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Debugging
I think that people who take a computer science degree in college should be required to study debugging. For better or for worse, debugging is an essential part of programming. However, most programmers are left to learn it on their own, in a way that is not true of many other aspects of programming. I…
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Jumper Again
I did go to the movie version of Jumper. It had nothing to do with the book. I think there were about three or four scenes from the book in the movie, all at the very beginning. The characters were all completely different, although they had the same names. In general the movie was pretty…
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Winter
Visiting Maine at this time of year reminds me how winter is the limiting factor for life in the north. Every plant and animal which lives there has a complex and energy intensive survival mechanism for the cold: insulation, hibernation, migration, etc. Where I live now in California the limiting factor is the long, dry,…
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Sanctions
Are economic sanctions a good idea? Sanctions were applied to Iraq between the two Gulf wars. They had no obvious effect on the leadership. They inflicted significant harm on ordinary citizens of Iraq. We are currently applying sanctions to North Korea. Again, it is not obvious that the leadership is affected, and, again, the ordinary…
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Centralize/Decentralize
One way to read the progress of computer usage is as an alternation between centralization and decentralization. Once there were no permanent documents: you ran your job, got the results, and took them away; centralized. Timesharing was introduced, and you had your own access to the single shared computer; less centralized Minicomputers let different groups…