Oh please, this guy considers himself a developer and he used iWeb and GoLive?
Emacs, Vim, Gedit, Kate -- these provide all the tools you need to develop anything. All you need is syntax coloring and your wits, if you are using anything more, you are wasting your time, or you are ignorant.
Seriously, GoLive? iWeb? Learn how to use a computer, man.
The industry always eventually succumbs to open standards. If you thought for a second that investing your skill into a proprietary technology (like Silverlight of.NET) was a good long-term career move, you deserve to be left out in the cold by Microsoft.
Still,.NET will be necessary for backwards compatibility of applications for several years to come. By then, hopefully, you developers will have learned your lesson. Never invest any more time learning proprietary API's than is necessary to satisfy your employer, especially if the API is from Microsoft.
I am sick of people ranting about Google and their market research. Its been like this forever -- people collecting information on you so they know what to sell you and how. Now technology just makes it easier to do, as technology does with everything. So if that scares you, go live in a cave.
All I want is to NOT be censored. If the data were being used to try and censor me, I would be against it. But otherwise, I voluntarily tell people what I like and hate, and if Google wants to know so they can sell me something, all they need to do is ask. I hate advertising, but the reason I hate it is because 99.99909174% of it has nothing to do with what I like or what I want to buy. Like, I am sick of ads for Windows software when I haven't used Windows for anything, EVER. If every advertisement I ever see happens to be something I might be interested in buying, that would be awesome.
Cool, this is definitely a good move on Google's behalf. Now all they need to do is ditch the tabs bar as well, and Chrome will become the BEST BROWSER EVER!
You're a moron if you didn't see this coming. You're a moron if you have EVER trusted Microsoft for any quality product or service. Because Skype was never open-source, I have been gradually nudging my family and friends to switch to Google. But the minute I heard Microsoft bought-out Skype, I immediately mailed everyone on my Skype contacts list that I wouldn't be using it anymore, and that they should switch to Google or never see me online again. It always makes me laugh when people who use Microsoft (or any non-open-source) products/services complain about a feature change or a service discontinuation.
I am a pack-rat, so I would always hesitate before getting rid of my old computers.
To be realistic, though, we can't expect to keep the same hardware forever. People really need to care more about preserving our old video games, and that means making more sturdy emulators that have been tested on the full catalog of games for that platform. This is difficult and time consuming -- but necessary if we wish to preserve this part of our history.
Unfortunately, the state of many emulators is usually "not good enough". I remember trying to play Street Fighter II on a genesis emulator, and the timing mechanism was all screwed up. In that game, time is tracked by counting clock cycles. The game emulation was a bit slow, so it wouldn't function well unless you sped up the virtual CPU. Speeding up the VCPU made it run smoothly, but then the time limit for each round would drop to like 20 seconds.
Someone has probably fixed the problem now, but the point is, little problems like this always crop up in emulators. Thats why I am really hesitant to throw out any of my old things, even though I am really starting to run out of space in my home.
Multiple monitors is mostly an unnecessary luxury.
1. One large high-res monitor, 2. a tiling window manager replete with multiple desktops and good keyboard shortcuts, and 3. a VT-100 terminal emulator. Thats all any developer needs. The rest is all about knowing how to use your curses-based console programs in clever ways.
Multiple displays come in handy for other, non-developer tasks. Art and graphic design, and storyboarding, movie editing, live television programming, administering multiple clients in a cloud computing platform, running tests on a graphical interface in a virtual machine -- for these tasks a second and third monitor makes life a lot easier.
Another government agency spending tax payer money on commercial software that can be done better and cheaper by Linux. If government just switched over now, and told their employees to just get used to it (using Linux), excessive operational cost could be further eliminated for years to come.
If I was only using the e-mail service to send/receive government-related documents and queries, and I didn't ever use it for anything else, then sure I could trust the government as my e-mail provider.
Fractions are great - if you lived in Babylonian times when you might be asked to do two computations a day.
I especially like 1/60th - with perfect factors of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 15, 20 and 30 - much more versatile than 1/100th that only breaks down into 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25 and 50.
You forgot 12. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30.
But this is why 360 degrees in a circle, and 60 minutes in a degree, and 60 seconds in a minute. 360 gives you 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 24, 25, 30, 40, 45, 50, 60, 72, 90, 120, 180
Its is easier than using fractions multiples of Pi. So for time and circles, 360 and 60 are best because it makes cutting a circle into slices is easy as pie.
Most metric metrics (lol...ya, I just did that) are multi syllable compound words, and most of them don't have any obvious way of being shortened. Americans just don't want to say "Kilometer" when they can say "mile. They don't want to say "centimeter" when they can say "inch".
The Metric System is elegantly simple and beautiful, in everything but the English pronunciation of said metrics. What a shame.
The Japanese are the go-to people for inventing single or dual-sylable words that abbreviate longer words. They say "senchi" for "centimeter". For milliliters and millimeters, they say "miri" and it is clear from context whether they are talking about volume or distance. "Kiro" can mean kilograms or kilometers, depending on context.
Americans could learn to do the same thing... maybe... if we weren't so stupid.
Seriously though, it is likely that if we switched to metric, you'd see popular abbreviations creep in eventually. Like saying 10 C's or 15 K's.
Communicating over cell networks requires incredibly complex and expensive technology. Cell companies need gobs of cash to update their infrastructure to support the high-speed data technology, and still need to worry about coverage, with atmospheric problems, putting relays in tunnels and in subways, bending signals around big buildings, and trying to cover remote areas, and the best networks still break down when thousands of people suddenly crowed into one place to watch a fireworks show. No matter what you do, 3G/4G will just be more expensive and less reliable, even if each cell cover larger areas than WiFi.
It is better to use many smaller, inexpensive cells, i.e. WiFi. WiFi can build up a decentralized network that is much cheaper, more robust, and provides more bandwidth. Hopefully some day, there will be wireless brokers that bill users consistently and fairly no matter where they are. All WiFi providers will charge your broker based on how much you use their network, while allowing you to seamlessly transition from one network to another, never loosing connectivity even accross different providers because all providers charge a trusted broker, who in turn charges you.
This is a much better network infrastructure than what we see with modern cell networks. I hope, by lack of demand, 3G and 4G will die off, so I only use WiFi.
Computer science, as in theoretical computer science, the study algorithms, data structures, theory of parsing and programming languages, this should all be an optional advanced placement curriculum for students who express interest, like an alternative to pre-calculus.
But general computer use should be mandatory, as fundamental as algebra and geometry. And I am not talking using spreadsheets and word processors and web browsers. I mean teaching kids fundamental computing concepts, and how to use a command line to actually compute things:
What is file compression and how do I do it
What your computer does when you back up data.
How to write a flat-file databases, like an address book, using a text editor, and then "grep" it to retrieve information
Simple regular expressions
Using string variables to fill in the blanks of a form or a report.
What the importance of "indexing" is and how it can improve efficiency of search engines.
How to sum a very long list of numbers without Excel
How to sort tables according to certain keys without Excel
The importance of understanding logic for use in loops, and if-then statements
How to write simple scripts to accomplish repetitive tasks
You can argue about whether they should learn to do this using bash or python, or MatLab or R, but the important thing is to teach that, yes, computers can do these things, and let the students' imaginations apply these tools to whatever problems they may have.
All of these things are really easy to understand, and are completely fundamental to common every day computer tasks. Most people never even try to solve their own problems, rather they wait for some programmers to include the aforementioned computing functionality into a GUI, and if the GUI doesn't have that feature, then they think its impossible to do. Even the simplest things, something that could be done with one line of a bash script, an ordinary user doesn't know about it and is stuck relying on that freeware thing they downloaded to take care of it for them.
Education FAILs to teach this; it needs to change.
LOL...I dont consider myself strongly pro or anti-Microsoft. However, I get such a kick at the idiot Microsoft haters on Slashdot who can't even admit when Microsoft does something right.
Pro-Microsoft, anti-microsoft? The important thing is you've found a way to make yourself feel superior to both. (XKCD)
Except you fail to realize that Microsoft hasn't done anything right yet.
How quickly people forget why we never trust Microsoft. It might be free now, it might be helpful to geeks now, it might even seem like they are growing an open-source market now. But as soon as it you come to depend on it, then they pull the rug out from under you, using all those strings they've attached: raising the cost, eliminating functionality, restricting use to a few specific applications, or making it impossible to use with other open-source solutions. Then, for your naivety, you be forced to once again choose:
1. do you abandon years of work and experience with the Microsoft platform, bite the bullet and change over to the open source solution starting again from scratch?
OR
2. do you accept Microsoft's terms, buy their upgrades, scrap your plans for integration with other devices, and hope they don't eliminate any features you really liked?
Yeah, nice try guys. Even video games require warm-up levels, and video games are about as simple as you can get. Now, try to make an interface that can do real work, not just play games, and people get will get frustrated very quickly. If you have ever tried to get someone less than computer literate to learn a new user interface, you know that they throw fits and give up the first time something unexpected happens. Unless Microsoft intends to force all of their customers to give up the same tired-old interface they have forced on us for the past 25+ years (even though Microsoft is quite experienced at forcing their customers to do things that the customers don't want to do), they will not get past the use pattern of: double-click icon, wait for window, repeat. If it were that simple to get people to change, Linux wouldn't have so many problems picking up new inexperienced users.
Then, this Microsoft guy claims their goal is to "eliminate the learning curve?" Give me a break. The fancy interfaces expo'd in this video would definitely require some training and getting-used-to for even advanced computer users. For example, learning how to relate physical wooden blocks to objects in 3D to do 3D arrangements -- unless your computer knows how to read your mind, you must have some method of mapping the blocks to the avatars in the interface. No matter how intuitive this mapping process is, it will take some time to learn.
Couldn't agree more, this article sucked.
He seems to suggest that Google has been receiving "a lot of bad press lately," and points to a New York Times article that, if you were to read it, doesn't make Google seem bad at all. What a hack (and not the good kind of hack).
After looking at the site, it seems to me to be more like an effort to make the idea of BSD ports, Portage, or "apt-get", but instead of porting operating systems or application software to eclectic computing platforms, you are porting machine-learning algorithms and training data to eclectic robotic platforms. Probably what they are researching is methods of making machine-learning algorithms interchangeable across interchangeable robot parts, like if all robots use the same robotic arm, or the same method of locomotion. You can apply a statistical learning algorithm to train the first robot, then use transfer that training data to other robots that use the same robotic arm or whatever. So it is probably an matter of classifying robot parts that require training information so they can more easily access them from a central repository. And not just algorithms for using robot parts, but more general algorithms like, search-and-rescue algorithms, or soccer-playing strategies, or knowledge bases to repair machinery, or anything at all.
Someone had better come up with an open-source version of this Skynet thing soon. I need to build my own robot army to defend myself from the government robot army that will inevitably come when they find out I've been downloading copyrighted material from BitTorrent.
Exactly right. Take the Babbage Difference engine, or the ENIAC or any old computer that use vaccuum tubes for their logic circuits. These tools aren't useful, but they still exist in museums, and enthusiastic hobbiests may build their own working modles of these machines. But this doesn't qualify as "use" and they are definitely obsolote. The Von Neuman architecture is certainly still in use, but what are we talking about here? The architecture or the machine itself? The NPR guys are obfusticating definitions for the sake of some stupid debate to fill air time (they do that a lot, I think). I think this fuzzy terminology is the same confused logic behind all software patents, by the way.
I'd like to replace those heavy Infiniband cables with optical fiber. While were at it, I think I might also like to replace my DVI or HDMI, ethernet, and USB cables all with optical fiber. 20GFC FibreChannel is fast enough for distributing about 100 FPS of 1080p HDTV. 100 times faster could feasibly get you to connect any two nodes with just two fiber optic cables, you could have a "universal connector" that could connect any two digital components together -- displays to computers, keyboards to displays, network cards to routers, routers to modems. Seriously, even with emerging 3D technology requiring double the bandwidth of ordinary high-def displays, a single connector could handle that. This could reduce costs for grid computing as well -- imagine a home-brew grid computer. Want more photo-realistic graphics for your favorite FPS game? Just add more nodes to your own personal switched fabric network!
Well, an Advent calendar is right along the lines of what the hyper-Christian Perl inventor Larry Wall would do.
Python fans would be better suited to a "Life of Brian" Calendar, which uses a Python coding technique to express one scene from the Life of Brian every day.
Or, on that line, the guy who started Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, or the guy who started Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales. But the Google guys or Zuckerberg is better. I think the more wealthy they are, the easier it is for kids to admire them.
When I was in Jr. High school, I was the biggest Apple fanboy you'd ever seen, so Steve Jobs was my hero. It paved the way for my present career in computer science.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh please, this guy considers himself a developer and he used iWeb and GoLive?
Emacs, Vim, Gedit, Kate -- these provide all the tools you need to develop anything. All you need is syntax coloring and your wits, if you are using anything more, you are wasting your time, or you are ignorant.
Seriously, GoLive? iWeb? Learn how to use a computer, man.
The industry always eventually succumbs to open standards. If you thought for a second that investing your skill into a proprietary technology (like Silverlight of .NET) was a good long-term career move, you deserve to be left out in the cold by Microsoft.
.NET will be necessary for backwards compatibility of applications for several years to come. By then, hopefully, you developers will have learned your lesson. Never invest any more time learning proprietary API's than is necessary to satisfy your employer, especially if the API is from Microsoft.
Still,
I am sick of people ranting about Google and their market research. Its been like this forever -- people collecting information on you so they know what to sell you and how. Now technology just makes it easier to do, as technology does with everything. So if that scares you, go live in a cave.
All I want is to NOT be censored. If the data were being used to try and censor me, I would be against it. But otherwise, I voluntarily tell people what I like and hate, and if Google wants to know so they can sell me something, all they need to do is ask. I hate advertising, but the reason I hate it is because 99.99909174% of it has nothing to do with what I like or what I want to buy. Like, I am sick of ads for Windows software when I haven't used Windows for anything, EVER. If every advertisement I ever see happens to be something I might be interested in buying, that would be awesome.
Google is solving these problems, and I am glad.
Cool, this is definitely a good move on Google's behalf. Now all they need to do is ditch the tabs bar as well, and Chrome will become the BEST BROWSER EVER!
You're a moron if you didn't see this coming. You're a moron if you have EVER trusted Microsoft for any quality product or service. Because Skype was never open-source, I have been gradually nudging my family and friends to switch to Google. But the minute I heard Microsoft bought-out Skype, I immediately mailed everyone on my Skype contacts list that I wouldn't be using it anymore, and that they should switch to Google or never see me online again. It always makes me laugh when people who use Microsoft (or any non-open-source) products/services complain about a feature change or a service discontinuation.
NASA scrapped this idea a long time ago, but I think it was just for lack of funding, not because it was a bad idea.
I am a pack-rat, so I would always hesitate before getting rid of my old computers.
To be realistic, though, we can't expect to keep the same hardware forever. People really need to care more about preserving our old video games, and that means making more sturdy emulators that have been tested on the full catalog of games for that platform. This is difficult and time consuming -- but necessary if we wish to preserve this part of our history.
Unfortunately, the state of many emulators is usually "not good enough". I remember trying to play Street Fighter II on a genesis emulator, and the timing mechanism was all screwed up. In that game, time is tracked by counting clock cycles. The game emulation was a bit slow, so it wouldn't function well unless you sped up the virtual CPU. Speeding up the VCPU made it run smoothly, but then the time limit for each round would drop to like 20 seconds.
Someone has probably fixed the problem now, but the point is, little problems like this always crop up in emulators. Thats why I am really hesitant to throw out any of my old things, even though I am really starting to run out of space in my home.
Multiple monitors is mostly an unnecessary luxury.
1. One large high-res monitor, 2. a tiling window manager replete with multiple desktops and good keyboard shortcuts, and 3. a VT-100 terminal emulator. Thats all any developer needs. The rest is all about knowing how to use your curses-based console programs in clever ways.
Multiple displays come in handy for other, non-developer tasks. Art and graphic design, and storyboarding, movie editing, live television programming, administering multiple clients in a cloud computing platform, running tests on a graphical interface in a virtual machine -- for these tasks a second and third monitor makes life a lot easier.
XKCD #810 already solved this problem. Get with the program Mozilla.
Another government agency spending tax payer money on commercial software that can be done better and cheaper by Linux. If government just switched over now, and told their employees to just get used to it (using Linux), excessive operational cost could be further eliminated for years to come.
If I was only using the e-mail service to send/receive government-related documents and queries, and I didn't ever use it for anything else, then sure I could trust the government as my e-mail provider.
Fractions are great - if you lived in Babylonian times when you might be asked to do two computations a day.
I especially like 1/60th - with perfect factors of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 15, 20 and 30 - much more versatile than 1/100th that only breaks down into 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25 and 50.
You forgot 12.
2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30.
But this is why 360 degrees in a circle, and 60 minutes in a degree, and 60 seconds in a minute. 360 gives you
2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 24, 25, 30, 40, 45, 50, 60, 72, 90, 120, 180
Its is easier than using fractions multiples of Pi. So for time and circles, 360 and 60 are best because it makes cutting a circle into slices is easy as pie.
Most metric metrics (lol...ya, I just did that) are multi syllable compound words, and most of them don't have any obvious way of being shortened. Americans just don't want to say "Kilometer" when they can say "mile. They don't want to say "centimeter" when they can say "inch".
The Metric System is elegantly simple and beautiful, in everything but the English pronunciation of said metrics. What a shame.
The Japanese are the go-to people for inventing single or dual-sylable words that abbreviate longer words. They say "senchi" for "centimeter". For milliliters and millimeters, they say "miri" and it is clear from context whether they are talking about volume or distance. "Kiro" can mean kilograms or kilometers, depending on context.
... maybe ... if we weren't so stupid.
Americans could learn to do the same thing
Seriously though, it is likely that if we switched to metric, you'd see popular abbreviations creep in eventually. Like saying 10 C's or 15 K's.
Communicating over cell networks requires incredibly complex and expensive technology. Cell companies need gobs of cash to update their infrastructure to support the high-speed data technology, and still need to worry about coverage, with atmospheric problems, putting relays in tunnels and in subways, bending signals around big buildings, and trying to cover remote areas, and the best networks still break down when thousands of people suddenly crowed into one place to watch a fireworks show. No matter what you do, 3G/4G will just be more expensive and less reliable, even if each cell cover larger areas than WiFi.
It is better to use many smaller, inexpensive cells, i.e. WiFi. WiFi can build up a decentralized network that is much cheaper, more robust, and provides more bandwidth. Hopefully some day, there will be wireless brokers that bill users consistently and fairly no matter where they are. All WiFi providers will charge your broker based on how much you use their network, while allowing you to seamlessly transition from one network to another, never loosing connectivity even accross different providers because all providers charge a trusted broker, who in turn charges you.
This is a much better network infrastructure than what we see with modern cell networks. I hope, by lack of demand, 3G and 4G will die off, so I only use WiFi.
But general computer use should be mandatory, as fundamental as algebra and geometry. And I am not talking using spreadsheets and word processors and web browsers. I mean teaching kids fundamental computing concepts, and how to use a command line to actually compute things:
You can argue about whether they should learn to do this using bash or python, or MatLab or R, but the important thing is to teach that, yes, computers can do these things, and let the students' imaginations apply these tools to whatever problems they may have.
All of these things are really easy to understand, and are completely fundamental to common every day computer tasks. Most people never even try to solve their own problems, rather they wait for some programmers to include the aforementioned computing functionality into a GUI, and if the GUI doesn't have that feature, then they think its impossible to do. Even the simplest things, something that could be done with one line of a bash script, an ordinary user doesn't know about it and is stuck relying on that freeware thing they downloaded to take care of it for them.
Education FAILs to teach this; it needs to change.
LOL...I dont consider myself strongly pro or anti-Microsoft. However, I get such a kick at the idiot Microsoft haters on Slashdot who can't even admit when Microsoft does something right.
Pro-Microsoft, anti-microsoft? The important thing is you've found a way to make yourself feel superior to both. (XKCD)
Except you fail to realize that Microsoft hasn't done anything right yet.
How quickly people forget why we never trust Microsoft. It might be free now, it might be helpful to geeks now, it might even seem like they are growing an open-source market now. But as soon as it you come to depend on it, then they pull the rug out from under you, using all those strings they've attached: raising the cost, eliminating functionality, restricting use to a few specific applications, or making it impossible to use with other open-source solutions. Then, for your naivety, you be forced to once again choose:
1. do you abandon years of work and experience with the Microsoft platform, bite the bullet and change over to the open source solution starting again from scratch?
OR
2. do you accept Microsoft's terms, buy their upgrades, scrap your plans for integration with other devices, and hope they don't eliminate any features you really liked?
"Fanboys?" Seriously, grow up.
Yeah, nice try guys. Even video games require warm-up levels, and video games are about as simple as you can get. Now, try to make an interface that can do real work, not just play games, and people get will get frustrated very quickly. If you have ever tried to get someone less than computer literate to learn a new user interface, you know that they throw fits and give up the first time something unexpected happens. Unless Microsoft intends to force all of their customers to give up the same tired-old interface they have forced on us for the past 25+ years (even though Microsoft is quite experienced at forcing their customers to do things that the customers don't want to do), they will not get past the use pattern of: double-click icon, wait for window, repeat. If it were that simple to get people to change, Linux wouldn't have so many problems picking up new inexperienced users.
Then, this Microsoft guy claims their goal is to "eliminate the learning curve?" Give me a break. The fancy interfaces expo'd in this video would definitely require some training and getting-used-to for even advanced computer users. For example, learning how to relate physical wooden blocks to objects in 3D to do 3D arrangements -- unless your computer knows how to read your mind, you must have some method of mapping the blocks to the avatars in the interface. No matter how intuitive this mapping process is, it will take some time to learn.
Couldn't agree more, this article sucked. He seems to suggest that Google has been receiving "a lot of bad press lately," and points to a New York Times article that, if you were to read it, doesn't make Google seem bad at all. What a hack (and not the good kind of hack).
After looking at the site, it seems to me to be more like an effort to make the idea of BSD ports, Portage, or "apt-get", but instead of porting operating systems or application software to eclectic computing platforms, you are porting machine-learning algorithms and training data to eclectic robotic platforms. Probably what they are researching is methods of making machine-learning algorithms interchangeable across interchangeable robot parts, like if all robots use the same robotic arm, or the same method of locomotion. You can apply a statistical learning algorithm to train the first robot, then use transfer that training data to other robots that use the same robotic arm or whatever. So it is probably an matter of classifying robot parts that require training information so they can more easily access them from a central repository. And not just algorithms for using robot parts, but more general algorithms like, search-and-rescue algorithms, or soccer-playing strategies, or knowledge bases to repair machinery, or anything at all.
Someone had better come up with an open-source version of this Skynet thing soon. I need to build my own robot army to defend myself from the government robot army that will inevitably come when they find out I've been downloading copyrighted material from BitTorrent.
Exactly right. Take the Babbage Difference engine, or the ENIAC or any old computer that use vaccuum tubes for their logic circuits. These tools aren't useful, but they still exist in museums, and enthusiastic hobbiests may build their own working modles of these machines. But this doesn't qualify as "use" and they are definitely obsolote. The Von Neuman architecture is certainly still in use, but what are we talking about here? The architecture or the machine itself? The NPR guys are obfusticating definitions for the sake of some stupid debate to fill air time (they do that a lot, I think). I think this fuzzy terminology is the same confused logic behind all software patents, by the way.
I'd like to replace those heavy Infiniband cables with optical fiber. While were at it, I think I might also like to replace my DVI or HDMI, ethernet, and USB cables all with optical fiber. 20GFC FibreChannel is fast enough for distributing about 100 FPS of 1080p HDTV. 100 times faster could feasibly get you to connect any two nodes with just two fiber optic cables, you could have a "universal connector" that could connect any two digital components together -- displays to computers, keyboards to displays, network cards to routers, routers to modems. Seriously, even with emerging 3D technology requiring double the bandwidth of ordinary high-def displays, a single connector could handle that. This could reduce costs for grid computing as well -- imagine a home-brew grid computer. Want more photo-realistic graphics for your favorite FPS game? Just add more nodes to your own personal switched fabric network!
Well, an Advent calendar is right along the lines of what the hyper-Christian Perl inventor Larry Wall would do. Python fans would be better suited to a "Life of Brian" Calendar, which uses a Python coding technique to express one scene from the Life of Brian every day.
"Well, they can't all be winners, can they." -- Bad Santa
Or, on that line, the guy who started Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, or the guy who started Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales. But the Google guys or Zuckerberg is better. I think the more wealthy they are, the easier it is for kids to admire them. When I was in Jr. High school, I was the biggest Apple fanboy you'd ever seen, so Steve Jobs was my hero. It paved the way for my present career in computer science.