Have to agree with you about needing more time to think as you grow older. I think it's a function of growing aware of more detail in whatever you do; with experience, you've learned to recognize the difference between mediocre and good, and good often takes a lot more thought and energy, thus requiring fewer distractions in your day.
When we're younger, our primary function is to consume information and learn; as we age, that balance shifts to a primary function of creation and output based on our experience, which is a much more internally driven process.
Some form of BASIC is, well, pretty basic and easy to pick up with no prior programming experience. I imagine gifted kids these days would only need a couple weeks with that to learn enough to graduate to something else.
Don't do Visual, though, or introduce any kind of IDE tools. Keep it plain and simple, text editor and compiler and executable. Focus on the concepts not the tools.
In high school, at 16, I took a programming course that taught in Pascal. Looking back I think it provided an exceptional foundation for learning basic programming constructs like procedures, functions, looping, input/output, and arrays. It was close enough to psuedocode that it was natural to start with comments and translate it to code.
As for exercises, I've always thought recursive functions were a real head-trip and exemplified the power of computing. Sorting of course is a must, at least a couple different classic variants, and network/graph traversing algorithms are quite educational (traveling salesman).
My wife loves puzzle games. Her favorite series was King's Quest, and she also liked Civilization 1 and 2, but mostly 1.
She hates combat, or anything to do with time-based interactions or interactions that depend upon hand-eye coordination and/or motor skills. She likes to just play along with a good story at her own pace and solve some interesting puzzles, as long as it's not too dark or creepy.
We've been looking, unsuccessfully, for new games for her to play. Maybe the Harry Potter games, but she's not really a Potter fan.
I think it's pretty indicative of the state of gaming, and gamer's expectations, when almost all of the responses to this article attempt to refute it by citing combat-centric games that happen to contain puzzles.
Any advice? Or are we just 1% market share left in the dust by 99% who want kinetic mayhem?
Unfortunately, the product will never be able to filter out useless spam reviews that artificially inflate product ratings, such as "OMFG THIS IS THE BEST!!!!" (entire review) (especially for products that aren't even released yet) or paid site-fillers like "this is good I'm so glad [this site] made it available".
I expect most media product reviews will summarize to something like "This is the best ever, if that's your kind of thing."
This also means we need to start planning our cities and communities around mass transit instead of driving, which means mixed use zoning to create pedestrian-friendly core destinations instead of decentralized urban/suburban grid sprawl. Mass transit doesn't work in a decentralized population.
In other words, we literally need to plan our communities to look more European. Any help convincing Americans to do that is much appreciated.
Open source/unlocked apps will be a competitive option only for those who have the technical gumption to risk bricking or otherwise crippling their phone, and the burden of time and attention required to learn how to uncripple it. This is acceptable to the hacker community, but not to the majority of iPhone users, who just want a stable, uninterrupted user experience.
Are we likely to significantly change our behaviors because of increased surveillance?
Or, as a society, are we more likely to loosen our cultural norms and not care as much about what people are caught doing, because, as it turns out, we all eventually get caught doing something for which someone else can fault us? (excepting illegal activity)
When an item or event is uncommon, it attracts attention. When the market is flooded with it, it retains little value, and warrants little attention.
A briefcase is a physical object that contains other physical objects that can be used in physically bad ways.
The contents of a hard drive are not physical objects, they are pure information, that can not be used in physically bad ways. To police them is to police thought, at least in the context of a border crossing.
You might need a different mattress. Seriously, check it out. My tempurpedic has done wonders for my restfulness, focus, and energy levels, which I struggled with for 20 years. (Though I also have a mild case of sleep apnea.)
Seems to me that most people don't start as developers, they start as testers or call center reps, and work their way up internally. That's if you're going for larger companies. If you want to get into smaller companies or consulting, it's all about networking.
A friend of mine sold something on eBay. The winning buyer didn't respond to email for 2 weeks, then left a negative feedback on my friend's otherwise spotless record, claiming that she "changed her mind" and told my friend about it, which was false.
So my friend is left with 100% record and non-reimbursable eBay fees.
Consider the potential audience on eBay (any loser in the world) and adjust your feedback threshhold accordingly (especially for volume sellers).
Not free. You have to pay $1.29 or whatever for a bottle of Pepsi. That's $.30 more than if you bought the song by itself on iTMS. If you weren't going to buy some Pepsi anyway, then it's not a good deal at all.
I'd believe distribution problems too, though. I only found a few bottles in the Seattle area (not that I really went looking too hard, though).
In my experience, generally speaking, men are more functionally oriented, so they want to learn as much as they can about what they're buying so that they can make their own decision about what best fits their needs. Then they feel a sense of accomplishment, even more so if it's complex to operate, because they can put their knowledge to use.
Women are more socially oriented, so they would rather have someone ask them what their needs are and then recommend the best product to them, without forcing them to learn all the details. Then they feel supported, especially if the item is very simple to use and does everything the salesperson/marketer said it would.
Different marketing and design strategies are required to specifically target either gender.
Interesting, I would think that the investment already placed in the drug is water under the bridge. Maybe you won't recoup all of it by bringing it to market without much remaining patent life, but you certainly aren't going to recoup anything at all if you just shelve it.
What might be the shelving motivations? To prevent competitors from getting a piece of the pie (if I can't make a profit, neither are you)?
I wonder how many drugs have been shelved that could be out there helping people instead?
Domestic workers who are out of work will be willing to work for less, thus driving down the cost of locally made goods. When the cost of local goods and services drops below the cost of foreign made goods and services, then jobs will start to flow back into the USA.
And when the average quality of life for American citizens drops until it equals that of other developing nations, we'll finally be able to compete toe-to-toe with their cheap labor. And when everything in the world becomes a commodity -- where do we go from there?
You're talking about lowest-common-denominator economics. While it makes sense from an objective, global perspective, from a subjective, local perspective, it sucks goat nads, and we're entitled to a little bitching.
It is my belief that the human brain is a magnificent pattern detection machine. That is how we, as a species, have evolved to be successful, because our brain can make linear sense out of an otherwise chaotic environment.
But when we learn language, and theories, and skills and stories, our brain gets filled up with all this information which, while extremely useful in obvious ways, also acts to create filters in our minds. The more we learn, the more we think we know, and the more we distrust anything our brain picks up on that we have not consciously learned. It's why children can often be cuttingly insightful and have potential far above what most adults credit them -- they have not yet learned that they are not supposed to understand things yet.
Our brains pick up on many things in this world that, as we grow older and are told things by other people, we learn to ignore. Deja vu... first impressions of other people (including love at first sight)... ghosts... premonitions, or just having a "feeling" about the way something will turn out... resolving complex problems when not even thinking about it... They are all linked, yet we are trained to discard some of them as superstition or bad gas.
We figure things out when we sleep or are otherwise distracted because our conscious mind drops the filters and lets the real hardcore pattern detection machine, our unconscious mind, which has not been and cannot be corrupted by our attempts to consciously control it, send out its results.
For the next week, try really paying attention to your feelings and unexplainable impressions of the events and people in your everyday life, including yourself. (For example, you often know in your gut that you're doing something wrong, but consciously you think it's what you're supposed to do so you will create rational excuses for it; it's how people end up looking stupid on Dr. Phil without having any clue about it beforehand.) You will find that you are a much more intuitive, insightful, and powerful person than you realized, if only you can learn to trust yourself over what you've been taught to believe. It's like tapping into a part of your awareness that you didn't even realize was there.
Personally I would like to support companies that are putting genuine effort into their interface design and aesthetics.
Any half-assed company can throw together some circuits and sell it as an MP3 player, but that doesn't mean it's usable. Apple seems to be one of the few companies out there trying to improve technical design holistically instead of just competing by the numbers, and I think that's worth supporting.
I downloaded iTunes yesterday. Within 5 minutes I had imported my music library, set up all the options I wanted, and I was listening to music. It has a very pleasant interface and includes all the features I want -- nothing more, nothing less.
Who wants crazy flexibility when you don't even use half of the extra options and they just clutter up the user experience? I'm ditching the other jukeboxes I've been suffering with all year and sticking with iTunes. It may even influence me to buy an iPod -- if it works as seamlessly and easily as iTunes, sign me up.
I'm tired of frittering away so much time trying to overcome the learning curves of PC software and trying to get programs to work and play together. I'm not into computers because I'm in love with jerking around in advanced options settings all day long, I'm into computers because of what they can do for me. My job already pays me to spend 10 hrs a day getting computers to work, I don't want to spend the rest of my free time doing the same thing.
Mac stuff works, first time, every time, it does what you expect it to do. I think that just might be worth paying for. I think I'm going to start saving my pennies for a nice little PowerBook.
Now, in addition to seemingly talking to themselves in public (tiny headsets), cell phone users will also wildly gesticulate in the air, finally making them indistinguishable from the homeless residents of Seattle's streets.
Slashdot Mirror
Have to agree with you about needing more time to think as you grow older. I think it's a function of growing aware of more detail in whatever you do; with experience, you've learned to recognize the difference between mediocre and good, and good often takes a lot more thought and energy, thus requiring fewer distractions in your day.
When we're younger, our primary function is to consume information and learn; as we age, that balance shifts to a primary function of creation and output based on our experience, which is a much more internally driven process.
Some form of BASIC is, well, pretty basic and easy to pick up with no prior programming experience. I imagine gifted kids these days would only need a couple weeks with that to learn enough to graduate to something else.
Don't do Visual, though, or introduce any kind of IDE tools. Keep it plain and simple, text editor and compiler and executable. Focus on the concepts not the tools.
In high school, at 16, I took a programming course that taught in Pascal. Looking back I think it provided an exceptional foundation for learning basic programming constructs like procedures, functions, looping, input/output, and arrays. It was close enough to psuedocode that it was natural to start with comments and translate it to code.
As for exercises, I've always thought recursive functions were a real head-trip and exemplified the power of computing. Sorting of course is a must, at least a couple different classic variants, and network/graph traversing algorithms are quite educational (traveling salesman).
My wife loves puzzle games. Her favorite series was King's Quest, and she also liked Civilization 1 and 2, but mostly 1.
She hates combat, or anything to do with time-based interactions or interactions that depend upon hand-eye coordination and/or motor skills. She likes to just play along with a good story at her own pace and solve some interesting puzzles, as long as it's not too dark or creepy.
We've been looking, unsuccessfully, for new games for her to play. Maybe the Harry Potter games, but she's not really a Potter fan.
I think it's pretty indicative of the state of gaming, and gamer's expectations, when almost all of the responses to this article attempt to refute it by citing combat-centric games that happen to contain puzzles.
Any advice? Or are we just 1% market share left in the dust by 99% who want kinetic mayhem?
Unfortunately, the product will never be able to filter out useless spam reviews that artificially inflate product ratings, such as "OMFG THIS IS THE BEST!!!!" (entire review) (especially for products that aren't even released yet) or paid site-fillers like "this is good I'm so glad [this site] made it available".
I expect most media product reviews will summarize to something like "This is the best ever, if that's your kind of thing."
This also means we need to start planning our cities and communities around mass transit instead of driving, which means mixed use zoning to create pedestrian-friendly core destinations instead of decentralized urban/suburban grid sprawl. Mass transit doesn't work in a decentralized population.
In other words, we literally need to plan our communities to look more European. Any help convincing Americans to do that is much appreciated.
Open source/unlocked apps will be a competitive option only for those who have the technical gumption to risk bricking or otherwise crippling their phone, and the burden of time and attention required to learn how to uncripple it. This is acceptable to the hacker community, but not to the majority of iPhone users, who just want a stable, uninterrupted user experience.
Are we likely to significantly change our behaviors because of increased surveillance?
Or, as a society, are we more likely to loosen our cultural norms and not care as much about what people are caught doing, because, as it turns out, we all eventually get caught doing something for which someone else can fault us? (excepting illegal activity)
When an item or event is uncommon, it attracts attention. When the market is flooded with it, it retains little value, and warrants little attention.
A briefcase is a physical object that contains other physical objects that can be used in physically bad ways.
The contents of a hard drive are not physical objects, they are pure information, that can not be used in physically bad ways. To police them is to police thought, at least in the context of a border crossing.
Analogy fails.
You might need a different mattress. Seriously, check it out. My tempurpedic has done wonders for my restfulness, focus, and energy levels, which I struggled with for 20 years. (Though I also have a mild case of sleep apnea.)
Well, some companies do, anyway. Maybe he just needs to look a little harder. Vote with your dollar.
Might such a computing system display any fun behavior if carried aboard a vessel approaching the speed of light?
Seems to me that most people don't start as developers, they start as testers or call center reps, and work their way up internally. That's if you're going for larger companies. If you want to get into smaller companies or consulting, it's all about networking.
er, that's supposed to be LESS THAN 100% record
A friend of mine sold something on eBay. The winning buyer didn't respond to email for 2 weeks, then left a negative feedback on my friend's otherwise spotless record, claiming that she "changed her mind" and told my friend about it, which was false.
So my friend is left with 100% record and non-reimbursable eBay fees.
Consider the potential audience on eBay (any loser in the world) and adjust your feedback threshhold accordingly (especially for volume sellers).
Not free. You have to pay $1.29 or whatever for a bottle of Pepsi. That's $.30 more than if you bought the song by itself on iTMS. If you weren't going to buy some Pepsi anyway, then it's not a good deal at all.
I'd believe distribution problems too, though. I only found a few bottles in the Seattle area (not that I really went looking too hard, though).
In my experience, generally speaking, men are more functionally oriented, so they want to learn as much as they can about what they're buying so that they can make their own decision about what best fits their needs. Then they feel a sense of accomplishment, even more so if it's complex to operate, because they can put their knowledge to use.
Women are more socially oriented, so they would rather have someone ask them what their needs are and then recommend the best product to them, without forcing them to learn all the details. Then they feel supported, especially if the item is very simple to use and does everything the salesperson/marketer said it would.
Different marketing and design strategies are required to specifically target either gender.
Interesting, I would think that the investment already placed in the drug is water under the bridge. Maybe you won't recoup all of it by bringing it to market without much remaining patent life, but you certainly aren't going to recoup anything at all if you just shelve it.
What might be the shelving motivations? To prevent competitors from getting a piece of the pie (if I can't make a profit, neither are you)?
I wonder how many drugs have been shelved that could be out there helping people instead?
Domestic workers who are out of work will be willing to work for less, thus driving down the cost of locally made goods. When the cost of local goods and services drops below the cost of foreign made goods and services, then jobs will start to flow back into the USA.
And when the average quality of life for American citizens drops until it equals that of other developing nations, we'll finally be able to compete toe-to-toe with their cheap labor. And when everything in the world becomes a commodity -- where do we go from there?
You're talking about lowest-common-denominator economics. While it makes sense from an objective, global perspective, from a subjective, local perspective, it sucks goat nads, and we're entitled to a little bitching.
Agreed. There is absolutely nothing wrong with paying for good design. It supports good designers.
It is my belief that the human brain is a magnificent pattern detection machine. That is how we, as a species, have evolved to be successful, because our brain can make linear sense out of an otherwise chaotic environment.
But when we learn language, and theories, and skills and stories, our brain gets filled up with all this information which, while extremely useful in obvious ways, also acts to create filters in our minds. The more we learn, the more we think we know, and the more we distrust anything our brain picks up on that we have not consciously learned. It's why children can often be cuttingly insightful and have potential far above what most adults credit them -- they have not yet learned that they are not supposed to understand things yet.
Our brains pick up on many things in this world that, as we grow older and are told things by other people, we learn to ignore. Deja vu... first impressions of other people (including love at first sight)... ghosts... premonitions, or just having a "feeling" about the way something will turn out... resolving complex problems when not even thinking about it... They are all linked, yet we are trained to discard some of them as superstition or bad gas.
We figure things out when we sleep or are otherwise distracted because our conscious mind drops the filters and lets the real hardcore pattern detection machine, our unconscious mind, which has not been and cannot be corrupted by our attempts to consciously control it, send out its results.
For the next week, try really paying attention to your feelings and unexplainable impressions of the events and people in your everyday life, including yourself. (For example, you often know in your gut that you're doing something wrong, but consciously you think it's what you're supposed to do so you will create rational excuses for it; it's how people end up looking stupid on Dr. Phil without having any clue about it beforehand.) You will find that you are a much more intuitive, insightful, and powerful person than you realized, if only you can learn to trust yourself over what you've been taught to believe. It's like tapping into a part of your awareness that you didn't even realize was there.
Personally I would like to support companies that are putting genuine effort into their interface design and aesthetics.
Any half-assed company can throw together some circuits and sell it as an MP3 player, but that doesn't mean it's usable. Apple seems to be one of the few companies out there trying to improve technical design holistically instead of just competing by the numbers, and I think that's worth supporting.
Will this be a problem for people with corn allergies?
Or how about other food allergies. "This compact disc was manufactured in a facility that processes nuts."
I downloaded iTunes yesterday. Within 5 minutes I had imported my music library, set up all the options I wanted, and I was listening to music. It has a very pleasant interface and includes all the features I want -- nothing more, nothing less.
Who wants crazy flexibility when you don't even use half of the extra options and they just clutter up the user experience? I'm ditching the other jukeboxes I've been suffering with all year and sticking with iTunes. It may even influence me to buy an iPod -- if it works as seamlessly and easily as iTunes, sign me up.
I'm tired of frittering away so much time trying to overcome the learning curves of PC software and trying to get programs to work and play together. I'm not into computers because I'm in love with jerking around in advanced options settings all day long, I'm into computers because of what they can do for me. My job already pays me to spend 10 hrs a day getting computers to work, I don't want to spend the rest of my free time doing the same thing.
Mac stuff works, first time, every time, it does what you expect it to do. I think that just might be worth paying for. I think I'm going to start saving my pennies for a nice little PowerBook.
They still make books?
Now, in addition to seemingly talking to themselves in public (tiny headsets), cell phone users will also wildly gesticulate in the air, finally making them indistinguishable from the homeless residents of Seattle's streets.