I've actually met a decent number of programmers/sysadmins/etc who also have interests in stuff that isn't conventionally associated with technology. Random example, my dad is a software engineer turned university professor, and he keeps bees.
Have to disagree with you here, as both a blacksmith and "one of today's kids".
Anvils are typically purchased, because "blacksmith" doesn't equate to "foundry".
Many kids today are just as, if not *more*, motivated to ask questions than the "older generation". This includes asking "how can I do something my IDE doesn't support".
Extra info on the blacksmith bit: most blacksmith shops are designed around the idea of forging metals, not smelting them. This is part of why a blacksmith's anvil was and is one of their most prized possessions...it used to be nearly irreplaceable. Current technology has made cheap anvils fairly available, but you can't just buy a 300 pound anvil at your local Home Depot.
The process of creating an anvil is one of the few things that you can't do with traditional blacksmith tools. If you have an anvil and a single hammer, all of your other tools can be made from bits of metal or bar/rod stock. Punches, tongs, other hammers...even the forge itself can be made by hand. But the anvil has to be a solid piece of metal, and the only way to do that is with a shop designed specifically for anvil making, or with modern metal casting equipment.
Moving on from the anvil bit to the "kids these days, gerrof mah lawn" bit...I would hazard that the typical distribution of interests has migrated outward in the bell curve. Technology today makes it easy for an unmotivated child to spend the majority of their day immersed in facebook/instagram/pinterest/twitter/etc. But it also makes it much easier for a motivated child to find knowledge.
An example from my personal experiences: I ran Minecraft servers for about 3 years, and had one of the more successful modded servers online in early to mid 2014. A lot of the players were in the 8-18 years old range. And quite a lot of them were interested in figuring out and using interesting game mechanics to their advantage. We're talking about kids in their early teens learning digital logic so that they can build a piston based elevator with floor selection buttons. I know more teenagers who have a solid grasp of programming decision logic because of ComputerCraft than I do professional programmers who learned via a 4 year computer science school.
Obviously, it's just my own personal experience. But I was one of the kids who started out with an IDE scratching out HTML, and now I'm a linux system administrator with four or so languages under my belt.
Basically came here to say exactly this. Anyone who tries to tell you different is either relating secondhand info (Pinterest/Tumblr/Facebook/etc said it was easy so it must be true!) or is trying to sell you something.
Raising your own food, in quantities sufficient to feed a family (assuming 4 or more people here) is *HARD* and takes quantities of time on a daily and weekly basis. As a software developer with a full time career job who also contributes to open source projects in my free time and does contract work on the side, my time tends to be in high demand.
I have all the necessary skills...16 years growing up on the farm gave me a wide range of crop management and animal husbandry skills. But I choose not to, due to the time commitment and the degree to which it ties you down (eg, plants need daily watering/weeding, animals need fed morning and night, etc).
Right there with ya. I'm a software developer and system administrator...It'd probably take me a month or so to read up on malware techniques and come up with a delivery mechanism and a way to do distributed CNC via RSA or PGP key.
Still on this side of the fence. But I'm watching the other side carefully.
I wish I had mod points. This, right here, is why other 1st world residents look at 'MURIKA and shake their heads, and resolve never to live here.
(obviously, we're still better than places that are openly corrupt and allow the crime cartels to run entire cities...but replace "crime cartel" with "large above-the-law corporation" and it's starting to look uncomfortably similar...)
Or better yet, use Minecraft to teach them the basics of logic and programming.
A modpack with ComputerCraft, RedLogic, and possibly a couple of "just for fun" mods like Thermal Expansion or RailCraft would be a solid starting point...if you want to put together something more complex, contact me on IRC (esper.net, #minechem channel) or via Twitter and I'd be more than happy to help you out.
Disclosure: I develop the Minechem mod, and help maintain a couple of different modpacks.
So...what you're saying is "people who aren't security conscious continue to be vulnerable to attacks that exploit their sloppiness and/or lack of attention"?
I figured the best way to hammer this out was to poke it myself.
I agree that the trend is upwards. What I'm not so certain is to why its upwards. Given how much crap we've pumped into the atmosphere, and how much we've changed the surface of the earth, it would seem to me that the trend should have been fairly "level" before...I dunno, about the mid 1920s, when cars first started being sold en-masse. But the rate of change doesn't seem to have spiked (or curved) all that much in the next 20-30 years as industrialization took over the world.
Like I said in my first comment, I think global warming happens. I just don't think we understand why it happens. I'm actually familiar with statistical outliers. Part of what interested me about that blogpost was the observation of differences between the actual trend and the models predicting change. Emphasis again on the fact that I don't think we understand global warming yet.
I actually wasn't referring to the WatsUpWithThat blog, although it does have an interesting analysis of the U.S. Climate Reference Network data, which is what I was referring to, and the raw data, which is also what I'm referring to.
As I said in my first comment, I'm just curious why some data is used, and other data is ignored.
As to that last comment...in general, if there's adjustment happening to something like research data, it has to be disclosed in findings reports. Eg, "I adjusted the weight readings by 10.5 grams, because I forgot to tare my scale with the crucible on it". I don't think that all unadjusted data is better. I think that if data is adjusted, the reasons for doing so and the method should also be fully disclosed.
Have to admit, I'm curious about this as well. I'm in the "I think there's global warming, but I'm not sure if we actually understand why" camp, but it kinda annoys me when global warming fanatics froth about "the science", when the best data (eg, stuff that hasn't been adjusted or tweaked) is showing something else entirely.
I'm not saying global warming isn't a thing...just curious about why nobody ever addresses the data.
That nitpick aside...I agree that a Raspberry Pi is way overkill for making an LED blink...unless you're trying to teach rather than accomplish something (eg low cost blinking light). If you need to produce a thousand blinking widgets, the process is far different than if you're trying to teach kids (or adults...) about programming and software driven hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
I've actually met a decent number of programmers/sysadmins/etc who also have interests in stuff that isn't conventionally associated with technology. Random example, my dad is a software engineer turned university professor, and he keeps bees.
Have to disagree with you here, as both a blacksmith and "one of today's kids".
Anvils are typically purchased, because "blacksmith" doesn't equate to "foundry".
Many kids today are just as, if not *more*, motivated to ask questions than the "older generation". This includes asking "how can I do something my IDE doesn't support".
Extra info on the blacksmith bit: most blacksmith shops are designed around the idea of forging metals, not smelting them. This is part of why a blacksmith's anvil was and is one of their most prized possessions...it used to be nearly irreplaceable. Current technology has made cheap anvils fairly available, but you can't just buy a 300 pound anvil at your local Home Depot.
The process of creating an anvil is one of the few things that you can't do with traditional blacksmith tools. If you have an anvil and a single hammer, all of your other tools can be made from bits of metal or bar/rod stock. Punches, tongs, other hammers...even the forge itself can be made by hand. But the anvil has to be a solid piece of metal, and the only way to do that is with a shop designed specifically for anvil making, or with modern metal casting equipment.
Moving on from the anvil bit to the "kids these days, gerrof mah lawn" bit...I would hazard that the typical distribution of interests has migrated outward in the bell curve. Technology today makes it easy for an unmotivated child to spend the majority of their day immersed in facebook/instagram/pinterest/twitter/etc. But it also makes it much easier for a motivated child to find knowledge.
An example from my personal experiences: I ran Minecraft servers for about 3 years, and had one of the more successful modded servers online in early to mid 2014. A lot of the players were in the 8-18 years old range. And quite a lot of them were interested in figuring out and using interesting game mechanics to their advantage. We're talking about kids in their early teens learning digital logic so that they can build a piston based elevator with floor selection buttons. I know more teenagers who have a solid grasp of programming decision logic because of ComputerCraft than I do professional programmers who learned via a 4 year computer science school.
Obviously, it's just my own personal experience. But I was one of the kids who started out with an IDE scratching out HTML, and now I'm a linux system administrator with four or so languages under my belt.
[citation needed]
Sounds reasonable, you'll most likely be getting a raise out of this.
[citation needed]
Basically came here to say exactly this. Anyone who tries to tell you different is either relating secondhand info (Pinterest/Tumblr/Facebook/etc said it was easy so it must be true!) or is trying to sell you something.
Raising your own food, in quantities sufficient to feed a family (assuming 4 or more people here) is *HARD* and takes quantities of time on a daily and weekly basis. As a software developer with a full time career job who also contributes to open source projects in my free time and does contract work on the side, my time tends to be in high demand.
I have all the necessary skills...16 years growing up on the farm gave me a wide range of crop management and animal husbandry skills. But I choose not to, due to the time commitment and the degree to which it ties you down (eg, plants need daily watering/weeding, animals need fed morning and night, etc).
Right there with ya. I'm a software developer and system administrator...It'd probably take me a month or so to read up on malware techniques and come up with a delivery mechanism and a way to do distributed CNC via RSA or PGP key.
Still on this side of the fence. But I'm watching the other side carefully.
I wish I had mod points. This, right here, is why other 1st world residents look at 'MURIKA and shake their heads, and resolve never to live here.
(obviously, we're still better than places that are openly corrupt and allow the crime cartels to run entire cities...but replace "crime cartel" with "large above-the-law corporation" and it's starting to look uncomfortably similar...)
Yeah, I pulled up the comments expecting a string of "That's no moon!" and "Now we know where the Sun Crusher is doing practice runs".
If you're using apt, you can just grab a list of manually installed packages.
A quick google search returns multiple ways to do this. It took me all of 20 seconds to find a one-liner that spit out a full list.
pics or it didn't happen.
Or better yet, use Minecraft to teach them the basics of logic and programming.
A modpack with ComputerCraft, RedLogic, and possibly a couple of "just for fun" mods like Thermal Expansion or RailCraft would be a solid starting point...if you want to put together something more complex, contact me on IRC (esper.net, #minechem channel) or via Twitter and I'd be more than happy to help you out.
Disclosure: I develop the Minechem mod, and help maintain a couple of different modpacks.
Where's the "Would be funny if it didn't hurt so much" moderation option?
So...what you're saying is "people who aren't security conscious continue to be vulnerable to attacks that exploit their sloppiness and/or lack of attention"?
Shocker.
*citation needed
Suggestion: Everyone go report this as a HIPAA violation.
Suggestion: Everyone go report this as a HIPAA violation.
*citation needed
I figured the best way to hammer this out was to poke it myself.
I agree that the trend is upwards. What I'm not so certain is to why its upwards. Given how much crap we've pumped into the atmosphere, and how much we've changed the surface of the earth, it would seem to me that the trend should have been fairly "level" before...I dunno, about the mid 1920s, when cars first started being sold en-masse. But the rate of change doesn't seem to have spiked (or curved) all that much in the next 20-30 years as industrialization took over the world.
Like I said in my first comment, I think global warming happens. I just don't think we understand why it happens. I'm actually familiar with statistical outliers. Part of what interested me about that blogpost was the observation of differences between the actual trend and the models predicting change. Emphasis again on the fact that I don't think we understand global warming yet.
I actually wasn't referring to the WatsUpWithThat blog, although it does have an interesting analysis of the U.S. Climate Reference Network data, which is what I was referring to, and the raw data, which is also what I'm referring to.
As I said in my first comment, I'm just curious why some data is used, and other data is ignored.
As to that last comment...in general, if there's adjustment happening to something like research data, it has to be disclosed in findings reports. Eg, "I adjusted the weight readings by 10.5 grams, because I forgot to tare my scale with the crucible on it". I don't think that all unadjusted data is better. I think that if data is adjusted, the reasons for doing so and the method should also be fully disclosed.
Have to admit, I'm curious about this as well. I'm in the "I think there's global warming, but I'm not sure if we actually understand why" camp, but it kinda annoys me when global warming fanatics froth about "the science", when the best data (eg, stuff that hasn't been adjusted or tweaked) is showing something else entirely.
I'm not saying global warming isn't a thing...just curious about why nobody ever addresses the data.
They're commiserating with both of the Blackberry users about it.
This.
4.98 / 100 = 0.0498
Last I checked, 0.0498 > 0.45 > 0.035
That nitpick aside...I agree that a Raspberry Pi is way overkill for making an LED blink...unless you're trying to teach rather than accomplish something (eg low cost blinking light). If you need to produce a thousand blinking widgets, the process is far different than if you're trying to teach kids (or adults...) about programming and software driven hardware.