There are a lot of good points in this thread. It's worth noting that there's no direct replacement for experience. You bring N years of experience to the job, and the only thing that can bring you N years of experience is N years of doing the job. While you can teach some the broad lessons (and, I would say, teach them specifically in the context of this app; you're not a professor and you're not teaching a class), there's no replacement for experience.

When I was fresh out of college, I could write programs that did very interesting and useful things. Now it's *mumblety* years later, and I know for a fact I would write my programs far differently now, with generally much better outcomes in maintainability, scalability and flexibility. Much of that was learned through trial and error—ie. experience. That only comes with time and practice.

I am a kid from India and did exactly the same things. I wasn't dirt poor or anything but I used to buy books for a couple of rupees (old books that were destined to be recycled). In India, people will pay you money for old newspapers and books that they will recycle later and many of them will sell these old books and magazines to others as a side business.

I used to buy tons of business magazines and stray volumes of encyclopaedia, mainly because I was bored and loved knowing anything about anything.

Children will figure out a way to learn if they want to. Access to information is sometimes the least of the problems, most often it is inspiring them with that sense of awe and wonder.

To put it another way, it is impossible to make an accurate progress bar because it is impossible to predict the future. That's all.

You can make assumptions, extrapolation, use past performance,etc but you are never going to get it accurate.

This is like getting pissed at your GPS because it told you you will reach in 22 mins when it actually took you 35.

It is either a dumbass expectation from the user or a dumbass design decision. You might have as well used an hourglass so the user could spend their time shaking it trying to get the sand to fall faster.

Sure, very little current flows through the transistor's gate. But, the transistors themselves are imperfect switches, and so you get some current flowing from Vdd to Vss all the time anyway. For the products I tend to work on, around half or more of the power consumption comes from leakage, amazingly.

For the uninitiated: CMOS gates consist of a pair of complementary switches. One set connects Vdd (the positive voltage indicating a logic '1') to the output node, and the other set connects Vss or GND (the zero voltage indicating a logic '0') to the output node. The way CMOS works, there should only be one path from either Vdd or Vss to the output node. All other paths must be open.

The simplest example is an inverter. It has two switches. The switch from Vdd to output opens with the input is 1 and closes when the input is 0. The switch from Vss to output does the opposite: Closes when the input is 1 and opens when the input is 0.

CMOS burns power two main ways. The first and most obvious way is through switching, also called dynamic power. When the output goes to '1', the gate outputs a high voltage. This voltage then charges all of the gates connected to that output. Even if the gates don't leak, they still end up taking on a certain amount of charge due to their capacitance. The total charge taken on is V*C, where V is the voltage and C is the total capacitance of all the inputs this gate drives. Later, when the gate's output switches to 0, all that charge flows back out to ground. The more often you switch an output from 1 to 0, the more charge you ratchet from Vdd to Vss. Furthermore, while you're switching, there's often a very brief period when the two switches are both slightly closed. You can get some current racing directly from Vdd to Vss at this time.

The second, perhaps less obvious way CMOS burns power is through leakage. Modern transistors are far from perfect switches. When they're closed, they conduct, and when they're open they also conduct, just not as well. This leads to a phenomenon known as leakage. That is, even when the gates aren't switching, there's a constant current from Vdd to Vss, because the transistors haven't completely cut off the current flow. You can sometimes address this by lowering the input voltage or using transistors with different threshold voltages, but that trades off speed for leakage.

So, while the promise of CMOS is that no current flows when gates don't switch, the actuality is that tiny transistors in modern processes aren't as good at holding up to that ideal.

How about some data? 3Q11 saw around 750K units world wide for plasma and LCD public displays according to this link., whereas the North American and Chinese LCD and plasma TV market for 3Q12 was closer to 54M units, according to this link from the same source.

And before you cry foul because I picked different years, please note I picked the same quarter, and the peak quarter for the year for both years. You can also look at the Y/Y growth and extrapolate the 2011 numbers from 2012. The Y/Y growth numbers were negative, meaning it fell slightly, and yet TVs are about 2 orders of magnitude larger than public displays.

So, yeah, I was off a bit. It's 2 orders of magnitude. Still, that drives a lot more economies of scale in the TV market.

That's the total market for public displays. Now what proportion of these public displays are actually appropriate for e-Ink? And how does that compare to consumer uses, such as e-readers for volume?

Seems more likely they're watching for taggers.

You mean it smelt ewe?

From what (little) I know, that's exactly what data warehouse appliances like Netezza and Teradata do. They have custom built FPGAs to do the SQL execution significantly faster than what a CPU can do.

I don't know enough about sword history, but I do know that the Indian swords or "talwars" during that time period were also damascus pattern swords. I also know that they were commonly made in India at that time. However, I'm not contradicting your point per se, I'm only adding to it. Sword making in itself is a highly evolved and nuanced art form.

To my knowledge, the real tricky part was in making the steel ingots which were made exclusively in India, and were exported by Arabian traders to the rest of the world. It is worth noting that the mystery behind wootz steel has been a topic of constant research for hundreds of years and has remained a mystery until a few years ago despite constant and repeated attempts to crack the puzzle. The first microscopic analysis of steel was done on wootz steel.

How utterly loverly. I hope they are not planning to charge people for not filling gas at all.

Reminds me of the old joke. The opera was so good, they charged me 100 bucks to sit in the balcony and 200 for not attending.