The OP talks about getting a system that he can easily get his "old" grandparents up and using, because they are too "old" to grasp systems that are relatively cutting edge.
Just how old is "old" in everybody's mind? I know this is/. so I expect the answer to be an embarrassingly small number.
I am 70, and I am the technical guru for my family and friends, who are mostly younger.
I spent most of my career in Silicon Valley. Lived in San Jose most of the time, Sunnyvale for a short while. Worked in different places in Sunnyvale and Mountain View with a short (very) stint in Redwood City. None of the jobs I had were customer-facing, and I always had flexible hours. Carpool hours on the freeway ended at 9am in the morning and at 7pm in the evening, so I arranged my commute to be at the office by 930 or 1000, and I left after 1900. That gave me a 20-mile commute in about 25 minutes. On the rare day I needed to be there earlier, the commute time went up to 60 - 90 minutes.
In those days, the car got refueled once or twice a week, and I drove 20000+ miles a year. Since retiring I moved to a much smaller place. Now I refuel the car about once a month and drive less than 15000 km a year. That is a huge difference!
Perhaps I should also chime in that, for me, cities have never been the answer. I do not like to even be in them, much less live in one. One thing I really, really liked about Silicon Valley, and that I have not seen otherwise mentioned in these comments, is that from all those towns in Silicon Valley a short drive of less than an hour can take you out into some pretty empty and very beautiful countryside. I liked to go out and walk the trails, and that is how I recharged. Try Grant Ranch County Park outside San Jose.
In 2006 I did get Telecom "all you can eat" plan, and they definitely *did* oversell their bandwidth at that time. I only started getting reliable service when I switched providers, in 2009 iirc. Since there is internet by cable in only 2 cities, and I live in neither of them, I will happily consider that there is no internet by cable in NZ - and there is certainly not any where I am.
In 1999 I moved into an entirely newly developed neighborhood in San Jose, CA. I thought that surely I would find better internet service there than where I had been before. Sadly, that was not true. Couldn't get DSL until 2001, again iirc.
I had very similar experience. In the US until 2006, I never had faster than 1 - 1.5 Mbps with DSL. In NZ, I got service that was a good deal faster until the provider oversold its service and sometimes I was doing good to get 0.15 Mbps. Now I see 12 - 15 Mbps pretty regularly, and it is not all that expensive. Of course, I no longer know what I could get with DSL at my old address these days. There is no internet via cable here.
I have not worried about this issue in years. But back in the day when owning a foreign-made camera was far less prevalent than today, one was advised to get a customs sticker on the device before leaving the US to be able to prove that the camera was taken out, not purchased while on the trip. Has the law changed at all, or is it just a "why bother"? I really don't know.
You did not read the article. The balloons have limited "steerability" in that they can be raised or lowered by signal, allowing them to move in differently-directed air currents at different altitudes. The plan is that when the balloon starts to falter, it would be "steered" over a collection center (multiple instances around the globe), where it would be "collected" and its payload become reusable. Sounds almost doable. In any event, there are not supposed to be lots of balloons randomly falling to earth, and they will not fall in the sea, either, if Google can help it.
One of the videos I watched about this said the wireless service would be "3G-like", but gave no specs. It is clear that it is not WiFi as we know it at home.
When I read about this, I first wondered how it was going to play out with the effort of the NZ government to bring "ultra-fast broadband" to most of the country. That has been going on for several years and offers to continue for several more years before anyone can actually sign up. Even so, the government effort is only targeted at 75-80% of the potential users in the country. So much of NZ is remote and rural, that deploying physical internet infrastructure is a huge undertaking. After reading more about Project Loon, I realize it is not meant for NZ alone, but if it works it might be a cheaper way to have attacked the problem for NZ in the first place. Good luck to this effort. If it proves to work, I might well sign up.
I will stand by what I said because the people you know and the people I know are far from "most" people. I still think most people will not even be trying most of the things you list. The only thing on your list that I have encountered is region-coding on DVDs. I have a player that plays all regions equally.
Most of the things you mention are not things that ordinary people do for the most part unless they are egged on by a techie such as yourself. I consider downloading copyrighted stuff to be unethical at best and criminal at worst, and avoid doing it - not to mention that where I live the data costs for downloading are pretty stiff.
I am just thankful that most of my air travel is NOT in the US! Security checks in other places can be onerous, too, but rarely as bad as when in the US. But security practices used worldwide are mostly at the behest of the TSA.
Who doesn't sell ebooks to non-US residents? I am a non-US resident, and have bought ebooks from Amazon and other places with almost no trouble. But I tell them where I live, and I abide by the various licensing issues that come up. Once I had a problem trying to buy a book while travelling on a cruise ship. I think it was because they know I reside in X and the cruise ship wasn't X. After I got back home I could buy the book with no trouble. Once I bought a book that I really wanted after figuring out that it was sold where I live under a completely different title. It was the same book.
Last Christmas I used Amazon's ebook gifting mechanism to buy an ebook for a friend in California. When he tried to redeem the coupon, Amazon said that he couldn't because the book had been bought in X and he was not in X. It did offer him the option of trading in the coupon for a gift certificate, which he did and then used to buy the book in California. Convoluted, but it worked.
Slashdotters may care about this (I don't), but most consumers will have no idea what you are talking about. They will own a Kindle, say, and buy books for it and read them on it. They will not be concerned with reading the books on other devices. And they won't mind a bit.
And it is very important to understand O(x) concepts. When you did not understand you built code with an O(n**2) dependence and n got very large in your production installation one night at midnight and you wind up spending the wee hours frantically trying to find a different algorithm so the system can actually do useful work in reasonable time again -- you will understand what I mean.
I would recommend that a person wanting to do serious software development, they should study some core subject and then do a minor of CS for learning progarmming skills. If one then starts developing software to solve problems in their core subject, they will use the math knowledge from that subject to inform their work, and will likely do better than someone who just did straight CS.
In general, doing the advanced math operations is seldom if ever needed. What is important is to gain an understanding of concepts so that aspects of the problem at hand might be addressed in a more rigoroud manner. Linear algebra and discrete math are the main topics a developer should know because they come into play in understanding complexity of algorithms and such.
In 1960, as a freshman at Carnegie Institute of Technology, I was given the opportunity to enroll in the first undergraduate programming class offered there. I thought it would be interesting and something that other people were not doing. The class was taught by Alan Perlis, a well-known thinker about programming and languages. (He later was the first winner of the Turing Award.) We learned to program the school's IBM 650 in SOAP (Symbolic Optimizing Assembly Program), which optimized the layout of the program instructions on the magnetic drum memory so that the next operation was ready to pass under the read/write heads just when the previous instruction had finished (a mind-blowing concept that later was useful when programming CDC machines with multiple functional units and independent execution). Later came an early form of FORTRAN. By the time I graduated, the school had changed machines and was mainly using a form of Algol. I only took the one course as a freshman, but I fell in love with computers and software, and found a way to incorporate programming into my chemistry degree, working with the resident theoretical chemist.
My graduate work was in computational quantum chemistry, and I had a part-time job in the university computing center. Gave me the opportunity to dabble in lots of different things. We got one of the earliest CDC 6600 supercomputers and learning how to get the most out of that beast was a challenge.
By the time I was done with my chemistry PhD, it was pretty clear to me that computing was where I should spend my career. The university was starting a Computer Science department in 1968, and I was invited to be one of the first faculty. I taught mainly in programming languages and programming techniques. I was mainly self-taught. I had long-since left academia before I got my first home computer, a C64. In 1984 I had a chance to buy a FatMac at the Apple employee store, and the rest is history.
It says in the article that the trip is intended to be one-way, so if you volunteer it is with the expectation that you will not return. Sure, as you point out it may work out differently, but going in that is not the expectation.
In the early '80s I was Assistant Program Manager for Software on a large project for the government. The development was being done using the same mimicomputers that would be shipped as embedded components of the system. There were more workers doing development than there were to be users of the finished system. We were having more and more trouble meeting our development goals because the load just could not be accommodated. We did a fair bit of analysis and decided that the major problem was there was just not enough RAM.
I requested that more RAM be purchased and the Program Manager repeatedly balked and said No. Meanwhile he kept the heat on us for progress on development.
This Program Manager was an experienced aerospace engineer with lots of satellite launch experience. He was totally dedicated to the idea that the "launch window" was fleeting, and it had to be met. When development lagged and making the window was threatened, he knew how to make one squirm.
Finally I went to him and explained that without the additional RAM we would have increasing difficulty meeting the deadline, and why was he so opposed to adding it? He revealed that he was mortally afraid that adding more memory would slow the computers down, and the system would miss its performance targets. i.e. "miss the window" He did not understand how RAM worked!! In his mind if you made the memory bigger, then it must take longer to find and retrieve data. He was jeopardizing the project out of FEAR!
I was able to explain how it worked and convinced him to order more RAM. He did, and we went on to a very successful completion and delivery of the system.
I first heard these rules back in the early '60s when I was in ROTC during my undergrad years. The crusty old seargeant was teaching a class on "Military Teaching Principles", and those 3 were the principles to be learned. I used those principles throughout my career, and they work!
I once had a manager who wanted to have a weekly status report from each of the development teams working on the product. (large scientific computer) We learned soon enough that to avoid flak and to keep the manager happy, we just needed to come up with lots of slides with tables and colored graphs, and the more slides we had, the happier he was. That idea really influenced our behavior! And that was back in the day when making slides was not as easy as using Powerpoint.
This guy seems to be all about Renaissance Faires -- boring. If you want NSFW, then look for Kevin "Bloody" Wilson, an Australian performer whose act is pure raunch. DILLIGAF forever!
I took on my last tech job at age 61. I was titled a manager, but as ever before, I could not (would not) keep my hands away from coding. I was in a start-up company involved in a completely different line of work than I had done before. I had learned a lot about XML in my previous job, and in the last one I learned VXML and Perl. And developed my first Eclipse plug-in. My coding experience went back to the old days when every computer architecture was different, there were no "platforms", and all code was developed from scratch. Memory dumps were our friends in the old days.
I did sense that programming technologies were changing rapidly, and I managed to keep my hand in with all the 20-something coworkers by working very hard to study and learn and apply new things. It can be done.
Too often, I see folks debating the merits of various languages. During my career I learned a zillion of them. Not a big deal. The big deal is learning the concepts. Sometimes a particular language will embody a concept (such as objects) more clearly or more usefully than another. But once you grasp the concept, the rest is syntax. Once I was searching for a new job and an HR type rejected me because my CV did not show Visual Basic. When I did get a job a few weeks later, one of my first activities was helping a junior programmer develop some Visual Basic code. Although I had never seen Visual Basic code before, I became the "expert" because I could see the ideas and concepts beyond the syntax.
33, 40 is not "old". I am 70 now, and still get a kick out of reading/.
Check out Invensense (http://www.invensense.com). They have been making single-chip motion sensor/processors for years, and their products look to be smaller than what was pictured in the OA. Maybe the newness is in the particular manufacturing/packaging process.
I arrived in NZ to live on Oct 1, 2006. That happened to be the first Sunday in October, and according to the rules was the day that Daylight Time started in 2006. During 2007 there was rather intense lobbying to have the start date of Daylight Time be moved earlier so the extra daylight could be enjoyed sooner.
The change happened, and for 2007 the changeover date was set to be the last Sunday in September going forward. My what an outcry there was from many people protesting the awful disruption that change would cause them for days on end. Really, just bitter protests!
It turned out that the last Sunday of September in 2007 was September 30. So, compared to 2006, the change happened all of 1 day earlier. I really had to laugh at all the heat of the protests that had been put forward for really no reason. It was a hoot!
Slashdot Mirror
The OP talks about getting a system that he can easily get his "old" grandparents up and using, because they are too "old" to grasp systems that are relatively cutting edge.
/. so I expect the answer to be an embarrassingly small number.
Just how old is "old" in everybody's mind? I know this is
I am 70, and I am the technical guru for my family and friends, who are mostly younger.
Right on!
I spent most of my career in Silicon Valley. Lived in San Jose most of the time, Sunnyvale for a short while. Worked in different places in Sunnyvale and Mountain View with a short (very) stint in Redwood City. None of the jobs I had were customer-facing, and I always had flexible hours. Carpool hours on the freeway ended at 9am in the morning and at 7pm in the evening, so I arranged my commute to be at the office by 930 or 1000, and I left after 1900. That gave me a 20-mile commute in about 25 minutes. On the rare day I needed to be there earlier, the commute time went up to 60 - 90 minutes.
In those days, the car got refueled once or twice a week, and I drove 20000+ miles a year. Since retiring I moved to a much smaller place. Now I refuel the car about once a month and drive less than 15000 km a year. That is a huge difference!
Perhaps I should also chime in that, for me, cities have never been the answer. I do not like to even be in them, much less live in one. One thing I really, really liked about Silicon Valley, and that I have not seen otherwise mentioned in these comments, is that from all those towns in Silicon Valley a short drive of less than an hour can take you out into some pretty empty and very beautiful countryside. I liked to go out and walk the trails, and that is how I recharged. Try Grant Ranch County Park outside San Jose.
In 2006 I did get Telecom "all you can eat" plan, and they definitely *did* oversell their bandwidth at that time. I only started getting reliable service when I switched providers, in 2009 iirc. Since there is internet by cable in only 2 cities, and I live in neither of them, I will happily consider that there is no internet by cable in NZ - and there is certainly not any where I am.
In 1999 I moved into an entirely newly developed neighborhood in San Jose, CA. I thought that surely I would find better internet service there than where I had been before. Sadly, that was not true. Couldn't get DSL until 2001, again iirc.
I had very similar experience. In the US until 2006, I never had faster than 1 - 1.5 Mbps with DSL. In NZ, I got service that was a good deal faster until the provider oversold its service and sometimes I was doing good to get 0.15 Mbps. Now I see 12 - 15 Mbps pretty regularly, and it is not all that expensive. Of course, I no longer know what I could get with DSL at my old address these days. There is no internet via cable here.
I have not worried about this issue in years. But back in the day when owning a foreign-made camera was far less prevalent than today, one was advised to get a customs sticker on the device before leaving the US to be able to prove that the camera was taken out, not purchased while on the trip. Has the law changed at all, or is it just a "why bother"? I really don't know.
You did not read the article. The balloons have limited "steerability" in that they can be raised or lowered by signal, allowing them to move in differently-directed air currents at different altitudes. The plan is that when the balloon starts to falter, it would be "steered" over a collection center (multiple instances around the globe), where it would be "collected" and its payload become reusable. Sounds almost doable. In any event, there are not supposed to be lots of balloons randomly falling to earth, and they will not fall in the sea, either, if Google can help it.
One of the videos I watched about this said the wireless service would be "3G-like", but gave no specs. It is clear that it is not WiFi as we know it at home.
When I read about this, I first wondered how it was going to play out with the effort of the NZ government to bring "ultra-fast broadband" to most of the country. That has been going on for several years and offers to continue for several more years before anyone can actually sign up. Even so, the government effort is only targeted at 75-80% of the potential users in the country. So much of NZ is remote and rural, that deploying physical internet infrastructure is a huge undertaking. After reading more about Project Loon, I realize it is not meant for NZ alone, but if it works it might be a cheaper way to have attacked the problem for NZ in the first place. Good luck to this effort. If it proves to work, I might well sign up.
I will stand by what I said because the people you know and the people I know are far from "most" people. I still think most people will not even be trying most of the things you list. The only thing on your list that I have encountered is region-coding on DVDs. I have a player that plays all regions equally. Most of the things you mention are not things that ordinary people do for the most part unless they are egged on by a techie such as yourself. I consider downloading copyrighted stuff to be unethical at best and criminal at worst, and avoid doing it - not to mention that where I live the data costs for downloading are pretty stiff.
I am just thankful that most of my air travel is NOT in the US! Security checks in other places can be onerous, too, but rarely as bad as when in the US. But security practices used worldwide are mostly at the behest of the TSA.
Amen! The TSA was never necessary, and still isn't.
Who doesn't sell ebooks to non-US residents? I am a non-US resident, and have bought ebooks from Amazon and other places with almost no trouble. But I tell them where I live, and I abide by the various licensing issues that come up. Once I had a problem trying to buy a book while travelling on a cruise ship. I think it was because they know I reside in X and the cruise ship wasn't X. After I got back home I could buy the book with no trouble. Once I bought a book that I really wanted after figuring out that it was sold where I live under a completely different title. It was the same book.
Last Christmas I used Amazon's ebook gifting mechanism to buy an ebook for a friend in California. When he tried to redeem the coupon, Amazon said that he couldn't because the book had been bought in X and he was not in X. It did offer him the option of trading in the coupon for a gift certificate, which he did and then used to buy the book in California. Convoluted, but it worked.
Slashdotters may care about this (I don't), but most consumers will have no idea what you are talking about. They will own a Kindle, say, and buy books for it and read them on it. They will not be concerned with reading the books on other devices. And they won't mind a bit.
And it is very important to understand O(x) concepts. When you did not understand you built code with an O(n**2) dependence and n got very large in your production installation one night at midnight and you wind up spending the wee hours frantically trying to find a different algorithm so the system can actually do useful work in reasonable time again -- you will understand what I mean.
Excellently said!
I would recommend that a person wanting to do serious software development, they should study some core subject and then do a minor of CS for learning progarmming skills. If one then starts developing software to solve problems in their core subject, they will use the math knowledge from that subject to inform their work, and will likely do better than someone who just did straight CS.
In general, doing the advanced math operations is seldom if ever needed. What is important is to gain an understanding of concepts so that aspects of the problem at hand might be addressed in a more rigoroud manner. Linear algebra and discrete math are the main topics a developer should know because they come into play in understanding complexity of algorithms and such.
In 1960, as a freshman at Carnegie Institute of Technology, I was given the opportunity to enroll in the first undergraduate programming class offered there. I thought it would be interesting and something that other people were not doing. The class was taught by Alan Perlis, a well-known thinker about programming and languages. (He later was the first winner of the Turing Award.) We learned to program the school's IBM 650 in SOAP (Symbolic Optimizing Assembly Program), which optimized the layout of the program instructions on the magnetic drum memory so that the next operation was ready to pass under the read/write heads just when the previous instruction had finished (a mind-blowing concept that later was useful when programming CDC machines with multiple functional units and independent execution). Later came an early form of FORTRAN. By the time I graduated, the school had changed machines and was mainly using a form of Algol. I only took the one course as a freshman, but I fell in love with computers and software, and found a way to incorporate programming into my chemistry degree, working with the resident theoretical chemist.
My graduate work was in computational quantum chemistry, and I had a part-time job in the university computing center. Gave me the opportunity to dabble in lots of different things. We got one of the earliest CDC 6600 supercomputers and learning how to get the most out of that beast was a challenge.
By the time I was done with my chemistry PhD, it was pretty clear to me that computing was where I should spend my career. The university was starting a Computer Science department in 1968, and I was invited to be one of the first faculty. I taught mainly in programming languages and programming techniques. I was mainly self-taught. I had long-since left academia before I got my first home computer, a C64. In 1984 I had a chance to buy a FatMac at the Apple employee store, and the rest is history.
I thought the word that is pronounced "Dao" is spelled as "Tao", meaning "the Way". So, what is a "Dao"?
It says in the article that the trip is intended to be one-way, so if you volunteer it is with the expectation that you will not return. Sure, as you point out it may work out differently, but going in that is not the expectation.
and address those fears.
In the early '80s I was Assistant Program Manager for Software on a large project for the government. The development was being done using the same mimicomputers that would be shipped as embedded components of the system. There were more workers doing development than there were to be users of the finished system. We were having more and more trouble meeting our development goals because the load just could not be accommodated. We did a fair bit of analysis and decided that the major problem was there was just not enough RAM.
I requested that more RAM be purchased and the Program Manager repeatedly balked and said No. Meanwhile he kept the heat on us for progress on development. This Program Manager was an experienced aerospace engineer with lots of satellite launch experience. He was totally dedicated to the idea that the "launch window" was fleeting, and it had to be met. When development lagged and making the window was threatened, he knew how to make one squirm.
Finally I went to him and explained that without the additional RAM we would have increasing difficulty meeting the deadline, and why was he so opposed to adding it? He revealed that he was mortally afraid that adding more memory would slow the computers down, and the system would miss its performance targets. i.e. "miss the window" He did not understand how RAM worked!! In his mind if you made the memory bigger, then it must take longer to find and retrieve data. He was jeopardizing the project out of FEAR!
I was able to explain how it worked and convinced him to order more RAM. He did, and we went on to a very successful completion and delivery of the system.
I first heard these rules back in the early '60s when I was in ROTC during my undergrad years. The crusty old seargeant was teaching a class on "Military Teaching Principles", and those 3 were the principles to be learned. I used those principles throughout my career, and they work!
I once had a manager who wanted to have a weekly status report from each of the development teams working on the product. (large scientific computer) We learned soon enough that to avoid flak and to keep the manager happy, we just needed to come up with lots of slides with tables and colored graphs, and the more slides we had, the happier he was. That idea really influenced our behavior! And that was back in the day when making slides was not as easy as using Powerpoint.
Yup!
This guy seems to be all about Renaissance Faires -- boring. If you want NSFW, then look for Kevin "Bloody" Wilson, an Australian performer whose act is pure raunch. DILLIGAF forever!
I took on my last tech job at age 61. I was titled a manager, but as ever before, I could not (would not) keep my hands away from coding. I was in a start-up company involved in a completely different line of work than I had done before. I had learned a lot about XML in my previous job, and in the last one I learned VXML and Perl. And developed my first Eclipse plug-in. My coding experience went back to the old days when every computer architecture was different, there were no "platforms", and all code was developed from scratch. Memory dumps were our friends in the old days.
/.
I did sense that programming technologies were changing rapidly, and I managed to keep my hand in with all the 20-something coworkers by working very hard to study and learn and apply new things. It can be done.
Too often, I see folks debating the merits of various languages. During my career I learned a zillion of them. Not a big deal. The big deal is learning the concepts. Sometimes a particular language will embody a concept (such as objects) more clearly or more usefully than another. But once you grasp the concept, the rest is syntax. Once I was searching for a new job and an HR type rejected me because my CV did not show Visual Basic. When I did get a job a few weeks later, one of my first activities was helping a junior programmer develop some Visual Basic code. Although I had never seen Visual Basic code before, I became the "expert" because I could see the ideas and concepts beyond the syntax.
33, 40 is not "old". I am 70 now, and still get a kick out of reading
Check out Invensense (http://www.invensense.com). They have been making single-chip motion sensor/processors for years, and their products look to be smaller than what was pictured in the OA. Maybe the newness is in the particular manufacturing/packaging process.
You are not always in a car when this thing will be most useful. How about when your combat team is inside the corridors of a building?
I arrived in NZ to live on Oct 1, 2006. That happened to be the first Sunday in October, and according to the rules was the day that Daylight Time started in 2006. During 2007 there was rather intense lobbying to have the start date of Daylight Time be moved earlier so the extra daylight could be enjoyed sooner.
The change happened, and for 2007 the changeover date was set to be the last Sunday in September going forward. My what an outcry there was from many people protesting the awful disruption that change would cause them for days on end. Really, just bitter protests!
It turned out that the last Sunday of September in 2007 was September 30. So, compared to 2006, the change happened all of 1 day earlier. I really had to laugh at all the heat of the protests that had been put forward for really no reason. It was a hoot!