You've very much hit the nail on the head. However, though it's hard, it's not impossible - we've got some magic (read as: not suitable for a public forum) in the business pipeline that should keep this project alive. If all goes well, we'll have a lot to shout about in a couple of months time. Until then, we're still welcoming sponsorship or donations! If nothing else, the project remains open source for anyone to contribute to.
Cheers, Ed
I've been thinking about teaching myself low level development and FlingOS is just what I've been looking for. If these resources work out well, I'd be willing to pay you for them :)
Thanks! Good to hear. We haven't yet but we're planning to in late 2016. We are hoping to produce an OS dev kit for A-Level / first-year univeristy students which we can sell at low cost.
Awesome that you're from UoB! Shame you weren't here last term when I ran the lectures/workshops. Are you still living in Bristol?
I have to say, I only come on here occasionally and signed up today to be able to reply to things about FlingOS - new user syndrome is limiting my number of comments though!
That sounds wonderful ! - A dev kit would be really cool - something like the arduino that students can get their hands dirty with.
I am working for a startup who are involved in the education space, but it's focused on the chinese market, somehow our sale's team figured out how to make chinese consumer pay us money to write code lol.
I moved to London.
yeah - hacker news is weird. Do not let the comments hear or on reddit affect you - you could cure cancer and still be shrugged off.
When I was in Uni I didn't take an modules on OS stuff - too complicated, too much time - and there aren't many things I do with it once it's done ? So if you can convince people of the application - something that will capture the imagination. Something they could do with FlingOS - make a robot, IoT, put on their car/bike ?
I mean I am having a difficult time thinking of writing a custom OS to solve some problem I am having.
I really like your youtube videos ! You should invest in a better microphone - it actually helps !
Yep but we're looking at the creator CI20 or CI40 boards as our compiler supports MIPS.
I tend to only listen to the positive stuff from Reddit and the like but that said, we've not had any notable amount of negative feedback online thus far which is rather remarkable!
Yeah cool projects are one aspect but we're also pushing the "if you understand low level, your high level and Web apps will be better and certainly much more secure"!
Thanks for the feedback about the videos. I have a pro microphone - Blue Yeti. The issue is actually the recording environment (my thin walled, noisy neighbours flat in Bristol) which means quality is lost in editing the noise out. I'm trying to organise I better recording environment for future videos.
Is there a link to the startup you're involved in? Or is it all in a language a I sadly don't speak? Haha.
Reduce the gain on your Blue Yeti - it's actually one of the disadvantages of the Yeti microphones - they capture a lot of the background noise.
For noise - try the starving artist method - record it under a thick duvet. The physics behind it is the same as those fancy expensive sound proof rooms. It actually works ! Many artists with no money use this method.
It does look ridiculous and when you present your audio to a bunch of people you do not want to reveal that you recorded it under a duvet wearing your underwear.
I am guessing you are living in a student house lol - I was lucky to live with working people who valued silence - Find a time - usually 10pm - 12 pm that is not too late and when things are quite to do your recording. If you can schedule it like that you should be fine.
I agree, understanding C helps me everyday - even though I used to complain about it in first year.
Its all in Javascript, so its something that you have experience with.
Have you thought about creating your board for the chinese market ? - in chinese for example lot of demand for educational content there ( Lots of demand for everything actually )
Haha it's always at the lowest! My flat really is that noisy. And the video I'm (slowly) uploading now is even worse because I don't have my mic so it's laptop recorded - wanted to post something to "ride the New Year wave" so to speak!
I have sound proof foam etc, it just doesn't help. Many things researched and tried (with much laughter from my flat mates on the occasion they saw me doing odd things) to no avail. A lot of it was recorded when heavy building work was going on just outside my window (basically all of the summer I was working the building works were going on but University buildings were even worse). If you'd heard the original audio, I think you'd be impressed by how clean I actually managed to get it in then end.
Targeting the Chinese is an interesting idea. The problem would be finding someone to translate the content (and documentation in the code) - which really requires a native Chinese speaker (what about both variants of the language?) and they need the technical language - a very rare person indeed in the UK, I expect!
Yes MVB has lots of international students (as social secretary of BEEES I do talk to them regularly! ;) ), but the ones who actually have all the technical language (good enough to translate the docs accurately) are (at a guess) busy third or fourth years. None the less, I'll ask around when I'm back in Bristol (and post exam season).
It was just after first year so sadly not. Most of my friends moved out of Bristol for the summer.
I was really slow on picking up Babel too. But I've been using Babel 5.x in production for six months without errors - main things were docs that referred to old versions of babel and babelify.
I needed to plug this in the package.json of my private modules:
Node.js is moving pretty fast at this point, after the io.js merger. I can understand using Babel to provide a unified, modern language API for browser applications, as there are so few guarantees you can make about a client's browser, but there already is a single API target for server javascript for any given version of node. Unlike browser JS, you can guarantee that the server development environment and the production environment will execute on the same runtime. Meanwhile, I don't trust that every Babel implementation of an unstable language feature will match the final official implementation. If it did, someone would just merge babel's shims into node and call it a day.
To some extent, yes. In some of my projects I decided to avoid using Babel and just limit myself to Node's (new) features. The advantages of not having a build step for the backend js is sometimes worth it.
However, there are so many cases where Babel is useful, or turns out to be 'necessary', that I'm considering just using Babel by default again.
Some examples:
- JSX for using React in the back-end (almost a default for me nowadays)
- async/await for async-heavy code
- a miscellaneous few still-unsupported ES2015 features that occasionally are sorely missed
And finally, it's happing more and more regularly that I end up wanting to use some server-side modules on the client-side, in which case I need to set up Babel anyways.
That said, if I'm pretty sure I'm not going to need Babel, I still try to leave it out. It adds complexity that I'd rather avoid.
Check out Material Design by google - its been a lifesaver to me who is from a very technical background. Best part is with very little work you can really impress your bosses !
Material Design is just like Apple's guidelines. It's great for helping to create something that looks uniformly designed and not a hodge podge of UI gimmicks, helping design-ignorant coders create something that looks nice, and as you say it's easy to get management buy in, but is it actually good? Will following it actually reduce your count of UI mistakes? Personally I don't like it at all, and I've had many complaints, both functional and from personal preference, with Google's design changes over the last few years.
But I do not have the time to go back and do another degree on design. Try convincing people with money to shell out extra for someone with good design experience.
I guess once we have millions of customers we might have to think about it - but small companies without much resources its hard to justify spending a lot of resources on good design.
From what I've come to understand, JSPM works a lot like NPM, except you can pull packages both from npm and git(hub). We're using it at our startup, and it works quite well. Had to do make a custom build script to make it fit into our Rails application.
Edit: JSPM biggest strength is possibly that it supports a vast set of module loaders (AMD, CommonJS and ES6 modules).
JSPM also normalizes importing in ES6 from AMD, CommonJS, and ES6 (not sure about TypeScript, probably though). It is built on top of System.js, which lets you import modules and allows you to configure the local global namespace.
Edit: Looks like there was a ninja edit since I started typing :)
Bill Gates, Musk, etc are going to lose a fair bit of their power, prestige and wealth when someone does finally create super intelligence - Windows and Space X are great but those achievement will be dwarfed by whoever comes up with "superintelligence"
Ray Kurzweil's optimism comes from the fact that he will be unemployed if the govt bans A.I research.
And someone who works as a day journalist needs to make sure they meet the daily quote of generating clickbait traffic - its easiest to do it by writing something that is counter to whatever viewpoint is trendy this month.
Looking at history and how humanity dealt with technology - its fairly impossible to enforce any form of restriction on AI research.
We cannot stop >100,000 individuals from taking over an area larger than ireland in the middle east - good luck stopping the maths whiz with a pen.
I generally agree that there isn't much we can do to stop it, and I also think that trying too hard could backfire in unexpected ways, but certainly it's not something that this reporter, who is not very well informed on the matter, can correctly dismiss as hysteria.
I find it funny that we leave it to the economist to decide the fate of research.
I remember in uni I found EE topics much harder and boring then Software topics. Anything below C is a big nope. Verilog, VLSI, FPGA, anything to do with embedded IoT.
Yeah america wont survive if kids today stop valuing EE topic just due to some misguided economical models/interpretation.
The rockets that will land on mars wont be designed solely by software guys - it will require a lot of EE innovations - if america gives up then some other country will take its place.
Richard Hamming ( the person who came up with hamming distance ) has an interesting insight - based on the rate of sub-fields being created in mathematics - he concluded that by the year 2000 there would be 1000 different sub-fields for every mathematical subfield !
Do the people in power expect everyone to know everything ?
Knowledge is important - but society will stop working if everyone spends their lifetimes studying.
I read it in hacker news a while ago - the amount of new information we are introduced daily in 2015 was equivalent to what humans received in their lifetimes - for most of human history.
We need better methods to organize information - ( this is why google has its insane valuation - and no its not a bubble )
It should not take me 20 years to understand mathematics at the level of newton - how am I supposed to understand another 400 years of maths before I am homeless ?
Its a difficult question to answer but I think its a question my generation has to find an answer - and fast.
However the tools are getting better also. You now "stand on the shoulders of giants". With modern computer based math tools you can, for some problems, be lot more productive then working out everything on paper.
You can also just search the internet many types of information and methods instead of having parallel invent it. Making you more effective.
Unless he figures out how to convince people who are :
1| C# Developers
2| Interested in OS development
To give him money for his work its going to be a tough sell - sadly.