futuremint

This commenter gets annoyed by authors who write about themselves in the third person. This comment writer suspects the article's author thinks he makes himself sound less ignorant when he writes in the third person. Maybe the economist's editorial guidelines demand pieces light on content (or facts to backup the premise) be written this way to distract the reader; thinks this comment writer.

I can't enlighten, but one of the first questions in my mind was, "Ok, it can run LINPACK, but can they program it?"

Yeah, I just finished the Business Week article which also stated that the interconnects are currently a Chinese design.

I think uses those Loongson MIPS processors.

Edit: According to the PCMag article they're Xeon processors.

"Car design"? So that means when they start selling Cherry Motors cars over here they might meet federal safety standards on the first try?

This is usually how I go about learning a new area of development. I think through the problem, get an idea of how it might work, maybe even write some code, then go spelunking on github & google to see how other people solved it.

Sometimes I'm surprised to find my method was spot on. Other times I find someone who already iterated the solution a few times and I can jump over those mistakes to a more mature solution.

Learning to read other people's code and quickly get the gist of how it works and recognizing patterns is crucial in becoming a proficient programmer.

Single page link: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/myth-ch...

Upvoted, just to keep you refreshing, John ;)

This is ultimately what led me to switch from OS X to Ubuntu. Been using Ubuntu full-time since May and its great! All those headaches are gone!

I have a ZaReason Strata Pro 13" with an SSD. The processor is by no means fast, but its fast enough for coding & web design. Any heavier work (like high-res graphics, video editing, or intensive compiling) would probably be annoying.

Its a good laptop with Ubuntu 10.10, only thing not working is suspend automatically when the lid is closed.

Money no object and you need Linux than a ThinkPad would be your best bet. Expensive, but awesome keyboards and pretty durable & reliable.

You can install Linux on a MBP as a commenter has already mentioned, but you have to install a weird open source EFI thing for boot, and it'd be tricky to get support for the newest hardware.

Another option is to use Ubuntu in VirtualBox on OS X. You can install all of your favorite Linux packages in OS X, but they're patched and you can't always get the latest release without some work. AFAIK all of the open-source package management systems for OS X are source based so you get to watch things compile. I used to have a MBP and compiling new software was always annoying to me.

This is true. We had a cash bar, and opted for the cheapest chairs and people had to use paper napkins and plastic utensils to eat their BBQ off of paper plates (gasp!).

But the part friends & family still talk about years later is, "Hey, remember when your German Shepherd was your ring-bearer at your wedding, and you sent her running down the aisle? That was great!"

Doesn't take money to be entertaining.

I think this article (and some of your points too) are conflating minimalism with simplicity. Minimalist is buying 1 Kindle and putting all of your books on it and then selling them. This is more expensive.

Simple is keeping your books you want to read again and getting rid of books you've read and aren't going to read to reduce your bookshelf space. Then get a library card and check out books to read from there. Less $ and simpler, though not necessarily the most minimalist you can be.

I think minimalism is one aspect of simplicity, but not the only one. Simplicity also involves practicality, economics, sustainability, etc.

We don't spend too much time talking or thinking about it in my house, but we do periodically clean/throw out old junk that piles in closets & the garage.

I agree with his point regarding being sanctimonious about it though. We don't brag to anybody, or even talk about it much. Its just a matter of doing something we know makes us feel better and thats about it.

However, over time it does save you money, because if you have to move or change your surroundings, you only need enough room for your body and not your stuff.

We're moving to a new house that is only marginally larger than our current house because we're planning a larger family (it also is a higher quality house too)... not because we need more space for stuff. Its nice to only consider your living space from the perspective of what you do in it, and not have to also worry about how all of your stuff goes into it too.

"Inverse nanobarns"? WTF? I've never heard of the unit "barn", but a nanobarn just sounds like its about to spew out nanounicorns followed by nanoblackholes.

But its cool to see their progress and how they're slowly ramping up the power and beams to split instead of just going full throttle all at once.

The very first thing I tried to do was click on the words "comments" and "points" to sort the entries by that column.

Placing those columns on the left-hand side gives them the highest importance. Is that the intention of this UI?

Cool! I like that you have the source on github. It feels a little poky on my Droid (OC'd to 800'hz) but works great! I also realize I could just fork on github & make it faster, but I haven't much spare time at the moment.

This news reminded me that I still needed to stop paying my Xbox live account I never use. Went through their (not-so) funny game of "are you sure you want to quit? are you sure you want to quit?" ad-infinitum.

I always remap Caps Lock to be a Ctrl key. Using the lower-left Ctrl key would just be... weird :).

With Caps Lock as control, and using the Alt key closest to the spacebar as Meta, the key-chords in Emacs are comfortable for me (I just spread out my left hand a little over home-row and I can reach them all w/o moving my hand).

I was a vim user long ago (I learned to program in vim) and constantly hitting esc bothered me more than Emacs Ctrl key gymnastics.

I don't spend a lot of time typing out my programs but I do spend a log of time thinking them through. I have slight pain in my right wrist that comes and goes.

I narrowed it down to 2 causes:

1: My car has a manual transmission, and all that gear changing in my commute irritates the nerves.

2: Mousing. I spend a lot of time using the mouse to move all those damned windows around. I switched to using my left hand for the mouse. Now the only times my right wrist hurts are driving for extended periods in slow traffic, or using the touchpad on my laptop a lot (I still use my right hand by habit).

Switching to Dvorak might be the most obvious way to reduce RSI, but I don't think it is the one best thing you can do.

Another thing I'm doing to combat #2 above is trying to get as much of my programming done in Emacs as possible. I also have, "learn a decent window manager" on my list of things to do.

Once I can do all programming & code browsing/navigation in Emacs, and also use the keyboard to manage my windows... maybe Dvorak would help me.

Isn't that what Excel is for? Seriously... I worked for a company that was developing a web app for small businesses for their business processes, and its amazing (and appalling) how many small businesses use Excel spreadsheets for everything.

Even now I work on a product that manages data, and all the customers think a "data export" is a CSV file. I've run into some folks who think the app stores its data in "special spreadsheets"!

And frankly most small businesses don't care that Excel spreadsheets aren't all that great. They work well enough. The market has an education problem more than anything.

I guess more specifically I meant control in that your emotions aren't making the decisions rather your "self" is in control. Its hard to explain with language... imagine if someone is completely consumed with rage... or lust... we don't usually say that that person is in "control" of themselves.

Thats all I meant by it.

I find it fascinating that Zen/Tao "teachings" for thousands of years have focused on what seems to be one of the most difficult areas of human existence: "man vs. himself".

Modern cognitive therapy seems to be an institutionalized version of the whole Zen thing which I find amusing. Personally I've never been happier once I realized that the world is literally what you make of it, that is, it is all up to your internal interpretation.

Once you realize that your mind is constantly interpreting everything, you can learn - through practice and meditation - to just be however you want to be and be in complete control of yourself.

Because in the end... you're just being... unless you're not and then it doesn't matter.

Either that our we're all inside of a bunch of nested lexical closures. Maybe time isn't inherited from an object hierarchy, but is a locally bound variable inside of a closure function? Meh... functional & OO start to look pretty much the same if you squint your eyes just right.

ZaReason Strata Pro 13" w/Core 2 & SSD.

Just fast enough for my needs, a ULV processor so I can feel good about not sucking too much energy (the SSD makes up for the lack of CPU power, it still feels 'fast'), and Ubuntu FTW.

Eminently portable (3.5lbs), decent resolution on the screen and a nice keyboard (on par if not a little better than my old MacBook Pro's keyboard).

I love it as it has just enough of everything I need and not too much.

The lens through which parenting is viewed here is too narrow. Parenting isn't about being happier. It is about being a bigger and better person. Children make your life BIGGER. You feel moments of happiness like you've never felt before. You also feel moments of anger like you've never felt before.

It really is indescribable and not for the faint of heart or the selfish. The beautiful thing about parenting is that it shows you who you really are (not who you think you are), and gives you chances every day to grow.

It makes you see what really matters in life, assuming you actually come to this realization. I've seen plenty of people not realize this and fight to keep their identity, their original idea of what they wanted for themselves while also trying to be a parent. That doesn't work.

Part of parenting is a certain amount of ego destruction. You have to go through that if you want to genuinely care for another human being.

This is what makes the experience of parenting so great. It is a kind of Zen experience of making yourself better by destroying your concept of self (and putting another 'self' first more than your own self would like).

I would also like to point out that I feel pleasure after working through a day in a disciplined way that doesn't waste time. So "disciplining yourself not to waste time" isn't always to gain pleasure later, but can also generate direct pleasure. At least for me. (my $0.02)

It was easy to grab an ePub reader from the Android app market to read this on my phone. I still need to plug my iPad into my computer to "sync" the file to the iPad to read it in iBooks. This is lame IMHO. Back on topic, this is a great book. It got me into Scheme when I first read it 5 years ago (I didn't attend MIT unfortunately)

Flagging this as this article is wasting a lot of words to just say, "Apple keeps everything secret. Maybe they always had them in cases to keep them secret." Sorry... but lame. The Andantech review is more like what I like to read.

Yeah, I thought that line was odd. I'm under the impression that people who put linux on netbooks just blow out windows and install Linux over it? Thats what I do anyway.

My first thought was the same as yours, "Well uptake wouldn't be slow if vendors actually offered it!"

I had the same thought. I think its because he wants to get "Sent from my iPad" on the internet on as many web pages and into as many minds as possible. Its a marketing ploy.