Schoolchildren have no taste

This isn't singing, it's just screaming. (Led Zeppelin, Immigrant Song)

Someone asked some British schoolchildren to give their opinions on classic rock songs. They have no taste at all.

Original story is from The Guardian, but Jason Kottke's coverage is better.

Posted at 2004-02-02 15:18:48 by Richard • Link to Schoolchildren hav…
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French and German

Lambda The Ultimate has started straying onto real-world languages at the moment, throwing up the lovely comparison of German and French, which reverses the usual prejudice about sounding gutteral:

Here's a classic example of that I learned long ago (The little birds sing in the trees):

• French: Les petits oiseaux chantent dans les arbres.
• German: Die kleinen Vögel singen in den Baümen.

It's actually quite lovely!

Posted at 2004-02-02 15:12:45 by Richard • Link to French and German
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Eric S Raymond on talent

From The Cathedral and the Bazaar:

My friend, familiar with both the open-source world and large closed projects, believes that open source has been successful partly because its culture only accepts the most talented 5% or so of the programming population. She spends most of her time organizing the deployment of the other 95%, and has thus observed first-hand the well-known variance of a factor of one hundred in productivity between the most able programmers and the merely competent.

The size of that variance has always raised an awkward question: would individual projects, and the field as a whole, be better off without more than 50% of the least able in it? Thoughtful managers have understood for a long time that if conventional software management's only function were to convert the least able from a net loss to a marginal win, the game might not be worth the candle.

The success of the open-source community sharpens this question considerably, by providing hard evidence that it is often cheaper and more effective to recruit self-selected volunteers from the Internet than it is to manage buildings full of people who would rather be doing something else.

From a generally-insightful book, a good comment on how all those code-monkeys might generally not be worth our while as a world….

Posted at 2004-02-02 08:11:30 by Richard • Link to Eric S Raymond on …
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Commuting

Commuting every morning is starting to get a little disheartening — it was about 40 minutes this morning, jammed most of the way. No fun.

On the plus side, I do get to think and listen to music for 40 minutes every morning and evening, but it does feel like a bit of a waste of time. Judging by the drivers I see every morning, it's also more than a little bit risky.

Ah well — maybe I'll move sometime!

Posted at 2004-02-02 01:19:25 by Richard • Link to Commuting
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