Reminds me of when I was chatting online with a linux consultant for months trying to help my father get his ISP up and running. The guy was absolutely sharp when it came to linux, even on user groups there was no comparison to this guys likes. Finally I had enough of it it. I told my father I could not keep up. So lets just buy all new servers (@ the time the fastest servers were only 300MHz) hire him for two weeks time to get everything configured. We offered him $5,000 plus transportation, and room and board for two weeks time. His answer right off the bat was HOLY SH!T... 5K??? Yeah I'll do it, but I gotta ask my parents first.
Well, his parents let him take the job but we had to pay them. When he arrived... his age was only 13 to our shock. We thought he would be like 16 or 17.
His father built him his first computer when he was only 9 years old. He did not have the money for Windows 3.11 back then, so he installed Linux instead. When we gave him command of a PC to test everything we could think of that had Linux/Win98/WinNT tripple booting. He could not use either the Win98 or NT... it was a impossibly hard to use operating system(s).
In the end when he left, we gave him an extra $2K bonus in 'petty cash' that we did not tell his parents about in case they did not use that $5K for him.
Well he got the job done, and he did everything right. We were never hacked as all ports were properly closed that were not in use. We were the fastest internet provider in our town, we had the most clients of the two operating ISP's in our town after 3 months of opening for business... Just to have to pull the plug from a direct result of our former governor Tony Knowles deciding to keep AT&T Alascom a regulated company so GCI could grow more. We were assured that AT&T would not be regulated for more than 4 years after starting our business as GCI was growing substancially fast. Well come renewal time, the governor granted another 5 years. GCI spread it's internet access throughout the state like a plague. Where there were ISP's in small towns (like ours) GCI was selling to end users internet access for less than we could ever dream of buying from them wholesale. Needless to say, our first competator folded up first. We had money saved up, but the pricing was just too high to stay open as AT&T could not legally lower their price for us (as well as all other ISP's in the state). So many local business owners like my father and I wound up broke and had to close down.
If anybody knows where I can get big (5-7 digits) small business grants. I know of a way to take away almost all bush Alaska's internet access from GCI (7+ million in retail and educational sales alone in sales / year) by offering a far faster way to delivery internet then they can possibly can unless they fiber the state @ the price tag of almost 300 million. But I need @ least 1.7 million to get started, that simply is outta my range. SBA and State grants at the most will only cover upto $150,000... that still leaves 1.555mil to go. After losing out on our ISP, I am broke and working in a grocery store of all places, well short of under the counter computer work :|
But getting back on topic, yeah. 9 years old is never too young to teach this stuff to the kiddies. 🙂 For two weeks work we paid a kid a good chunk of what his parents make per year if you teach them the right way. Technical is 😎, but slap Linux on her for future money. Put on linux games and other multimedia things on there. Is she wants the lastest and greatest hardware. She can and will get good insight of how linux works and linux 'geeks' do make a lot of money. After all, linux is the fastest growing operating system for servers. If you start her off with just games, she will learn the OS.
BTW... what game?
