Keep in mind that Andy Hertzfeld is recounting a story about Jobs from the 1980's. Jobs' taste in expensive cars apparently changed from big and expensive to small and expensive.
I think the key thing to keep in mind here is that being a visionary and being a douchebag are not mutually exclusive.
Amen. What you describe happened to me exactly. How hard is it to flag two subsequent downmods to the same poster as fishy? Three is more than fishy; it is so unlikely that the person downmodding probably has an agenda. Since upmodding is considered more important than downmodding, there's an easy fix here: if someone does a slew of downmods, timeout their moderation privileges for longer. Or even better, use the StackOverflow model: downmods cost more than upmods (upmods are free on StackOverflow). If downvotes also diminished your karma by some epsilon, then people would only downvote when it was really necessary. Make upvotes count less (i.e., finer-grained) and then allow everyone to vote.
I noticed the change. But my new inhaler works just as well as the old one.
Most people don't breathe deeply enough when using their inhalers- they just puff it into their mouths. You really need to pull it in. If you do it correctly, you can even suck in no-propellant inhalents like I had when I was a kid in the 80's.
/.'ers are being characteristically reactionist. I use the new inhalers, and have done so for several years now. This story should be modded anti-government flamebait.
Furthermore, epinephrine inhalers are less effective than salabuterol inhalers, with more side effects (epinephrine can be very unpleasant). That's the real reason they're going away-- reformulating them for a new propellant is not worth the cost.
The purpose of subsidies is to remove volatility or to provide an incentive for public good. This is why we have subsidies for food and oil, which have no problems selling themselves, thank you very much, and it is one of the reasons why the US has been a stable economic force for the past 60 years.
Subsidies are not automatically bad. R&D in particular is extremely unpredictable, and that unpredictability introduces volatility in funding. When new energy technology has the potential to change an economy, your national policy should take advantage of it.
I'm sorry, but the Republican position here is idiotic. You have energy blasting the planet constantly. The government is willing to assume the R&D risk so that YOU, the corporatiom, can scoop this free energy and sell it, for profit. So green energy is bad, but subsidies for oil, gas, food, and virtually every other segment of U.S. manufacturing is good? Where's the logic in that? A job is a job.
Agreed. My house is presently dry, but that's only because the Connecticut River in my town has 20ft high embankments. Nonetheless, my wife and I are staying with friends. Fortunately, this is a rental; when we buy our own house, we definitely will not be living in a flood plain.
IIRC, toolbar behavior was especially frustrating for me-- they weren't floating, they tended to be buried under things, and they sometimes got sent to the wrong virtual desktop. GIMP's usability issues made me finally throw in the towel. I went out and bought an old copy of Photoshop, which installs and runs just fine on WINE and Ubuntu 11.04. Now I'm happy.
The GIMP probably has more features than said old version of Photoshop, but if they're unusable to me, they might as well not be there, right? As a point of reference, I spend at least 10 hours a day looking at code (mostly Scala, C, and Ruby). I find using the GIMP harder than reading code. I think the single window thing is a step in the right direction-- maybe I'll try it again.
Your post misses the point of school entirely. School is nominally about learning "basic skills". But is there any doubt that the real purpose is socialization? How a teacher handles a girl bringing a cellphone into a class, or a boy flinging rubber bands at the kid who sits in front of him, are at least as important as the basic math, reading, and writing skills that they spend their day learning. Everything is a learning moment.
I was one of the studious people in elementary school. I was frequently annoyed by disruptive students. However, in retrospect, my teachers' response to these annoyances taught me something very important: tolerance. Right now, our culture has a frightening lack of tolerance. Given that civility is the glue that holds our civilization together, the trend toward "zero-tolerance" school policies fills me with dread, and I think that our current political climate is a symptom of the failure to recognize the importance of this basic civic virtue.
You cannot build a modern society without cooperation. Cooperation is why we do not struggle daily to survive like the rest of the animal kingdom.
Seconded. I bought my Nook Color specifically for reading journal articles. The bonus is that it has an SD slot and I can watch movies on it too. Great little device.
I hope you guys succeed, but I tend to agree with the parent: once your company gets big enough, someone will go out of their way to eat your lunch. That's essentially the purpose that patents serve nowadays.
I once worked for a great small company, and the smartest thing they ever did was let one of the big players (the most friendly big player) come around and buy them. They're allowed to operate independently, and they benefit from their parent corp's legal team and other resources. Most of their old, small competitors are simply gone-- wiped off the map by the bigger players-- who bought their IP and layed off all of the employees.
Ditto. The #1 advantage to age is domain knowledge. You need to play this up.
Code monkeys are cheap, but a guy who knows his algorithms and has good domain knowledge is cheaper. Code monkeys will cut and paste, do naive things or write unmaintainable code. According to Alan Kay, on average, 80% of the cost of software development is after the software has been released. This means that in order to beat those odds, good code needs to be written from the start. You should make this case in your job interviews.
For anyone out there doing hiring, here's a tip for spotting good programmers: they tend to work on paper first. Give them a practice problem and see if they can decompose it without a computer. No code needs to be written, just watch the process unfold. Any competent programmer, or one who dares to call himself an 'engineer' should be able to do this in front of you.
Get your dad on R for statistical analysis. Even if you love to program (and I do), doing it in C can be a grind. R, like Perl and Ruby, has a HUGE library which is dead simple to use (just about as easy to use as RubyGems), and very high quality. Plots are easy to do and look beautiful (especially if you use Hadley Wickham's ggplot2 library). We use it in our department because when it comes time to do the analysis, we want to be focusing on the math, not whether we have some null pointer dereference hiding somewhere. If you taught yourself Scala and Erlang, then R will be a piece of cake.
That's NOT the way a pharmaceutical company works. See this post above. I'm a cynical person, but your attitude isn't cynical, it's paranoia.
Having recently written an NSF grant proposal (for computer science), and with the details fresh in mind, here's how it works: you write about your great idea. It goes to a committee. The committee is often composed from your peers. That committee is responsible for allocating a large, but finite, amount of money to some of the proposals they receive. Your chances are substantially improved if you're a good writer. Your chances are substantially improved if someone on your team has received funding before and published good work from that funding. Your chances are substantially improved if you've done some preliminary work that shows your idea might really work. In the end, they fund about 20% of the applications that come in, so the odds are stacked against you from the start, but especially if your idea is risky. Injecting someone with HIV to cure cancer? Pretty much the definition of risky.
Furthermore, it is sometimes impossible to know ahead of time whether an idea will actually pan out or not. The story of Wilhelm Roentgen's discovery of X-rays is illuminating. He discovered them because he had left a barium-painted piece of cardboard across the room when setting up an experiment. He notice a strange light out of the corner of his eye. It turns out that his experiment, which emitted X-rays, was causing the paint on the cardboard to fluoresce. "That's strange," he thought, "no light should be coming out of this..." Covering up the source of the light did not stop the paint from fluorescing. When he put his hand in front of the light source and saw the bones in his hand, he immediately locked himself in his laboratory for weeks to determine what was happening. Until he showed his wife the same trick, and he knew that someone else had seen it (she was convinced he had summoned some kind of demon), he had concluded that he had lost his mind. And this is the guy who was doing the experiment. Now, imagine the guy reading a proposal to study a "light that showed the inner workings of your body projected on a screen." Sounds crazy, especially since nobody at the time could offer and explanation for how such a light would work.
Science is a messy process, but we do our best with what we have. Sometimes people don't discover things that they could. That's just the way the world works.
Ah-- I see. I misunderstood what you meant when you said that "needing the right way to express them" is not the problem. I agree-- graphical programming languages don't really solve the problem. OTOH, when I was a teenager, my father worked on a project called Function Machines that, in my mind, deeply tied together the mathematical and programmatic concepts of functions. In Function Machines, functions looked like meat grinders, and, in some way, I've thought about functions as variations on meat grinders ever since. In my graduate computational complexity theory course, this once came out inadvertently, when I started talking about input to reduction functions being meat and the output being a trick played by the butcher. My classmates were like... "what the hell are you talking about?";)
The key thing to remember is that there are many ways to understand something-- everybody has to learn from what they already know. Some of us are fortunate to have technical people in our lives at an early age, and we are exposed to analytical ways of thinking. When we finally get our hands dirty with programming, it comes naturally. Other people have no basis for understanding, or even appreciating, that knowledge. Instilling the appreciation is the hardest part, but that's ultimately what will help them to succeed. Computer science can be incredibly challenging, and if you aren't internally-motivated, you're never going to learn it.
I highly suggest teaching in something like PHP. PHP gets knocked around by the intelligentsia, but the fact is that it is a simple, procedural, C-like language, largely without things like objects and functional idioms to get in the way. It has the ability to do indirection (references), so when people need to graduate to passing complex data structures around (and you should endeavor to get them to that point ASAP), they can do it. You can set them up centrally, but most of all, they can write cool programs that their friends can use, on the web and on their cellphones. And it is relevant. After that they can explore the wonders of Ruby and the mysteries of C on their own.
Not base case: There are items in the bag. Take one out. Do take-stuff-out-of-a-bag-recursive-function.
Not only is it recursive, but you can make it tail-recursive, which means it can also be iterative.
This is the other reason why newbies are turned off to computer science. Technical people can be incredibly hostile. Lighten up a little. This is a fun subject, and people doing it should be having fun.
The problem with your argument is that, even for people who 'get it', programming languages have historically been hard to understand. Maybe you've never seen an algorithm written in assembly or FORTRAN and compared the same algorithm to something written in Ruby or Python? The difference in clarity is incredible, but the computer is [essentially] doing the same thing.
Sure, abstraction, recursion, iteration-- these are not natural concepts for most people. But that does not mean that they are incapable of understanding them. Indeed, people engage in precisely these activities daily. You might:
talk about tomorrow (abstraction)
take all of your groceries out of your shopping bag (recursion)
count the money in your wallet (iteration)
Those examples are very easy to understand, so what's the problem? The problem is language. The reason is that programming has a rich technical and mathematical history, and that is reflected in its language. Trust me, there is no bottom to the rabbit hole of technicalities. The guy who sits across from me works on "type algebras", and the whole thing is expressed in first-order predicate calculus. Why? Because he needs to move up to the level of meta-programming to be able to talk about types. But really, it's just a fancy way of saying things like "if you have a list of Animals, you should be able to add Dogs to it." Simple to understand, once you express it simply. In my experience, most mathematical concepts are like this.
The real issue is that people tend not to talk this way, in general terms. They just do this one thing. Taking groceries out of a bag isn't the same as building a brick wall. Of course, once you've developed the knack for talking about things generally, you realize that, in some sense, emptying your shopping bag and building a brick wall have some commonalities-- they have a similar pattern. If you can't express a technical idea to a lay person, you probably don't understand it yourself. You're just throwing words around.
Don't like the variable -> box analogy? How about a lunch bag? Your mom puts food in it. Your job is to eat whatever is in there. See? You don't know what's in the bag (variable), but you do know that, whatever it is, you (a function) are going to eat it. It just takes practice, like anything else. I have yet to see someone fail to understand these concepts when 1) they're presented clearly, and 2) they're actually making an effort to try to understand them. I recently tutored a person in C++ who was on the brink of a nervous meltdown after his first year in CS, and by the end of our tutoring sessions, he had the basics nailed. It doesn't help when you have technical people who harp on generally unimportant differences, like how "pointers are not the same thing as references" and other time-wasters, and that's what confuses newbies.
SMB2 doesn't support oplocks?! But oplocks are Microsoft's own thing! Or is this a sneaky way to force people to replace their old Access databases with SQL Servers?
While I generally feel the same way, if Firefox fails to adopt rich client-side interfaces, developers will simply move on to other browsers. Firefox has a large market share-- now-- but that's no guarantee that it always will. Firefox gained in popularity because, by and large, developers preferred standards over extra features (i.e., ActiveX, Flex, etc, etc), but you see that wherever the environment was tightly controlled (corporate environments), IE-only sites were frequently built in favor of standards-compliant sites. That's why IE6 just won't die.
The sad fact is that most of the people funding 'websites' want web-based applications, not open-semantic-y-HTML5-y things. Understanding how open standards are a benefit requires more creativity than many people possess.
As a longtime web programmer myself, it's not extra features that bug me-- JQuery has generally tamed Javascript's quirks, and HTML5 is f***ing cool-- it's the lack of standard user interfaces. In my opinion, right now, user interfaces suck worse than they ever did in the early days of the Macintosh and Windows. At least Apple and Microsoft had HIGs.
Mobile and cloud computing being the hot areas of research right now are even more of a reason to do research into OS kernels. Right now, people are using kernels essentially written for big machines, always plugged into the wall, with non-malicious users. We need provably-correct, power-aware kernels that can handle massive heterogeneous parallel hardware. We're nowhere near that right now.
Open data is good, too, but there are plenty of useful areas of computer research. I can give you a laundry list of reasons why you don't want all of your researchers trying to solve the same problem at once.
Slashdot Mirror
Keep in mind that Andy Hertzfeld is recounting a story about Jobs from the 1980's. Jobs' taste in expensive cars apparently changed from big and expensive to small and expensive.
I think the key thing to keep in mind here is that being a visionary and being a douchebag are not mutually exclusive.
Amen. What you describe happened to me exactly. How hard is it to flag two subsequent downmods to the same poster as fishy? Three is more than fishy; it is so unlikely that the person downmodding probably has an agenda. Since upmodding is considered more important than downmodding, there's an easy fix here: if someone does a slew of downmods, timeout their moderation privileges for longer. Or even better, use the StackOverflow model: downmods cost more than upmods (upmods are free on StackOverflow). If downvotes also diminished your karma by some epsilon, then people would only downvote when it was really necessary. Make upvotes count less (i.e., finer-grained) and then allow everyone to vote.
Mod parent up!
I noticed the change. But my new inhaler works just as well as the old one.
Most people don't breathe deeply enough when using their inhalers- they just puff it into their mouths. You really need to pull it in. If you do it correctly, you can even suck in no-propellant inhalents like I had when I was a kid in the 80's.
/.'ers are being characteristically reactionist. I use the new inhalers, and have done so for several years now. This story should be modded anti-government flamebait.
Furthermore, epinephrine inhalers are less effective than salabuterol inhalers, with more side effects (epinephrine can be very unpleasant). That's the real reason they're going away-- reformulating them for a new propellant is not worth the cost.
If you read TFA, it's being developed by a private company in conjunction with the state of New Mexico, and it's expected to be a money-maker.
The purpose of subsidies is to remove volatility or to provide an incentive for public good. This is why we have subsidies for food and oil, which have no problems selling themselves, thank you very much, and it is one of the reasons why the US has been a stable economic force for the past 60 years.
Subsidies are not automatically bad. R&D in particular is extremely unpredictable, and that unpredictability introduces volatility in funding. When new energy technology has the potential to change an economy, your national policy should take advantage of it.
I'm sorry, but the Republican position here is idiotic. You have energy blasting the planet constantly. The government is willing to assume the R&D risk so that YOU, the corporatiom, can scoop this free energy and sell it, for profit. So green energy is bad, but subsidies for oil, gas, food, and virtually every other segment of U.S. manufacturing is good? Where's the logic in that? A job is a job.
Agreed. My house is presently dry, but that's only because the Connecticut River in my town has 20ft high embankments. Nonetheless, my wife and I are staying with friends. Fortunately, this is a rental; when we buy our own house, we definitely will not be living in a flood plain.
Fortunately, TCP/IP itself crosses ISO layer boundaries, so it's all good ;)
IIRC, toolbar behavior was especially frustrating for me-- they weren't floating, they tended to be buried under things, and they sometimes got sent to the wrong virtual desktop. GIMP's usability issues made me finally throw in the towel. I went out and bought an old copy of Photoshop, which installs and runs just fine on WINE and Ubuntu 11.04. Now I'm happy.
The GIMP probably has more features than said old version of Photoshop, but if they're unusable to me, they might as well not be there, right? As a point of reference, I spend at least 10 hours a day looking at code (mostly Scala, C, and Ruby). I find using the GIMP harder than reading code. I think the single window thing is a step in the right direction-- maybe I'll try it again.
Your post misses the point of school entirely. School is nominally about learning "basic skills". But is there any doubt that the real purpose is socialization? How a teacher handles a girl bringing a cellphone into a class, or a boy flinging rubber bands at the kid who sits in front of him, are at least as important as the basic math, reading, and writing skills that they spend their day learning. Everything is a learning moment.
I was one of the studious people in elementary school. I was frequently annoyed by disruptive students. However, in retrospect, my teachers' response to these annoyances taught me something very important: tolerance. Right now, our culture has a frightening lack of tolerance. Given that civility is the glue that holds our civilization together, the trend toward "zero-tolerance" school policies fills me with dread, and I think that our current political climate is a symptom of the failure to recognize the importance of this basic civic virtue.
You cannot build a modern society without cooperation. Cooperation is why we do not struggle daily to survive like the rest of the animal kingdom.
Seconded. I bought my Nook Color specifically for reading journal articles. The bonus is that it has an SD slot and I can watch movies on it too. Great little device.
I hope you guys succeed, but I tend to agree with the parent: once your company gets big enough, someone will go out of their way to eat your lunch. That's essentially the purpose that patents serve nowadays.
I once worked for a great small company, and the smartest thing they ever did was let one of the big players (the most friendly big player) come around and buy them. They're allowed to operate independently, and they benefit from their parent corp's legal team and other resources. Most of their old, small competitors are simply gone-- wiped off the map by the bigger players-- who bought their IP and layed off all of the employees.
Ditto. The #1 advantage to age is domain knowledge. You need to play this up.
Code monkeys are cheap, but a guy who knows his algorithms and has good domain knowledge is cheaper. Code monkeys will cut and paste, do naive things or write unmaintainable code. According to Alan Kay, on average, 80% of the cost of software development is after the software has been released. This means that in order to beat those odds, good code needs to be written from the start. You should make this case in your job interviews.
For anyone out there doing hiring, here's a tip for spotting good programmers: they tend to work on paper first. Give them a practice problem and see if they can decompose it without a computer. No code needs to be written, just watch the process unfold. Any competent programmer, or one who dares to call himself an 'engineer' should be able to do this in front of you.
Get your dad on R for statistical analysis. Even if you love to program (and I do), doing it in C can be a grind. R, like Perl and Ruby, has a HUGE library which is dead simple to use (just about as easy to use as RubyGems), and very high quality. Plots are easy to do and look beautiful (especially if you use Hadley Wickham's ggplot2 library). We use it in our department because when it comes time to do the analysis, we want to be focusing on the math, not whether we have some null pointer dereference hiding somewhere. If you taught yourself Scala and Erlang, then R will be a piece of cake.
That's NOT the way a pharmaceutical company works. See this post above. I'm a cynical person, but your attitude isn't cynical, it's paranoia.
Having recently written an NSF grant proposal (for computer science), and with the details fresh in mind, here's how it works: you write about your great idea. It goes to a committee. The committee is often composed from your peers. That committee is responsible for allocating a large, but finite, amount of money to some of the proposals they receive. Your chances are substantially improved if you're a good writer. Your chances are substantially improved if someone on your team has received funding before and published good work from that funding. Your chances are substantially improved if you've done some preliminary work that shows your idea might really work. In the end, they fund about 20% of the applications that come in, so the odds are stacked against you from the start, but especially if your idea is risky. Injecting someone with HIV to cure cancer? Pretty much the definition of risky.
Furthermore, it is sometimes impossible to know ahead of time whether an idea will actually pan out or not. The story of Wilhelm Roentgen's discovery of X-rays is illuminating. He discovered them because he had left a barium-painted piece of cardboard across the room when setting up an experiment. He notice a strange light out of the corner of his eye. It turns out that his experiment, which emitted X-rays, was causing the paint on the cardboard to fluoresce. "That's strange," he thought, "no light should be coming out of this..." Covering up the source of the light did not stop the paint from fluorescing. When he put his hand in front of the light source and saw the bones in his hand, he immediately locked himself in his laboratory for weeks to determine what was happening. Until he showed his wife the same trick, and he knew that someone else had seen it (she was convinced he had summoned some kind of demon), he had concluded that he had lost his mind. And this is the guy who was doing the experiment. Now, imagine the guy reading a proposal to study a "light that showed the inner workings of your body projected on a screen." Sounds crazy, especially since nobody at the time could offer and explanation for how such a light would work.
Science is a messy process, but we do our best with what we have. Sometimes people don't discover things that they could. That's just the way the world works.
Ah-- I see. I misunderstood what you meant when you said that "needing the right way to express them" is not the problem. I agree-- graphical programming languages don't really solve the problem. OTOH, when I was a teenager, my father worked on a project called Function Machines that, in my mind, deeply tied together the mathematical and programmatic concepts of functions. In Function Machines, functions looked like meat grinders, and, in some way, I've thought about functions as variations on meat grinders ever since. In my graduate computational complexity theory course, this once came out inadvertently, when I started talking about input to reduction functions being meat and the output being a trick played by the butcher. My classmates were like... "what the hell are you talking about?" ;)
The key thing to remember is that there are many ways to understand something-- everybody has to learn from what they already know. Some of us are fortunate to have technical people in our lives at an early age, and we are exposed to analytical ways of thinking. When we finally get our hands dirty with programming, it comes naturally. Other people have no basis for understanding, or even appreciating, that knowledge. Instilling the appreciation is the hardest part, but that's ultimately what will help them to succeed. Computer science can be incredibly challenging, and if you aren't internally-motivated, you're never going to learn it.
I highly suggest teaching in something like PHP. PHP gets knocked around by the intelligentsia, but the fact is that it is a simple, procedural, C-like language, largely without things like objects and functional idioms to get in the way. It has the ability to do indirection (references), so when people need to graduate to passing complex data structures around (and you should endeavor to get them to that point ASAP), they can do it. You can set them up centrally, but most of all, they can write cool programs that their friends can use, on the web and on their cellphones. And it is relevant. After that they can explore the wonders of Ruby and the mysteries of C on their own.
Not only is it recursive, but you can make it tail-recursive, which means it can also be iterative.
This is the other reason why newbies are turned off to computer science. Technical people can be incredibly hostile. Lighten up a little. This is a fun subject, and people doing it should be having fun.
Sure, abstraction, recursion, iteration-- these are not natural concepts for most people. But that does not mean that they are incapable of understanding them. Indeed, people engage in precisely these activities daily. You might:
Those examples are very easy to understand, so what's the problem? The problem is language. The reason is that programming has a rich technical and mathematical history, and that is reflected in its language. Trust me, there is no bottom to the rabbit hole of technicalities. The guy who sits across from me works on "type algebras", and the whole thing is expressed in first-order predicate calculus. Why? Because he needs to move up to the level of meta-programming to be able to talk about types. But really, it's just a fancy way of saying things like "if you have a list of Animals, you should be able to add Dogs to it." Simple to understand, once you express it simply. In my experience, most mathematical concepts are like this.
The real issue is that people tend not to talk this way, in general terms. They just do this one thing. Taking groceries out of a bag isn't the same as building a brick wall. Of course, once you've developed the knack for talking about things generally, you realize that, in some sense, emptying your shopping bag and building a brick wall have some commonalities-- they have a similar pattern. If you can't express a technical idea to a lay person, you probably don't understand it yourself. You're just throwing words around.
Don't like the variable -> box analogy? How about a lunch bag? Your mom puts food in it. Your job is to eat whatever is in there. See? You don't know what's in the bag (variable), but you do know that, whatever it is, you (a function) are going to eat it. It just takes practice, like anything else. I have yet to see someone fail to understand these concepts when 1) they're presented clearly, and 2) they're actually making an effort to try to understand them. I recently tutored a person in C++ who was on the brink of a nervous meltdown after his first year in CS, and by the end of our tutoring sessions, he had the basics nailed. It doesn't help when you have technical people who harp on generally unimportant differences, like how "pointers are not the same thing as references" and other time-wasters, and that's what confuses newbies.
SMB2 doesn't support oplocks?! But oplocks are Microsoft's own thing! Or is this a sneaky way to force people to replace their old Access databases with SQL Servers?
Is that true? I thought that the Samba people paid Microsoft for technical docs that a court order required Microsoft to provide. Have things changed?
While I generally feel the same way, if Firefox fails to adopt rich client-side interfaces, developers will simply move on to other browsers. Firefox has a large market share-- now-- but that's no guarantee that it always will. Firefox gained in popularity because, by and large, developers preferred standards over extra features (i.e., ActiveX, Flex, etc, etc), but you see that wherever the environment was tightly controlled (corporate environments), IE-only sites were frequently built in favor of standards-compliant sites. That's why IE6 just won't die.
The sad fact is that most of the people funding 'websites' want web-based applications, not open-semantic-y-HTML5-y things. Understanding how open standards are a benefit requires more creativity than many people possess.
As a longtime web programmer myself, it's not extra features that bug me-- JQuery has generally tamed Javascript's quirks, and HTML5 is f***ing cool-- it's the lack of standard user interfaces. In my opinion, right now, user interfaces suck worse than they ever did in the early days of the Macintosh and Windows. At least Apple and Microsoft had HIGs.
I know, that was my first thought, too. "But didn't Orac-- oh, you mean that thing outside."
Mobile and cloud computing being the hot areas of research right now are even more of a reason to do research into OS kernels. Right now, people are using kernels essentially written for big machines, always plugged into the wall, with non-malicious users. We need provably-correct, power-aware kernels that can handle massive heterogeneous parallel hardware. We're nowhere near that right now.
Open data is good, too, but there are plenty of useful areas of computer research. I can give you a laundry list of reasons why you don't want all of your researchers trying to solve the same problem at once.
Being able to use it as a mouse and the computer would be even better. Wireless monitor, keyboard, and network interface.