An observation comes to mind: FB Provides the social reality of small villages about up to 50 years ago - everybody knows everything about everybody in your social circle. This fosters gossip but definitely not reputation, actually it amplifies both positive and negative social imaging. People got out of villages because anonymity does have advantages.
Seriously, I have seen so many cases where people think they can do interior design themselves, and get it all wrong. I am not talking about decorating your bathroom. I am talking about functional, human friendly spaces where people need to spend working time.
Somebody remembers that Gibson novel where exactly these things were made of nano components, and therefore so light that they could fly (suspend would be the more accurate word)?
Reading the comments so far, I can only agree with a book being the winner. It has the additional advantage that it will probably be a museum piece by the time she gets to open it -- wait, I forgot that at least another 1000 guys will be doing the same after this slashdot post...
If it had to be digital because of video, I would bet for a USB stick. In fact, I would even bet that by 2025 we will be using USB 10.0 or something ridiculous like that. There are few technologies that have a long life, but those which make it to that status do tend to last very long. Examples: ethernet, cd-roms, HFS harddisks. I count USB in that camp because of its versatility.
As happens quite often in IT, you are asking for a solution without knowing the requirements, e.g. what do teachers and kids need as IT support?
My kids go to a high-school where assignments, projects and virtually all school work is done on computers. Children send in their assignments per email, corrections are returned as replies. They produce documents, tables, videos (most of them land in YouTube), music files and presentations.
So how does the IT infrastructure looks like? There are computer zones, mostly in open spaces (Caffe-like) with a mixture of desktop batteries (on round tables) and table/seat space to work with laptops (wide WiFi coverage).
As you can imagine, this kind of school assumes that kids do have a computer at home. And, with time most of those computers will have been converted to laptops.
So, rather than adapting school practice to a given IT solution, the school has adapted IT to its needs.
One of the things that sucked me into programming was realizing that I could play with concepts. I got my eyes opened when I first learnt about finite state machines. This simple concept is so beautiful and yet so powerful. That was 25 years ago, but it sure hasn't chaged a bit.
I would take hands off from games -- it takes too much, too long until you have something that makes you proud. You want to make sure the road to satisfaction is right: short at the beginning, building up later.
Now, the trouble with astrophysics is that you find (and must understand) every area of physics included in there. You will need thermodynamics, nuclear and particle physics for star formation; gravitation and fluid dynamics for galaxies; relativity and quantum physics for cosmology; electrodynamics and optics for interstellar fields; and so on.
The Feynmann lectures are an excellent entry point. The rest depends on the direction you want to take. Theory? Then the Landau-Lifschitz volumes will be your friends. Observational? That will depend of the area, ask your majors.
Twitter is basically a database application, where a lot of the stress comes in getting things into and out of the database at high speed.
How can you expect high performance from a framework that basically hides the sweat from good db programming? Any framework, not just Rails will fail. When you get a load higher than, say 600 reqs per second, you have to come down to understanding how to scale db performance -- take the framework away and start doing serious work.
Simple, by moving to Intel based processors they will increase their margins by at least 20% (TWENTY PERCENT!) Just like that. It's called economy of scale.
I don't think anybody, in any industry has ever been able to pull such a feat. Mr Jobs, my humble compliments. Chapeau.
that Apple hit the nail where it hurts most: they
lowered the price for an album -- flat, for
every album.
In my view, this is the most significant innovation in the iTMS concept -- and it will have deep consequences too. If Apple manages to bring iTMS to PCs, it will create a market that
is a direct competitor to the good old music distribution channels, including online stores.
My guess is that it will not take long
until the street price for CDs gets lowered too. Then, I predict, the crisis of the music industry will evaporate.
Slashdot Mirror
An observation comes to mind: FB Provides the social reality of small villages about up to 50 years ago - everybody knows everything about everybody in your social circle. This fosters gossip but definitely not reputation, actually it amplifies both positive and negative social imaging. People got out of villages because anonymity does have advantages.
Seriously, I have seen so many cases where people think they can do interior design themselves, and get it all wrong. I am not talking about decorating your bathroom. I am talking about functional, human friendly spaces where people need to spend working time.
Google xirrus wifi monitor. Is a free wifi signal monitor.
Oh, and did I tell you that you should have peanuts handy? They help you getting a hicthhike on a passing by spaceship.
I love this nerdy culture in /.
Somebody remembers that Gibson novel where exactly these things were made of nano components, and therefore so light that they could fly (suspend would be the more accurate word)?
OK, I 'll give them ten years to get there ...
Reading the comments so far, I can only agree with a book being the winner. It has the additional advantage that it will probably be a museum piece by the time she gets to open it -- wait, I forgot that at least another 1000 guys will be doing the same after this slashdot post ...
If it had to be digital because of video, I would bet for a USB stick. In fact, I would even bet that by 2025 we will be using USB 10.0 or something ridiculous like that. There are few technologies that have a long life, but those which make it to that status do tend to last very long. Examples: ethernet, cd-roms, HFS harddisks. I count USB in that camp because of its versatility.
What problem are you actually trying to solve?
As happens quite often in IT, you are asking for a solution without knowing the requirements, e.g. what do teachers and kids need as IT support?
My kids go to a high-school where assignments, projects and virtually all school work is done on computers. Children send in their assignments per email, corrections are returned as replies. They produce documents, tables, videos (most of them land in YouTube), music files and presentations.
So how does the IT infrastructure looks like? There are computer zones, mostly in open spaces (Caffe-like) with a mixture of desktop batteries (on round tables) and table/seat space to work with laptops (wide WiFi coverage).
As you can imagine, this kind of school assumes that kids do have a computer at home. And, with time most of those computers will have been converted to laptops.
So, rather than adapting school practice to a given IT solution, the school has adapted IT to its needs.
One of the things that sucked me into programming was realizing that I could play with concepts. I got my eyes opened when I first learnt about finite state machines. This simple concept is so beautiful and yet so powerful. That was 25 years ago, but it sure hasn't chaged a bit.
I would take hands off from games -- it takes too much, too long until you have something that makes you proud. You want to make sure the road to satisfaction is right: short at the beginning, building up later.
Done a PhD on theoretical astrophysics myself.
Now, the trouble with astrophysics is that you find (and must understand) every area of physics included in there. You will need thermodynamics, nuclear and particle physics for star formation; gravitation and fluid dynamics for galaxies; relativity and quantum physics for cosmology; electrodynamics and optics for interstellar fields; and so on.
The Feynmann lectures are an excellent entry point. The rest depends on the direction you want to take. Theory? Then the Landau-Lifschitz volumes will be your friends. Observational? That will depend of the area, ask your majors.
Twitter is basically a database application, where a lot of the stress comes in getting things into and out of the database at high speed.
How can you expect high performance from a framework that basically hides the sweat from good db programming? Any framework, not just Rails will fail. When you get a load higher than, say 600 reqs per second, you have to come down to understanding how to scale db performance -- take the framework away and start doing serious work.
... I would run and buy Apple shares. Why?
Simple, by moving to Intel based processors they will increase their margins by at least 20% (TWENTY PERCENT!) Just like that. It's called economy of scale.
I don't think anybody, in any industry has ever been able to pull such a feat. Mr Jobs, my humble compliments. Chapeau.
In my view, this is the most significant innovation in the iTMS concept -- and it will have deep consequences too. If Apple manages to bring iTMS to PCs, it will create a market that is a direct competitor to the good old music distribution channels, including online stores.
My guess is that it will not take long until the street price for CDs gets lowered too. Then, I predict, the crisis of the music industry will evaporate.