The military has run short courses for electronic technicians and paramedics for decades. Paramedic boot camp is about 14 weeks.

I remember a few years ago seeing the 1960s Canadian TV series Wojeck, and it carried a viewer discretion warning that the standards for personal and professional relationships had changed since the program was produced. There was a certain element of "like, duh!", but somebody had thought about it, and I had no problem with it.

Fast forward to the present day. I'm watching Swedish sci-fi show Äcta Människor ("Real Humans" in English). It quietly avoids any gratuitous sex or violence, but there is lots of non-gratuitous sex and violence, as integral parts of the plot. Like all Scandinavian shows it has interesting female characters who do in fact talk to each other about something other than men. That's the sort of culture they want, it's one I admire, and I'm cool with it.

...laura

Good UI & UX design is hard. Really hard. It's one thing doing a cleanroom design of UX, an entirely other doing it for real life and various screen-sizes - preferably responsive. It's like with the code itself. In dev it will run and work, but beware of post-deployment if you haven't tested your stuff in every possible situation. I did tons of this stuff with Flash back in the day, and even with Flashs superiour visual & direct manupilation workplace and solid cross-plattform compatilibilty it was hard. I remember doing the UI for a flash-based MMO at a gamepublisher some years ago. We worked for months just to get the pageflow of character configuration and setup right. Video-based UX testing with usergroups and all. We'd discuss how and why the rail of a slider would look like X and not like Y.
Now, with HTML5, CSS and JS and all the screen sizes and mouse vs. tough it's by orders of magnitude harder.

It does not get that much easyer when you go native with Android or iOS SDK. You're app and your workflow will always have something significant that a good UI designer would like to highlight or help out in being intuitively usable - without destroying the page- and workflow the user is used to with other applications. It's a really tough job and each and every time it's like jumping off a cliff and not knowing if the parachute will deploy.

I'm one of the rare cases that's actually reasonably good at both - I have various diplomas in art and design and 28 years of programming experience, but I honestly couldn't tell which is harder. Basically both require very hard work if you want to do it well. Good UI is also where shitty backends are exposed. If the backend can't deliver what the user needs, no UX in the world will fix it. A significant portion of the logic is having the computer do what the enduser needs, fast and efficient. If UX and backend development don't work together or one of them doesn't understand the needs of the other, it almost instantly shows in a project. That's the classic difference between Apple and MS, btw. Steve Jobs basically nailed it in this rare direct comparsion comment.

Bottom line: The apps shown in this rundown on lollypop are the best you can get with boilerplate UX. The article basically is right, good UX looks different.

I think the mold on the left yogurt in my fridge is an MCSE. ... Yeah, he was bored one afternoon.

Seriously though, if my kid were a computer prodigy, the last thing I would teach it is something proprietary with such a short half-life as MCP. Basic knowledge of a programming language and TCP/IP would've been much better for this kid at that age. What a waste of talent. ... Put him on the kernel team and Linus accept a commit by him - *that* would be news. :-)

I hope this wasn't some nutty dad driving his kid to do something so he could feel great about himself as a dad.

But maybe the kid is happy and loves his dad and dad loves him back. That's the most important think at that age - MCP or not.

My 2 cents.

Technically, this is quite do-able. Then again, consider what a dud 3D TV was.

Headgear for a game, like an FPS shooter, should be fun. But for passive watching, it's too much work.

No, it's the new part of the system that's broken. The big hole on caller ID is where VoIP enters the switched telephone network without cryptographic source identification.

When caller ID was generated by physical wires strung through the holes of a Dimond ring translator (this was ROM, 1950s style), there was no way to spoof it from outside the central office.

Oh, good, the other videos are up now. So that's how the machine is used for analysis.

This is very similar to the Great Brass Brain, a tide prediction engine.

We know. It was on Hacker News days ago.

When the guy publishes the videos of how to use it for Fourier analysis, that will be interesting. It's obvious how synthesis works, but not how the reverse operation works.

You'll come back as a TCP/IP Expert - which can never hurt. That aside, I'd take some serious stoic philosophy with me too. Helps you tune into the mood you need if at sometime you're feeling down. Senecas "Letters of a Stoic" and everything from Epicurous is neat aswell.

Maybe you want to check out a little buddhist philosophy while you're at it, since you're in a place where that's the thing anyway.

Other than that, I'd try to find ways of coping with boredom and loss of meaning. Mingle with the locals and learn their traditions - perhaps a musical instrument or their local tales or tibetan buddhist literature. No need to be arrogant or pompous about things we nerds of the west care so much about.

Oh, almost forgot: Learn alpine mountaineering! You're in climbers paradise, stupid! If you get into climbing, you won't get bored and your computer-books will remain unread. Promise. Also there's a lot to geek out about on gear and climbing routes and all that kind of stuff. Ice climbing is a whole field in itself aswell. If that's not enough, take a camera and try to catch some lokal wildlife, if that's your thing. ... Seriously, the books on computing stuff should just be a fallback.

Have fun!

Seven minutes to fly up and down three feet; that's almost impossible to imagine.

Yepp. You could probalby jump beyond it's gravitational pull.
One sneeze and your away for the day.
*Aaaachoooh!* ... oh noes! Help, I'm flying.

How did they do it? I started reading the linked paper, but my brain started hurting two sentences in. I couldn't extract any useful information on the 'how'.

Automate basic jobs, so I can talk to humans.

I view this as an extension of using cruise control in a car, or an autopilot in a plane. Let robots do what they're good at, so humans can do what they are good at.

...laura

This is so cool. ... Isn't that freakin' amazing? ... I'm getting goosebumps all over and feel like back in the 70ies when we'd been to the moon. (my Grandpa worked at Grumman as a Engineer on the Lunar Lander btw.)

We've landed on a friggin' Comet! This is so awesome!
F*ck yeah! YAY! Go, space exploration, go!