I have a liberal arts degree, and I've been a residential carpenter for the last 13 years. I guess the money I earn puts me in the middle class. Looking back on that time it's fair to say I've left a lot of money on the table by not seeking a higher-paying job.
I don't think it's arguable that a Google engineer will not make more money than a carpenter on my crew. The thing that bothers me about articles like this is the sense that technocrats like Andreesen assume their needs are everyone else's.
I think the consensus might be underestimating things like Project Glass and new directions in keyboards (microfluid haptics, perhaps even more radical designs). For example it seems like it didn't take long for people to accept in-ear headsets.
The writing example isn't that sound. First he asks if you can teach 'good' programming, but then expects 'great' programmers to come of it. Rhetoric like that smells a little fishy. Then he rests his conclusion, that great programmers can't be trained, on the point that we have perfect knowledge of every great writer that ever wrote? I don't buy it.
As a user of an x41 'twist', I'm definitely curious about this new wave of tablets. I wonder how they'll compare to something like an x220t though? Will the price point be convincing enough to accept the reduced performance?
I read recently that in medieval England large distributed families (i.e. families with lots of extended cousins in different towns and counties) had important network effects for finance, information, and so on. It was a great benefit to have a second cousin in that other town in the rather parochial society of the time.
I wonder if the rise of urban density, fast transportation, and more efficient technological networks have served to replace these benefits?
I like these posts, the presentation is quite good IMO.
You see the old game state --> new game state pattern a lot in functionally written games, but something about that has always seemed off to me. The functional retrogames series of posts (starts at http://prog21.dadgum.com/23.html ) summed up the issue well I think,
When I first mused over writing a game in a purely functional style, this had me stymied. One simple function ends up possibly changing the entire state of the world? Should that function take the whole world as input and return a brand new world as output? Why even use functional programming, then?
In niche MMOs it's not unusual for users to spend over 20 real dollars/month on micro transactions. I don't know what an average multiplier in terms of in-game transactions would be but 3x doesn't seem out of the question.
Exactly; even though the article mentions the meaning of the graph, it seems to misinterpret it anyway.
From my perspective as a residential carpenter I see a continuing decline in the cost of labor combined with increases in efficiency due to new materials and equipment. Combine that with the high price of land in most urban areas, and I don't see much incentive for the big home builders to push manufactured homes and on-site automated fabrication.