g00dn3ss

I do think Bill Gates was on to something. From a UI perspective, a pen/touch screen is superior in that it removes one level of indirection in a UI paradigm that is attempting to be "direct manipulation".

However, for this to be the most popular form of PC, I think there will need to be a breakthrough in text input. I've looked at a lot of alternative text input techniques and I don't think any of the current ones will cut it. This includes soft keyboards, crazy dasher-like things, predictive stuff, handwriting recognition, gestures, voice, etc. The huge advantage of keyboard entry is not only the tactile feedback, but that it has a fairly low cognitive cost. In other words, you can think about other things while you type - it's automatic. Pretty much anything aural or visual will take away from thinking about your real tasks.

I went to a public university in my state (NC) and a top 20 public CS grad school - so I can recommend them. I have also worked with a lot of folks from all the other top CS grad programs across the country.

The thing I have found that is different with the folks who went to undergrad at some of best schools, like MIT, is that they spent more time focused on their studies than I did. And I'm saying this having been top of my class in both undergrad and grad school. So I'm not sure if that says something about public schools, liberal arts, or the kinds of people who target MIT. Probably all of these. In any case, I think you can get the same level of education at public schools if you're willing to put in a lot of your personal time. If it turns out that you don't want to be so hard-nosed about it, then I think you'll find a lot of cool things to do at a public school.

Following closely on the heels of DNF!

Actually, there was a recent article on YC news about the large number of discoveries that were made independently at almost the same time.

Our made-for-tv histories usually show a lone scientist toiling away for years, making huge discoveries. But in reality, most discoveries are incremental. The stories we are taught about these discoveries are usually mythologized.

It is true that there is some level of creativity needed. But it's probably way more common than our histories would lead you to believe. The recurring theme you will hear from scientists is that "chance favors the prepared mind."

Here is a pop-sci version of some recent research:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-to-raising-sm...

However, this isn't particularly surprising. Research on "grandmasters" in many activities, like chess or pilots, usually shows they've put in 25K hours of practice in their field.

I'm certainly not in favor of saying anyone can do anything. Especially in physical activity. There are definitely physiological advantages.

The same is also true in mental activities to some extent. A kid with down syndrome probably isn't going to become a math professor. However, I think the point is that most normally developed folks probably haven't hit a ceiling in their math aptitude. They just stopped caring or putting in the effort.

Recent evidence tends to indicate that 'not smart enough' is probably a myth. Almost everything can be attributed to exposure and effort at some point rather than some innate smartness.

A lot of advanced math takes some serious concentration to understand. For some non-practical aspects, I found that I lacked the motivation rather than ability to understand it . One particular class where I seemed to hit my tolerance was a theoretical linear algebra class. I could understand the practical applications of most of the topics but some of the theory seemed just out of reach. The book was extremely dry and I think the professor may have been taking lessons from Ben Stein.

Give me a private tutor, a theoretical linear algebra for dummies book, and a pending disaster for which this is the solution, and I bet the outcome would be a little different.

One of the biggest drawbacks for me is the crazy assumption that I should check out directly from their repository and use whatever half baked thing happens to be in there at the time. Sure, I can use the stable version but then none of the plug-ins work. The whole Django website is built around the assumption that I'm running directly from the repository.

We went to a financial planner and he projected how much it would cost to send our kids to college. He plotted out these graphs and then told us "we'll assume that college costs continue to outpace inflation by 2%, since they have for the past 20 years..." I appreciated what he was doing but I know there is no way that can continue. At some point in the very near future, you can live off the interest of the cost of 4 years of college.

OK, that's good to know. However, that's my general experience with Pylons. The documentation would seem to recommend AuthKit. For example, see http://wiki.pylonshq.com/. The top link is AuthKit. Is there an alternative that you are using?

I tried pylons not too long ago. I liked the general idea but I ran into several problems. Building the sample didn't work out of the gate and I had to dig around the site to figure out what was wrong. I never could get the user authentication stuff (AuthKit) working with the latest version of Pylons. I finally decided that I'd rather not spend my time debugging or rewriting the framework, even if it does give me more choice.

This title makes no sense. Was Fonzie jumping over a more popular show disguised as a shark? Let's mix some metaphors!

I think this is mostly bogus. Consider the research presented in recent articles like:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-to-raising-sm...

This division into 3 kinds of kids has an underlying assumption that kids can be classified by some innate characteristics.

Rather than putting effort into "identifying gifted students", maybe we should concentrate on finding more effective ways to teach everybody. Getting rid of grades comes to mind as one way to help convert "high achievers" into "gifted learners".

The back button problem is on the main splash page. It looks like you are doing some kind of javascript redirection. So there are actually two entries in history. When you go back one page in history, it jumps forward again.

Incidentally, there have been several related products in recent years. Someone (maybe Sharper Image?) was selling an alarm clock that supported downloadable alarm sounds. I don't remember exactly, but I think it worked like those digital picture frames. That's not to say that you couldn't do it better. But I think your biggest issue may be that most people don't sleep next to their computer.

If you're looking at Python frameworks - TurboGears also has built in Identity Management.

http://docs.turbogears.org/1.0/IdentityManagement?action=sho...

Then there is the AuthKit extension for Pylons. Although I really like Pylons, I had some problems getting AuthKit working with the latest version.

Yeah, but he could ask the questions in any order!

The funny thing is that, for once, most people probably agree with Balmer's original statement.

I don't see how Facebook could not be a fad. Unlike Google or even Microsoft, they aren't solving any real technology problems. They are providing a service that is essentially a limited version of the internet at large. I'm not saying they won't be around at all in five years. Just that the noobs will eventually tire of poking each other and paying to send each other icons.

I mostly agree with you and Google has already been accused of mixing paid listings into their search results. However, it seems that search engines are really sensitive to being labeled with this stigma. If this becomes common practice again, then it opens the door for someone else to be the new Google.

As another poster mentioned - guess what happens when you try to block things and the blocking becomes common. Think spam or popups. If there are financial incentives, the advertisers getting blocked will just get more creative. Its the usual arms race. Text ads just haven't gotten annoying enough for most people to block.

I do think Google's advertising model can't last forever. Just like the old "pay per view" model mostly died out on the web, the "pay per click" model will die out too. The obvious next step is pay per sale. Yes, it's hard and has problems. But if somebody finds a good way to make this work, this could potential steal away some of Google's business.

They actually have search? I was trying to find an article the other day and looked all over for a search box. I finally had to resort to a Google site search.

I still think this quote from the Hamming article points to one of the biggest opportunities for making a difference across all fields (at least for a programmer):

"Since from the time of Newton to now, we have come close to doubling knowledge every 17 years, more or less. And we cope with that, essentially, by specialization. In the next 340 years at that rate, there will be 20 doublings, i.e. a million, and there will be a million fields of specialty for every one field now. It isn't going to happen. The present growth of knowledge will choke itself off until we get different tools."

One problem that will continue to need solving is finding better tools to organize and search through all the information out there. That's more of the problem Google solves, as others have mentioned above.

Another, related problem is finding better ways to get the information into our heads. To give you an extreme example, coming up with a way to access a hard drive directly with our brain could potentially allow us to tackle harder problems. That's pretty hard and probably a long way off. But you can probably imagine baby steps toward that.

There's also the whole AI problem but the media has covered that one enough that it doesn't really need mentioning.

Wow, I've never read that. Here's my favorite section:

'Since from the time of Newton to now, we have come close to doubling knowledge every 17 years, more or less. And we cope with that, essentially, by specialization. In the next 340 years at that rate, there will be 20 doublings, i.e. a million, and there will be a million fields of specialty for every one field now. It isn't going to happen. The present growth of knowledge will choke itself off until we get different tools.'

If you actually look at how people use email you will find quite a bit of diversity. However, one of the common threads in email usage is task management. This highlights one of the biggest areas of deficiency in Gmail. Take the lack of calendar integration as one example.

Hmm, let me think about the primary apps people around my office use when they want to get work done (instead of goofing off on the web). Artists: Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. Coders: Visual Studio, Eclipse, Emacs, etc. Project Managers: MS Project, Requisite Pro, JIRA, etc. Business/Marketing: Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.

Only one non-desktop app in the mix there - that being JIRA. Looks like the death knell was a tad premature once again.