Posted by Max Dunn Mon, 14 Aug 2006 21:25:48 GMT | no comments
It is weird that a few weeks ago we were looking forward to our vacation, and now we are looking back on it. And we will never be able to experience any of this vacation ever again, except through our memories. This seems very strange to me.
Posted by Max Dunn Wed, 09 Aug 2006 15:35:11 GMT | no comments
Many times when a young person is trying to figure out what they will do with their lives, they are given the advice to “just do what you enjoy”, and are led to believe that if they do this, then the money will follow and they will be able to support themselves with this activity. However, I think that this advice falls short of the truth, and a distinction needs to be made between “consuming” and “producing” activities.
Posted by Max Dunn Tue, 08 Aug 2006 17:20:44 GMT | 1 comment
On this cruise, I am still trying to figure out what we should actually be doing in a foreign city.
Posted by Max Dunn Fri, 04 Aug 2006 12:09:07 GMT | no comments
We went through the Hermitage Museum in two hours today. There are a thousand rooms in the Hermitage and you would probably need to spend two hours in each one to get the full impact. Even the ceilings in many of the rooms were so fantastic that I always made it a point of looking up when I first entered each room.
Posted by Max Dunn Thu, 06 Jul 2006 18:50:27 GMT | no comments
In college, I went to see a Shakespearen tragedy with some friends. They thought it was depressing, but I disagreed. I said that it was depressing when a story had a happy but artificial ending because this was like saying that we can only be happy when everything goes right. But in a tragedy, when everything goes wrong and the characters still find the will to move forward and live, that is what I find to be the most encouraging and uplifting.
Posted by Max Dunn Wed, 28 Jun 2006 18:23:00 GMT | no comments
Back in the 80s and 90s when basic PC applications like word processors were being developed, there were a lot of holes in what they could do. Even rudimentary features like numbered lists, foreign character support and tables were often missing. So users frantically upgraded to each new release to gain new features they could actually use.
However, at some point, the new features stopped becoming useful to most people. Sure there would be a few esoteric new features that a small percentage of people would use, but for most users, these new features just made the programmer bigger, slower and harder to use. This was the age of feature bloat.
Posted by Max Dunn Thu, 22 Jun 2006 01:00:00 GMT | no comments
Several years ago, I stopped using credit cards on the Internet. Don’t get me wrong, I still buy plenty of stuff over the Internet including almost all of my books, clothes, amusement park tickets, and more. However, I never give out my real credit card number. Instead, I give out a virtual credit card number that can be used only once. I didn’t do this because I was scared that some hacker was going to get my card number and misuse it; I did it because some of the merchants I bought stuff from misused it. Here are the tales.
Posted by Max Dunn Thu, 18 May 2006 05:08:00 GMT | 2 comments
In today’s age, the trait of being very senstive to our emotions is highly extolled. Books about boy’s problems usually boil down to the solution that boys would be better off if they were more like girls in this regard. So I recently poised the question to some friends “Are there any traditional “hunter” characteristics of men that are still useful in today’s world?” No-one could come up with an answer. But watching my son pitch at his baseball game today, I thought of one.
Posted by Max Dunn Wed, 12 Apr 2006 15:11:00 GMT | 1 comment
A lot of people think it is a little weird that I put so much personal stuff in my web site and blog and I can understand their point. However, here are some reasons why I do this.
Posted by Max Dunn Mon, 10 Apr 2006 17:55:00 GMT | no comments
Marx was right; he was just 150 years to early.
In the Communist Manifesto published in 1848, he outlined the principle of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” as the next step in society’s development.
Of course we have seen how this principle has failed miserably when applied to anything that is resource limited. Who would work hard growing food if others would just take it all away? This is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union during the grain crisis of 1928 when the Politiburo set too low a price for grain and, when not enough was sold at this price, they seized what they needed. The next year, the peasant farmers engaged in massive hiding of grain which resulted in an agricultural collapse.
However the situation changes greatly when dealing with software. Since distributing software over the Internet costs essentially nothing, making software available to whoever needs it doesn’t take anything away from the creator. So open source software is the perfect embodiment of this communist principle: those that are able to contribute do, and those that need it can take it at will.
Marx also envisioned a stateless society where there was no central power exerting control over its citizens. This is another stark parallel to open source.
So while the ideals of communism have not been successfully applied to society, many of these principles can be vividly seen in the open source software movement.