on without comments. Then when you do have some comments, it's a bonus (Or just even more confusing and contradictory).
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You can write a provable theorem as a stream of symbols from mathematical logic, instead of prose. But, do you really want to read the result? Code can be made clearer through abstraction, certainly, but comments are a domain specific language for helping humans understand computer programs.
as time goes, people tend to write less comments
I maintained a piece of 250,000 line C code that had one comment in it (apart from copyright notices):

/* bad code */

To this day I do not know if this was a comment on the quality of the code that came after it, or if the developer was reprimanding the code.
Yes, the site does its job and works fine, but this came out of clearleft. These guys used to be allstars a few years ago, so although the site is decent, it doesn't live up to what I or other designers might expect to see from Clearleft. It's nothing at all spectacular at all, and it even comes from themselves. Not like this is some client project, it's as though they didn't care at all.
I admit I am not a user (yet), and I am not suggesting that they are a struggling company. I just feel that not everybody could have turned the idea into a successful business. It takes surviving long enough to reach the required level of perfection.
Too bad, Facebook "web sites" don't really exist. Without a Facebook login, they are invisible.
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Sure, but the premise of the article was "the death of OpenID". Maybe Facebookies will start using Facebook Connect - I am pretty sure that I and many others won't.
Is this even a realistic technical goal? I was under the impression that Symbian was a pretty dramatically different technology than Android. Symbian is a C++ platform from top to bottom (as far as I know), while Android is a Linux+Java platform with not a lick of C++ to be found anywhere (again, as far as I know).

I'm having a hard time imagining how the two could combine in any meaningful way. One project or the other would have to move to the other platform, losing the majority of their existing work. If Google wanted to do that, they would have been the ones to acquire Symbian. If Nokia wanted Java, they would have acquired RIM (or did what Google did and hire the lead developer of the Sidekick and set him loose with more resources and orders to produce the next generation platform for mobile).

The fact that a lot of the same companies are backing both projects is a null statement. Of course they are! They want to be able to offer whichever one takes off, the moment there is consumer demand. They also want to appear to support open platforms (even if they're a little nervous about the idea).

It's going to be a competitive landscape for the foreseeable future, and that's fine. iPhone needs some serious competition, and the only way to compete with something like iPhone is to go the opposite direction on some major point. In this case, iPhone is a thoroughly closed platform--everything goes through Apple, or it goes nowhere--and so the smart money among competitors is going into an open platform. Which one wins isn't really all that important to them...they just need reasonable plans for taking on the iPhone.
Eric Carr from Loopt discusses the various positioning technologies available on mobile phones in depth on TechCrunch:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/04/location-technologies-p...

Actual (unassisted) GPS is free when the device supports it, but is typically slow to first fix, power intensive, and rarely works indoors.
I'm thinking if you have 3 exits (there might be more): IPO, M&A and continue running it then have a diversified portfolio of these 3 options.
There was a lot of green on that pie chart... let me be first to tell you not much of that is going into our (soldiers') pockets ;)

Although, if Civilization has taught me anything it's that being in a constant state of war really hurts your ability to keep up with the Jones's...

A great article.
an analogy for me is you're in Singapore and you're thinking of flying or driving by car to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia - driving, it takes you 4 hours. Flying is only 30 minutes but check-in time is 2 hours and disembarkation/waiting for your baggage is abou 30 minutes plus you need to take a taxi to the airport - it works out the same. Choose your poison. Driving is more scenic but you get flier's miles with flying.
Maybe it is just the ratio of E="effort to make OS run on Laptop x" to U="units of laptops x sold". Price =~ E/U.
Could you link to such a Dell configuration? The last "comparison" I saw compared completely different notebook types. Are there notebooks where you can literally choose Win XP or Ubuntu and the latter costs 150$ more?
Fighting wars directly destroys an enormous amount of economic value, but it's not true that military spending is bad for progress. Jet engines, satellite communications, radar, etc - any one of those alone has probably repaid the defence budget many times over.
3 reasons why Knol will beat Wikipedia
Why does open source work better for code than for design (or does it)? I thought the reason for the good quality of many open source projects is that people fix the flaws for themselves, and all the fixes accumulate.

Why does it not work the same for design (or does it). Are designers less prone to fixing flaws in products? Are they just lazy and use Apple stuff?

Personally I can't really see a fundamental difference between an ugly widget (looks) and an ugly piece of code, they are both bugs?
He missed the distinction between in-line comments and API comments. Pretty much all skilled developers would agree that in-line comments should be minimized, and used only when necessary to explain the reasoning behind a particular design, or to clarify a complex section that can't be refactored. But for API functions which you intend other developers to use as black boxes, you need to provide extensive comments clearly explaining the purpose, inputs, outputs, error conditions, and maybe even some sample code.
what about split view, this seems very similar and no one has mentioned that?
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sure. drop me a line, email is in my profile.
Shouldn't we examine military spending as a percentage of GDP? The author only shows absolute numbers, which I think is misleading.
One thing I'm wondering: where did the money go? Money is not destroyed (is it?) it just goes to someone else, so where did it all go?
One of the things I've seen is that the business becomes like an extended family -- that the founders get emotionally wrapped up in the people. It's not only the challenge of the work anymore, it's the commitment everyone has made to each other. They stop being at work all the time because they're solving world hunger and start being at work all the time because -- it's home.

Doesn't happen all the time, but I've seen it more than once. I'm sure there are other scenarios that could play out.
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I agree completely with you Joop. The killer feature here is that users can get a substantial pay from their articles if Google keeps on ranking them high. However this could also be its downfall.
Or the way the words "liberal" and "progressive" have been hijacked by people who actually believe in the USSR of the 1950s.
Assuming for a minute that this is a person who honestly feels these questions are off-limits (as opposed to just trying to crank up the old hit machine) I think the questions say more about the questioner than the questions themselves.

In certain circles all of these questions are on the table -- including a lot more obnoxious questions than he thought about. In certain circles a lot more questions are off limits (I'm thinking of the former dean of Harvard and his simple suggestion that "Do the sexes learn differently?" would be a provocative question. Poor schmuck)

I liked #1 the best, about evolving the human genome. The reason why is that it seems so logical at the surface -- if people can be "bred" like cats and dogs, why not breed them for qualities we all hold dear?

The coolest part of that question is that we immediately hit Godwin's law and end up where all internet discussions lead -- Nazis. And for good reason! They had the same ideas. (I won't go into trashing the entire notion. Too easy to do. I would add that most attacks on it are a lot more emotional than rational though)
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I'm sure that looks really good on their CVs.
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Not one of the better essays. Reminds me of somebody poorly channeling Chomsky.

Labels are nouns. That's all. Nouns have meaning based on how we use them. Guess what? Nouns are always imprecise. Language is slippery, my dear friends, as those of you who ever tried to write a system based on somebody else's input know.

So we're stuck debating and talking about things with words that flex a lot. That's why the #1 thing to do in a discussion, debate, or whatever is talk about terms. It sounds silly, but you have to say things like "when you say 'cat', what exactly do you mean?"

As a political junkie, let me offer an example. Reagan rallied against "tax and spend liberals" -- folks who thought of solving problems from the top-down using government funds and power, instead of from the bottom-up. He was so successful, he inspired a lot of radio commentators who beat the "liberal" phrase to death. As of today, the best word that describes what "liberal" used to describe is "progressive", although there are many who are proud to still be called "liberal"

The kicker is that "liberal" doesn't _really_ mean what Reagan used it for at all. It originally meant somebody supportive of free speech and action. Heck, as a libertarian, I am a classic liberal. We all probably are.

But most of us real people who live in the real world are stuck with messy words like these because humans are not machines. So we say wonderfully obscenely mushy things like "as a liberal I'm not at all supportive of the current progressive agenda"

There's a reason the Lincoln-Douglas debates went on for four hours or more. Language is tough to do. It does not reduce to something like p or ~ q. Labels only shut you down if you're damn fool enough not to qualify the label as soon as its used. I'm just glad I'm not writing AI to figure all of this out.
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i will give you 1 reason why it won't beat Wikipedia

The name sucks. It reminds me of some kind of a lost god
+1 from me... it's great!
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I checked the article's claim for myself -- "Results 1 - 10 of about 12,700,000 for read russian."

"How to read Russian in 75 minutes" knol at #5 -- but it was created yesterday.

Google does not seem so objective now.
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Money can be destroyed by unpaid debts. The past bubble originated from money creation by loans. Read Wikipedia article on fractional reserve banking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking
3 reasons why Wikipedia will kick Knol's Ass.

[0] => No ads and it is clean. It is made by people who don't intend to make money, created by people whose world don't revolve around money and read by people who value knowledge more than money.

[1] => Wikipedia is millions of pages ahead of Google Knol when it comes to content. 7 million pages in 200 languages. Money can't buy you that.

[2] => Wikipedia is synonymous with knowledge but with Google Knol, only the first four letters match, that is the closest it comes to knowledge.

I can go on, but will stop here. This is Google's narrow minded way of making money by showing more ads. They clearly were directing lot of traffic to Wikipedia pages, they realized why direct the traffic to some other site when we can let users steal content from Wikipedia and show it in Knol.
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It wasn't the point of the article I now feel smug about being able to identify that Newton-Raphson implementation before reading the line below.
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You are assuming those things would not have been invented without the military (and with all that money freed up). That's a pretty shaky assumption.
It's a same they havent done too good a job at ripping off the UI of muxtape.
The money was not destroyed, the person who took out the loan has it. Maybe he spent it, so whoever he gave it to has it, but it was not destroyed.

Fractional reserve banking is a lovely canard that is trotted out constantly, but it is not the monster the internet makes it out to be. Don't believe popular logic just because it's repeated over and over.

Fractional reserver banking, at it's core, is a way of converting collateral into cash, without having to sell it so someone. No value was created. Money was created, but not value.

And writing that just helped me understand what happened: value (of houses) was destroyed, so the money value that went along with it vanished too.
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would a solution to the chicken & egg problem of dating sites be to populate it with people's profiles they already created on social networks like fb and myspace?
If that's true, it's a pity "the population of Lisp programmers" think they don't need to learn any new languages, even if they won't use them.

With all my disrespect to Java and C#, for example, I did study them and tried to code to see myself what's right and what's wrong with these languages. Once I even used C# in production. And definitely it wasn't a complete waste of time.
No, I'm just saying that that's what did happen. You can always say "if someone didn't invent something someone else would have eventually".
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destroys an enormous amount of economic value, but it's not true that military spending is bad for progress. I don't see how you can say the first part, and still agree with the second part. The logical conclusion is, not only that someone would have invented everything that was invented, but in fact they would have invented more.
Those comments he doesn't like are often required by coding practices in a team setting. Rightly so as there are often people of many different skill levels working on the same code.
Yeah... the filter design is pretty much a short term fix, I'm not sure what the next stage in its evolution should be. Maybe start limiting the displayed keywords to the more popular ones, I dunno.

I think I agree about the bubbles on the about page... I suppose it's better to have shorter text blocks and more bullet points, images, etc?

I'm glad you like the site's purpose at least... it would be really unfortunate if we had designed this to solve a problem and everyone had just said, 'what problem?' ;)
Well... it is more like the home page bubbles are on the 'about' page :-D They originally existed to solve the problem of 'how can we tell people what the site is about if they only go to the home page?'... maybe they still aren't concise enough? We already trimmed out so much, the first drafts were huge!
Google can't be subjective, its on a freaking google subdomain. Search engines do treat subdomains as seperate new pages (with little ranking effect from the domain) it still on google.com which makes it golden, then Im sure mattcutts.com/blog and other googlers blog roll is pointed to it - its done, a page on knol will soon rank higher than a page with exact same content on wikipedia.
I agree about the about page, and "we are working on it". And I know the filters are eventually going to become nearly unusable but I am hopping a clever idea presents itself before then.

Also 'favorable prejudice' is always welcome... much preferred to hateful bias :)
You didn't grasp the most important features, but did you understand the purpose of the site? Because that is perhaps the most important thing, I think. If we can get people interested in the site then they will read about the features (maybe?).
I'd just like to say here that we were science majors and have no idea what we're doing as far as marketing the site goes... so thanks for all your inputs.
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Yea they were like freshman year term papers...
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While it is true that when some idea can be expressed by descriptive variable or function name, comment is not necessary.

But there are many places in the code, where it is highly desirable to explain by plain words, why certain solution was adopted, that certain part is a bug fix, or why some part of the code is counter-intuitive. I for one am much more happier when my colleagues comment their code extensively.

To look at it from the opposite side: Is there any inherent problem with having too much comments? (provided they are correct).
Objectively, all listed Knol features can be turned vice versa. But no wonder that money with name of Google can make perfect results together...
I think you're talking about an exit and DHH is talking about choosing what kind of business to start. If someone offers to buy you, your chance of a liquidity event is 100%. But if you're still deciding what kind of business or startup strategy to use, that chance is more like 50%, 10%, or even 1% or less. Given those odds that any normal entrepreneur (not you or DHH) faces, he says it's smart to build for profit and take the safer money, rather than go all or nothing.
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