I was working for another micro company when the Apple/// was first shown. When I saw it, and the double-shot-molded keys with word processor commands on them, I thought, "We're screwed!"
4 months later, I was working at Apple -- before the company went public. Oh, everyone already had badges. I learned more than I ever wanted to know about the Apple///, good, bad, ugly. The clock problem was caused by National Semiconductor. The clock battery problem was Apple's, and was fixed in the reintroduced/// by replacing the watch batteries (mounted to the logic board, requiring disassembly to replace) with 3 AA cells under the lid. The infamous memory problem was caused by cheapskates in purchasing buying cheap connectors -- tin on tin, and tin oxide is a tenacious insulator!
Was the/// a failure? If you measured it in terms of Apple ][ sales, yes. If you measure it in terms of what it did to other companies/competitors, it was a success. And as others have mentioned, senior management felt it necessary to have the/// on the market prior to going public to show people that Apple was more than a one-trick pony.
The Apple/// also marked the first system that was actually engineered, as opposed to one that just happened. Hardware engineers, Software engineers, development plans, test plans -- a great leap forward.
And Lisa? May not have sold a lot of machines, but it was a technological milestone, introducing new ideas to the computing public. It was a stepping stone for the Macintosh -- that's where the Mac project got Bill Atkinson and the Quickdraw core.
Apple flops? They're there, but many stem from over-reaching technically -- the Twiggy disk drive for example. Many didn't have enough backing, or enough spine -- eWorld? Open Doc?
How about pushing products out the door before they're ready? Apple/// rings the bell. I also remember the morning we found out that our sugar-water selling chairman had just decided to keynote a presentation in about 6 weeks by showing the Newton -- about 6 months too early!
Many failures at Apple were products or ideas which were ahead of their time -- part of Lisa's problem. Newton fits into that category, ahead of its time and born prematurely. So does Web TV -- it didn't "fit" with the then Apple model, so Steve P and others took it outside, made it fly, eventually selling it to Gates.
Another example of Apple's "mistakes" and "failures" -- businesses other companies find very attractive.
At the risk of inciting a flame war, if you can write, I'd suggest law school, and more specifically, patent law. There's a lack of people who understand technical aspects of computer science and software, and can write about it. Damn computers are everywhere -- software and software-enabled inventions are becoming more and more prominent.
(My original degrees are in computer science and physics; went back after a decade or so for the law degree. Spent the weekend hacking python to turn router logs into something more useful.)
Re:still waiting for my gf's shuffle to show up
on
Apple Updates iPod
·
· Score: 1
The two I ordered on January 13 (through Amazon) are scheduled to arrive today. Last Friday, they were still showing March 20-25.
Why would I want to view images in an e-mail message?
Spam is a problem, but for me at least, this ain't the solution! I'm not about to jump through these hoops. If you want to exchange e-mails with me, fine. This system tells me you don't.
A lot of people won't understand it, and a lot of people who do are going to ignore it and move on to the next message in the inbox.
This is a standard shake-down in the U.S. Entertainment and IP lawyers get calls all the time from business owners asking "Can they do that? Do I have to pay these bastards money for playing my fsking radio?"
The answer is usually, yes. The exceptions are very narrow.
(Ever wonder why restaurant chains sing hokey made-up songs instead of the nominal "happy birthday?" Licensing fees -- money -- that's why.)
One exception, in the U.S. at least, is to play only material that is in the public domain, not subject to (ascap/bmi) licensing. As an example, Fry's in Sunnyvale plays classical piano music which is free of licensing. In the U.S., there are collections of CDs full of such material.
Of course when a business takes such an approach, the licensing authorities (sic) will make the assumption that you are a crook, and they will watch carefully and wait for you to screw up -- and then sue your ass (arse, in Canada).
Consult an attorney familiar with these rackets. I imagine that there exists or will soon exist a standard set of recommendations for Canadian businesses who wish to remain free of licensing fees (and don't expect that guidance to come from the licensing societies).
Unless you're dealing with the rare individual who's interested in learning for learning's sake, you need to be goal or task oriented. (A classroom environment provides its own goal -- passing the class and/or getting a good grade.)
Before you look at languages, look for a problem they're interested in solving. Can this be broken down into byte (sic) sized pieces? If so, you've got a winner -- and pick a language that allows you to solve that problem without too much pain.
If they don't have a task/goal in mind, or if their choice may be a little too difficult, step in with smaller problems and/or subsets.
Geez, not another one! I expect the Sony product to be well designed, a lot of attention to detail -- and high priced. And don't forget, Sony has built-in schizophrenia -- their music division -- MP3 is evil, remember? Sony could have owned the market with mini-disc, but their own paranoia crippled the product (no high-speed digital download, clunky proprietary software, etc.)
But a friend points me to the Sony announcement -- it plays movies, all these formats. Does it have a corkscrew, I ask? GPS?
What? Corkscrew? GPS? Yeah, if it's going to replace things, it should play my AV stuff, have a corkscrew, show me where I am, and be sturdy enough to pound nails...
Really -- what I want in a portable music player is to play music. I don't care about video, GPS, cell phone, or anything else.
As to the iPod killer? It's already on the market. It stores enough of my music, the battery lasts long enough, it drives my earphones (Etymotics ER4), and it's small enough to carry in a pocket.
It's the iPod mini. It does what I want, and I love it.
While the plasma may disappear when the antenna isn't in use, the housing containing the plasma doesn't. Not too stealthy...
Another minor issue -- what's a plasma? Ionized gas, right? How do you ionize gas? By passing current through it. That gives you a large plasma arc. Gee, I wonder if just possibly that arc might be generating RF on its own? Any guesses on DC to light (literally -- gas discharge lamps give off quite characteristic spectra)? That arc is a very wideband RF source.
You're telling me you're going to hook up a sensitive receiver to a gas arc, and it's going to work? Or you're going to hook up a transmitter to a gas arc, and the extra power from the transmitter isn't going to alter the characteristics of the plasma?
Kind of like playing the violin while sitting atop a foghorn...
The risks of attending movies in theatres -- exposure to disease (SARS, tuberculosis, other airborne pathogens), risks to your sanity (insipid "previews," the idiot behind you with the cell phone, the gaggle of girls talking through the whole thing, bad sound and worse pictures), parking lot mayhem, $6 for a bucket of popcorn that's coated with the same stuff they spread on the floors to give them that wonderful, MPAA-approved tacky feel...
But then you didn't expect a balanced presentation, did you?
BASIC stamps (http://www.parallax.com/) provide a great intoduction to both hardware and software. Kids can write (and debug) programs that actually DO THINGS -- blink lights, make noises, wave a small flag taped to the end of a cheepie servo motor.
Yes, they also offer some of the worst features of a programming language-environment, no type-checking to start with, and there are severe limitations on RAM and program memory.
But these limitations also teach kids about the "real world" -- if you are limited on RAM, program space, and program speed, then you have to actually think about how you're going to solve a problem!
Once upon a time, *nix supported multiple users on a 64kb PDP 11/45 -- and we took pride in tight, elegant code.
Sounds like the same strategy, get 'em hooked early.
Give it away, sell it cheap ($85 for Office X for the Mac at the San Jose State University bookstore if you're a student, compared to $499 at Fry's), then sock it to businesses.
Same strategy in many Asian markets -- make products available cheap/free, at least for now. You can bet that when copyright/intellectual property protection evolves in those markets, the price will go up.
Set your wayback machine to the mid 70's, scenic El Segundo California, home of Scientific Data Systems (bought and torpedoed by Xerox but that's a different story)...
Not only was the vast majority of the systems software for the SDS mainframes written in assembly code, customers actually got the code!
Coding/commenting styles differed greatly. The module which handled all remote batch operations, called RBBAT, was *completely* uncommented. Yet its author and maintainer, Sam, when challenged on this, said, "read me 5 lines from any place in rbbat and I'll tell you where they are and what they do."
I was responsible for some other parts of the operating system. When I saw this thread, I instantly remembered an event from those days -- my boss came into my office and handed me a bug report on my code. Some prudish asshole in Salt Lake City didn't like my comments and had sent in a bug report complaining about them. Ed asked me what I was going to do about it. I told him, not a fucking thing, unless I had the opportunity to visit the customer site. Ed agreed I didn't have to change the comments.
A cardiologist friend still calls it "radical keratotomy" and says he'll believe in it "when the bastards start doing their wives and mistresses." Well, they've been doing their wives and mistresses for years now, both eyes at the same time.
I had both eyes done (LASIK) at the same time about 5 years ago (and I'm neither someone's wife nor mistress).
It takes a certain leap of faith to allow someone to slice up the only pair of eyeballs you're ever going to have. My outcome was good, and I don't regret having it done.
Well, I do regret it occasionally. During boring meetings I used to be able to take off my glasses and let the world fade out. Can't do that anymore.
What I tell people--
Find someone who does the procedure A LOT. Ask if they turn people away as unsuitable for LASIK. If the answer they give you is NO, look for someone else -- LASIK won't fix everything.
You need to be satisfied knowing that:
You may end up with 20/40 vision (most practitioners won't do touch-ups if you are 20/40 or better).
You'll never be able to wear contact lenses again in your life (LASIK alters the cornea).
LASIK won't protect you against presbyopia (loss of accomodation in the lens as we grow older) so you'll probably end up using cheesy reading glasses eventually.
The creases on the sides of your head from wearing glasses most of your life will probably never go away.
Most insurance plans classify LASIK as cosmetic, and don't cover it. CHeck into prepaid medical plans that let you set aside pre-tax dollars to pay for medical procedures.
I'm very glad I did it. People who haven't worn glasses all their lives don't understand how incredibly fucking amazing it is to be able to see leaves on trees, or your own toes in the shower without wearing glasses!
Dealing with phone lines is a PITA. Look at the innards of something like a Panasonic PBX ( I've had one in the house for 10+ years), and one of the first things you notice is that a large percentage of the circuitry deals with spike and surge protection for all the lines going in and out of the box.
I've thought about homebrewing a system, but don't have a 30 hour day just yet. The panasonic box is reliable -- it just sits in the closet and works. Oh, when power fails, it automagically switches the CO (incoming) lines to the first n extensions, so you're not totally screwed.
Features with unintended consequences department: One cool feature of the panasonic system is the doorbell boxes. Put one on the front door, and you can answer the door from any phone connected to the system. Unfortunately when I first set up the system, the front door also rang the extension with the answering machine on it. We went away for the weekend -- when we returned, we found that the answering machine had been answering the front door! Oops! A "simple matter of programming" fixed that.
So, was the decline in auto sales last year due to piracy? How about decline in real estate sales? Piracy? Durable goods? Airline travel? Must have been piracy!
Good glub, do any of these idiots understand we were in a recession, and the *entire* economy was in the pits? That CDs are a highly discretionary item, far down the list from things such as food and rent?
A 10% dip sounds like their business did really well, in comparison to other areas of the economy -- I'm sure companies such as Cisco and JDS Uniphase would be deliriously happy had their sales for last year only dropped 10%.
It's the claims which count, not what the marketing folks say.
Claim 1 requires a channel guide database, user criteria, that the processor use pattern matching or fuzzy logic, and an interesting kicker -- the processor also "further selects for removal a previously recorded show having a lower priority than the selected future shows if insufficient capacity exists for recording the future shows..."
Most of the independent claims (1, 19,30,36,42,48,49,50) have this limitation, namely the leabillity to automatically remove old recorded shows.
If you don't have this limitation, it seems to me you've avoided those claims.
On the other hand, I don't know what Claim 26 means!
People lose cards. Someone should suggest to Ascroft that the thing to do is require everyone to have an ID number tattooed on at birth -- say on the inside of the right forearm. Something tells me he'd like the idea very, very much.
Knuth's "Art of Computer Programming" volumes (shouldn't there be another one *any day now*?)
K&R's C book
Minsky's "Computation -- Finite and Infinite Machines"
Aho&Ullman's Dragon book -- "Principles of Compiler Design"
Fred Brooks "The Mythical Man Month"
Knuth's books are classics. K&R is short and sweet. A&O still lays out the field clearly and concisely. Minsky's book explains the limits on computation.
Oh, these are for the most part "computer science" books, and other than K&R, not "practical."
Read what Fred Brooks wrote many moons ago, and see how far we've advanced -- we're still using the same damn debugging techniques that were used when computer memories used Wilkes tubes and little donuts made out of rust!
Garnder's "Annotated Alice" should be on the list as well -- if you can't believe n impossible things before breakfast, you shouldn't be in the computer biz.
Some people have no damn sense of humor -- as of 16:30 PDT, the item has been pulled from eBay. I'm sure there will be more. (I'm sure people are making them in their garages even now.)
Slashdot Mirror
HP didn't want Alan Kay's work, they wanted his name, and the prestige associated.
I was working for another micro company when the Apple /// was first shown. When I saw it, and the double-shot-molded keys with word processor commands on them, I thought, "We're screwed!"
///, good, bad, ugly. The clock problem was caused by National Semiconductor. The clock battery problem was Apple's, and was fixed in the reintroduced /// by replacing the watch batteries (mounted to the logic board, requiring disassembly to replace) with 3 AA cells under the lid. The infamous memory problem was caused by cheapskates in purchasing buying cheap connectors -- tin on tin, and tin oxide is a tenacious insulator!
/// a failure? If you measured it in terms of Apple ][ sales, yes. If you measure it in terms of what it did to other companies/competitors, it was a success. And as others have mentioned, senior management felt it necessary to have the /// on the market prior to going public to show people that Apple was more than a one-trick pony.
/// also marked the first system that was actually engineered, as opposed to one that just happened. Hardware engineers, Software engineers, development plans, test plans -- a great leap forward.
/// rings the bell. I also remember the morning we found out that our sugar-water selling chairman had just decided to keynote a presentation in about 6 weeks by showing the Newton -- about 6 months too early!
4 months later, I was working at Apple -- before the company went public. Oh, everyone already had badges. I learned more than I ever wanted to know about the Apple
Was the
The Apple
And Lisa? May not have sold a lot of machines, but it was a technological milestone, introducing new ideas to the computing public. It was a stepping stone for the Macintosh -- that's where the Mac project got Bill Atkinson and the Quickdraw core.
Apple flops? They're there, but many stem from over-reaching technically -- the Twiggy disk drive for example. Many didn't have enough backing, or enough spine -- eWorld? Open Doc?
How about pushing products out the door before they're ready? Apple
Many failures at Apple were products or ideas which were ahead of their time -- part of Lisa's problem. Newton fits into that category, ahead of its time and born prematurely. So does Web TV -- it didn't "fit" with the then Apple model, so Steve P and others took it outside, made it fly, eventually selling it to Gates.
Another example of Apple's "mistakes" and "failures" -- businesses other companies find very attractive.
At the risk of inciting a flame war, if you can write, I'd suggest law school, and more specifically, patent law. There's a lack of people who understand technical aspects of computer science and software, and can write about it. Damn computers are everywhere -- software and software-enabled inventions are becoming more and more prominent.
(My original degrees are in computer science and physics; went back after a decade or so for the law degree. Spent the weekend hacking python to turn router logs into something more useful.)
The two I ordered on January 13 (through Amazon) are scheduled to arrive today. Last Friday, they were still showing March 20-25.
Why would I want to view images in an e-mail message?
Spam is a problem, but for me at least, this ain't the solution! I'm not about to jump through these hoops. If you want to exchange e-mails with me, fine. This system tells me you don't.
A lot of people won't understand it, and a lot of people who do are going to ignore it and move on to the next message in the inbox.
Seven or eight rows back, on the left side, wearing one of those red shirts
hoping, praying, that everything would work
that Andy got everything working (smooth horizontal scrolling was hard)
what an incredible feeling, to be part of the family, the project, the revolution.
Was it really that many years ago?
Wow, HP sure has come a long way under Carly!
... uh, other companies' products.
The "old" HP would have announced its iPod as something like the "HP i3481A Portable Compressed Media Reproducer."
But Carly has style! A big, flashy show in Miami introducing sexy products
Look at the HP cornerstone -- "Invent!" -- other companies' products.
But think of all the hPods they're going to sell! Uh, and they get all of them from Apple, along with iTunes.
But look at what Carly has done for HP's share value! Uh, well, she's building momentum... With other companies' procducts.
Ignore all that -- I'm still glad Carly is running HP -- and not my company!
This is a standard shake-down in the U.S. Entertainment and IP lawyers get calls all the time from business owners asking "Can they do that? Do I have to pay these bastards money for playing my fsking radio?"
The answer is usually, yes. The exceptions are very narrow.
(Ever wonder why restaurant chains sing hokey made-up songs instead of the nominal "happy birthday?" Licensing fees -- money -- that's why.)
One exception, in the U.S. at least, is to play only material that is in the public domain, not subject to (ascap/bmi) licensing. As an example, Fry's in Sunnyvale plays classical piano music which is free of licensing. In the U.S., there are collections of CDs full of such material.
Of course when a business takes such an approach, the licensing authorities (sic) will make the assumption that you are a crook, and they will watch carefully and wait for you to screw up -- and then sue your ass (arse, in Canada).
Consult an attorney familiar with these rackets. I imagine that there exists or will soon exist a standard set of recommendations for Canadian businesses who wish to remain free of licensing fees (and don't expect that guidance to come from the licensing societies).
Unless you're dealing with the rare individual who's interested in learning for learning's sake, you need to be goal or task oriented. (A classroom environment provides its own goal -- passing the class and/or getting a good grade.)
Before you look at languages, look for a problem they're interested in solving. Can this be broken down into byte (sic) sized pieces? If so, you've got a winner -- and pick a language that allows you to solve that problem without too much pain.
If they don't have a task/goal in mind, or if their choice may be a little too difficult, step in with smaller problems and/or subsets.
Geez, not another one! I expect the Sony product to be well designed, a lot of attention to detail -- and high priced. And don't forget, Sony has built-in schizophrenia -- their music division -- MP3 is evil, remember? Sony could have owned the market with mini-disc, but their own paranoia crippled the product (no high-speed digital download, clunky proprietary software, etc.)
But a friend points me to the Sony announcement -- it plays movies, all these formats. Does it have a corkscrew, I ask? GPS?
What? Corkscrew? GPS? Yeah, if it's going to replace things, it should play my AV stuff, have a corkscrew, show me where I am, and be sturdy enough to pound nails...
Really -- what I want in a portable music player is to play music. I don't care about video, GPS, cell phone, or anything else.
As to the iPod killer? It's already on the market. It stores enough of my music, the battery lasts long enough, it drives my earphones (Etymotics ER4), and it's small enough to carry in a pocket.
It's the iPod mini. It does what I want, and I love it.
While the plasma may disappear when the antenna isn't in use, the housing containing the plasma doesn't. Not too stealthy...
Another minor issue -- what's a plasma? Ionized gas, right? How do you ionize gas? By passing current through it. That gives you a large plasma arc. Gee, I wonder if just possibly that arc might be generating RF on its own? Any guesses on DC to light (literally -- gas discharge lamps give off quite characteristic spectra)? That arc is a very wideband RF source.
You're telling me you're going to hook up a sensitive receiver to a gas arc, and it's going to work? Or you're going to hook up a transmitter to a gas arc, and the extra power from the transmitter isn't going to alter the characteristics of the plasma?
Kind of like playing the violin while sitting atop a foghorn...
The risks of attending movies in theatres -- exposure to disease (SARS, tuberculosis, other airborne pathogens), risks to your sanity (insipid "previews," the idiot behind you with the cell phone, the gaggle of girls talking through the whole thing, bad sound and worse pictures), parking lot mayhem, $6 for a bucket of popcorn that's coated with the same stuff they spread on the floors to give them that wonderful, MPAA-approved tacky feel...
But then you didn't expect a balanced presentation, did you?
BASIC stamps (http://www.parallax.com/) provide a great intoduction to both hardware and software. Kids can write (and debug) programs that actually DO THINGS -- blink lights, make noises, wave a small flag taped to the end of a cheepie servo motor.
Yes, they also offer some of the worst features of a programming language-environment, no type-checking to start with, and there are severe limitations on RAM and program memory.
But these limitations also teach kids about the "real world" -- if you are limited on RAM, program space, and program speed, then you have to actually think about how you're going to solve a problem!
Once upon a time, *nix supported multiple users on a 64kb PDP 11/45 -- and we took pride in tight, elegant code.
Namaste-
Sounds like the same strategy, get 'em hooked early.
Give it away, sell it cheap ($85 for Office X for the Mac at the San Jose State University bookstore if you're a student, compared to $499 at Fry's), then sock it to businesses.
Same strategy in many Asian markets -- make products available cheap/free, at least for now. You can bet that when copyright/intellectual property protection evolves in those markets, the price will go up.
Namaste-
Set your wayback machine to the mid 70's, scenic El Segundo California, home of Scientific Data Systems (bought and torpedoed by Xerox but that's a different story)...
Not only was the vast majority of the systems software for the SDS mainframes written in assembly code, customers actually got the code!
Coding/commenting styles differed greatly. The module which handled all remote batch operations, called RBBAT, was *completely* uncommented. Yet its author and maintainer, Sam, when challenged on this, said, "read me 5 lines from any place in rbbat and I'll tell you where they are and what they do."
I was responsible for some other parts of the operating system. When I saw this thread, I instantly remembered an event from those days -- my boss came into my office and handed me a bug report on my code. Some prudish asshole in Salt Lake City didn't like my comments and had sent in a bug report complaining about them. Ed asked me what I was going to do about it. I told him, not a fucking thing, unless I had the opportunity to visit the customer site. Ed agreed I didn't have to change the comments.
A cardiologist friend still calls it "radical keratotomy" and says he'll believe in it "when the bastards start doing their wives and mistresses." Well, they've been doing their wives and mistresses for years now, both eyes at the same time.
I had both eyes done (LASIK) at the same time about 5 years ago (and I'm neither someone's wife nor mistress).
It takes a certain leap of faith to allow someone to slice up the only pair of eyeballs you're ever going to have. My outcome was good, and I don't regret having it done.
Well, I do regret it occasionally. During boring meetings I used to be able to take off my glasses and let the world fade out. Can't do that anymore.
What I tell people--
Find someone who does the procedure A LOT. Ask if they turn people away as unsuitable for LASIK. If the answer they give you is NO, look for someone else -- LASIK won't fix everything.
You need to be satisfied knowing that:
You may end up with 20/40 vision (most practitioners won't do touch-ups if you are 20/40 or better).
You'll never be able to wear contact lenses again in your life (LASIK alters the cornea).
LASIK won't protect you against presbyopia (loss of accomodation in the lens as we grow older) so you'll probably end up using cheesy reading glasses eventually.
The creases on the sides of your head from wearing glasses most of your life will probably never go away.
Most insurance plans classify LASIK as cosmetic, and don't cover it. CHeck into prepaid medical plans that let you set aside pre-tax dollars to pay for medical procedures.
I'm very glad I did it. People who haven't worn glasses all their lives don't understand how incredibly fucking amazing it is to be able to see leaves on trees, or your own toes in the shower without wearing glasses!
Dealing with phone lines is a PITA. Look at the innards of something like a Panasonic PBX ( I've had one in the house for 10+ years), and one of the first things you notice is that a large percentage of the circuitry deals with spike and surge protection for all the lines going in and out of the box.
I've thought about homebrewing a system, but don't have a 30 hour day just yet. The panasonic box is reliable -- it just sits in the closet and works. Oh, when power fails, it automagically switches the CO (incoming) lines to the first n extensions, so you're not totally screwed.
Features with unintended consequences department: One cool feature of the panasonic system is the doorbell boxes. Put one on the front door, and you can answer the door from any phone connected to the system. Unfortunately when I first set up the system, the front door also rang the extension with the answering machine on it. We went away for the weekend -- when we returned, we found that the answering machine had been answering the front door! Oops! A "simple matter of programming" fixed that.
So, was the decline in auto sales last year due to piracy? How about decline in real estate sales? Piracy? Durable goods? Airline travel? Must have been piracy!
Good glub, do any of these idiots understand we were in a recession, and the *entire* economy was in the pits? That CDs are a highly discretionary item, far down the list from things such as food and rent?
A 10% dip sounds like their business did really well, in comparison to other areas of the economy -- I'm sure companies such as Cisco and JDS Uniphase would be deliriously happy had their sales for last year only dropped 10%.
It's the claims which count, not what the marketing folks say.
Claim 1 requires a channel guide database, user criteria, that the processor use pattern matching or fuzzy logic, and an interesting kicker -- the processor also "further selects for removal a previously recorded show having a lower priority than the selected future shows if insufficient capacity exists for recording the future shows..."
Most of the independent claims (1, 19,30,36,42,48,49,50) have this limitation, namely the leabillity to automatically remove old recorded shows.
If you don't have this limitation, it seems to me you've avoided those claims.
On the other hand, I don't know what Claim 26 means!
namaste-
People lose cards. Someone should suggest to Ascroft that the thing to do is require everyone to have an ID number tattooed on at birth -- say on the inside of the right forearm. Something tells me he'd like the idea very, very much.
namaste-
K&R's C book
Minsky's "Computation -- Finite and Infinite Machines"
Aho&Ullman's Dragon book -- "Principles of Compiler Design"
Fred Brooks "The Mythical Man Month"
Knuth's books are classics. K&R is short and sweet. A&O still lays out the field clearly and concisely. Minsky's book explains the limits on computation.
Oh, these are for the most part "computer science" books, and other than K&R, not "practical."
Read what Fred Brooks wrote many moons ago, and see how far we've advanced -- we're still using the same damn debugging techniques that were used when computer memories used Wilkes tubes and little donuts made out of rust!
Garnder's "Annotated Alice" should be on the list as well -- if you can't believe n impossible things before breakfast, you shouldn't be in the computer biz.
namaste-
Some people have no damn sense of humor -- as of 16:30 PDT, the item has been pulled from eBay. I'm sure there will be more. (I'm sure people are making them in their garages even now.)