My son is the same, he's 11 and wanting to create Minecraft Mods has caused him to:
- Learn Java (he had a few brief experiences with Processing but now he's reading the Nutshell books)
- Decompile Minecraft
- Find and follow instructions on how to do all this (Web and YouTube it seems)
- Write his own mods
He's currently at the stage where he's letting his brother have his mods, and we're starting to talk to him about the implications of distribution (support, licensing etc.).
I'm doing very little except providing the right tools at the right time (IntelliJ has been excellent for navigating the code base).
Very impressed with Minecraft and how much he's been motivated to learn. I had tried to teach him some programming before but never really got anywhere, now he's so deep into aspects of Java that I can't really help him... and I've not had to utter a single word of encouragement or assistance.
Minecraft feels like it is the BBC Model B of his generation.
If you research into 100 different ideas, and take them all the way from "Conception" to "Reduction to Practice" then you have a decent chance of winning a patent fight on them.
However, if you conceive of 100 different ideas, put them in your desk drawer, and then only pay attention to them (and reduce them to practice) when someone else has done something cool, you'll struggle to prove "Diligence" and hence won't be able to knock the other guy out.
The US patent system most certainly has flaws, but it does rewards inventor for inventing stuff, as opposed to people who can fill forms out. Alternatively, you can reward people who share (by filing a patent).
Neither first-to-file or first-to-invent are perfect (and the tradeoffs are to some extent unavoidable) but the founders of the US felt sufficiently strongly about the whole thing that it got a mention in the Constitution... having crossed the Atlantic more than a few times, my conclusion is the US has made a choice which is congruent with other aspects of American life.
I tried to like WebObjects, I really did. But it never seemed to work properly on my machine, always some bug or another. I bought the books, wrote a few small apps - and never seemed to be getting anywhere. That, combined with the fact that it clearly isn't getting any investment from Apple and the community is small (compared to other app servers & frameworks), made me very reluctant to invest more of my time. Ruby On Rails however "just works" (thanks, Locomotive!, clearly has a future and vibrant community, and does exactly what I need (rapid development of in-house web apps). Yes, WebObjects is nice - in theory - but in practice unless Apple's prepared to invest in it's future, I wouldn't start any new projects in it.
I don't think the problem is with Alice creating the initial implementation - after all it works for them. Alice and her project are a vital enabler of innovation in the way companies use IT.
The problem is Alice's boss thinking the single-user toy can be scaled up, where what really needs to happen is a proper professional implementation using Alice's tool as the prototype.
Forcing IT involvement at the low end when Alice is really just messing around, overloads IT and kills any innovation which involves IT - which isn't what we need. This is the very worst example of IT flexing its muscle and optimising IT at the expense of the rest of the company.
The best shops have a process for encouraging Alice to write these little apps, and engaging with her at the right time to productionalise them. And if Alice turns out to be a serial offender, she often ends up getting recruited by IT as a customer interface kind of person, and given some training in "real" IT systems.
I was waiting for it. Selection isn't as good as I would like, but I've bought 2 albums so far and will probably buy more gradually. Let's hope they get more of the distributors on board soon.
I have a PowerBook (DVI) with the USB Bluetooth adaptor and a T68i connected to Orange here in the UK and it works OK. I downloaded some scripts for the modem (sorry can't remember the URL), and currently its setup as a "Ericson GPRS CID2".
Performance wise, latency feels quite low. I was sitting in a field in Orkney (islands North of Scotland) reading my mail from work using IMAP, and it felt almost as if I was on my cable modem at home.
The only problem I have at the moment is the Orange GPRS network is a little flakey. It seems quite easy at the moment to "Fall off" the GPRS network, which in some cases can be fixed by removing the phone battery with the phone on, and in other cases you need to call tech support to get them to remove and re-add you to the network.
Overall, I'm very impressed. Would be nice if the network was a little more reliable, but I guess its just teething trouble.
The Domino server will support POP3 so you can get your Notes mail using whatever client you choose. Shouldn't be a problem.
Failing that, Lotus also provide a "WebMail" template on Notes.Net, but I haven't heard anyone use that for everyday use. Useful when you are travelling though.
I have almost the same setup - a Linux server, another Linux machine, 2 Windows NT boxes (blame my wife), and a Mac.
I bought the personal edition of Retrospect for the Mac, and backup via FTP to the Linux server. Hard disks are cheap enough for this to be the easiest solution for me (I use an old slow one for the backup).
For the Windows machines, the Linux box mounts their disks with smbmount.
Then I can run BRU Personal Edition (came with RedHat) on the Linux machine to back all this up.
When I got a second Linux box (firewall) I NFSed that up to the main server, and bought the normal version of BRU which will do NFS drives.
There are probably better ways to do all this, but this method works well enough for me, and I'd rather spend my time messing with other things:-)
Slashdot Mirror
My son is the same, he's 11 and wanting to create Minecraft Mods has caused him to:
- Learn Java (he had a few brief experiences with Processing but now he's reading the Nutshell books)
- Decompile Minecraft
- Find and follow instructions on how to do all this (Web and YouTube it seems)
- Write his own mods
He's currently at the stage where he's letting his brother have his mods, and we're starting to talk to him about the implications of distribution (support, licensing etc.).
I'm doing very little except providing the right tools at the right time (IntelliJ has been excellent for navigating the code base).
Very impressed with Minecraft and how much he's been motivated to learn. I had tried to teach him some programming before but never really got anywhere, now he's so deep into aspects of Java that I can't really help him... and I've not had to utter a single word of encouragement or assistance.
Minecraft feels like it is the BBC Model B of his generation.
If you research into 100 different ideas, and take them all the way from "Conception" to "Reduction to Practice" then you have a decent chance of winning a patent fight on them.
However, if you conceive of 100 different ideas, put them in your desk drawer, and then only pay attention to them (and reduce them to practice) when someone else has done something cool, you'll struggle to prove "Diligence" and hence won't be able to knock the other guy out.
The US patent system most certainly has flaws, but it does rewards inventor for inventing stuff, as opposed to people who can fill forms out. Alternatively, you can reward people who share (by filing a patent).
Neither first-to-file or first-to-invent are perfect (and the tradeoffs are to some extent unavoidable) but the founders of the US felt sufficiently strongly about the whole thing that it got a mention in the Constitution... having crossed the Atlantic more than a few times, my conclusion is the US has made a choice which is congruent with other aspects of American life.
I tried to like WebObjects, I really did. But it never seemed to work properly on my machine, always some bug or another. I bought the books, wrote a few small apps - and never seemed to be getting anywhere. That, combined with the fact that it clearly isn't getting any investment from Apple and the community is small (compared to other app servers & frameworks), made me very reluctant to invest more of my time. Ruby On Rails however "just works" (thanks, Locomotive!, clearly has a future and vibrant community, and does exactly what I need (rapid development of in-house web apps). Yes, WebObjects is nice - in theory - but in practice unless Apple's prepared to invest in it's future, I wouldn't start any new projects in it.
I don't think the problem is with Alice creating the initial implementation - after all it works for them. Alice and her project are a vital enabler of innovation in the way companies use IT.
The problem is Alice's boss thinking the single-user toy can be scaled up, where what really needs to happen is a proper professional implementation using Alice's tool as the prototype.
Forcing IT involvement at the low end when Alice is really just messing around, overloads IT and kills any innovation which involves IT - which isn't what we need. This is the very worst example of IT flexing its muscle and optimising IT at the expense of the rest of the company.
The best shops have a process for encouraging Alice to write these little apps, and engaging with her at the right time to productionalise them. And if Alice turns out to be a serial offender, she often ends up getting recruited by IT as a customer interface kind of person, and given some training in "real" IT systems.
I was waiting for it. Selection isn't as good as I would like, but I've bought 2 albums so far and will probably buy more gradually. Let's hope they get more of the distributors on board soon.
I have a PowerBook (DVI) with the USB Bluetooth adaptor and a T68i connected to Orange here in the UK and it works OK. I downloaded some scripts for the modem (sorry can't remember the URL), and currently its setup as a "Ericson GPRS CID2".
Performance wise, latency feels quite low. I was sitting in a field in Orkney (islands North of Scotland) reading my mail from work using IMAP, and it felt almost as if I was on my cable modem at home.
The only problem I have at the moment is the Orange GPRS network is a little flakey. It seems quite easy at the moment to "Fall off" the GPRS network, which in some cases can be fixed by removing the phone battery with the phone on, and in other cases you need to call tech support to get them to remove and re-add you to the network.
Overall, I'm very impressed. Would be nice if the network was a little more reliable, but I guess its just teething trouble.
The Domino server will support POP3 so you can get your Notes mail using whatever client you choose. Shouldn't be a problem.
Failing that, Lotus also provide a "WebMail" template on Notes.Net, but I haven't heard anyone use that for everyday use. Useful when you are travelling though.
We've setup a mailing list for discussing Domino on Linux.
:-)
To join the list, send an email (content isn't important) to join-dominolinux@lyris.nipltd.com
More information see http://www.nipltd.com/dominolinux.htm
This is excellent stuff.... as soon as this is stable I am hitting our machine room with a RedHat CD
I have almost the same setup - a Linux server, another Linux machine, 2 Windows NT boxes (blame my wife), and a Mac.
:-)
I bought the personal edition of Retrospect for the Mac, and backup via FTP to the Linux server. Hard disks are cheap enough for this to be the easiest solution for me (I use an old slow one for the backup).
For the Windows machines, the Linux box mounts their disks with smbmount.
Then I can run BRU Personal Edition (came with RedHat) on the Linux machine to back all this up.
When I got a second Linux box (firewall) I NFSed that up to the main server, and bought the normal version of BRU which will do NFS drives.
There are probably better ways to do all this, but this method works well enough for me, and I'd rather spend my time messing with other things
Simon