g00dn3ss

I do think Bill Gates was on to something. From a UI perspective, a pen/touch screen is superior in that it removes one level of indirection in a UI paradigm that is attempting to be "direct manipulation".

However, for this to be the most popular form of PC, I think there will need to be a breakthrough in text input. I've looked at a lot of alternative text input techniques and I don't think any of the current ones will cut it. This includes soft keyboards, crazy dasher-like things, predictive stuff, handwriting recognition, gestures, voice, etc. The huge advantage of keyboard entry is not only the tactile feedback, but that it has a fairly low cognitive cost. In other words, you can think about other things while you type - it's automatic. Pretty much anything aural or visual will take away from thinking about your real tasks.

I went to a public university in my state (NC) and a top 20 public CS grad school - so I can recommend them. I have also worked with a lot of folks from all the other top CS grad programs across the country.

The thing I have found that is different with the folks who went to undergrad at some of best schools, like MIT, is that they spent more time focused on their studies than I did. And I'm saying this having been top of my class in both undergrad and grad school. So I'm not sure if that says something about public schools, liberal arts, or the kinds of people who target MIT. Probably all of these. In any case, I think you can get the same level of education at public schools if you're willing to put in a lot of your personal time. If it turns out that you don't want to be so hard-nosed about it, then I think you'll find a lot of cool things to do at a public school.

Following closely on the heels of DNF!

Actually, there was a recent article on YC news about the large number of discoveries that were made independently at almost the same time.

Our made-for-tv histories usually show a lone scientist toiling away for years, making huge discoveries. But in reality, most discoveries are incremental. The stories we are taught about these discoveries are usually mythologized.

It is true that there is some level of creativity needed. But it's probably way more common than our histories would lead you to believe. The recurring theme you will hear from scientists is that "chance favors the prepared mind."

Recent evidence tends to indicate that 'not smart enough' is probably a myth. Almost everything can be attributed to exposure and effort at some point rather than some innate smartness.

A lot of advanced math takes some serious concentration to understand. For some non-practical aspects, I found that I lacked the motivation rather than ability to understand it . One particular class where I seemed to hit my tolerance was a theoretical linear algebra class. I could understand the practical applications of most of the topics but some of the theory seemed just out of reach. The book was extremely dry and I think the professor may have been taking lessons from Ben Stein.

Give me a private tutor, a theoretical linear algebra for dummies book, and a pending disaster for which this is the solution, and I bet the outcome would be a little different.

One of the biggest drawbacks for me is the crazy assumption that I should check out directly from their repository and use whatever half baked thing happens to be in there at the time. Sure, I can use the stable version but then none of the plug-ins work. The whole Django website is built around the assumption that I'm running directly from the repository.

We went to a financial planner and he projected how much it would cost to send our kids to college. He plotted out these graphs and then told us "we'll assume that college costs continue to outpace inflation by 2%, since they have for the past 20 years..." I appreciated what he was doing but I know there is no way that can continue. At some point in the very near future, you can live off the interest of the cost of 4 years of college.

I tried pylons not too long ago. I liked the general idea but I ran into several problems. Building the sample didn't work out of the gate and I had to dig around the site to figure out what was wrong. I never could get the user authentication stuff (AuthKit) working with the latest version of Pylons. I finally decided that I'd rather not spend my time debugging or rewriting the framework, even if it does give me more choice.

This title makes no sense. Was Fonzie jumping over a more popular show disguised as a shark? Let's mix some metaphors!

The back button problem is on the main splash page. It looks like you are doing some kind of javascript redirection. So there are actually two entries in history. When you go back one page in history, it jumps forward again.

Incidentally, there have been several related products in recent years. Someone (maybe Sharper Image?) was selling an alarm clock that supported downloadable alarm sounds. I don't remember exactly, but I think it worked like those digital picture frames. That's not to say that you couldn't do it better. But I think your biggest issue may be that most people don't sleep next to their computer.

Yeah, but he could ask the questions in any order!