To be more fair, Python is not hard if you use just basic features. No one has to use list comprehension to manage data on a list.
However, and that's a BIG however, there's still nothing in the python world that matches the ease of creating a GUI app like VB has. Hell, using some IDEs like Qt Creator makes GUI programming easier even for C/C++. And a GUI is what most non-programmers believe a "program" is.
Anyway, I'd still ask the kid for a project, which would pretty much dictate the technology to be used. A good programmer knows many languages and uses the best for the task.
To get attention, one could start by getting an Arduino and making a led blink. That's the electronics "hello world". You can use either Wiring or simple C (without pointers) to do that, and with a program skeleton in place, there's lots to be learned.
If he made it with his home computer, why would it be counted as if it were purchased for the movie? He'll still use it after the movie is done since probably he hasn't bought it just for the movie.
If you think a deep further, with a LOT of imagination, one could envision another scenario:
It's possible Google is preparing for a non net-neutrality world, in which it would have to pay for the vast amount of bandwidth that it's clients use. Actually, Google is one of the first targets of those who wish to double-charge for bandwith (charge for users and providers at the same time).
In this world, a sensible way out of that cash-hole is for Google to be an ISP on its own. For that purpose, it could acquire dark fiber and try to acquire wireless spectrum (or lobby the FCC to make some unlicensed spectrum bands). With those at hand, it could make devices which are capable of forming mesh networks (if Android support that in the future, which is not unlikely). Those networks would then be connected by fiber over long distances. As such, how to get enough coverage to have a reliable mesh network? One answer it to make available a Google Phone which would have a great appeal if it could make free calls through Google Voice. That would ensure quite good acceptance from users.
That's it. A simple scenario. Seems quite possible to me, though I'm not an expert on the economics required to make it a reality (though if there's one company with enough resources to make it happen, that company is Google).
Note: the words marked with bold indicate topics which were discussed at a number of times right here on Slashdot.
Finally a true sub-$100 "laptop". One which is not vaporware like the OLPC.
Yes, I know there are real OLPCs out there, but until I can get my hands on one, it's still vapor as far as I can tell.
By the way, not making the OLPC available for anyone but governments to buy was one (among many) of the biggest mistakes you did. You simply closed yourself to your own community.
That's exactly why I do any serious work by "offline" means. And I hope I can still keep doing this in the following years (aka: I hope Chrome OS's way of going "everything online" doesn't catch up)
Not really... the fact is that my budget didn't really allow that kind of backup, and each user was responsible for his/her own backups locally. Server-wise, I did my own backups of important files, though I wanted to have some sort of redundancy on hard drives in case of a hard drive failure, which would allow me a quicker return from downtime. I'd guess that's what the RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) term stands for.
The problem of files disappearing ended when I disabled RAID. It most probably started because it was software RAID, not hardware, though what caused it to unsync is still a mistery to me (even though I suspect a power outage or peak or something like that, like when a tree fell over a nearby transmission line). But the problem was very real, seen when comparing the directories of both the drives, where I could see different filesets.
Anyway, I do not pretend to say that RAID is a bad thing. It is good, if used correctly. Though it is still another layer of complexity, which can overwhelm someone who isn't used to it (I wasn't allowed any courses on RAID... hell, even on sysadmin stuff I wasn't formally taught, though I was the best the company had).
In the past I have worked in a place that had around the same problem as you say.
I had a very small budget, so I was hosting services on commodity PCs, with outdated systems, no virtualization (no dual cores back then), with as much as 3 to 4 services running in the same machine with no kind of sandboxing.
All was running fine.
Then, I got a small budget to buy a newer system. It was a Dual Core system, and I managed to get two hard drives which I put on simple mirroring RAID (low storage was the main problem that allowed me to buy new hardware). That's when the problems started arising.
I was young back then, and was seeing all the "good stuff" around to speed up machines, so I fell for that RAID thing, since it supposedly would almost double read time and automatically create backups. It ran fine until some weeks after I set it up, when some files simply "vanished" from the file server. Nobody knew where they were. I didn't know where they were or what happened, but since we were small, most files were stored in the users' workstations (even though that was not "a good practice (tm)"). Because each user had its own backups locally, we managed to get going without the files.
Then it happened again. Many files went missing again! But this time I noticed that some files (that vanished in the first incident) appeared again, and the missing ones now were the newer ones added after the first incident. So, I naturally traced it to the raid array and noticed it wasn't in sync. Then I saw that it was not mirroring correctly, and at each boot of the server the active drive could be "swapped".
In the end, I chose the simple path: I disabled RAID and used cron to daily backup from one drive to the other in the end of the day. Problem solved, everybody got happy. From what I've heard, this setup hasn't broken again (since nobody dared mess with it after I left). Lesson learned: follow Occam's razor ("The simplest answer is usually the correct answer."). By the way, as far as availability is concerned, all I had to do would be to get one of the drives to another machine and boot up, as I could do when a lightning fried the motherboard even with correct grounding and UPS.
I have been fearful this would come since the first "nettop" concept.
People don't really realise how dangerous having everything "on the cloud" can be.
Well, some people do, like the recent Sidekick shows us.
Yet, most people don't get it. Historically, the main motivation for the birth of the internet was specifically to avoid the dreaded Single Point of Failure. What we see in the cloud concept is exactly the opposite. The cloud can (and statistically it will) eat your data, along with everyone's else. What if a whole contry's data infrastructure is in one failed cloud?
Also, what happens when you get without internet access? What happens when power is out? (my laptop can run for two hours on battery, my router won't)
What happens when the three-strikes law passes? Not if, given current state of affairs. Will you be locked out of all your data? What when you put all your family HD movies in the cloud, will you need to have fiber to watch it with good quality?
Also, economically that's a catastrophe. The cloud will maintain some companies basically with a monopoly on YOUR data. It will destroy the whole industry based on standalone software. Don't be mislead: you WILL have to pay to get even the most basic software running. Many companies already do that with auto-deactivating software. The cloud will only make it easier.
And for those who think the comment above looks like some doomsday dark sci-fi story, I advice to take a look around. Things are already happening. One doesn't have to dig deep to find news of what's already happening.
You can try SAGE http://sagemath.org/ which is a Python-based CAS which describes itself as trying to build an alternative to Magma, Mathematica, Maple, Matlab, etc.
I use it and it's pretty good. Also it's under heavy development and you can get to directly influence it's direction (if you can code).
I arrive at work, drink some coffee and start to go to my office to play some games (sudoku IS better than WoW).
Right at this time my boss comes to me with an alarming news: someone has KILLed the web server! In a hurry, I put my detective hat and go to solve this mistery.
I start in the server's HOME. By reading his LOG I try to figure if he had any enemies, but all I see are empty FILEs.
Next, I look WHO were his friends. I try to LOCATE some images, which I FIND near his PING-pong trophies. In there, I only see the picture of one strange guy. WHOIS him? I try to LOOKUP any INFOrmation about him and I manage to GET his ADDRESS and ZIP code, WRITtEn by the victim in a hurry in a NOTEPAD that was in his DESK's TOP
I start to CONNECT the/DOTS, but when I was EXITting the building, something HITs me in the neck and I pass out.
When I WAKE UP, I find I'm tied to a chair in a dark room, full of PIPEs scattered around. Then I hear a voice. I recognize it as the MANAGER's one. When he comes to the light, I see he looks as if DAEMONized, with his EYES glazed. I try to escape, fiddling with my FINGERs through the rope's knot. I do manage to untie it, and FREE myself. The manager tries to punch me, but I KICK him first and he passes out.
I call the police and tell the OPERATOR what happened. Soon they appear in the house, FLASHlights in hand, to RESCUE me.
After all that, I can only think of my next vacations in AVAHI.
Slashdot Mirror
Get him an Arduino. That way you can kickstart him in both programming and electronics.
Also, the Arduino was actually built for people that don't already know how to program.
And kids love blinking lights :D
To be more fair, Python is not hard if you use just basic features. No one has to use list comprehension to manage data on a list.
However, and that's a BIG however, there's still nothing in the python world that matches the ease of creating a GUI app like VB has. Hell, using some IDEs like Qt Creator makes GUI programming easier even for C/C++. And a GUI is what most non-programmers believe a "program" is.
Anyway, I'd still ask the kid for a project, which would pretty much dictate the technology to be used. A good programmer knows many languages and uses the best for the task.
To get attention, one could start by getting an Arduino and making a led blink. That's the electronics "hello world". You can use either Wiring or simple C (without pointers) to do that, and with a program skeleton in place, there's lots to be learned.
If I can't buy it, and you can't buy it, then it's vaporware as far as I know.
If he made it with his home computer, why would it be counted as if it were purchased for the movie? He'll still use it after the movie is done since probably he hasn't bought it just for the movie.
And those same people don't know (or remember) the first rule of intelligence:
Those who know, don't talk. Those who talk, don't know.
I'm not talking, move along.
If you think a deep further, with a LOT of imagination, one could envision another scenario:
It's possible Google is preparing for a non net-neutrality world, in which it would have to pay for the vast amount of bandwidth that it's clients use. Actually, Google is one of the first targets of those who wish to double-charge for bandwith (charge for users and providers at the same time).
In this world, a sensible way out of that cash-hole is for Google to be an ISP on its own. For that purpose, it could acquire dark fiber and try to acquire wireless spectrum (or lobby the FCC to make some unlicensed spectrum bands). With those at hand, it could make devices which are capable of forming mesh networks (if Android support that in the future, which is not unlikely). Those networks would then be connected by fiber over long distances. As such, how to get enough coverage to have a reliable mesh network? One answer it to make available a Google Phone which would have a great appeal if it could make free calls through Google Voice. That would ensure quite good acceptance from users.
That's it. A simple scenario. Seems quite possible to me, though I'm not an expert on the economics required to make it a reality (though if there's one company with enough resources to make it happen, that company is Google).
Note: the words marked with bold indicate topics which were discussed at a number of times right here on Slashdot.
Last time I checked, that's what politicians do
Maybe I should just start a church and make believers be my friend on Facebook
Get that OLPC!
Finally a true sub-$100 "laptop". One which is not vaporware like the OLPC.
Yes, I know there are real OLPCs out there, but until I can get my hands on one, it's still vapor as far as I can tell.
By the way, not making the OLPC available for anyone but governments to buy was one (among many) of the biggest mistakes you did. You simply closed yourself to your own community.
The biggest advantage of the typewriter over a computer is exactly for writers: it makes him/her think much more before writing.
--
PS: this post was writtent without thinking
That's exactly why I do any serious work by "offline" means. And I hope I can still keep doing this in the following years (aka: I hope Chrome OS's way of going "everything online" doesn't catch up)
Not really... the fact is that my budget didn't really allow that kind of backup, and each user was responsible for his/her own backups locally. Server-wise, I did my own backups of important files, though I wanted to have some sort of redundancy on hard drives in case of a hard drive failure, which would allow me a quicker return from downtime. I'd guess that's what the RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) term stands for.
The problem of files disappearing ended when I disabled RAID. It most probably started because it was software RAID, not hardware, though what caused it to unsync is still a mistery to me (even though I suspect a power outage or peak or something like that, like when a tree fell over a nearby transmission line). But the problem was very real, seen when comparing the directories of both the drives, where I could see different filesets.
Anyway, I do not pretend to say that RAID is a bad thing. It is good, if used correctly. Though it is still another layer of complexity, which can overwhelm someone who isn't used to it (I wasn't allowed any courses on RAID... hell, even on sysadmin stuff I wasn't formally taught, though I was the best the company had).
In the past I have worked in a place that had around the same problem as you say.
I had a very small budget, so I was hosting services on commodity PCs, with outdated systems, no virtualization (no dual cores back then), with as much as 3 to 4 services running in the same machine with no kind of sandboxing.
All was running fine.
Then, I got a small budget to buy a newer system. It was a Dual Core system, and I managed to get two hard drives which I put on simple mirroring RAID (low storage was the main problem that allowed me to buy new hardware). That's when the problems started arising.
I was young back then, and was seeing all the "good stuff" around to speed up machines, so I fell for that RAID thing, since it supposedly would almost double read time and automatically create backups. It ran fine until some weeks after I set it up, when some files simply "vanished" from the file server. Nobody knew where they were. I didn't know where they were or what happened, but since we were small, most files were stored in the users' workstations (even though that was not "a good practice (tm)"). Because each user had its own backups locally, we managed to get going without the files.
Then it happened again. Many files went missing again! But this time I noticed that some files (that vanished in the first incident) appeared again, and the missing ones now were the newer ones added after the first incident. So, I naturally traced it to the raid array and noticed it wasn't in sync. Then I saw that it was not mirroring correctly, and at each boot of the server the active drive could be "swapped".
In the end, I chose the simple path: I disabled RAID and used cron to daily backup from one drive to the other in the end of the day. Problem solved, everybody got happy. From what I've heard, this setup hasn't broken again (since nobody dared mess with it after I left). Lesson learned: follow Occam's razor ("The simplest answer is usually the correct answer."). By the way, as far as availability is concerned, all I had to do would be to get one of the drives to another machine and boot up, as I could do when a lightning fried the motherboard even with correct grounding and UPS.
I think most people will stick with Windows and proper GNU/Linux netbooks.
I think most people will stick with X-Windows and proper GNU/Linux netbooks.
There... Fixed that for ya.
I think most people will stick with OS X and proper iPhones.
There... Fixed that for ya.
I think most people will stick with Windows and proper GNU/Linux netbooks.
I think most people will stick with X-Windows and proper GNU/Linux netbooks.
There... Fixed that for ya.
I think most people will stick with Windows X and proper GNU/Linux netbooks with pirated Windows X.
There... Fixed that for ya.
Yet, most people don't get it. Historically, the main motivation for the birth of the internet was specifically to avoid the dreaded Single Point of Failure. What we see in the cloud concept is exactly the opposite. The cloud can (and statistically it will) eat your data, along with everyone's else. What if a whole contry's data infrastructure is in one failed cloud?
Do you trust one company to be better at handling YOUR data than yourself? Do you trust it will never be hacked? Do you trust it will always be online? Do you trust nobody will access it without your consent?
I don't. You shouldn't.
Also, what happens when you get without internet access? What happens when power is out? (my laptop can run for two hours on battery, my router won't)
What happens when the three-strikes law passes? Not if, given current state of affairs. Will you be locked out of all your data? What when you put all your family HD movies in the cloud, will you need to have fiber to watch it with good quality?
Also, economically that's a catastrophe. The cloud will maintain some companies basically with a monopoly on YOUR data. It will destroy the whole industry based on standalone software. Don't be mislead: you WILL have to pay to get even the most basic software running. Many companies already do that with auto-deactivating software. The cloud will only make it easier.
And for those who think the comment above looks like some doomsday dark sci-fi story, I advice to take a look around. Things are already happening. One doesn't have to dig deep to find news of what's already happening.
You can try SAGE http://sagemath.org/ which is a Python-based CAS which describes itself as trying to build an alternative to Magma, Mathematica, Maple, Matlab, etc.
I use it and it's pretty good. Also it's under heavy development and you can get to directly influence it's direction (if you can code).
Sage http://sagemath.org/ is coming pretty good. Version 3.2 will come out in just a few days.
And you can use Mathematica, Matlab, Maple, Magma, Maxima, etc from inside Sage if you have those programs available.
I don't want to spend eight hours staring at a terminal entering esoteric commands to fix someone else's.
I don't want that too, but it could be worse (spend eight days staring at a blue screen clicking in esoteric buttoons)
He could follow Mark Shuttleworth's adventure in the Linux world.
Maybe an MSbuntu?
The first jet to build the Air Force to defend Google's floating data center.
An oxymoron is a moron with too much oxygen
The next time I see a 5.0 popping up, I'll admit it was the OP's company and post it on slashdot. That will effectively kill the bastards.
Actually, I would start with GruntMaster Pro 9000 Turbo XP
Much better (and cooler) would be to have a professional smuggler take your laptop for your destination.
I arrive at work, drink some coffee and start to go to my office to play some games (sudoku IS better than WoW).
Right at this time my boss comes to me with an alarming news: someone has KILLed the web server! In a hurry, I put my detective hat and go to solve this mistery.
I start in the server's HOME. By reading his LOG I try to figure if he had any enemies, but all I see are empty FILEs.
Next, I look WHO were his friends. I try to LOCATE some images, which I FIND near his PING-pong trophies. In there, I only see the picture of one strange guy. WHOIS him? I try to LOOKUP any INFOrmation about him and I manage to GET his ADDRESS and ZIP code, WRITtEn by the victim in a hurry in a NOTEPAD that was in his DESK's TOP
I start to CONNECT the /DOTS, but when I was EXITting the building, something HITs me in the neck and I pass out.
When I WAKE UP, I find I'm tied to a chair in a dark room, full of PIPEs scattered around. Then I hear a voice. I recognize it as the MANAGER's one. When he comes to the light, I see he looks as if DAEMONized, with his EYES glazed. I try to escape, fiddling with my FINGERs through the rope's knot. I do manage to untie it, and FREE myself. The manager tries to punch me, but I KICK him first and he passes out.
I call the police and tell the OPERATOR what happened. Soon they appear in the house, FLASHlights in hand, to RESCUE me.
After all that, I can only think of my next vacations in AVAHI.