You may be aware of Nix or NixOS. Users love it for being a superior tool for building, deploying, and managing software. Yet, it is generally perceived as notoriously hard to learn. In an attempt to provide an alternative learning approach, this article discusses the Nix package manager (hereafter simply referred to as Nix) and its underlying principles in the context of the history of computing. The condensed findings presented here reflect only some of our ongoing community effort1, started this year to improve documentation and make the benefits of Nix more accessible to software developers, and eventually computer users in general.

I don't know how to really explain my fascination with programming, but I'll try. To somebody who does it, it's the most interesting thing in the world. It's a game much more involved than chess, a game where you can make up your own rules and where the end result is whatever you can make of it. And yet, to the outside, it looks like the most boring thing on Earth. Part of the initial excitement in programming is easy to explain: just the fact that when you tell the computer to do something, it will do it. But blind obedience on its own, while initially fascinating, obviously does not make for a very likeable companion.

PWC Deals Exchange April 26, 2018 How is the economy changing? What are the implications for business? What does technology now make possible that was previously impossible? We have to let go of the maps that are steering us wrong In 1625, we thought California was an island In 2018, we still think in terms of standalone firms. We need to think about every company as if it is a network Networks and the Nature of the Firm "The existence of high transaction costs outside firms led to the emergence of the firm as we know it, and management as we know it….The reverse side of Coase's argument is as important: If the (transaction) costs of exchanging value in the society at large go down drastically as is happening today [because of networks], the form and logic of economic and organizational entities necessarily need to change! The mainstream firm, as we have known it, becomes the more expensive alternative."Esko

Ideas forum TED ended its year by picking its top 10 TED Talks for the year, and we'll start 2017 off by selecting a handful of techie ones we figure might be of particular interest to Network World readers. These talks, published during 2016, touch on subjects ranging from AI to the Blockchain to Linux (as discussed by Linus Torvalds himself). One nice thing about the TED YouTube channel is that videos are now captioned, so yes, you can digest these videos even when you're not in a position to actually listen to them... Among other things we learn that Torvalds really likes to work alone, maybe with the exception of his cat hanging out on his lap. Neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris describes how "The gains we make in artificial intelligence could ultimately destroy us."