GrumpyYoungMan

The old joke that "Consultants tell you what you already knew but didn't want to face." has been around forever for a reason. It's even an accepted tactic by business units to hire a consultant to document all these known problems as a means to force themselves to clean up their own act.

Once you reach your mid- to late-30s, you'll find your ability to spend time learning decreasing due to aging and increased personal and family time commitments. You also find that, much like compound interest, the more you know, the easier it is to learn more because of how interrelated computing topics are. So, yes, it's worth investing as much time as you can afford on learning while still in your twenties will pay off very well.

There are caveats, of course:

- "Afford" is rather an important word in the last sentence above; burnout and stunting your personal relationships are genuine hazards.

- Choose carefully learn because of the "half-life of knowledge" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge). You will want to concentrate on fundamental topics that hold their value over the long term, like security, performance analysis, etc. rather than ephemeral knowledge like tools, frameworks, and libraries.

It's been tried but never achieved any significant commercial success.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Memory_Systems

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-RAM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperOs_HyperDrive

> "If I were to go into the office, I'd need to either (a) spend longer over the same tasks to stretch them to fill out the day because I'm constantly being observed, or (b) finish my work at the same rate and ask for more work."

You might also consider trying c) Spend that extra time learning a new career skill that both benefits you in the long run and your employer in the short run. That's been my principle and it has served me well over a lengthy career.

I'm not sure if this is what you want but there are devices for people with hearing disabilities that will flash a light if a phone call comes in. Versions exist for both land lines and for cell phones, for example: https://www.maxiaids.com/cell-phone-sensor

It is in certain niche areas. For example, when working on a smartphone OS, maximizing battery life is paramount. There are specialized power measurement instruments that one attaches to the phone when trying new features / builds to verify that code changes don't cause an increase in the rate of power usage.

Petzold's Code is a popularization aimed at non-technical readers, as you said. ECS is a textbook aimed at college-level CS and Comp. Eng. students and goes into sufficient technical depth for the reader to build their own digital computing systems.

I have both a computer engineering education and have read the book. My recollection is that it's good for what it is but omits[0] a heck of a lot of necessary background knowledge to apply the material outside of the limited context of the book. I'm not saying that it's not good, just be aware that it's not the whole picture, so to speak.

[0] or perhaps it would be better to say "has no choice but to omit" or it would be ten times thicker than it is.

As I understand it, the frequency bands for the various GNSS systems either overlap or are adjacent (see, for example, https://gssc.esa.int/navipedia/index.php/File:GNSS_navigatio...), so interference with one means interference for all of them.

For computer science specifically, that's unfortunately not possible because the GRE for CS was discontinued in April 2013.

It's interesting to see the bifurcation between developers and software engineers continuing to deepen. Most developer jobs have been simplified, compared to pre-2000 development, that the knowledge conferred by a CS degree is indeed no longer required and knowledge of in vogue languages and frameworks is more immediately useful.

The rub is, of course, that creating those frameworks, language compilers, etc., still does require knowledge of CS. Knowing how to operate a car is not the same as knowing how to design and build one. As a person advances in their career, more and more deep knowledge is required and they may find themselves hitting a wall mid- to late in their career because they never acquired these fundamentals. And, unlike tools, these fundamentals are built on each other so that one has to acquire one before going on to the next; you can't just skim a book on compiler design without the prerequisite knowledge.

So, it's kind of a gamble that their career trajectory is going stay in the space where they never need that knowledge. It's not necessarily a bad gamble either since there are always going to be such jobs but the risk should be understood by anyone intending to follow the poster's advice.

Apparently slingshotting around the sun is needed to get any appreciable velocity. Start thrusting at 90 degrees to the line between the ship and the star as soon as the ship materializes to enter an orbit.

> "...I do not remember RAM failing in an unpredictable ways."

I'm about halfway through my career and I have seen something like that happen exactly once; the erratic behavior of the machine had my team scratching our heads for a fair bit until we ran memtest86 on it after running out of ideas. So I would say that it's not impossible, just extraordinarily unlikely.

The rest of your post I entirely agree with.

> "So in the 70s you could pay per request billed to millisecond precision?"

It's been a while since I encountered it but yes, mainframe time was so blisteringly expensive that usage was accounted for on a per-job basis and billed to individual user accounts. I don't recall the resolution or pricing anymore but students would be issued an hour or so (?) of processing time to complete their coursework per semester. Perhaps somebody with better recall than I can fill in the details.

If you're after a MOOC-like experience, I'd recommend CalTech's highly-regarded "The Mechanical Universe" series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8_xPU5epJddRABXqJ5h5... It covers basic mechanics, E&M, and a bit of QM.

As others have pointed out, you won't really get much out of it without having the necessary mathematical background and doing the physics exercises. The Mechanical Universe textbooks are still available on Amazon. If you prefer a more recent textbook, Serway's "Physics for Scientists and Engineers" is well regarded, as is Halliday & Resnick, though the latter is aimed more at career physicists.

[EDIT] Regarding the Feynman Lectures on Physics mentioned elsewhere, while Feynman indeed intended it for physics undergraduates, if you read his biographies and the views of his contemporaries, it was famous for being utterly impenetrable for actual undergraduates. (One might even say the FLoP was a flop.) It would probably not be a good idea to use it as your text; I've never heard of any undergraduate physics course that uses it.

Perhaps Coherent was the other UNIX you were thinking of?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system)

That's unnecessary since there's pre-calibrated mixtures referred to, unsurprisingly, as "calibration gas" readily available. Googling for "carbon dioxide calibration gas" will find you what you need as well as the appropriate pressure regulators.

Note that even the professional meters require calibration on a regular basis; for example the calibration schedule for the Fluke 975 for CO2 is yearly and for carbon monoxide is monthly.

Yup, this absolutely works! I always write my performance review as if I were updating my resume. If I don't like what I see, that's feedback to myself and motivation to change my plans for the next review period.

This particularly works in companies big enough that internal transfers are possible; the text of the performance review should be specifically written with the idea that the next hiring manager will read it in mind.

Life is about keeping the human race in existence long enough for one of our descendants to figure out what life is actually about.

> "I’m not sure what there is to lament except maybe a lack of processor and OS variety?"

Yeah, but that's something we should lament; we're stuck at a local maxima for both. The ability to try out new ideas and architectures has been curtailed because no competitor can get enough momentum to stay alive long enough to displace the entrenched incumbents.

I reside in the US and have met only one person over the past 25 years who used a fountain pen.

Regarding lecture 16, Intro to QA testing, my feedback as a practitioner would be:

- Typo - "principle goals" / "principle techniques" instead of "principal"

- Add accessibility and internationalization under non-functional testing types, with at least a brief mention of their importance

- Add mention of exploratory testing under manual testing as a valuable technique

- Most of your students will not be QA staff themselves in their careers, so a brief mention of the benefits and pitfalls of collaborating with dedicated QA personnel may be useful. A mention that the type of QA personnel varies highly by software subspecialty and size of the business (ranging from non-technical to CS degree holding specialists) may also be useful.

They might be able to do it with an Earthworks M30 measurement mic, which claims accuracy down to 3 Hz, and an appropriate digitizer. It's expensive but not as blisteringly expensive as lab mics like Brüel & Kjær's gear.

Use rsync to copy the files over. It only transfers changed files and can use file compression to reduce bandwidth so it's highly efficient.

Being a research librarian at a tier one university might be interesting. I enjoy books and helping others find information.

The vast majority of testers are manual testers. Testers with software development skills are used in the FAANGs and other segments where one pretty much has to be a developer in order to understand and write tests for the product but they're as expensive as a junior developer.

Requirements can vary. The institution I went to did require a differential equations course after Calc III even for CompE students. And, yeah, it was painful.

Either way, I agree with you 100%; if the student doesn't like math, they are almost guaranteed to get weeded out by the calculus courses.

Assuming that you actually mean computer engineer (as in digital logic and computer hardware) and not software developer, as so many people here are assuming, there are a lot of resources available:

For a gentle overview of how digital logic and CPUs work, Charles Petzold's book "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" is solid introduction. Nisan and Schocken's textbook "The Elements of Computing Systems" and the lessons at the NAND2Tetris site (https://www.nand2tetris.org/) are good if they want to get hands on with the subject.

There are a variety of robotics and electronics interfacing kits based off the Arduino and Raspberry Pi available through Adafruit and SparkFun. If they're more interested in the digital logic side, Digilent provides FPGA boards and test instruments intended for use in educational environments that also include tutorials https://store.digilentinc.com/the-zynq-book-tutorials-for-zy....

[EDIT] I've seen some recommendations for the video game Factorio in this thread and, odd as it may sound, it would not be a bad gauge of interest. Digital logic is all about getting the right signals to the right place at the right time and doing the right thing with them and Factorio definitely teaches analogues of that.

[EDIT 2] Another interesting project for them might be to build a computer from chips. Ben Eater has a design, tutorials, and sells kits for building a 6502 computer (Same CPU as the Apple II) on a breadboard: https://eater.net/6502. (Not sure I'd want to try that without a 5V tolerant logic analyzer but they're cheaply available nowadays, e.g. https://www.seeedstudio.com/Logic-Pirate-p-1750.html) Note that I don't vouch for any of these, they're just examples of what's available out there that your friend can investigate if it piques their interest.

Try Charles Petzold's book "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software". It goes through the structure of a computer at the binary level in a gentle way that's aimed at non-specialists.

People have direct experience of the impact of computers in their everyday lives; working on documents, playing videogames, using smartphones, etc. What the general public doesn't usually see is the behind the scenes infrastructure (it's nothing short of astonishing that I can ask Youtube for a video posted 15 years ago and have it come up with no perceptible delay) as well as scientific and engineering megaprojects that use, to laypeople, unimaginable amounts of computing power to improve their lives (e.g. supercomputing in weather forecasting) or push back the boundaries of human knowledge (e.g. data processing at the LHC, SETI@Home, Folding@Home). Capturing the public's imagination with the wondrousness of these human achievements is one of the things I would think that a computer museum should want to do.