I've had internet access since age 15 or so, and BBS access since age 11. In any case, my parents were not particularly computer literate, and they never had any say in what I did with the computer. They also had a similar approach to real-life.
Now here's the thing: Teenagers are by nature lazy, shiftless, and hedonistic. I can bet your kids, no matter what you do, will spend more time playing videogames, looking for naked chicks, and doing whatever else occurs to them than they will doing homework, etc...
That being said, I think you should let them get it out of their system, respect their privacy, and let them know that you're there to be a non-judgemental answerer of questions and giver of _requested_ advice. For the most part unless your kids are immensely stupid, they'll be able to take care of themselves, or know when to ask an adult for help/advice/etc...
As technology advances, it becomes tougher for the small-scale individual to do pretty much _anything_ themselves. I'm really psyched that this guy is trying.
When airplanes were new, anybody could build a decent one that would compete with at least the low-range commercial ones. Same with computers, cars, operating systems (but then, hey, look at Linux now!). I guess what I'm trying to say is that no matter how may people call this dude a fool, I think he's doing something really cool =:-)
I remember a big source of laughs during my childhood was coaxing my Speak 'n' Spell (from TI) to swear like a sailor =:-) There's nothing like a robotic voice with a texas accent rattling out some paint-peeling blue streak in a grinding electronic monotone. We would laugh until we could no longer breathe...
Anybody know how I can cross the chasm in the dungeon? My first thought was to tie the rope to the crowbar and make a grappling iron, but it won't let me, and my second thought was to use the board, but the ravine is too wide... Any ideas?
Right now I'm a consultant, and my main (and pretty much only) client is a company writing financial software. They for the most part leave all the technical decisions to the software people (which means us), and that's alright. We build the servers, configure them, install them, write the code, maintain them, and really, so long as everything works they couldn't give a flying rat's ass how it was all put together.
One exception is when it comes to infrastructure. This company is funded by some crusty "old guard" types, and they refuse to pay for data or services, and they make up a large enough bloc of the voting partners that they have some serious sway. Essentially we could order the moon in a box, and so long as it's a physical tangible thing, they'll approve it. Right now, however, we need data feeds (market data etc...) to be delivered to a new data center, and they are unwilling to spring for a comparably small expense (less than the cost of the hardware, and really the data are at the heart of the system, as always) because they don't feel that anything that can't be stacked in a warehouse could possibly have any value.
As a consultant, it is important to me to get the job done right, because if it backfires (even though it was on account of their poor decisions), part of the blame will land on me, and it _is_ part of my job to call bullshit when the non-technical non computer literate management is about to do something that is either ignorant or just plain catostrophicly stupid.
So I spoke up, and y'know what, they IGNORED me, so I talked to my coworkers, and my boss, and they all felt the same way, so we spoke up as a group, and they IGNORED us all! Why they hire technical consultants to ignore the advice they just payed for and do something stupid is beyond me. I would say fuck'em let them reap what they sew, but in this economy it's hard to find clients enough to keep a roof over one's head, and so I really want them to make it, but if they keep letting the Pointy Haired Bosses veto all our recommendations, they _will_ paint themselves into a corner and then we're screwed too.
I guess the sum total of it all is, who knows, you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
Actually, in Ithaca, NY our sewage plant is entirely energy self-sufficient. All the pumps and generators are run by natural gas (methane) fired engines, and all the heating and AC are also natural gas powered. They have digester tanks to rot the sewage and generate the methane.
They have one of those flames, however, because every once in a while they generate more methane than they have the capacity to turn into energy or store.
I don't know if they put any power back on the grid, but they help keep our sewer taxes down by not having to buy the gas.
I dropped my star-tac cell phone into a bathtub once, it got angry, made a hissing/beeping noise, and filled the screen with static. Then it crashed. No biggie, I took off the battery, put it and the phone on top of the steam radiator for a couple hours, charged my battery, and it all worked. Go figure.
These guys are already notorious among wearable developers. Here's why. The bought the patents and designs for the Private Eye HUD from the previous manufacturer, and put it and all of it's relatives out of production. Never mind that they were higher resolution, cheaper, and lower current than any of the competing display solutions, and STILL ARE!
The display technology involved a single strip of extremely high density LEDs packed together in a line, and a vibrating mirror that would scan back and forth as the LEDs blinked to make a picture. Neat technology. Very high contrast, readable in high light conditions.
I spent a year or two hoping they'd come back, but no =:-( They're gone, and _just_ before I managed to get my hands on one.
Most of those little digital video cameras overheat. Read the manual to pretty much any of them, they tell you that continuous operation for more than usually two hours will cause problems, possibly damage.
C++ can lick my hairy ass. What about plain old C? At my job at least, all the GUI client code is written in Java, but all the backend server, database, and nubmer crunching code is written in C.
I'd vote for teh Chicago Museum of Science and Industry (see the everything2 node). It's cool, they have a WW2 U-Boat you can tour, the first desil-electric bullet train in the U.S., some cool airplanes, an engine from a V2 rocket, some cool old cars, a complete scale model of all the railroad connections in Chicago, and much much more...
In general, it rules, and it's only $9 to get in for the day.
Ask them about their for-fun projects. This will break the ice, and give you an idea for their level of geeky enthusiasm for programming. It will also give you a look at how they approach problems, and will give you a good buzzword-free handle on the sort of thing they are good at.
If you task a programmer with things similar in nature and challege level as the stuff they are doing for fun on their own time, you'll have a better fit to their skills. A programmer knows what they can do, and they will use everything they've got on their own projects. A programmer with no projects of their own probably lacks design skills and is more of a coder than a programmer.
It may help to point out that you're not asking this so as to steal away the projects, but rather to gain a better/wider picture of one's experience.
(I work as a programmer for perspective information).
The most important thing is that each developed must be important. Not just feel important, but _be_ important. Delegate design decisions, and encourage people to try multi-pronged approaches and to experiment. Let them make design decisions about parts of the project that fall in their individual areas of expertness. Let them make mistakes and correct them.
I think you have to make the problem engaging to keep people motivated, you have to give your team a chance to all get their hands dirty and think about the problem and design stuff. If you do all the design, code the interresting parts, and hand out the menial labor to your team, you can bet your ass they won't be motivated.
We don not want an 80x86 compatible chip. It's crap. It's an outdated CISC architecture. Has anybody read the complete white paper on the IA64 chip? Intel may have completely screwed up the implementation, but as specified (by H.P. originally) the chip is kicking ass and taking names.
Some extremely large percent of the silicon (and thus power dissipation and heat generation) on the athlon line is spent on the insanely complex variable length instruction decode needed to break old legacy x86 instructions into smaller pieces to feed to the well designed and powerful execution units.
A well designed RISC with optimization and caching hinds built into the object code will kick the living shit out of a 64 bit CISC hack built on top of an instruction set that was designed to run pocket calculators and automatic washing machines.
A friend of mine had several ferrets, as well as a computer that was prone to overheating. So in any case, when the weather got hot he took the sides off his case and put a box fan next to the case (which was about the height and depth of his tower case) to gain some additional cooling. In any case, the largest and smartest of the ferrets thought it was just the _neatest_ game to go and yank all the IDE cables from his drives when he was at work. So he'd get home and his computer would claim to have no drives, he'd look at it, and discover that the fan had been wedged aside and next to his disconnected cabling were some droppings from the ferret. From that point on the fan was duct taped inside and out to the case.
Ferrets don't only chew cables, they like to unplug them, and even steal them to make nests out of. This ferret was also a master keyring theif/pickpocket and liked to take people's keyrigns out of their pockets and wind them down the spiral of the couch springs... (i can see why it could be entertaining).
So if you live in an evironment that contains any shiny objects weighing less than 2-3 Kg that aren't bolted down, you may want to be wary of the ferrets...
It seems to me that the biggest cost is in sysadmin time. I figure it this way, at work I use a few UNIX systems. We have one machine running IRIX, a couple running BSD and one running Linux. Now, when I write a script one one of the BSD machines, it works on all of them, but it may or may not work on the Linux machine, and certainly won't work on the System V-esque IRIX machine.
Now, if your sysadmins employ a lot of scripts, figure you'll have to spend twice the time maintaining them if you have two different platforms that are not fully compatible. You can minimize this if you stick to POSIXly correct scripting, but you'll never completely eliminate it.
The same goes for custom programming. For instance, if you're running everything on BSD, and you want to take on a Sun machine running solaris, there may be some issues with the occasional socket call that Sun implments differently from the rest of the world.
So, the more custom scripting/custom apps you have, the more time your sysadmins will have to spend maintaining/porting/testing the stuff.
Okay, here's how I view it: If you have joe random programmer, there are several factors at work. First, you get your problem spec. Somebody higher up says "hey, we have this information, we know it can be processed into this smaller set of more immediately applicable data, and we need something in the middle to sort through reams of data, find the relevant points, accumulate them in a database, perform some analysis, and spit out a condensed set of results"...
Okay, now there are lots of ways you could go about this. First there's brute force, there may be a simple way to do it, but it's not ideal because it's O(N^2), okay well there are several routes you could take. First, you could run with it, second you could think about it, possibly for days, while you may be reading the morning papers, your subconscious mind is churning through multitudes of different solutions, working on what would generally be considered intractible topography problems in th' background using the massively paralell computer known as the human brain. When you finish with that stage, and you're ready to implement, then's when the groove hits.
What i'm talking about is when there is a hairy multifaceted problem, and after goofing off playing tradewars for a couple days, you finally latch onto a solid solution. What looked like a massive unmanagable mass of special cases and state variables condenses into a simple but subtle loop invariant and you go for the gold. Pop a couple of ephedrine, drink some coffee, eat a bunch of solid high calorie food, put on some good driving music, something with a solid steady beat that you can use for a clock signal to push the data through your brain, and let fly. It's one of those things where you have solved the problem on a subconscious level, and you can see all the facets and details as it if were a building in front of you, except instead of a building, it's a nice regular 5 dimensional shape, but it's there, and for that moment in time you see it clearly, and as fast as you can code and comment, it can be translated back into our mortal plane, it can change from a shimmering but abstract represenation of a problem into a concrete solution. That's where it's at. =:-)
Power consuption is the bottom line! ARM kicks the living shit out of x86 by a factor of 2 or 3, but MIPS kicks the shit out of ARM by that much again.
You can piss away 5 watts to run a 133 mhz pentium, you can use a moderate 2 watts to run an ARM of equivilant computational power, or you can spend 300mW (.3 watts) to run a MIPS chip with the same might. Any questions?
The problem is the advertisers are shooting themselves in the foot. The more irritating their advertisements, the more numb the readers become. If they shout all the time, people will learn to ignore shouting. I already am so used to killing the popups on weather.com that i know when they pop up and kill the windows with a swift keystroke before the ad image even loads.
My biggest wish for the marketing/management types that i have to work with is that they wouldn't make assumptions about what is difficult and what is easy. For instance, they think of redesigning the whole look and feel of the U.I. as a minor cosmetic change, and they assume that changing some tweakable parameter in the code that does the real work is going to be difficult. The trick is that they have not always taken the time to understand the structure of the system, and aren't always willing to. They'll say "those are implementation details, you guys can do that however you think would work best", and then after the fact they will say "we want a change here". I guess the root of what I'm trying to get at is that anybody who is going to want code changes should make their needs clear during the design phase so the programmers know where to spend the extra time designing in excess flexibility, and where to spend their time writing a more optimized but less flexible solution. I know, people are going to say that everything should always be completely modular and flexible, and i agree, but it seems that no matter how much flexibility we design in, marketing comes up with one change that we have to rip up some serious code to accomidate.
This is a good idea =:-) It's sort of like putting a deliberately weak system on your network to see when somebody is attacking you and trap them, but it works in reverse. I think it's probably great in terms of the number of people it'll educate per tax dollar spent.
This could be part of why they are cutting loose their PC division. It seems they've been doing a lot of pure research lately. I hope some of this comes to market soon (within the next 5-10 years) and they aren't just filing speculative patents.
On the humorous side, maybe they can use this tech to start making the HP48gx again and overclock it to 1ghz =:-)
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I've had internet access since age 15 or so, and BBS access since age 11. In any case, my parents were not particularly computer literate, and they never had any say in what I did with the computer. They also had a similar approach to real-life.
Now here's the thing: Teenagers are by nature lazy, shiftless, and hedonistic. I can bet your kids, no matter what you do, will spend more time playing videogames, looking for naked chicks, and doing whatever else occurs to them than they will doing homework, etc...
That being said, I think you should let them get it out of their system, respect their privacy, and let them know that you're there to be a non-judgemental answerer of questions and giver of _requested_ advice. For the most part unless your kids are immensely stupid, they'll be able to take care of themselves, or know when to ask an adult for help/advice/etc...
As technology advances, it becomes tougher for the small-scale individual to do pretty much _anything_ themselves. I'm really psyched that this guy is trying.
When airplanes were new, anybody could build a decent one that would compete with at least the low-range commercial ones. Same with computers, cars, operating systems (but then, hey, look at Linux now!). I guess what I'm trying to say is that no matter how may people call this dude a fool, I think he's doing something really cool =:-)
I remember a big source of laughs during my childhood was coaxing my Speak 'n' Spell (from TI) to swear like a sailor =:-) There's nothing like a robotic voice with a texas accent rattling out some paint-peeling blue streak in a grinding electronic monotone. We would laugh until we could no longer breathe...
Yes, there are cartridges in the murdered scientist's room, in the media center.
Anybody know how I can cross the chasm in the dungeon? My first thought was to tie the rope to the crowbar and make a grappling iron, but it won't let me, and my second thought was to use the board, but the ravine is too wide... Any ideas?
It's just a type-o, although it could almost pass for an obscure word =:-)
Right now I'm a consultant, and my main (and pretty much only) client is a company writing financial software. They for the most part leave all the technical decisions to the software people (which means us), and that's alright. We build the servers, configure them, install them, write the code, maintain them, and really, so long as everything works they couldn't give a flying rat's ass how it was all put together.
One exception is when it comes to infrastructure. This company is funded by some crusty "old guard" types, and they refuse to pay for data or services, and they make up a large enough bloc of the voting partners that they have some serious sway. Essentially we could order the moon in a box, and so long as it's a physical tangible thing, they'll approve it. Right now, however, we need data feeds (market data etc...) to be delivered to a new data center, and they are unwilling to spring for a comparably small expense (less than the cost of the hardware, and really the data are at the heart of the system, as always) because they don't feel that anything that can't be stacked in a warehouse could possibly have any value.
As a consultant, it is important to me to get the job done right, because if it backfires (even though it was on account of their poor decisions), part of the blame will land on me, and it _is_ part of my job to call bullshit when the non-technical non computer literate management is about to do something that is either ignorant or just plain catostrophicly stupid.
So I spoke up, and y'know what, they IGNORED me, so I talked to my coworkers, and my boss, and they all felt the same way, so we spoke up as a group, and they IGNORED us all! Why they hire technical consultants to ignore the advice they just payed for and do something stupid is beyond me. I would say fuck'em let them reap what they sew, but in this economy it's hard to find clients enough to keep a roof over one's head, and so I really want them to make it, but if they keep letting the Pointy Haired Bosses veto all our recommendations, they _will_ paint themselves into a corner and then we're screwed too.
I guess the sum total of it all is, who knows, you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
Actually, in Ithaca, NY our sewage plant is entirely energy self-sufficient. All the pumps and generators are run by natural gas (methane) fired engines, and all the heating and AC are also natural gas powered. They have digester tanks to rot the sewage and generate the methane.
They have one of those flames, however, because every once in a while they generate more methane than they have the capacity to turn into energy or store.
I don't know if they put any power back on the grid, but they help keep our sewer taxes down by not having to buy the gas.
I dropped my star-tac cell phone into a bathtub once, it got angry, made a hissing/beeping noise, and filled the screen with static. Then it crashed. No biggie, I took off the battery, put it and the phone on top of the steam radiator for a couple hours, charged my battery, and it all worked. Go figure.
These guys are already notorious among wearable developers. Here's why. The bought the patents and designs for the Private Eye HUD from the previous manufacturer, and put it and all of it's relatives out of production. Never mind that they were higher resolution, cheaper, and lower current than any of the competing display solutions, and STILL ARE!
The display technology involved a single strip of extremely high density LEDs packed together in a line, and a vibrating mirror that would scan back and forth as the LEDs blinked to make a picture. Neat technology. Very high contrast, readable in high light conditions.
I spent a year or two hoping they'd come back, but no =:-( They're gone, and _just_ before I managed to get my hands on one.
Most of those little digital video cameras overheat. Read the manual to pretty much any of them, they tell you that continuous operation for more than usually two hours will cause problems, possibly damage.
C++ can lick my hairy ass. What about plain old C? At my job at least, all the GUI client code is written in Java, but all the backend server, database, and nubmer crunching code is written in C.
I'd vote for teh Chicago Museum of Science and Industry (see the everything2 node). It's cool, they have a WW2 U-Boat you can tour, the first desil-electric bullet train in the U.S., some cool airplanes, an engine from a V2 rocket, some cool old cars, a complete scale model of all the railroad connections in Chicago, and much much more...
In general, it rules, and it's only $9 to get in for the day.
Ask them about their for-fun projects. This will break the ice, and give you an idea for their level of geeky enthusiasm for programming. It will also give you a look at how they approach problems, and will give you a good buzzword-free handle on the sort of thing they are good at.
If you task a programmer with things similar in nature and challege level as the stuff they are doing for fun on their own time, you'll have a better fit to their skills. A programmer knows what they can do, and they will use everything they've got on their own projects. A programmer with no projects of their own probably lacks design skills and is more of a coder than a programmer.
It may help to point out that you're not asking this so as to steal away the projects, but rather to gain a better/wider picture of one's experience.
(I work as a programmer for perspective information).
Here's what i've seen:
The most important thing is that each developed must be important. Not just feel important, but _be_ important. Delegate design decisions, and encourage people to try multi-pronged approaches and to experiment. Let them make design decisions about parts of the project that fall in their individual areas of expertness. Let them make mistakes and correct them.
I think you have to make the problem engaging to keep people motivated, you have to give your team a chance to all get their hands dirty and think about the problem and design stuff. If you do all the design, code the interresting parts, and hand out the menial labor to your team, you can bet your ass they won't be motivated.
We don not want an 80x86 compatible chip. It's crap. It's an outdated CISC architecture. Has anybody read the complete white paper on the IA64 chip? Intel may have completely screwed up the implementation, but as specified (by H.P. originally) the chip is kicking ass and taking names.
Some extremely large percent of the silicon (and thus power dissipation and heat generation) on the athlon line is spent on the insanely complex variable length instruction decode needed to break old legacy x86 instructions into smaller pieces to feed to the well designed and powerful execution units.
A well designed RISC with optimization and caching hinds built into the object code will kick the living shit out of a 64 bit CISC hack built on top of an instruction set that was designed to run pocket calculators and automatic washing machines.
A friend of mine had several ferrets, as well as a computer that was prone to overheating. So in any case, when the weather got hot he took the sides off his case and put a box fan next to the case (which was about the height and depth of his tower case) to gain some additional cooling. In any case, the largest and smartest of the ferrets thought it was just the _neatest_ game to go and yank all the IDE cables from his drives when he was at work. So he'd get home and his computer would claim to have no drives, he'd look at it, and discover that the fan had been wedged aside and next to his disconnected cabling were some droppings from the ferret. From that point on the fan was duct taped inside and out to the case.
Ferrets don't only chew cables, they like to unplug them, and even steal them to make nests out of. This ferret was also a master keyring theif/pickpocket and liked to take people's keyrigns out of their pockets and wind them down the spiral of the couch springs... (i can see why it could be entertaining).
So if you live in an evironment that contains any shiny objects weighing less than 2-3 Kg that aren't bolted down, you may want to be wary of the ferrets...
It seems to me that the biggest cost is in sysadmin time. I figure it this way, at work I use a few UNIX systems. We have one machine running IRIX, a couple running BSD and one running Linux. Now, when I write a script one one of the BSD machines, it works on all of them, but it may or may not work on the Linux machine, and certainly won't work on the System V-esque IRIX machine.
Now, if your sysadmins employ a lot of scripts, figure you'll have to spend twice the time maintaining them if you have two different platforms that are not fully compatible. You can minimize this if you stick to POSIXly correct scripting, but you'll never completely eliminate it.
The same goes for custom programming. For instance, if you're running everything on BSD, and you want to take on a Sun machine running solaris, there may be some issues with the occasional socket call that Sun implments differently from the rest of the world.
So, the more custom scripting/custom apps you have, the more time your sysadmins will have to spend maintaining/porting/testing the stuff.
Okay, here's how I view it: If you have joe random programmer, there are several factors at work. First, you get your problem spec. Somebody higher up says "hey, we have this information, we know it can be processed into this smaller set of more immediately applicable data, and we need something in the middle to sort through reams of data, find the relevant points, accumulate them in a database, perform some analysis, and spit out a condensed set of results"...
Okay, now there are lots of ways you could go about this. First there's brute force, there may be a simple way to do it, but it's not ideal because it's O(N^2), okay well there are several routes you could take. First, you could run with it, second you could think about it, possibly for days, while you may be reading the morning papers, your subconscious mind is churning through multitudes of different solutions, working on what would generally be considered intractible topography problems in th' background using the massively paralell computer known as the human brain. When you finish with that stage, and you're ready to implement, then's when the groove hits.
What i'm talking about is when there is a hairy multifaceted problem, and after goofing off playing tradewars for a couple days, you finally latch onto a solid solution. What looked like a massive unmanagable mass of special cases and state variables condenses into a simple but subtle loop invariant and you go for the gold. Pop a couple of ephedrine, drink some coffee, eat a bunch of solid high calorie food, put on some good driving music, something with a solid steady beat that you can use for a clock signal to push the data through your brain, and let fly. It's one of those things where you have solved the problem on a subconscious level, and you can see all the facets and details as it if were a building in front of you, except instead of a building, it's a nice regular 5 dimensional shape, but it's there, and for that moment in time you see it clearly, and as fast as you can code and comment, it can be translated back into our mortal plane, it can change from a shimmering but abstract represenation of a problem into a concrete solution. That's where it's at. =:-)
Power consuption is the bottom line! ARM kicks the living shit out of x86 by a factor of 2 or 3, but MIPS kicks the shit out of ARM by that much again.
You can piss away 5 watts to run a 133 mhz pentium, you can use a moderate 2 watts to run an ARM of equivilant computational power, or you can spend 300mW (.3 watts) to run a MIPS chip with the same might. Any questions?
The problem is the advertisers are shooting themselves in the foot. The more irritating their advertisements, the more numb the readers become. If they shout all the time, people will learn to ignore shouting. I already am so used to killing the popups on weather.com that i know when they pop up and kill the windows with a swift keystroke before the ad image even loads.
I wonder if it's legal to import these things to the united states?
My biggest wish for the marketing/management types that i have to work with is that they wouldn't make assumptions about what is difficult and what is easy. For instance, they think of redesigning the whole look and feel of the U.I. as a minor cosmetic change, and they assume that changing some tweakable parameter in the code that does the real work is going to be difficult. The trick is that they have not always taken the time to understand the structure of the system, and aren't always willing to. They'll say "those are implementation details, you guys can do that however you think would work best", and then after the fact they will say "we want a change here". I guess the root of what I'm trying to get at is that anybody who is going to want code changes should make their needs clear during the design phase so the programmers know where to spend the extra time designing in excess flexibility, and where to spend their time writing a more optimized but less flexible solution. I know, people are going to say that everything should always be completely modular and flexible, and i agree, but it seems that no matter how much flexibility we design in, marketing comes up with one change that we have to rip up some serious code to accomidate.
This is a good idea =:-) It's sort of like putting a deliberately weak system on your network to see when somebody is attacking you and trap them, but it works in reverse. I think it's probably great in terms of the number of people it'll educate per tax dollar spent.
This could be part of why they are cutting loose their PC division. It seems they've been doing a lot of pure research lately. I hope some of this comes to market soon (within the next 5-10 years) and they aren't just filing speculative patents.
On the humorous side, maybe they can use this tech to start making the HP48gx again and overclock it to 1ghz =:-)