CodeBetter.Com
CodeBetter.Com
RSS 2.0 via Feedburner
           Do you Twitter? Follow us @CodeBetter

Steve Hebert's Development Blog

Steve's Blog - From .Net to dotMath and everything in between.

If you won the lottery, what kind of programming would you do?

I was reading Steve Eichert's blog entry asking “if you had it to do all over again would you go into computers?“  Then I started thinking, if you won the lottery what kind of programming would you do?

I'd probably make an offer to John Deere to do work like this for free out of my house. They take real-time yield information from a combine and drive the equipment accordingly.  Then they can take this information the following year and feed it into the planting equipment to vary seed density and fertizilizer to maximize yield over the field according to soil quality (and other factors).  That is so freakin' cool!

Added thought:  Add a little GPS drive system and farmers could be using this interface for their field work.

Otherwise I'd do open-source software and miscellaneous projects for businesses that I find compelling and try to turn them into good business opportunities in my spare time.



Comments

Paul Czywczynski said:

I hate to burst your bubble but your John Deere idea is closer then you think. I have an uncle that works at a farm implement dealership in Beach ND. He was telling me last April how the newer tractors have GPS systems onboard. On these new systems all the driver has to do is plug some GPS coordinates in and the tractor will drive itself. Quite interesting...
# December 2, 2004 4:21 PM

Steve Hebert said:

That's fascinating. I guess the 'free' offer to John Deere wouldn't be that great of a deal to them. :)

Now if they can just tie the GPS system into an interface like the "John Deere American Farmer" game you'd have farm operations centers where computer operators monitor field operations and dispatch support crews as needed.

I grew up on a farm, but never really cared for farming. But if I could do it from the comfort of my pc...
# December 3, 2004 4:33 AM
Check out Devlicio.us!

Our Sponsors