It's really tautological; information is entirely non-physical and therefore fundamentally can not be a physical good. It can have physical manifestations...

That's silly. Information must have a physical manifestation. It's in your brain cells, it's in electromagnetic waves, it's on paper -- otherwise it doesn't exist. Information theory even defines it in terms of entropy which is a property of matter. Maxwell's daemon and all that.

Devon

Well, if you want to motivate a child, perhaps you do have to have the latest and greatest, or at least something with some cool factor.

I'm not so sure. The "cool" part of playing with the old machines is that there was little abstraction back then keeping you away from the bits. If you poked the right memory location with the right number, the pixels on your screen would change. Poke another bit and you'll hear a click on your speaker. That's very cool, in my old timer opinion, and something the kids today almost never get to see. Everything they're learning is so abstract that they don't understand why anything actually works. How boring that would be...

Devon

If you estimate a 40 hour effort, and it turns into 120, that means you suck.

Absolutely. I work a mix of fixed and hourly contracts. Hourly is necessary if the specs aren't clear and the job is to help them figure out what they want. But for a defined project, I've never had any trouble providing fixed, competitive prices and coming in on schedule. All these comments about "losing your shirt" by working for a fixed price sound very unprofessional to me.

Devon

After becoming a pilot, I became a firm believer in checklists and brought them into my computer work. I make checklists for software delivery processes, framework installations, toner cartridge changes, etc. Then I ask someone else in the team to carry them out while I watch over their shoulder. And then I make improvements and put them in a well-known directory. My vacations are never interrupted anymore. ;-)

Devon

I've run the C-172M checklist several hundred times, and let me tell you, it's *very* easy to lose track of your place in the list, and forget whether your memory of having completed a given item is from this evening's flight, or from the one you did this morning.

Try reading the list out loud. This helps me for some reason.

Devon

Adding another point to your feature space, I'll put in a plug for a technique called Stochastic Discrimination. It's not well known but is quite good at pattern recognition and avoids a lot of the weaknesses of neural networks such as over-training. Since it's not so well known, you have to go to the few academic papers to read up on it. Or visit the website http://kappa.math.buffalo.edu/. But it's got a very solid mathematical foundation (developed by a former math professor if mine) and isn't as "hacky" as other techniques.

Devon