My employer doesn't want our code to escape to the cloud, so we can only use local models. The granite-code models from IBM run on ollama, and they're sometimes helpful, but it doesn't feel as magical as some people describe. Maybe I'm too old to be too excited. IDK. They work, and sometimes they offer some better, more complete autocomplete, but I feel like I'm missing something, because it just isn't that amazing.

Sensors used for science need ridiculously low noise budgets. You can't use fancy software to fake it the way you can with a picture on a phone. The photons that show up on the sensor are the science. They also have to be radiation-hardened so that they actually work when they get to where they're going, as total dose radiation is no joke for interplanetary projects. They also need rad-safe glass so that the lenses are cloudy when they get where they're going.

Every person you designs space electronics dearly wishes they could just plop some commercial electronics in it and be done. None of it would work. It'd all be dead by the time it go to where it was needed.

And what would Elon do? We already know. SpaceX builds redundant, rad-tolerant electronics because they have the mass budget and they don't leave LEO. It's an entirely different set of design constraints than an interplanetary spacecraft.

Apple could just pay state taxes. Then, the elected representatives of the people of California could decide how to spend that money. This way, Apple controls the money, and all of the affordable housing non-profits know not to bite the hand that feeds them.

But, yes, spending 0.1% of your cash hoard on a problem you helped create is, technically, better than nothing.

Signal delivers notifications with GCM, not messages themselves. But yes, meta-data is not secure.

My first several semesters as an undergrad were brutal. The assignments were very abstract, the courses hard, and some of the computer science classes were clearly designed to fail half the students at mid-semester, or so it seemed to me.

And I'm glad.

Being an adult and having a career is often full of hard work, most thankless, and sometimes tedious. I'm glad that my professors in college didn't coddle me, or try to spare my feelings. Adjusting to work life was hard enough, but it would have been doubly difficult if I had been under the mistaken impression that the purpose of work was to entertain me.

So, I'm all for adjusting coursework to make it more engaging and for capturing the imagination of young students and keeping them interested. But, when I put on my old man hat, I also want to make sure that students understand that there will also be a lot of hard work that will be terribly important and will be terribly boring.

No. We 4-digit people all downloaded those floppies and used them on our parents' Windows boxes so that we could feel morally superior to Windows users while also not having to actually convince our parents to run Linux on their computers. Ah, memories.

> We live in the present. The sons/daughters are not responsible for the sins of the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfathers/mothers.

This would be true, if the crimes committed against American Indians were actually in the past. In my lifetime, the federal government (through the Indian Health Service) forcibly sterilized American Indian women:
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_indian_quarterly/v024/24.3lawrence.html

And by the way, I do believe the individuals are culpable for sins committed by the societies to which they belong, so we, collectively, as Americans, do bare the stain of those crimes.

Back when cell phones just made phone calls, my wife had an old Nokia with a 4-line display. It fell out of her purse, and neither of us noticed. The next morning, while parking my car, I rolled right over it, smashing the display. It still made and received calls as if nothing had happened.

> Sure, computers are not the answer to every
> educational problem. Traditional methods that work
> should not be thrown away. But to ignore all of the
> possible lessons that would not be possible without
> computers is very short-sighted, and unfairly
> limits the experiences the students might be able
> to have.

I want to agree with you. I want to believe that there are educational opportunities that are not available without instructional technology. I want to believe that the fact that I have never seen any instructional technology that works better than a book and a teacher doesn't mean they don't exist.

What concerns me, however, is that the cost of getting these (possible existent) opportunities into the classroom is to allow intellectually lazy habits to develop, e.g. indoctrinating children into the world of middle management PowerPoint presentations or into becoming so dependent on spell check that they can neither write nor spell on their own.

To the original poster, I think that your decision should rest on what the teachers in your school are going to do with this IT infrastructure. Given the comparative expense of computers and textbooks, I would set a high bar for putting any computer in the classroom.

"... team stays motivated while reporting to me ..."

Most of the replies I see so far are really answering the question 'What makes a good manager?'. 'How do I keep experienced people motivated?' is an entirely different question.

When I was young, I didn't need anything from my manager(s) to be motivated. It happened naturally because I wasn't yet jaded or cynical. I hadn't seen one hundred page coding standards, TQM, Six Sigma, or AS9100A, and I hadn't been forced to repeatedly take training on how to avoid stabbing myself with writing utensils. The newness of any challenge was enough to make me excited.

Now that I'm older, what I need most to be motivated is to know that the people who manage my work (and rarely understand what I do) care about the quality of the product we produce. If you actually care about the quality of the software you deliver, then you will do lots of things that others have suggested. Its important, however, that you communicate that you're doing it because you actually care about delivering a quality product.

You'll fight for reasonable schedules and budgets. You'll offer your people ways to grow technically and organizationally. You'll value technical skill and put up with a little bit of personality shenanigans in order to keep good people on your team. You won't let your process slide, but you also won't pretend that a well-written TPS report is your actual product.

The most important thing is that a desire for quality is a motivation that managers can share with the people they manage. A junior programmer (no matter how old) may have a hard time understanding the business drivers that influence what you do, but that programmer does want to have his/her work appreciated. As a manager, you probably don't care that some feature of Java EE 5 makes your code so much more elegant the way that your programmers will, but if you understand that its increasing the quality of your code, you can appreciate it, too.

My advice to you, as a 'seasoned' software engineer, is to actually care about quality and tell your team that you do.

By the way, take some of the advice you're being given with a grain of salt. People with 11-digit slashdot IDs are not 'seasoned'. They're brand new :)

I use one of these at home with an almost complete Debian install on a USB memory stick:
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/12454-12454-321959-338927-89307-3341342.html
US$200, no fan noise, very low power.

As many have pointed out, if you purchase an entire system with power consumption as a priority, you can achieve a lower total power consumption. But for US$200, I've cut my 'check email, look up something on Wikipedia' power consumption by two orders of magnitude since I don't need a workstation for that.