One way to have fun and learn Java is to introduce them to Robocode. Robocode is a competitive tank battle game where the students have to learn programming in order to make a more intelligent tank. Lots of competition and it is fun. The goal is to develop a robot battle tank to battle against other tanks in Java or .NET. The robot battles are running in real-time and on-screen against each other.

Here's a better Eniac simulator:

http://www.zib.de/zuse/Inhalt/Programme/eniac/

The Eniac had 3 portable function tables, each with 1200 switches! Here's info on programming it:

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/eniac.html

Here's the link to the 3 different DOS based simulators for the SSEM or sometimes called the Manchester Mark 1

Forgot to mention, that you can throw out all of your latest programming conventions and syntax with the SSEM. At that time, there wasn't a convention for digital logic. On the switches, up was a 0 and down was a 1. The MSb was on the right and the LSb on the left. There was no such thing as semiconductor RAM, it used a dot on a CRT for memory storage. There was no difference between commands and data, a line would contain both. And so on...

In 1998, there was a contest to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM) . You had to write a program on a DOS based simulator, here's the instructions and a link to three different simulators.

Here's a java simulation of the Eniac computer. Try writing a program to make it work!

Not many people know what exactly broadcast engineering is and are quick to jump on solutions that involve IT. I'm a broadcast engineer who has been teaching IT to the Broadcast Systems Technology program at SAIT Polytechnic for the past 17 years. The issues surrounding the broadcast industry (television, production houses, etc..) is that there has been an incredible amount of change occuring in the past 10 years.

The transition from analog TV to HDTV has been a steep learning curve as most stations now have two parallel systems running: analog and digital. It is not as if it is just one system either, there's analog and digital audio and video. HDTV does not consist of just one format, there are dozens of formats for HDTV, 480i, 480p, 720i, 702p, 1080i, 1080p, and several transport streams such as mpg2, mpg4, avi, IPTV, etc.. Plus be able to transcode between the formats on the fly. It goes on and on.

These changes affect every step in the process: from production, news gathering, mobiles, remotes, ingest, editing, branding, playout, transmission, etc.. The engineers have to learn all of these new formats on the job while maintaining a station and maintaining sychronicity between the audio and video as the streams are separate. Synchronizing audio and video and then trying to maintain consistent volume levels with a digital signal has turned into a big headache. Volume is not easily measured as one would suspect - it consists of more than the peak levels and includes the background sound which all has to fit in a restricted bandwidth.

Now add into this mix that most new equipment is based on server farms and ethernet, the engineer has to learn networking concepts also such as TCP/IP, routers, VLANs, subnetting and switches, etc.. Just to confuse the issue, there are already analog and digital devices in broadcasting called video and audio routers and switches. A broadcast router is used to select a video or audio source for viewing, editing, etc.. A broadcast switch is used for mixing, creating special effects and creating shows - you've seen pictures of a director sitting in front of monitor wall (which are now going digital) calling the camera shots: take camera two, fade to commercial, etc.. the operator (technical director) is in front of a console full of buttons and levers performing the commands.

The BBC receives about 500 MB of data in a day (old stats), the problem becomes how to manage that much data coming in, how to catalog it using metadata (MXF), determine what to keep, how long to keep it, what to throw out, etc..

Another issue is just to edit HDTV? Uncompressed HDTV 1080p requires 2 Gbps BW for transport. Most transport streams except for 10 Gbps Ethernet aren't there yet. Most editors can't handle data moving that fast so HDTV is transcoded down to a smaller format, edited, then the edit commands perform the edits after to the HDTV to create the final production. This means that each piece of audio and video has to have a time stamp on it called a timecode.

More and more ingest and transmission is being sent through the Internet and private VPNs between stations. Often one station will control all the affiliate stations in the province or state. The affiliate stations will have their servers in the "HQ".

Back 5 years ago, you would see maybe 5 or 6 servers in a station, now you see rows of racks of servers of every type that you can imagine. There is a migration now from individual systems with each having its own server and a central storage such as SANs and NAS.

It is easier to teach a broadcast engineer about networking than an IT guy about broadcasting. But it is also imperative to have a trained and knowledgeable IT guys on staff.

Should it be a separate IT dept - absolutely not. The network is not separate, nor should the IT dept be. IT decisions which seem reasonable to an IT person can break the broadcast side or have dire consequences. The broadcast side is the money maker, the IT side supports broadcast.

VoIP datagrams are intentionally small in the order of 10 - 20 bytes. VoIP uses UDP because it is a fast and efficient protocol. These datagrams are small so that if there is loss, there is minimal interruption of the real-time voice stream. You may hear nothing or a small blip. Adding overhead to the rtp stream by increasing the payload size defeats the quality of the voice transmission. The major concern of VoIP is sound quality, hiding data inside an rtp stream will do the opposite of exactly what the industry wants - the added payload will create poor audio quality. This just sounds like a bad idea (pun intended).

"From what I've seen, many people enter college well before they've grown up."

I agree with this 100% When I graduated from high school (1973), I was totally unprepared for college. I didn't have a clue what I wanted to do or what I wanted to be. Since all my friends went to college, so did I. I spent 3 years banging my head, taking every course that I was interested in, dropping out of all that didn't interest me. No idea why I was there - no goals, just wasting time in school.

The point is that college wasn't the problem - it was me. I didn't know what I was doing there. After graduating (1976), I never worked in my field of Pure and Applied Science, I took any job that interested me: bouncer, audio visual tech, army, warehouseman, etc... After a number of years, I decided to go back to a polytechnical institute to learn about something that I was truly interested in and get a 2 year technology diploma (1981). This time I was mentally ready and focused - became a grade A student. I've been back since and updated to an IT field (1994).

Now I teach at the polytechnical institute and I see the same thing happening. Students take a program not really knowing why they are there. In our school, there is an attrition rate of about 10-20%, even though we have entrance requirements and go out of our way to make it perfectly clear what the field the students are getting into. Sometimes, until you try something, you just don't realize that it's not for you. It is okay to quit - contrary to what society makes you believe. If it is not the right thing for you - quit! Get on with your life doing something that you like.

I remember one student who was so frustrated in his studies, he would get so mad that he would have to leave the lab to cool down. I suggested to him that if this was making him so frustrated that maybe it wasn't the field he should be in. Ideally, you should be in a field that doesn't feel like work but feels like fun - that the problems you face are a challenge.

When you are 16-25 years old, what do you do? - you experiment! Sometime around the early to mid-20s, you start to realize who you are, what your values are, what interests you and what you want to do. Experience is the real teacher and once you know the "why" then the participation kicks in.

40% drop out rate - okay with me. It means that people are making decisions that are the best for them - maybe going to college or university in that particular field is really not what they want to do nor what they should be doing.

"Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country" - JFK Inaugural address.

When hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the phone system failed because the backup battery banks and generators were in the basement and were the first to be flooded. The actual telecommunication equipment was on the second floor of the exchanges and wasn't damaged. If they had put the battery banks and backup generators on any other floor except the basement, the phone system would of worked for the majority of the exchanges in New Orleans. Thought that maybe someone in Japan might of noticed this important piece of information for disaster planning...

Seems that RFID tags on the cars would solve that. No need to use facial recognition software - too complicated. In the railway industry they use barcodes on the side of railcars to keep track of them. That's another inexpensive idea. Just have the cars go single file through a laser barcode reader or through the local supermarket checkout...

All of this version control isn't worth a damn if there's no foosball table or bar fridge stocked with Coca Cola, Pepsi, and Aquafina. That's what drives the creative process, the movie pictures on the wall and the basket ball hoop in the corner help too. Using CVS is for suits and lawyers, real programmers don't have time to comment their code if they want to be successful. Your new company is giving you the freedom to code outside of the box, embrace it. As for unit testing and automated regression testing, that's what customers are for. If it is good enough for MS, then it should be good enough for you.

While not as smart as this young prodigy, I skipped two grades in elementary school and entered junior high 2 years younger than everyone else. Even though I was intellectually on par with my classmates, I was two years behind socially and physically in junior and senior high school. This screwed up my social life and self esteem until my mid-twenties as I felt I was younger than everyone and smaller in size. I was afraid that my friends would find out that I'm 2 years younger than them - it was a big secret. I had school friends and also outside of school friends that were my own age. Going through school and reaching puberty 2 years after every one else sucks. Forget about dating, who wants to date someone 2 years younger than you in high school? I still feel less mature than others my age (in my 50s now) and even though I'm 5'11", I still feel like a small person. Those growing years as a teenager are very important for your self esteem and self image. Here it is 40 years later and I still have that same image as being younger and smaller than others. My advice to him and all teenagers is to have fun, party but still pass school. The intellectual side is important but the social side is just as important.