I’m getting lots of OSCON spam all of the sudden. I guess someone’s spamming the Who’s Who list.
Theodore Gray of Wolfram has a wonderful rant on educational software. It covers everything from why we shouldn’t be afraid of calculators and other software that relieves kids of rote tasks to why video games are harmful (“The Army learned that the way to get soldiers to reliably pull the trigger was to use very basic, repetitive operant conditioning, along the lines of standard behaviorist theory.”) to why most educational software is awful (it’s made by the same people who make video games) all in a delightful dialog style filled with insight and humor. The only issue is that he uses “hard” when he means “complex”.
Two years in the making… Woody! Party time!
McCusker on planned fragility: “It’s likely true Office uses such inflexible code that feature changes do need file format changes. But it’s certain this is planned fragility, in analogy to the better known concept of planned obsolescence. When formats are more fragile, it’s easy to force entire communities to upgrade software when new versions ship, because network effects punish users of old versions.”
Russ Nelson has been trying to hack the DMCA too. He’s got some One-Time-Pads that might be interesting someday. My legal-oriented friends say this kind of thing doesn’t work, because if the courts think you’re playing games with them they’ll rule against you. Courts don’t work rationally like programs do.
Cool, Kevin “PythonCard” Altis and Russ Nelson are also giving lightning talks. I feel bad not being able to live up to such company. I wonder what else I could present.
Judging from the people who signed his key Leland Wallace looks pretty interesting.
Guido: “Your talk has been accepted for the Python Lightning Talks sessions”
ugh, I better do something today or I’ll have wasted the whole week. (that’s called vacation.)