I learned to code on a TRS-80. WIth no internet. And cassette tape for storage for the first two years. There's this amazing invention you may not have heard about. You see all those words and pictures on your screen? People have figured out how to put them on paper, then they stack a bunch of these pieces of paper and glue them together. There are even places where you can read these stacks of paper for free.

I was already playing with digital electronics and thinking like an engineer before high school. I even tried to build a computer from the chips available at Radio Shack in 1978, but sadly I hadn't quite grasped the concept of gate fan-out, or testing things in sections, at the age of thirteen. Not that it would have been easy without any test equipment more complicated than LEDs and an analog multimeter.

Unfortunately, due to the economy, I there haven't been too many potential new hires for me to be involved in interviewing them. But when I did have some involvement, your observation was correct. The CS grads of today can barely code their way out of a wet paper bag, and they don't know any other language than Java when they even try. Like "write a file copy subroutine, and why did you make the choices you did". Yeah, computer science grads, they don't even understand how to do a buffered copy, much less how to determine your buffer size, which is one of the basic concepts of Computer Science. Nor do they seem to understand how to work with linked lists. (Were they asleep through their sophomore year data structures class, or what?) The EE grads actually knew how to program.

I was a CS grad of the '80s, but I already knew how to program and hook up TTL chips from my teen years, when it was all 8-bit, and from disassembling a Z-80 MS-BASIC. (That was MY "summer of code" from Bill Gates, with zero cultural bullshit.) For me, CS filled in a lot of the things I didn't know, like data structures class. The uni's equivalent of "Computer Engineering" was too hard to get through (mostly because low participation meant that the classes weren't taught every semester), but what classes from that major that I took as electives were for the FUN of it. Build a serial transmitter from TTL chips? No sweat, and then watch me flip those switches to make messages, since I knew the entire ASCII code chart in hexadecimal. Again, zero cultural bullshit, just me against some chips and wires.

Actually the main reason I didn't go EE was that I only wanted to mess with digital electronics. I didn't fucking care what the beta of a transistor was, or even why it mattered. Just give me a handful of 2N2222, some 220ohm, 1K, and 5K resistors, and LEDs. I know to respect transmission line characteristics because they will bite you in the ass, but beyond that "There be dragons here". Maybe that's why I'm so big on encapsulation in my code.

These days I'm doing embedded systems programming. Not much ageism in this part of the industry. I'm 49, and I have the least gray hair of the half a dozen or so programmers where I work. I'm the whippersnapper who actually figured out how C++ could make my code better. Just this past week I got an Ethernet chip working for the first time (which was kind of a bucket list thing for me), on a system with no OS. (So is there a pull-string Barbie that says "interrupt handlers are hard"?)

Sorry, bullshit. First Minecraft video posted by Notch on 2009-05-13. Infiniminer source release on 2009-05-16. This means that Notch had been working on Minecraft for some time before Infiniminer's source code was released. Also, Infiniminer: .NET, Minecraft: Java.

So he didn't plagiarize anything more than the basic idea of a big world full of blocks. But Notch actually followed through to completion (more or less), while Infiniminer didn't.

As Steve Jobs was fond of saying, "Real artists ship."

Well I guess they do have to wait for there to be more than 100 Windows Phone users for there to be actual damages.

Can you live with Live playing live on Live?

I prefer Elvis, the standard vi editor of Slackware.

I saw an article on one of the major UK newspaper web sites in the past week or two about some guy who lost hundreds of pounds after getting a stomach bypass. It referred to his weight / weight loss in stone. I was rather surprised that they still use stone over there beyond old men talking to each other.

Does the metamoderation FAQ still describe the old system? The new one that they switched to (what, two or three years ago now?) is just plain confusing. Is it [+] the moderation is good, or [+] the post is good?

I think part of the problem is that K5 has a mod system that lets everybody, even new accounts, rate every post with no limits, which encourages sock-puppeting and circle-jerking. (Kind of like... Digg and Reddit? Two down, one to go.)

Slashdot literally makes you lurk more, as an important factor in getting mod points is simply reading a lot of articles. Among other things, this makes it difficult for sock puppet accounts to ever get mod points. I guess it does require a certain critical mass of users to work properly, but below that level is probably admin-moddable anyhow.

Whew! I was getting depressed about the thought of never being able to MTV VTD a sye article ever again.

In may ways it's been a pale shadow of adequacy.org, but with a lot more lame troll articles. It's also Michael D. Crawford's aspergement and abuse blog, and Sye's bad poetry aspergement blog. And watching for the inevitable idiot who pays $5 for a new account to plaster spam or a press release for something stupid, and we all get to laugh at the "nullo". Sometimes there's an article that's a good enough troll for everybody to agree to put it on the front page. I particularly like the phrase "Schizoasshole Disorder". And I still miss Turmeric.

Wait two years. That should be about when they get dumped because of lack of sales, and corporate ADD on the part of Microsoft.

Admittedly, one of the reasons Cisco bought them was because so many people didn't need maximum-speed minimum-latency ASIC-based routing (and certainly not L3 switching) in an era when 32 bit CPUs were cheap enough for consumer gear; being able to remotely get a CLI on a device in another city and individually control ports; or even the plethora of different standards to link multiple offices. (A simple watchdog timer would have been nice in Linksys gear, though.) A good part of the price of Cisco gear can be justified simply by not having to travel multiple hours just to push a button to reboot something. A lot of very small companies didn't need that, which is why Cisco was scared enough of market erosion to buy them.. But your example shows just how bad it was to forcibly re-brand everything as Cisco.

I'm sure the reason Cisco did the rebranding was simply out of their habit of Acquire and Absorb. This worked for enterprise stuff that was a somewhat niche market when Cisco bought them, when the acquisition was a good fit for their switching/routing architecture. But Linksys wasn't enterprise stuff. And Cisco didn't understand consumer stuff. Or the consumer market.

And then there was the "red-headed stepchild" angle. I was a Cisco employee at the time of the acquisition. We couldn't even buy Linksys gear at a decent discount through the employee hardware purchase program. I wanted a Linksys 24-port gigabit switch to use at home. Guess who I bought it from? Dell.com had the best price, and it was easier to order, too.

It also doesn't help that half of the codes out there in the wild are just raw timing codes that don't even identify the protocol, much less the bit patterns. And then the LIRC code library (which is a little better about pulling out some of the bit patterns, though not necessarily identifying the specific protocol) is primarily based around actual remotes and their manufacturer part numbers, not the receiving devices or their code sets.

It also isn't and can't be as easy as getting hash codes for a CD when you insert it. To get good timing information when reading an IR signal, you really need something based on a microcontroller, whether a USB or a standalone device.