I'd like to add my own parable on the occasion of Dave Winer's fiftieth birthday today [link]. This parable is in the same vein as Seth's Dave Winer's Software, Users, and Fiftieth Birthday post and Emmanuel's reply.

There is no doubt that Dave's impact on me is primarily as a result of Frontier and it's content management framework which I still use to this day. Not forgetting of course that this technology partly underpins Seth's superb implementation of Conversant.

But Dave's links and opinions on Scripting News have also had a significant influence. A search of Duncan's Jotter for 'Scripting News' currently yields more than 130 citations!

So many happy returns from one 50-year-old to another Dave. We may have had disagreements in the past - a Semi-colonic Irritation springs to mind ;-) - but there's no doubting your contribution to the sum total of human endeavour.

So Dave here's to your next 50 years!! Very best wishes.

College freshmen less interested in tech | CNET News.com:

"Incoming college students seem to have developed an allergy to computer science during the past four years--with women particularly being uninterested in the field.

That's the gist of a new report from Computing Research Association (CRA), a group made up of academic departments, research centers and professional societies. The study could fuel concerns that the United States may be losing its edge in the realm of information technology, especially when measured against emerging powers such as India and China. The dot-com bust and offshore outsourcing have been mentioned as factors to explain declining interest among Americans in computer science.

Citing research from the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles, the report says the percentage of incoming undergraduates indicating they would major in computer science declined by more than 60 percent between the fall of 2000 and the fall of 2004, and is now 70 percent lower than it was during its peak in the early 1980s.

Interest in computer science among women fell 80 percent between 1998 and 2004, and 93 percent since its peak in 1982, according to the report"...

Sam Ruby: Continuations for Curmudgeons:

"This essay is for people who, in web years, are older than dirt.  More specifically, if there was a period of time in which you programmed in a language which did not have garbage collection, then I mean you.  For most people these days, that means that you had some experience with a language named C.

It is a pretty safe bet that - despite your deep technical background - you find that you have some genetic defect that makes it completely impossible for you to understand articles with titles like Continuations Made Simple and Illustrated.  And for some reason, that bothers you.

If so, then maybe this article is for you"...