Oops, I thought I had replied to this already.
Of course I mean Popularise.
Sorry for the sloppy translation from French: In French "vulgariser" has positive connotations and is the direct equivalent of Popularise.

Not quite what you're asking for, but there a whole range of comics to help vulgarise maths that are a great read. Look for the work of Ian Stewart. He was quite successful in France with French translations, but I'm not sure whether he galvanised much interest in the English speaking world. His famous series in French goes by the title of "les chroniques de Rose Polymath".
http://www.amazon.com/Ian-Stewart/e/B000APQ9NM/.

On a slightly different note, French astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Petit vulgarised a number of physics theories in an entertaining way. And what's more he has now provided free download of the scans of a lot of his comics: http://www.savoir-sans-frontieres.com/JPP/telechargeables/free_downloads.htm#english.
Or read the same in many other languages, take your pick: http://www.savoir-sans-frontieres.com/.

For fun: The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams. All five volumes of the trilogy :-)

For self-improvement (and a fabulous, easy & profound read): Getting Things Done (a.k.a. GTD) by David Allen.

GTD, if you have not already read it, and its sequel, "Making it all work", have had a profound effect on the way I organise myself. In fact so profound an effect, that I do not see the end of a string of changes that these books have triggered in me. All changes that lead to more efficiency in how I deal with personal and business projects. I use whatever I can grasp from it and whatever I am able to put into practice, every day, at work and at home. No other book has done this for me.

I hope you choose to pick GTD & I hope that you will enjoy.

Just like Rei says, don't worry about anything except packaging. Whether you get a full crate or a partial one, you must make sure that things will not move within the container, and that if they move within a box they will not get damaged or cause damage (weight, shape).

If you use the original packaging for your computer or electronics, you should be fine as there is plenty of padding.

If you pack everything in boxes, this reduces your risk as no protruding object will risk puncturing other objects or boxes (think bicycle handles, skis or whatever else).

In my move across the Atlantic, I had no problem with any of my electronics. I did not use special care other than using original packaging (I packed those boxes myself, the removal company stacked everything in the container). The only objects that broke in my move was part of a crockery set that was badly packaged and badly stacked by the removal company (notably plates must be stacked vertically, not horizontally). Besides that they mislaid a box of screws to assemble some furniture and minor damage to furniture. There was no problem with computer, printer, ink, CD payers, routers, DIY equipment, soldering kit...

Most of the damage or loss occurs during loading or unloading at the source address or destination.

Choosing the right OS to match the industry is an impossible task. But I'll suggest a few avenues you might want to explore.

First you want to know which industry. If your scope is wide (as I expect it would with students and teachers using 5000 computers), then the industry range is wide too - which muddies the waters some.

I currently work for a bank, I have worked on defence, communications, air traffic control, embedded systems, both as a supplier and as a client - so quite a range of industries.

I found that large institutions try to use as few platforms as possible, which means that they only upgrade their systems as a whole somewhere between once every 3 to 6 years or so - add to that that generally corporations do not buy the latest out on the market, they buy a proven product. So while one corporation's systems might all be more or less the same for desktop applications they might lag by up to 10 years behind the leading edge if you're at the tail end of the update cycle. Or they might be reasonably up to date.

On the other end of the spectrum are small organisations. Quite a few of those will not have a standard policy and might use a multitude of systems.

So by and large for desktop use (office applications - which everybody needs in their daily work), but alos frequently for development, I believe the most common are variants on the Microsoft theme ranging from the oldest possible to the newest possible.

I am not very connected with any industry that puts the Apple solutions forward, so I cannot comment on this.
But for production and development systems I have seen and used a whole range and mix of Windows, Linux, proprietary Unix, and other older beasts (mainframes and similar dinosaurs).

So personally, what I would suggest is to equip your teachers and students with basic computers (choose one platform only, the one that is the easiest for the IT support group to work with), pick a cheap platform that you can easily multiply and scale to as many users as possible and for specialist applications use large server boxes to host virtual servers to access remotely. My personal choice would be for a cheap multi-screen intelligent terminal based on some Linux solution with VNC, X-Windows, or all sorts of "remote desktop" type applications, with a few large servers to offer a variety of Windows (95, 98, NT, XP, XP Pro, 2000, Vista, 7) and a variety of Linux systems (I don't know how to virtualise Apple solutions, I'll let you look that up). That way you have the best of both worlds (with a few snags). A large but simple network of computers to administer with basic and standard functionality. And a few tricky virtual servers that require specialised expertise, but being virtual they can a lot more easily be backed-up, a snap-shot taken, restored to a previous state... Plus you can probably hire expertise as and when required for those once in while situations when one of those systems you don't know so much about gives trouble.

Only my two cents,
w.

My personal solution to the OP's question is a zip-up pouch that I place on my trousers' belt (similar to those you might put your phone in).

Keys are easily accessible, they do not punch through pockets and it is easy to place that pouch in the same place every evening when going to bed - therefore quasi-impossible to forget or mislead. I always wear a belt, that may not be for everyone, but as I don't tend to change trousers' many times a day it makes it quite convenient to not even think about where my keys are: when they are not on my belt, they have to be in the only location where I put them at night or in my hands. Rule one: whenever I open the door out of the house I check that I have my keys with me (and my wallet and my phone too).

HPH,
w.

Like others I would tend to simply use a pen for note taking rather than a computer, but that may be because when I was a student computers were not versatile enough (by some way) to allow this type of use.

New technology though allows you to take shortcuts, to be more efficient, but beware of using technology left right and centre, it may be your downfall. I personally find that any type of full-length recording is generally a waste of time: you have to listen or view the full thing to be able to get it again. Sure you can fast forward and the like, but.

Always remember the purpose of note-taking, in whatever form you may do this. The purpose is to help you remember. More specifically, to help you remember what you have _learnt_. I will emphasise again: the lesson, course, presentation or whatever it is that you are attending, is there to provide you with the information you need. Your _first_ job is to understand it there and then and, as much as possible, remember the key tenets of it. The greater the detail you can remember the better. Any form of note taking should support that purpose and only that purpose. You should not use notes as a substitute for understanding things as they are explained. Surely you have a course book, a synopsis, some form of support, some way to find the appropriate information online or in some printed form or other support, so why be the scribe to take it all down? Someone else has done it. Your sole job is to make sure that you understand and you know how to get to the information when you need it.

I remember repeating a year of studies, way back. That repeat year, I relied on my notes from the previous year. I did not take new notes, except for minor corrections and to better structure (put hierarchy) into my notes. Instead, I focused on learning (i.e. understanding & retaining). It made a huge difference to the amount I actually was able to digest. Ever since that time I always swore, with great success, to take only the bare minimum of notes and to make sure that by the end of the lesson I had understood all of the material. This meant that I was free to actually apply this knowledge immediately and only occasionally use my notes as a pointer or reference rather than reviewing my notes to learn what had been given in a lesson before I could begin to understand - as I had been doing before.

With all of this in mind, I believe that technology can help you produce the best of notes. But do not stick to one technology. Continue to use whatever is most appropriate for the task at hand. Sometimes the pen might be best, other times a camera will be best for snaps, the computer can help with storage and calculations for instance. Rarely but sometimes you will want a video or a sound recording of a small duration for illustration purposes (studying behaviour or motion comes to mind). The key is that all of those should be eventually kept in a single place, with an index so that they are all easily accessible. The least amount of work that this creates for you, the most you will get out of your system.

hth,
walkey

First, does your brother show any interest or at least curiosity in computers? This is a pre-requisite.
If he does show curiosity then you must first try and understand what motivates this curiosity.

Is he interested by the looks of an application, is he interested with the creativity, is he interested with how things work?
The answer to this question will entirely change how you should approach your self-given task of teaching him to program.

When you have found out his main motivation, then you need to tease his curiosity further by giving him simple examples of things to do and helping him to achieve this. Onl then can you start figuring out which language might be best.

Personally I started with Logo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_%28programming_language%29) - in my opinion the best language ever to get started with great ease with a key advanced programming concept: recursion. Then I went on with Basic (eek) and Pascal (great). Pascal (non-OO) was indeed very educational in that it allowed for great creativity and helped understand how a simple language actually worked (including insight into how compilers function).

But soon, like you suggest, you need to get to a full blown language for a wholesome experience. Nowadays the choice is wide. Personally I would veer towards an interpreted language with an easy GUI toolkit. Python + Qt sounds like right the thing to me - but then again I'm sure you can make it happen with pretty much anything available.

The key to teaching is not so much what is being taught but how it is being taught. If your brother is having fun, he'll learn anything. If he sees you having fun, he'll learn it quicker again. So you both need to be enjoying what you teach him (you must be familiar with whatever language you choose to teach him) and you must find ways to make it enjoyable for him too (with pragmatic and quick results to begin with and gradually increasing difficulty - it is essential that you teach him the basic problems: sorting, recursion, human-machine interfaces, how memory allocation works, you'll soon talk about multiple threads or tasks and dead-locks, live-locks...).

Enjoy.

I don't know much about it personally, but I saw sawfish in action and found it pretty impressive under the command of a developer I know.
Sawfish is Lisp-powered, so not for the faint of heart and great for defining your own shortcuts.

While it is good advice to do background research and be observant, the purpose of the interview is not just for the company to evaluate a potential employee (you).

It is, of course, also for you to evaluate whether this job will suit you. One thing you absolutely want to find out is whether this is a dead end for you or whether it will open doors and serve your career plans. A pretty tough nut to crack, but all attempts will shed some light.

What you may or may not ask depends on several factors:

• How desperate you are for a job. If you absolutely need the job pretty much at all costs, then show interest as others suggested and don't quiz them too much on questions that they may not like to answer.
  If however you can afford to loose this opportunity then you do need to be inquisitive to make sure you are going to land a job that will fulfil your requirements.
• How good a fit you are for the job. If you are confident, based on the interviewer's reactions, that you are of great interest to them, you can afford to press harder questions and get a better sense of what the full situation is.
• Depending on the personality of the interviewer, some questions may be wiser than others. For instance if the future boss is authoritarian, do not question their authority. If they seem very open to change, be careful not to assume too much freedom, instead expect them to want you to show substantial initiative. This will change what you may want to ask or not.
• What type of career plan you have for yourself. Of course you want to be careful about what you say on this matter. For instance don't say that what you really want is your boss's position! But you do need to gain insight into what the position has to offer to you.

And probably many other factors I have not thought about in the last 20 minutes...

Combine the answer above with one or two further up, and you have the complete story:

1) network speed is key (being co-located with the exchange is best if you can do it);
2) server speed is key (that's the financial institution's access to the market);
3) you need to be a big trader and you need to run your algo trading scheme on the financial institution's servers.

Anything else and you're not in the run for milliseconds. Forget brokers.

Technology is not quite able to handle microseconds yet (unless you can co-locate your financial institution's server software on the same physical platform as the market server), end to end networks within a room still can't be much faster than a millisecond or so (one way, nearing in mind that you need two way communications to make a decision: you need some information, usually price, before you can decide to place an order - that being the point of algo trading).

So who benefits? Well those big guys with lots of dosh who deal with the large financial institutions who have the foresight and means to locate their servers nearest the market and the foresight and means to implement the fastest technology.

Everybody else looses to these guys when they're in the race.

So long and thanks for the fish.
42

Like others have said language does not really matter (in school). What matters is:
1/ ability to analyse the problem (critical thinking);
2/ ability to find the best answer possible (algorithms, requirements analysis, proof of concept, choose the tool appropriate to the task = concepts);
3/ ability to understand the potential issues and find solutions.

No method of teaching will provide you with proper experience. The only way to get experience is to actually develop a real world application. Get out there (while you study), get yourself a job where you need to use your newly acquired programming skills (you may have to start at a cheap rate, or you may not), get involved in projects (school/uni, Internet) or make your own project with a clear goal and deadlines in mind.

This is what will give you the best experience.

Besides no one can answer which is the best language because there is no answer to that question. It all depends what you're trying to achieve, it depends who you intend to work for, what industry, what type of project...

The aviation industry for instance tends to lag 10 to 20 years behind (though not always); banking could be anything between bleeding edge modern day technology and 30 years old; web companies tend to be on the cutting edge - but there is some inertia too depending how old the company is. Some industries require you to have highly reliable applications with heavy multitasking, others require difficult real-time engineering while some are happy with plain sequential code on a single processor. It all depends on the task that needs solving.

Your best bet is to do some research on the topics of particular interest to you. But well rounded sounds good to me.

You will only get experience once you start working in earnest.

Enjoy,
w

Do you really think we are going to run out of hydrogen anytime soon?

Hey, of course not.
I was taking a sacastically academic perspective, replying to a post that identified hydrogen as non renewable in the context of a hydrogen + oxygen combustion engine.

Which in the strict sense it exactly is renewable in that case since we can separate the hydrogen from the oxygen by electrolysis - albeit at cost. Only it is more convenient to store and carry hydrogen than it is to store and carry electricity.

Whereas still strictly academically the fusion of hydrogen atoms is not renewable as we do not know how to separate them (well not in any practical sense anyway and it would be at such a high cost that it would not be practicable - defeating the purpose if you ask me).

Why must people abandon all logical reason when they hear the word "nuclear"?

Hey you take an excerpt from my email and suspect it means what it does not say.

No I did not say that whenever in some undefined future we might be able to master fusion that this will have the same effect as living too close to the sun (unprotected). However I like to take a cautious approach to such developments and some of the potential consequences. Fusion in essence produces very high power radiations (this is why the H-bomb would be (is?) so efficient). Of course in a controlled reactor one would build in safety mechanisms. But we also all know about human failings and systemic problems. Examples abound of catasprophies and near catastrophies in the nuclear fission world (throughout the world). Not only that but the treatment and storage of 'contaminated' produce has not been resolved in a very pleasing way yet.

When someone talks about a 'good green renewable' energy source, one ought to consider not just the availability of the fuel, or the relative ease (which is not the case for fusion yet) of using the fuel, but also the whole panel of after effects and consequences. One is the safety (risks) of the facilities and in the case of fusion this will be even more delicate than for fission - which we have seen and continue to see is far from perfect. Another is the safe disposal of the resulting elements from the combustion/fission/fusion process. Granted, in the case of fusion it may turn out that the resulting materials will be more stable and not contaminated as much as for fission type materials. But rather than speculating on this we need solid proof.
So, yeah, let's build a test reactor whenver we think that we can safely do that, let's try the technology, I'm all go for this. And let's fully evaluate the risks and decide whether we want to build a second one after that.

Not that you would have guessed, but to be honest you are talking to the wrong guy about being illogical with the nuclear. I am a pragmatic and aside from being French and proud of nuclear power in France, I am also a realist and I think that human systems have the inherent ability to cause harm if we do not approach such technologies with tremendous amounts of due care (backed by solid study and controlled experimentation).

No need for a history course on this, no pointing the finger at any country in particular, there are at least five countries (one my own) I could identify as a source of serious worries regarding their handling of nuclear fission. No need to say that I want better than that for fusion.

Having serious worries is by no means a way for me to say no altogether, although I'm a computer guy I'm not binary (which might be implied by your email - seems like things are black or white for you, no shade or grey, no colour). So yes, I have serious misgivings about the nuclear, but I still invite and welcome experimentation and use provided that we solve critical issues regarding the safety and health concerns at stake, for the human population, and for the world at large since those technologies have such power that they can potentially affect very large areas.

That said, many traditional and less powerful sources of harm outdo by sheer mass the harm caused by those more high profile cases. I also support the rooting, evaluation and changes required to make those as clean and safe as possible too.

Sorry for the rant, but you hit a soft spot of mine. I really dislike it when someone places words in my mouth that are so unrepresentative of me or what I am saying or when they incorrectly extrapolate the meaning of my message.

As to covering Nevada with solar panels and windmills, I'll leave that up to the locals.

Incidentally, a workmate of mine was telling me recently of houses built in the UK (not the sunniest of places by a long run) which by careful study could be made to not require any external source of energy for heating, not even using solar panels or geothermal energy.

Basically what I am trying to say is that there isn't just one option. We can (do) look at ways to reduce our energy use, to intelligently manage our resources.

Using the almighty fusion may be overkill for ordinary uses on earth (which would be pretty much everything useful). It might very well be the way to go for short distance space travel (the few planets around us) but it still won't get us to the stars.

Always Happy, Waltzing Monkey.