I've been spending many hours of my free time in front of a screen like now, close to every day since the day I got my first personal computer (an IBM PC clone back in 1982).

This was two years before I landed a job working on PCs (chief responsible for all hw/sw on IBM compatible PCs in Norway's largest corporation), when I understood that they wanted to pay me good money (50% more than I was currently making) for doing what I was already doing as a hobby I was very pleased indeed.

Since then I've written several tens of MBs of code (about 20+ MB before 1990), most of it in my free time even if I later could reuse many programs & algorithms in my daytime job. I have always had at least a couple of computers at home, currently I have just one big deskside tower and a bunch of laptops. They run Windows 7 & 8, as well as FreeBSD (my gateway/fw/ntp stratum 1/ipv6 gw box) and Linux.

I've been able to work on a lot of interesting projects (if you google my name you'll find a few), including game code, ntp, crypto, graphics, video/audio decoding, simulation and modeling.

Currently my main hobby project is to take raw LiDAR point clouds and use pattern recognition to try to generate vector base maps for orienteering, including shades of green and yellow to represent various degrees of runability and visibility.

When I was ~20 years younger I won or made it to the podium in several programming/optimization contests, these days I've taken part in 3 of the 4 Facebook Hacker Cups that's been held so far. I usually make it to the second main round but I'm not fast enough any longer to get into the top 100 who make it to the finals. The main part is that it is fun to figure out problems and come up with efficient algorithms!

They key message here is that even though I'm getting closer to retirement age, I have absolutely no plans to stop thinking/thinkering!

Please give me a big list of other occupations which more than 24% of a random sample of kids are interested in, then I'll allow you to claim that too few youngsters are interested in cybersecurity.

Terje

A few years back we were sailing on my father-in-law's nice sloop when the wind dropped so we had to start the engine.

At the time we were in the middle of the narrow Drøbakssundet sound which all shipping to/from Oslo has to pass through, so we had to get out of the shipping lanes quickly, right?

After just a minute or so the engine choked up, and with a dead calm we had no other option than to declare an emergency and use the VHF to call for assistance from Sea Rescue.

We got towed into harbour and lifted up, then we found that the cooling water intake had got clogged by jellyfish puree. :-(

Terje

Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal !

Turbo Pascal was a runaway hit specifically because it broke with UCSD's version which was slow as molasses.

It also allowed you to break out of the straightjacket whenever you needed, including dropping down all the way to inline asm/hex codes.

37 kB for a complete IDE with editor/compiler/linker/debugger/run time library.

Terje

At the risk of getting a lot of flames: I've been in this category a few times, but never consistently over many months or years.

I.e. getting a challenge at work: "Mobil Oil left the meeting when we said you guys could develop this (safety) system in 3 months, with just one month to the first deployable version. They had calculated that it would take at least a calender year independent of the number of developers!"

My coworker and I hid away in a meeting room for three days, at which point we had written the entire first version, including a separate machine with a full sw simulation of all the missing hw parts, with programmable (Monte Carlo) error rates for all components and tracking of any resulting errors in the user output.

If I could do this day in and day out I would deserve that "rock star" title, but I know very well that I cannot.

Most of the time I'm quite happy working out interesting algorithms, shooting the breeze over at comp.arch or just spending my time figuring out why a given application/system doesn't work (or perform too badly).

I'm actually getting paid for that last part, so that is good.

Besides, I also want time for my wife & kids, my hobbies (orienteering, xc skiing/snowboarding, windsurfing/kiting, rock climbing etc), so I limit my work hours to the regulation 40h/week.

OTOH I have known/met a few real "rock stars", John Carmack is way up on that list and so is Anders Heijlsberg (who I first met way back when here in Scandinavia when he was a young punk who had just sold Turbo Pascal to Borland). Mike Abrash isn't quite as bright as Carmack, but he is incredibly persistent as well as consistently good.

All three of these come across as really nice guys.

Terje

I have seen research that I believe in which basically states that a hybrid drive can provide equivalent performance to a pure SSD solution, with capacity equal to a regular drive, but only if you have enough flash memory available:

The crucial point corresponds to about 5% of the total capacity, so a 500 GB disk like the new Seagate would require at least 25 GB of flash (which probably means 32 GB), instead of the very paltry 8 GB they are delivered with.

The only real advantage here compared to the previous model ( I have a 750 GB/8 GB hybrid disk in this laptop) seems to be the inclusion of write caching, I can personally attest that with a pretty much full drive, having just 1% flash cache doesn't seem to deliver any noticeable improvements compared to the same drive without the flash memory.

Terje

You have to separate 'cost' and 'price':

The price will of course stay as high as possible (i.e. whatever the military is willing to pay), while manufacturing cost will come down now that they have made & debugged the design.

Terje

Read the article: One of the main selling points of this tiny little helicopter is the fact that it is actually very stable even in high winds.

Remember that it was developed here in Norway where we have quite a bit of "inclement weather", i.e. it has to be able to handle both wind, dust and some rain.

Re. the excessive cost: This will obviously come down a lot, and even if the main article didn't say so, each kit contains multiple drones: The mil-spec controller is probably far more expensive to manufacture than each drone.

Terje

I have actually BT, DT, but in a good sense! :-)

I went to an interview once where they did ask me some more or less general questions about how I would solve various problems that I believed might arise, and I spent maybe 10-15 minutes brainstorming about it.

A week later I was invited back for a second interview, and this time they started by saying that "one of those ideas you gave us was so good that we have already added it to the requirements section in the Request for Proposal we have sent out to various vendors", and then we went on to more specifics like when I could start, what sort of salary I would require etc.

I got the offer (a very good one) for the job in writing the day after, and then a couple of phone calls when I didn't accept immediately ("we will give you an additional 3 extra pay grades rise") but in the end I decided that the job would probably become too boring for me after a year or two, so I declined.

Terje

For about 5+ years, Novell NetWare was indeed a killer app, it was the _only_ functional File/Print server for PCs!

From a computer architecture viewpoint NetWare had a lot of interesting ideas, including (by far) the most efficient sw stack I have ever seen:

Back around 1990 Drew Major had bummed the File Read Request code to the point where it needed just 300 clock cycles to do:

a) Pick up incoming packet
b) Detect that this was a file read request
c) Check that the user had the proper access rights to this file
d) Locate the relevant data in the the file cache (otherwise queue a physical read request)
f) Construct the response packet
    and
g) Return the response to the client

A bit later, around 1993-1995 Novell had their Multi-Master distributed Directory Service which from day one was far more functional that anything Microsoft has been able to write up to now.

Lotus Notes also had some good ideas, mostly related to replication and synchronization, allowing data to migrate to wherever it was needed/used.

Terje

No problem: We even put up a micro/nano-cell base station inside our EMP-secure (deep basement) server room!

Terje