Increasingly I've been wondering whether these agile approaches might be a detriment to most open source projects.
There is a massive pool of talented and motivated programmers that could contribute to open source projects, much more massive than any company's engineering dept, yet most projects follow a power law where a few contributors write all the code.
I think eschewing processes and documentation in favour of pure programming centered development, where tests & code serve as documentation and design tools, means the barrier to entry is much higher, and onboarding new members is bottlenecked by their ability to talk with the few main contributors.
The most successful open source projects have a clear established process for contributing and a lot of documentation. But the majority don't have anything like that, and that's only exacerbated by git hosting platforms that put all their emphasis on code over process. I wonder whether setting up new tools around git allowing for all projects to follow the waterfall or a V-cycle might improve the contribution inequality.
In the late 90s I remember being advised to always use an anonymous handle by my older privacy and security conscious friends. I don't think that Raymond's advice was widely accepted.
The 1000 dollars bill is for a single piece of equipment, a full lab is considerably more. The median household income is 70k in the U.S, in western Europe it's closer to 30k. The income distribution on youtube follows a power law.
I don't think that puts it within reach of your average middle class family, even over 5 years.
Can you talk about the resources you used to learn in the classroom?
I learned German using the Foreign Service Institute handbook and I thought it was great introduction to the language. I'd love to know what's in use nowadays.
It depends what you start out with of course, if you had low wattage incandescent bulbs for example you can replace them just fine with connected ones.
But currently, commercially available dumb bulbs go into much higher lumen ranges than connected ones. Ours were in the 2600-3000 lumens range before the change if I recall correctly.
What brand ear plugs do you recommend? I bought some just last week on amazon (some foam ones from Howard Leight) and it was a toss-up which were good and which were bad according to the reviews and descriptions.
My roommate changed all our bulbs to Philips Hue. The connectivity was really nice at first but they are so dim! It completely changed the mood of the flat at night.
I'd advise people to check their current bulbs and make sure the lumen rating is the same before replacing them, if I recall correctly most connected bulbs are around 1000-1200 lumens, and top out at 1600.
No, the answer is that there is a limited number of scientists and a limitless number of research directions. This doesn't have to be correlated with brilliance.
In fact, it can be easier to research some of the less popular paths because there is less competition and more low-hanging fruits.