<p>Basically, you go to developer.andoid.com and download a development environment that includes the necessary software, including a device emulator. So most development and testing is done on a regular computer with the emulator. The final step is to transfer it to a real device and test it there.</p>
<p>You’d think that they would have made NT fully usable and administerable by command line in order to allow better multiuser capability and scriptable/documentable administration. But it was so GUI-dependent that administering it was a very manual process.</p>
<p>I imagine that there was a clash of cultures. I think that Cutler brought over the whole development team at Digital with him (Pacific Northwest) and I imagine that there was somewhat of a clash of cultures. Cutler seemed to VMSify a lot of the stuff under the covers. Yes, the DOS window still persists and you don’t have DCL in Windows - though I think that there were some shells to emulate parts of it.</p>
<p>This…combined with Microsoft’s institutional resistance were probably major factors in why the various iterations of NT sucked from 3.1-4.0. Only when Win2k arrived did we finally have what could be considered a respectable stable workstation OS. </p>
<p>Even then, there was some backsliding as was the case with XP before SP2 & SP3 or <em>shudder</em>…Vista.</p>
<p>D1 complains that the comp sci lab is cold, and that a snuggie would be really useful. Hint hint. She also was very amused by the children’s book “Lauren Ipsum”, which presents comp sci concepts at a child’s (or clueless parent’s ) level.</p>
<p>A second, third or fourth monitor or a rack to mount multiple monitors. It sounds weird, but my MIT son and all his course 6 buddies had racks of monitors - one monitor for coding, one for compiling, one for web browsing, one for skype. Hardware is cheap, time is expensive!</p>
<p>Perhaps a good sized usb hard drive or a DAC to enhance music playback from computer. (Any future programmer will be suitably impressed by an audiophile geek purchase like a DAC. Just be ready to hear him rave about how much better his music sounds.)</p>
<p>I love SSDs. My MacBook Pro as a 48 GB SSD for boot and application launching and a 1 TB HDD for large storage capacity. I am considering a 96 GB SSD for more SSD capacity unless Apple puts a retina display in their upcoming MBPs and then I will just upgrade. My old laptop is quite old now but the SSD has made it new again.</p>
) level.</p>
(they do make one with vacuum tubes in the audio section…)</p>