In a world full of fancy development tools and sites, the kernel project’s dependence on email and mailing lists can seem quaintly dated, if not positively prehistoric. But, as Greg Kroah-Hartman pointed out in a Kernel Recipes talk titled “Patches carved into stone tablets”, there are some good reasons for the kernel community’s choices. Rather than being a holdover from an older era, email remains the best way to manage a project as large as the kernel.
A kernel is the first layer of computer, it controls everything on how the computer will work. The Linux Kernel is the most popular kernel in use today, powering over 1.5 billion Android devices, millions of Chromebooks, and millions of devices that are in use everyday (things from wireless routers to smartwatches). This doesn’t include all of the web services we depend on every day that run some version of Linux. You’re probably using something that requires Linux every day.
So what does that have to do with email? With Kernel development which involves thousands of developers around the world, email is the only technology that has proven itself to manage the process of Linux kernel development. Even if email seems old fashion, I like to point out to students that almost every service they use relies on email for account maintenance.
A new study in Frontiers in Psychology finds that children prefer storybooks containing more causal information. The results could help parents and teachers to choose the most engaging books to increase children’s interest in reading, which is important in improving early literacy and language skills. Children have a burning urge to understand the mechanics of the…
To explore what machine learning could mean in education, EdSurge convened a meetup this past week in San Francisco with Adam Blum (CEO of OpenEd), Armen Pischdotchian, (an academic technology mentor at IBM Watson), Kathy Benemann (CEO of EruditeAI), and Kirill Kireyev (founder of instaGrok and technology head at TextGenome and GYANT). EdSurge’s Tony Wan moderated the session. Source: Real Questions About…
Four years ago, Chris Nagele did what many other technology executives have done before — he moved his team into an open concept office. His staff had been exclusively working from home, but he wanted everyone to be together, to bond and collaborate more easily. It quickly became clear, though, that Nagele had made a…
Former New York Times technology reporter John Markoff used to think robots taking jobs was cause for alarm. Then, he found out that the working-age population in China, Japan, Korea and the U.S. was declining. Source: We need robots to take our jobs, according to John Markoff Some very surprising insight on where robots will be needed.
Have you considered the high cost of task switching? It probably takes you a little while to stop doing one thing and start doing another with efficiency. What happens when you switch less often? Also: Consider the sprint test. If there’s a task that comes up often, challenge yourself and your team to, just this…
Facebook’s secretive advertising practices became a little more public on Monday thanks to a leak out of the company’s Australian office. This 23-page document discovered by The Australian (paywall), details in particular how Facebook executives promote advertising campaigns that exploit Facebook users’ emotional states—and how these are aimed at users as young as 14 years old. According to the report, the…
