"Go take a look". Maybe you can justify it. But "copy it, just to prove a point", you are so screwed. I leave my front door unlocked, you do not have the right to come in, remove all my stuff, and leave a post-it note on the door saying where you've put it. And if I left my front door unlocked and happened to come back and find you inside, I'd be beating the crap out of you immediately without waiting to find whether you intended to take anything.
In this case, the guys were not just "proving a point", they were out to steal credit card details for massive personal profit. Justify that one, laddie.
When you've got a 10-foot by 3-foot wraparound monitor, good luck seeing it all without moving, dude. And until we've got those 10-foot by 5-foot monitors, the "paperless office" is a non-starter, because it can't replace the 10-foot by 3-foot desk which I regularly fill with pages of scrap paper when I'm trying to work something out.
Sorry, no. The early hackers (or crackers, if you like) themselves used the words "hacker" and "hacking" to describe their activities, which is a major factor in why mass media described it as such.
As for "some people choose to use a work incorrectly", the majority tends to be the deciding factor, I'm afraid. Languages drift over time, and meanings *do* change. There are many differences between American and British English, but the most telling differences are the words which just drifted *slightly* so that meanings are different. The word "quite" is a classic - in American usage it means "very" or "absolutely", whereas in British usage it means "somewhat". Now the American usage was originally the correct one, but if you tried using it that way in Britain, you would not be understood.
Language is simply a means of communication. If the majority of other people use words in a way where your different usage of those words hinders communication, *you* are the one in error. That's the perils of using something like English, instead of Latin or Ancient Greek which are nicely specified, textbook-ised and dead, dead, dead...:-/
That's a bit of a BS comparison. There's a very real difference between "new features added to an earlier version" and "new features added to imitate another platform". Not to defend MS wholeheartedly, but they have had some good ideas. New versions of MS products are not just iterative development of old stuff, but actually add new features.
Some of the features turn out to be crap, of course. The Office Assistant and MS Bob were/are horrible and unuseable - but at the time they were developed, there were lots of op-ed articles saying that the reason computers were so hard to use by Joe Average was because they didn't have an easy way to understand them, didn't know how to go about doing what they wanted, and didn't even know how to find out how to do stuff. To their credit, MS tried to fix that - OK, it was a pretty half-assed effort and everyone hated it, but the danger of innovating is that your new innovation doesn't succeed, so respect to them for trying something new.
Of course the OS community have had some good innovative ideas too. Tabs in browsers, for instance, or skinnable apps, or Paul Graham's anti-spam algorithms. Trouble is though that innovation doesn't just need clever people thinking up stuff, it also needs people to implement it, and it's easier for a rich company to push through the second part of that. That's why OS software tends to be playing catch-up - if you're only developing stuff in your free time, you simply can't keep up with someone who's coding 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. (Unless you have no social life or other hobbies, of course.;-)
If the only issue were setting up the bug-tracking server, then great.
In practise having an established OS has *big* ramifications. Most companies have an IT department whose job is to keep an eye on all important upgrades needed. Reckon they'll support Linux just bcos your bug-tracking server needs it? No way. It needs some different skills, so chances are that the IT department will need to hire someone (maybe part-time) to do setup and administration for Linux. Also you're talking a different anti-virus setup. And a different user-rights system. For one machine.
It's not going to happen, is it?
Now if you could show that migrating to Linux AND doing all support to keep that machine up-to-date OS-wise, free of virii, etc is cheaper than just getting a Windows-native bug-tracking system, THEN maybe you have a point. I think the chances of you showing that though start at around "snowball in hell" and go down from there...
A friend of mine runs a workshop called LiveWires which is basically doing what you're talking about. It's a Christian group, but if you subtract the religion then you'll probably have something useful. At least it's worth dropping them an email to ask questions.
Modelling environments do *simulation*. It *always* takes more processing power to simulate than to run on the intended target.
Also, the modelling environment is running in its own little sandbox on the PC. The real hardware will have a load of I/O and stuff to deal with, which is being simulated by the modelling environment. So you can't run directly from the modelling environment, any more than your PC joystick and MS Flight Sim can control a real aircraft.
What you *can* get are auto-coders which generate C code from the models, in the same way as a compiler generates assembly instructions from C code. Compile that C code and you'll get something that'll run on your target hardware. (Note the two-step process, because C code is portable between processors - it's more sensible to have the auto-coder write portable C code and then generate assembly using existing compilers, instead of reinventing the wheel.)
As you say though, he took it from a ship he captured. As far as discovering anything new himself, he didn't get much - just spread a bit of "brand recognition" for Britain.
Britain *did* discover that a useful form of income was beating the crap out of the Spanish and Portugese (through naval superiority) and stealing from them, which provided a lot of extra finance for Britain back then when pirates were legalised as privateers. But that wasn't really a "discovery" bcos sailors had been doing piracy for ages, just a different business model for government really.
Way back when, there were people like Magellan and Raleigh who went out exploring. They were funded by governments. No-one knew what they'd find out there, but chances were that it'd be interesting and often profitable. If a couple of your missions don't find much, maybe a third will hit the jackpot. Drake didn't bring much back with him, but Raleigh brought back the potato which revolutionised European farming, and the Spanish found gold mines in Mexico which basically financed Spain as a superpower for a couple of hundred years. (Note that I don't count Columbus, who had a fixed commercial reason of getting to India more easily.)
This is the venture capital principle - fund it with the intention of seeing what you can get back. And even if you don't make anything back off the trip itself, maybe you've learnt something from what you did that'll be of use - British funding of seafaring turned them into a superpower by having better ships and sailors than anyone else (rather like air superiority these days).
So what's the extra-terrestrial equivalent of Cathay and the Indies? Answer: asteroid mining. You can pick up a lot of metal very easily up there, but the problem is getting out there and back cheaply enough to make the trip worthwhile. If you have a space elevator to get you to the top of the gravity well, and a solar-powered spacecraft to get you around, spaceflight becomes relatively cheap.
Mars in itself isn't much of a prize. But Mars as an intermediate target on the way to true space exploration (and, let's be honest, exploitation) is very valuable. And if you're going to be mining asteroids, you might as well live on Mars instead of Earth, simply bcos it's closer and has less gravity well to overcome (even space elevators take energy).
And finally, don't discount the lure of pure investigation and "something new". The prime drive of humans is curiosity. Not long back, NewScientist had an article about travelling to Mars that suggested cutting down the cost of the expedition by making it one-way - if ppl couldn't survive there then they'd die. And a survey of ppl involved in space research found that a massive number of them would be up for that, even though the odds were they'd not live out the year.
Hey, some of us in the rest of the world don't *get* to choose! Who nominated that clown for "Leader of the Free World"? Answer: a few trillion dollars-worth of mineral deposits and an ego you could ski down. Not, for instance, other world leaders, or the UN, or any legal authority...
Sure, us non-Americans care more deeply. We can't change it! We're scared shitless that the American people are going to do the same as last time and vote in a moral-free, low-IQ weasel, just bcos he says he's a "wartime president" - when the only war on is Iraq and HE created it!
A computer scientist is what you start with. A Professional Programmer is what you get when you take a computer scientist and train them properly...
I'll make a more general statement about software. It starts off good. Then you double the number of features, and have to keep all the old hooks for backwards compatibility. OK, it leaves you with messy interfaces, but that's tolerable. Then someone tweaks something in their code that breaks yours, so you have to do some architecturally horrible things that are like taking the Taj Mahal, blocking up the doorways and forcing people to get in via the roof, using some rickety scaffolding (painted orange and purple) to get up there.
You ask for time to rewrite and remove cruft. Request denied. Meantime someone has now written some scaffolding traversal algorithm which will be broken if you clean up your code, so you're screwed. The scaffolding is now seen to be rickety, and someone else's code falls off it and is damaged. The owner of this code is currently on an ultra-high-priority project and can't spare the time to fix it, and no-one else understands it well enough to fix it for him. So the decision is made to fix the problem by concreting the scaffolding in place. After all, it's only a short-term solution until the owner of the other code has time to fix it, isn't it...?
The thrust of this more general statement is that humans who are encumbered with the limitations of a commercial environment are not designed to write software. Humans are fallible, and a commercial environment means that it doesn't get done unless the customer can tell the difference. Each individual bit of cruft isn't noticeable, and by the time the cruft has slowed the code down noticeably, the complete rewrite that it needs is way too expensive. Unless blessed with a godlike manager, your software will become shit.
Let's call this Bartlett's Law:
"All software does not start shit. However, all software will become shit unless management can recognise bad architectural decisions and will allow rewrites to fix them."
Lewis was certainly a college Prof. But he was also an incredibly well-known front-man for Christianity, and all his novels were written on thinly-disguised Christian themes, to sell based on his existing fan-base. Can you say "Beowulf"? I knew you could...;-)
Tolkein came from another angle, though. He was doing the whole thing for his own intellectual enjoyment, and it just happened that he wrote the most popular novel of the 20th century. His main gig was ancient European languages and the myths of those cultures. Creating his own "ancient culture" and populating it with his own myths was done entirely because that's the kind of thing he was interested in. He wrote his books to be evaluated by the same standards as the Norse Sagas, for example - in other words, writing books to be studied by the literary circle of which he was a member. And the fact that it made him heaps of money afterwards is irrelevant - at the time he wrote it, he was supported by his university work, and he kept doing the university work even when the books started jumping off the shelves. Dante author.
As for your point about patronage, I quote: "Commercial artists have a publisher, who decides whether or not to print their books based on the opinion of whether or not they will sell" (emphasis mine). So the publisher is accountable to the bunch of drunken Frisians, and you're accountable to the publisher. So unless you're writing books that appeal to drunken Frisians, you're SOL. That makes you as accountable to the drunken Frisians as if you were personally reciting it to each of them.
Certainly there are some Beowulf authors who don't write stuff with mass appeal and so don't get published (or get kicked out of the bar by the drunken Frisians, or by the bartender who caters for the drunken Frisians). But NS was talking about *successful* writers in this question, not about no-hopers who can't sell their books.
Grab.
PS. I *love* the drunken Frisians analogy. Can I say it again? Drunken Frisians, drunken Frisians, drunken... (fade);-)
Mineshaft ain't a good solution. One of the things you'll get on Mars and during the trip is light. If you don't need artificial light running your hydroponics, that's a bunch of energy budget saved. Being able to look out of a window will also help stop your subjects going crazy with cabin fever.:-)
Also, if you're going to spray the walls with concrete and some plastic, I don't see why a normal building isn't an option. It's much, much cheaper to put up a building than to excavate a tunnel.
Competence is only the 4th entry in the definition, and the "professional=competent" synonym is clearly based on people doing work that's good enough to pay for. Sure, you might do "pro bono" work, but if your main income is from working in that field, you're a professional in that field.
The "professional bodies" you mention are groups of professionals. You join the organisation because you *are* a professional (ie. working in a job and getting paid for it) - you don't somehow become a professional by joining the society. In fact, the "sufficient experience" part will specifically require you to have been working in a position of responsibility for some time, which comes down to having a paid job. Working on an open-source project in your free time, however good you happen to be, won't cut it for membership of the IEEE if your day-job is cleaning the drains.
Linus is not now an amateur - he's being paid lots of money to do software. But at the time he created Linux, he was absolutely an amateur in every sense, both by not being paid and by not being a very good software engineer (his own admission). Granted, he created something pretty good, but that's the whole point of the article!
Grab.
Re:Corps will continue to rule, people are sheep..
on
Amateur Revolution?
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· Score: 1
So Evelyn Glennie isn't a musician because she plays percussion? Or Mick Fleetwood? Or Charlie Watts? I don't think so, somehow...
To get the poster to answer their own question, what were they learning at age 10? Our school didn't do basic electricity ("This is a battery. This is a bulb. This is a switch. Look at the bulb glow.") until age 10-11. So don't imagine they'll follow much of the internals.
At that kind of age, the computer *has* to be a magic box. You press the "on" button on the PS2, put your CD in, the game plays. Focussing on all the amazing things these magic boxes do would be a good start.
Actually it's quite a large price to pay. You checked the price of GPRS recently?;-)
Technology may march on, but older technology and older standards may still be useful for stuff. Your car engine is currently being controlled by a computer running at, max, 40MHz (if you're very lucky, it may even have 32-bit floating-point support). If you phone someone in Africa, chances are that your call will be going via exchanges using ancient technology - but chances are that the call will still go through. The ballpoint pen you're scribbling with is 66-year-old tech.
In this case, the main use will be for reading back diagnostics for equipment in the field. No diagnostics program will have a serious need for bandwidth, so this modem is just fine.
Maybe in stills. In the film though, it became obvious that the animators had never seen a human moving. Bugs Bunny cartoons had more convincing animation than FF did.
Not to mention the few places where the animation broke down. Watch Aki's forearms and wrists - I noticed them break into rectangular surfaces at least twice during the film. A valiant effort, sure, but ultimately an attempt that failed, and not just due to the absence of a script - technically the visuals weren't up to it either.
Gollum made it because he *did* look human, and the acting was good enough as well that you never even thought about it. FF only got to the "nearly" stage on looks and the animation screamed "FAKE! FAKE! FAKE!". By falling into the Uncanny Valley, it only succeeded in looking strange and slightly creepy.
Slashdot Mirror
"Go take a look". Maybe you can justify it. But "copy it, just to prove a point", you are so screwed. I leave my front door unlocked, you do not have the right to come in, remove all my stuff, and leave a post-it note on the door saying where you've put it. And if I left my front door unlocked and happened to come back and find you inside, I'd be beating the crap out of you immediately without waiting to find whether you intended to take anything.
In this case, the guys were not just "proving a point", they were out to steal credit card details for massive personal profit. Justify that one, laddie.
Grab.
That noise you hear is the point going over your head...
When you've got a 10-foot by 3-foot wraparound monitor, good luck seeing it all without moving, dude. And until we've got those 10-foot by 5-foot monitors, the "paperless office" is a non-starter, because it can't replace the 10-foot by 3-foot desk which I regularly fill with pages of scrap paper when I'm trying to work something out.
Grab.
Sorry, no. The early hackers (or crackers, if you like) themselves used the words "hacker" and "hacking" to describe their activities, which is a major factor in why mass media described it as such.
:-/
As for "some people choose to use a work incorrectly", the majority tends to be the deciding factor, I'm afraid. Languages drift over time, and meanings *do* change. There are many differences between American and British English, but the most telling differences are the words which just drifted *slightly* so that meanings are different. The word "quite" is a classic - in American usage it means "very" or "absolutely", whereas in British usage it means "somewhat". Now the American usage was originally the correct one, but if you tried using it that way in Britain, you would not be understood.
Language is simply a means of communication. If the majority of other people use words in a way where your different usage of those words hinders communication, *you* are the one in error. That's the perils of using something like English, instead of Latin or Ancient Greek which are nicely specified, textbook-ised and dead, dead, dead...
Grab.
That's a bit of a BS comparison. There's a very real difference between "new features added to an earlier version" and "new features added to imitate another platform". Not to defend MS wholeheartedly, but they have had some good ideas. New versions of MS products are not just iterative development of old stuff, but actually add new features.
;-)
Some of the features turn out to be crap, of course. The Office Assistant and MS Bob were/are horrible and unuseable - but at the time they were developed, there were lots of op-ed articles saying that the reason computers were so hard to use by Joe Average was because they didn't have an easy way to understand them, didn't know how to go about doing what they wanted, and didn't even know how to find out how to do stuff. To their credit, MS tried to fix that - OK, it was a pretty half-assed effort and everyone hated it, but the danger of innovating is that your new innovation doesn't succeed, so respect to them for trying something new.
Of course the OS community have had some good innovative ideas too. Tabs in browsers, for instance, or skinnable apps, or Paul Graham's anti-spam algorithms. Trouble is though that innovation doesn't just need clever people thinking up stuff, it also needs people to implement it, and it's easier for a rich company to push through the second part of that. That's why OS software tends to be playing catch-up - if you're only developing stuff in your free time, you simply can't keep up with someone who's coding 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. (Unless you have no social life or other hobbies, of course.
Grab.
If the only issue were setting up the bug-tracking server, then great.
In practise having an established OS has *big* ramifications. Most companies have an IT department whose job is to keep an eye on all important upgrades needed. Reckon they'll support Linux just bcos your bug-tracking server needs it? No way. It needs some different skills, so chances are that the IT department will need to hire someone (maybe part-time) to do setup and administration for Linux. Also you're talking a different anti-virus setup. And a different user-rights system. For one machine.
It's not going to happen, is it?
Now if you could show that migrating to Linux AND doing all support to keep that machine up-to-date OS-wise, free of virii, etc is cheaper than just getting a Windows-native bug-tracking system, THEN maybe you have a point. I think the chances of you showing that though start at around "snowball in hell" and go down from there...
Grab.
Sure, but how many of those rocket flights were made by someone who hadn't slept in 40 hours?
Putz.
A friend of mine runs a workshop called LiveWires which is basically doing what you're talking about. It's a Christian group, but if you subtract the religion then you'll probably have something useful. At least it's worth dropping them an email to ask questions.
LiveWires link
Grab.
Modelling environments do *simulation*. It *always* takes more processing power to simulate than to run on the intended target.
Also, the modelling environment is running in its own little sandbox on the PC. The real hardware will have a load of I/O and stuff to deal with, which is being simulated by the modelling environment. So you can't run directly from the modelling environment, any more than your PC joystick and MS Flight Sim can control a real aircraft.
What you *can* get are auto-coders which generate C code from the models, in the same way as a compiler generates assembly instructions from C code. Compile that C code and you'll get something that'll run on your target hardware. (Note the two-step process, because C code is portable between processors - it's more sensible to have the auto-coder write portable C code and then generate assembly using existing compilers, instead of reinventing the wheel.)
Grab.
Hey, it's still a lot of money now! :-)
As you say though, he took it from a ship he captured. As far as discovering anything new himself, he didn't get much - just spread a bit of "brand recognition" for Britain.
Britain *did* discover that a useful form of income was beating the crap out of the Spanish and Portugese (through naval superiority) and stealing from them, which provided a lot of extra finance for Britain back then when pirates were legalised as privateers. But that wasn't really a "discovery" bcos sailors had been doing piracy for ages, just a different business model for government really.
Grab.
Way back when, there were people like Magellan and Raleigh who went out exploring. They were funded by governments. No-one knew what they'd find out there, but chances were that it'd be interesting and often profitable. If a couple of your missions don't find much, maybe a third will hit the jackpot. Drake didn't bring much back with him, but Raleigh brought back the potato which revolutionised European farming, and the Spanish found gold mines in Mexico which basically financed Spain as a superpower for a couple of hundred years. (Note that I don't count Columbus, who had a fixed commercial reason of getting to India more easily.)
This is the venture capital principle - fund it with the intention of seeing what you can get back. And even if you don't make anything back off the trip itself, maybe you've learnt something from what you did that'll be of use - British funding of seafaring turned them into a superpower by having better ships and sailors than anyone else (rather like air superiority these days).
So what's the extra-terrestrial equivalent of Cathay and the Indies? Answer: asteroid mining. You can pick up a lot of metal very easily up there, but the problem is getting out there and back cheaply enough to make the trip worthwhile. If you have a space elevator to get you to the top of the gravity well, and a solar-powered spacecraft to get you around, spaceflight becomes relatively cheap.
Mars in itself isn't much of a prize. But Mars as an intermediate target on the way to true space exploration (and, let's be honest, exploitation) is very valuable. And if you're going to be mining asteroids, you might as well live on Mars instead of Earth, simply bcos it's closer and has less gravity well to overcome (even space elevators take energy).
And finally, don't discount the lure of pure investigation and "something new". The prime drive of humans is curiosity. Not long back, NewScientist had an article about travelling to Mars that suggested cutting down the cost of the expedition by making it one-way - if ppl couldn't survive there then they'd die. And a survey of ppl involved in space research found that a massive number of them would be up for that, even though the odds were they'd not live out the year.
Grab.
Thanks for the appreciation, man. ;-)
Grab.
PS. What mis-spelling? I wouldn't normally ask, but I really can't see it.
Hey, some of us in the rest of the world don't *get* to choose! Who nominated that clown for "Leader of the Free World"? Answer: a few trillion dollars-worth of mineral deposits and an ego you could ski down. Not, for instance, other world leaders, or the UN, or any legal authority...
Grab.
Sure, us non-Americans care more deeply. We can't change it! We're scared shitless that the American people are going to do the same as last time and vote in a moral-free, low-IQ weasel, just bcos he says he's a "wartime president" - when the only war on is Iraq and HE created it!
Grab.
A computer scientist is what you start with. A Professional Programmer is what you get when you take a computer scientist and train them properly...
I'll make a more general statement about software. It starts off good. Then you double the number of features, and have to keep all the old hooks for backwards compatibility. OK, it leaves you with messy interfaces, but that's tolerable. Then someone tweaks something in their code that breaks yours, so you have to do some architecturally horrible things that are like taking the Taj Mahal, blocking up the doorways and forcing people to get in via the roof, using some rickety scaffolding (painted orange and purple) to get up there.
You ask for time to rewrite and remove cruft. Request denied. Meantime someone has now written some scaffolding traversal algorithm which will be broken if you clean up your code, so you're screwed. The scaffolding is now seen to be rickety, and someone else's code falls off it and is damaged. The owner of this code is currently on an ultra-high-priority project and can't spare the time to fix it, and no-one else understands it well enough to fix it for him. So the decision is made to fix the problem by concreting the scaffolding in place. After all, it's only a short-term solution until the owner of the other code has time to fix it, isn't it...?
The thrust of this more general statement is that humans who are encumbered with the limitations of a commercial environment are not designed to write software. Humans are fallible, and a commercial environment means that it doesn't get done unless the customer can tell the difference. Each individual bit of cruft isn't noticeable, and by the time the cruft has slowed the code down noticeably, the complete rewrite that it needs is way too expensive. Unless blessed with a godlike manager, your software will become shit.
Let's call this Bartlett's Law:
"All software does not start shit. However, all software will become shit unless management can recognise bad architectural decisions and will allow rewrites to fix them."
Grab.
Lewis was certainly a college Prof. But he was also an incredibly well-known front-man for Christianity, and all his novels were written on thinly-disguised Christian themes, to sell based on his existing fan-base. Can you say "Beowulf"? I knew you could... ;-)
;-)
Tolkein came from another angle, though. He was doing the whole thing for his own intellectual enjoyment, and it just happened that he wrote the most popular novel of the 20th century. His main gig was ancient European languages and the myths of those cultures. Creating his own "ancient culture" and populating it with his own myths was done entirely because that's the kind of thing he was interested in. He wrote his books to be evaluated by the same standards as the Norse Sagas, for example - in other words, writing books to be studied by the literary circle of which he was a member. And the fact that it made him heaps of money afterwards is irrelevant - at the time he wrote it, he was supported by his university work, and he kept doing the university work even when the books started jumping off the shelves. Dante author.
As for your point about patronage, I quote: "Commercial artists have a publisher, who decides whether or not to print their books based on the opinion of whether or not they will sell" (emphasis mine). So the publisher is accountable to the bunch of drunken Frisians, and you're accountable to the publisher. So unless you're writing books that appeal to drunken Frisians, you're SOL. That makes you as accountable to the drunken Frisians as if you were personally reciting it to each of them.
Certainly there are some Beowulf authors who don't write stuff with mass appeal and so don't get published (or get kicked out of the bar by the drunken Frisians, or by the bartender who caters for the drunken Frisians). But NS was talking about *successful* writers in this question, not about no-hopers who can't sell their books.
Grab.
PS. I *love* the drunken Frisians analogy. Can I say it again? Drunken Frisians, drunken Frisians, drunken... (fade)
Mineshaft ain't a good solution. One of the things you'll get on Mars and during the trip is light. If you don't need artificial light running your hydroponics, that's a bunch of energy budget saved. Being able to look out of a window will also help stop your subjects going crazy with cabin fever. :-)
Also, if you're going to spray the walls with concrete and some plastic, I don't see why a normal building isn't an option. It's much, much cheaper to put up a building than to excavate a tunnel.
Grab.
Yep, I reckon nutso websites masquerading as serious information is endangering us all, sure enough...
Grab.
Don't the astronauts have to do regular workouts anyway? So that energy can be used for something productive instead of wasted on a treadmill.
Grab.
Dictionary definition
Competence is only the 4th entry in the definition, and the "professional=competent" synonym is clearly based on people doing work that's good enough to pay for. Sure, you might do "pro bono" work, but if your main income is from working in that field, you're a professional in that field.
The "professional bodies" you mention are groups of professionals. You join the organisation because you *are* a professional (ie. working in a job and getting paid for it) - you don't somehow become a professional by joining the society. In fact, the "sufficient experience" part will specifically require you to have been working in a position of responsibility for some time, which comes down to having a paid job. Working on an open-source project in your free time, however good you happen to be, won't cut it for membership of the IEEE if your day-job is cleaning the drains.
Linus is not now an amateur - he's being paid lots of money to do software. But at the time he created Linux, he was absolutely an amateur in every sense, both by not being paid and by not being a very good software engineer (his own admission). Granted, he created something pretty good, but that's the whole point of the article!
Grab.
So Evelyn Glennie isn't a musician because she plays percussion? Or Mick Fleetwood? Or Charlie Watts? I don't think so, somehow...
Grab.
Got to agree with that.
To get the poster to answer their own question, what were they learning at age 10? Our school didn't do basic electricity ("This is a battery. This is a bulb. This is a switch. Look at the bulb glow.") until age 10-11. So don't imagine they'll follow much of the internals.
At that kind of age, the computer *has* to be a magic box. You press the "on" button on the PS2, put your CD in, the game plays. Focussing on all the amazing things these magic boxes do would be a good start.
Grab.
Actually it's quite a large price to pay. You checked the price of GPRS recently? ;-)
Technology may march on, but older technology and older standards may still be useful for stuff. Your car engine is currently being controlled by a computer running at, max, 40MHz (if you're very lucky, it may even have 32-bit floating-point support). If you phone someone in Africa, chances are that your call will be going via exchanges using ancient technology - but chances are that the call will still go through. The ballpoint pen you're scribbling with is 66-year-old tech.
In this case, the main use will be for reading back diagnostics for equipment in the field. No diagnostics program will have a serious need for bandwidth, so this modem is just fine.
Grab.
You: "Wait a minute while I hire a lipreader. Well, whaddaya know..."
Grab.
"Looked gorgeous"?
Maybe in stills. In the film though, it became obvious that the animators had never seen a human moving. Bugs Bunny cartoons had more convincing animation than FF did.
Not to mention the few places where the animation broke down. Watch Aki's forearms and wrists - I noticed them break into rectangular surfaces at least twice during the film. A valiant effort, sure, but ultimately an attempt that failed, and not just due to the absence of a script - technically the visuals weren't up to it either.
Gollum made it because he *did* look human, and the acting was good enough as well that you never even thought about it. FF only got to the "nearly" stage on looks and the animation screamed "FAKE! FAKE! FAKE!". By falling into the Uncanny Valley, it only succeeded in looking strange and slightly creepy.
Grab.