Atari 800 : my first computer

My dad paid $2000 for an Atari 800 with 16k in RAM and a cassette drive back around 1981.  According to MeasuringWorth, in todays dollars that would be like spending

	$4,560.48	using the Consumer Price Index
	$4,052.84	using the GDP deflator
	$5,843.89	using the value of consumer bundle *
	$4,536.14	using the unskilled wage *
	$6,721.12	using the nominal GDP per capita
	$8,827.20	using the relative share of GDP

We also had the 410 cassette drive and BASIC Computer Games (see the scanned book in its full glory) which made for some loooong typing sessions for some very simple games!

The Evolution of Language

I never realized how bad it was, until the Internet was born.  

Grammar, that is.  In chat sessions, forums, and emails the level of English displayed is amazingly low.  People show no sign of knowing the difference between they're, their, and there.  Or between to and too.  I'm talking about basic 4th grade English here.  Not esoterica like why it is incorrect to use beg the question in the way most people use it...

What's interesting is that English is evolving MUCH faster than it did before.  Why?  Because in the old days, our primary reading materials were newspapers, books, and magazines.  Things scrutinized by editors for correctness.  This limited the degredation/evolution of the language from generation to generation.  

But with the Internet as our primary reading material, there is no restoring force.  Nothing to pull us constantly toward a fixed standard of English.  Descriptive linguists should have a field day with this; prescriptive linguists will probably be crying if they aren't already.

The history and future of credentials

Paul Graham argues that credentials were but a step in the evolution of society .  In ancient societies family status determined the transfer of power from generation to generation.  The credential system provided a way for less powerful to gain access to higher positions.  Graham claims that the current climate of small startup companies rewards the best performing individuals, independent of degrees.

Background:

Before credentials, government positions were obtained mainly by family influence, if not outright bribery.

History suggests that, all other things being equal, a society prospers in proportion to its ability to prevent parents from influencing their children's success directly. 

His hypothesis:

In a world of small companies, performance is all anyone cares about. People hiring for a startup don't care whether you've even graduated from college, let alone which one. All they care about is what you can do. Which is in fact all that should matter, even in a large organization. The reason credentials have such prestige is that for so long the large organizations in a society tended to be the most powerful. But in the US at least they don't have the monopoly on power they once did, precisely because they can't measure (and thus reward) individual performance. Why spend twenty years climbing the corporate ladder when you can get rewarded directly by the market?

Excellent Photo Book Comparison

This guy created photo books from several popular companies including sharedink.com, mypublisher.com, digilabs.biz, viovio.com, blurb.com.  His analysis is very detailed.  Just the way I like it.

If the link is broken, try searching for terms like: [New York Dave Beckerman Print on Demand Photo Books]

I ended up going with mypublisher.com.  The quality of the book was impressive.  Their website seems strangely slow, but their turnaround time was great.