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Sounds like Squeak to me.

Basic and Pascal are easy to learn in because that's what they were designed for. Yes, they are quite limited, but they're what I learned and now I'm smrkt enough to... post... on... Slashdot............... Erm. Hrm.

Hey, there's this language out there DESIGNED to be easy for people to learn. Erm.... Think it was Squeak. Try finding out something about that....

And I'd say Java was easier to learn than Basic or Pascal. Just download Eclipse, unzip it, and start..... erm. Welllll..... No. Try Squeak - I didn't learn it, and I'm not sure it's what you want, but I remember there being a fat Ask Slashdot around here somewhere or possibly here somewhere or even possibly going to learn the IBM way, in java while gaming

Squeak may not have Ogre, but it has something called Alice which is an "interactive world-building and scripting environment" (that's what the page says...).

I recall it was included in recent Squeak releases which I downloaded. The demo was a bunny or something and you moved it using syntax like this (from here):

bunny move: forward
bunny move: forward distance: 2
bunny move: forward distance: 1 duration: 4
bunny move: forward distance: 1 duration: 2 asSeenBy: camera

bunny moveTo: { 0. 1. 0} duration: 2
bunny moveTo: {0. 0. 1} speed: 4
bunny moveTo: {asIs. 0. asIs}

bunny head pointAt: camera bunny head pointAt: camera duration: eachFrame

Indeed!

Scheme is very clean; you don't have to learn very much to get going with it.

"But it's not used in the real world!" Firstly, at the high school stage, who cares? Odds are, most of these students aren't going to rush right out and get a programming job; those who do are likely competent enough with programming to be able to pick up the language de jour when they get there.

Secondly, quite a few people think that a more functional style SHOULD be adopted in the real world. If we teach students functional programming when they are young, then maybe, just maybe, they will carry it with them INTO the real world.

Usage of C++ isn't some huge, insurmountable mountain. It's thousands of people. If thousands of newcomes all do functional programming, then eventually, the real world will change.

--

You also might look into Squeak/Smalltalk, depending on your audience: http://www.squeak.org/

Smalltalk using the Squeak. Smalltalk is an easy langauge to lean, lot's of cool examples and a blast to program in.

SmallTalk could be a good option.

Squeak is a SmallTalk implementation: http://www.squeak.org/

http://www.squeakland.org/ has a whole load of resources for teachers and students.

BeOS was a marketing disaster, and Plan9 was never more than a proof of concept, that doesn't mean that their core ideas were bad, just that their time hasn't come yet.

Squeak is another 'proof of concept' system with a lot of promising ideas. (Finally a system where you can rotate your windows 37.5 degrees anticlockwise. Pointless but very cool)

It will probably take another 50 years or so, before a viable OS is built based on these ideas (Squeak for example needs a host OS and has no security at all, making it useless for real world applications), and until that time, we'll have to get by with Unix variants. Just remember that computing today is extremely primitive compared to both the visions and working prototypes of the 1960s and 70s. We have made enormous advances in hardware, but progress in software engineering seems to have stalled in the early '80s.

(Personally I blame Bill Gates and Bjarne Soustrup for that, but I have no hard evidence to back it up)

Me and two others bought Amigas for our university work in 1986 for $A2500 - a special price from Commodore Australia for developers. One of us was looking to use it for remote sensing image analysis and I was interested in multimedia and education. When tax time came around we had a query from the Australian Tax Office asking us to justify that the mouse was a necessary purchase. The Amiga mouse came with the computer but some tax assessor thought it was an optional extra like with M$-DOS and so not deductible.

For awhile there the Business School was going to standardise on Amiga. The Visual and Performing Arts school did for teaching animation and the Science school used them extensively for GIS and medical imaging.

I still have my original Amiga 1000 though it has been upgraded with something called Phoenix.

Squeak http://squeak.org/ over AmigaDOS would have been a killer combination for education.

Squeak http://www.squeak.org/
Croquet http://opencroquet.org/
eToys http://squeakland.org/

Proably wont win any karma for saying this but what exactly has Alan Kay done in like the last 20 years.

Squeak http://www.squeak.org/
Croquet http://opencroquet.org/
eToys http://squeakland.org/

Someday I am going to have to learn Smalltalk so I can see precisely what you mean by this.

Then you should download Squeak and try it for yourself.

• Hurd (now with KDE)
• Haiku
• TUNES
• House
• Squeak

Yes, clearly machines running Smalltalk and LISP kernels never existed. And squeak developers are lying when they say its virtual machine is written in smalltalk.

And the reason why
for (x=0; x < 10000000; x++)
getpid();

takes 1 second due to system call overhead instead of 0.001 seconds is because C is such a great language for operating systems... hint: it's one instruction in a "safe" OS (ie not C/C++).

I used to wonder about a Newton/Squeak combo from Disney--kid game machine, edutainment device, Disneyworld guide, etc. This was like 6 years ago, though.

As far as I know, there is no non-free networked object-oriented database. Relational databases are nice, flat files have their place, but OO databases are quite useful too; I've built a few webapps using this. Thanks, Pavel Curtis!

Several programming languages exist only in a free version, or the non-free versions are derivatives. Scheme, Squeak (Smalltalk based), Python, and Perl are just a few that come to mind. Perhaps this clown would say that these are all derivative works from Fortran, or somesuch, but it's a stretch.

"What most people with Asperger's Syndrome find difficult is casual chatting - they can't do small talk." -- Teh B33b

Would they have done better today, now that there's Squeak?

Maybe in their spurt of generosity, they'll consider a better license for Squeak Smalltalk?

Maybe in their spurt of generosity, they'll consider a better license for Squeak Smalltalk?

If you'd like to develop new ideas in UI's and really experiment with different ways to handle them, probably neither Java nor C# will really help much.

But squeak (a smalltalk implementation) might. You should at least give it a serious look. Of course there are other possibilities (self, raw X windows...) but squeak looks like a good one to me.

Squeak has come up here a few times before. Squeak is an implementation of the Smalltalk programming language- the first fully OO language. It's where the WIMP (windows, icons, menus and pointers) GUI was invented, what Steve Jobs and his crew saw at Xerox Parc when they toured it.

Squeak has a lot of interesting media authoring capabilities in addition to the core language. In a lot of ways it's an OS running on top of whatever host OS you're running. It is completely binary compatible across platforms; not write once, debug anywhere like Java, but true cross platform compatibility with your binaries.

It runs on oodles of platforms: Linux/X11, Linux/DirectFB, Linux/SDL, Linux/SVGAlib, most any unix with X11, Mac OS X, Mac OS Classic, Windows XP/2k/ME/98/95, Acorn RiscOS, DOS, Pocket PC 2k/2k2/WM2003, WinCE 2.11-4.2, and probably a few more platforms I completely forgot. I develop for the Pocket PC in Squeak; I simply copy my image to my Axim via wifi and open it up- there's never any doubt as to whether or not it'll run ala Java.

Also see Squeak.org and the Squeak Swiki.

Sometime I'll take another look at Squeak, which seems to be the anointed successor to Smalltalk. I have a friend who's been a total fanatic about Smalltalk for many years - it has affected his career in interesting ways. A few months ago he got me interested in its descendant Squeak, because of Alan Croquet 3D system written in Squeak. So far, I've just bounced off when I've tried to do anything with it. I've been doing procedural programming for a long time. I think it was Dykstra who said (approximately), "Anyone who is proficient in FORTRAN can quickly learn to write FORTRAN in any language." I may try again soonish, although it's not

This note speaks to my interest - IMHO the next, and most interesting, phase of UI design will be in the use of 3D to create not just usable but "amenable" user interfaces.

For me, that will have to wait until I can get a better machine, preferably one I can use with polarized 3D glasses!! :O) I managed to get Croquet running on my system, but it was so slow (I'm running at 650 MHz) that it was unusable, and I diskliked the little buttons around the edge. Tthey seemed counterintuitive to me, but of course I grew up in a different UI paradign so who am I to say.

One problem I didn't have time to figure out at the time was that Croquet's OpenGL driver setup was hardwired into the code, and didn't accept my OpenGL setup (I'm running DRI). But that's another story.

Squeak Smalltalk can do multiple cursors. Someone would have to do a bit of simple hackery for Windows/Linux to take two PS/2/usb mice and feed it to Squeak, or also there are some easier (but more expensive) ways to do it with two squeak processes. The usual use of two (or more) cursors in Squeak is for the remote access/collaboration software built in- you can have 5 people connected remotely, each with their own cursor with its own focus, as well as the person who is sat down in front of the computer. No problem, it's all there.

It may be a place to start playing if you're interested in that sort of thing.

Seriously, give Squeak a chance. It's a Smalltalk-80 implementation that is very friendly to newbie programmers. Use it and learn some basic object-orientation and see what it can do for you.

Then you can move on to basically any modern imperative language.

Squeak website

I stumbled on squeak looking for some smalltalk tools.

From there I found squeakland ~ a media authoring tool with browser front end.

• '... Math and Science literacy has been devalued in our schools, or at best inappropriately taught. And yet it's vital, not just for vocational reasons, but to develop critical thinking skills needed by all world citizens. Based on a constructivist learning model, Squeak school examples show surprising ways of reaching math and science resistance and helping children develop powerful thinking skills. ...' Alan Keys, BACKGROUND ON HOW CHILDREN LEARN

The people behind squeak are impressive. What is more impressive is the ideas behind how kids learn.

Now I've just got to model the experiment I conducted with the young ones on the speed of maggots wriggling and their weird behaviour when you rotate the surface they are crawling on (they instantly seem to know which way is facing down).

I suggest showing them Squeak. It's pretty colorful for a programming environment. It also has an implementation of a racecar and a musical keyboard, a mouse face with eyes that follow the cursor and other things that would probably be fun for a short period of time. And while they're playing with all that, maybe you can explain that Software Engineers make this stuff as well as the games on the Xbox, Gameboy, and Playstation.

Squeak!

My recommendation for the kids is to have them see very basic principles in BASIC ...

GAAAaaahhhhhh!

Quick - learn smalltalk and tote along some toys from Squeakland.

The next generation will thank you someday ...

I imagine Squeak would be a good language for demonstrating to children.

Or Squeak, which already has tons of educational content (the primary objective of the language).

First off, learning OO via C++, C# or Java will not give a very good first impression of it because they allow you to break OO rules way too easily. To see real OO in action you should check out Smalltalk via squeak http://www.squeak.org/ (it's free). Smalltalk is designed so it's hard to write anything procedurally and it's very easy to learn (something like 5 reserved words total).

{/Soapbox}

Second off, the benefit of OO is that it is much easier for OTHER coders to learn and modify a properly designed OO piece of code than a procedurally designed one. Trust me. One of my first tasks as a 'professional programmer' was to understand a 30 page main procedurally coded simulator. Not fun. Not at all. The guy who wrote it had no problem finding exactly where code mods had to go but when he was reassigned to another project all that knowledge went with him. When I had to learn a well designed OO program it was MUCH MUCH easier.

Chekoff,(Sorry, I just read the Star Trek story)in summary, the difference between a good coder and a great coder is NOT that their code compiles,works, and that one can write code quicker than the other, its how well the design can be learned and modified by others. In the coding business, single points of failures aka losing contracts/business because your stud coder got hit by a bus, is bad.

-Pablo

Kay works a lot on new ideas, many of them being incorporated into Squeak and Croquet. The ideas are still rough, though, so in some cases I don't know if I'd say they were accessible yet. Such is the nature of research. (But even kids are using Squeak.)

The Smalltalk implementation Squeak is AWESOME. With their eToys you can do amazing things without typing any code. It is truly a wonder to behold.

While Squeak, as in the e-Toys environment, as its name implies, is a plaything, but it's a pretty good plaything none the less. It leads directly on to the commercial Smalltalks which are arguably the premier 'productivity' language. Onward links include:-

1. Squeakland for the e-Toys.
2. Squeak Smalltalk The Language itself.
3. The Smalltalk Community Portal
4. SmalltalkX A brilliant super-fast implementation.
5. Cincom Smalltalk The direct decendant from the original Xerox PARC version.

What was it that drew you to a life of programming? How old were you when you first used a computer?

I remember seeing this board on tv. Maybe a motherboard for some crappy computer. And I was enchanted. I couldn't have been more than a few years old. And I saw Mr. Wizard's world on Nickelodeon and I liked when they had robots on there. And my brother kept setting himself ablaze with batteries and things you're not supposed to use D-cell batteries with. I was loving it all and couldn't wait to get my hands on a computer.

I finally got my chance when my mother got me a Pocket PC (radio shack, not windows). It had a 1-line display, could be programmed in BASIC, and had an assembler. Then I went to a computer themed middle school, computer-themed high school, and got my degree in Computer Science at University. It always came naturally to me and I didn't need anybody to turn me on to computers.

What pieces of modern software do you think would be a good way to introduce today's kids to the world of computing?

I think Squeak would be good because it's just fun-looking. You get to play with the race car and the mouse's eyes follow your cursor around.

Even better would be a Lego Mindstorms set. Lego has got to be the coolest toy ever and it's programmable. And I don't care how old it is... LogoWriter is big fun. It was compiled, had methods and variables, and we could draw with it. I wish I could find a copy of it.

Squeak!

They can start as slow as they want, learn the concepts of programming, and when they want to enter in the "market", can always learn the language de jour, be it C++, Java or C#.

And squeak seem to run quite fast for what it does, and when they botch the runtime the restore is only an cp /whatever/image ~user/image Regards

http://www.metacard.com/
(although sold to runrev for commercial development, getting the old metacard IDE and heading over to yahoo groups, you will find some nice geeks continuing development of the free version)

http://www.hyperstudio.com/
It's been forever since they released a new version, and there is no Linux version of the software.

http://www.squeak.org/

Squeak is the modern Smalltalk implementation. It supports opengl, quicktime, widgets, networking etc. It is cross platform and runs on Windoze, Linux, other unices, Mac OS X, PDAs etc. http://www.squeak.org/

Here is my list of must-haves for PocketPC/WinCE. I'm not quite what most would consider to be a "normal user," as I've got a lot of Unix leanings. However, I do not use a Zaurus because ... well, the software pretty much sucks. I really like real HWR, which doesn't exist on Linux and does on CE and the Newton. So PocketPC it is. But that doesn't mean you can't have your favorite Unix tools...

First, there are a lot of Unix ports from Rainer. I use his TeX distro for writing papers, Maxima w/ GNUplot and Tcl/tk GUI support for doing maths. I used to use Perl/tk, though Dialect (a really cool pythonish RAD language for CE and dekstop windows) has replaced it when I need to write an app that fits in as a CE app.

The app I spend the most time in is Squeak Smalltalk. It's not quite an application, but a development and application environment. Binary and source portable between oodles of platforms, including but not limited to CE/PPC, desktop windows/x86, linux of all flavors, Mac OS X/classic, Acorn RISC OS, etc etc.

One of the few regular PocketPC apps I use regularily is GowerPoint's uBook ebook reader. It's the best ebook reader I've found for the platform so far, and pretty good. The only thing it lacks that I wished it had was a text-to-speech feature for having books read aloud occasionally. It can read just about any format- txt, pdb/prc (both txt and html inside), html, rtf, and all of those formats zipped- and prolly others. it's nice to put a whole series- say, Peter F. Hamilton's The Night's Dawn series in one zip file with all of the books in the series. I typically buy a LIT and convert it when I have to, though sometimes I get books from fictionWise where you can sometimes get books in unencrypted formats.

Coding and reading... that leaves out the other big thing I do on my PDA (which is my computer): internettin'. (what a horrible word) I really reccomend the NetFront web browser- it's really nice. IE used to be really bad in PPC 2k and 2k2, though I'm told it's improved in 2k3 and 2k3SE, more like the IE that came with Handheld PC 2000 or vanilla WinCE 4.x, which is a very capable browser on the order of IE 5-5.5 or so. Handles most sites well and is pretty fast. However, it doesn't cut the mustard- no tabs, few and not configurable key commands, etc. For that, you need ftxBrowser, which I've bene using for years. Slick. It just embeds the IE control, so it's still IE (a good thing in the case of CE), but you've got a lot of features that are a must for me, a person who can't just do one browser page at a time. :)

There are a number of SSH clients around there. Some good ones that cost money, but there are some free ones. Rainer has one for free, though it takes a little work to get set up, but it's what I use.

First, there are two kinds of small languages:
1. small languages like lua, io, and scheme that are small in the built-in libraries and in the total distro. These three are great places to start- both are small, OOPish, allow higher-order programming by passing classes, objects, functions and methods as objects.

2. Then there are languages that are big in some ways, but small in syntax. Some of these are easier to extend than so-called "little languages." The reason is usually that their syntax is small, in an isolated place, easy to get at, and meant to be modified. The two best examples for this are Smalltalk and Lisp. Both of these languages satisfy your other requirements and really kick ass for extention. Unlike the above languages, the so-called little-languages, most Smalltalk and Lisp dialects have big, useful libraries. Unlike a big fat language like perl or C++, having a useful library doesn't mean that the language is a huge pain in the ass to extend.

Both Lisp and Smalltalk have a number of implementations. I am a big fan of Squeak Smalltalk, though systems like Little Smalltalk or even GNU Smalltalk maybe worth checking out.

A lot of people here have bad feelings about Lisp-like languages. It's a shame, since Scheme, ISLISP (OpenLisp is a great implementation) and Common Lisp are all *very* powerful languages. You can be quite productive with them once you get over the part about whining about parens. But Lisp may very well be the best option here, there is a long history of people writing custom-syntaxes and language extensions. Look up Common Lisp macros- power almost beyond comprehension, a lot of fun to play with, and with an elegance all its own.

There are examples of people writing a C-like syntaxes for various Scheme implementations. IIRC, Gambit-C (a Scheme to C compiler) comes with one. On Cliki, there are a bunch of other alternative Scheme syntaxes listed.

To, one of the big advantages to using a language in the second category is that syntax extension/modification is done in the language itself, rather than in C. With that comes the familiarity of the language you're creating and the other benefits you gain by using a high-level language like Smalltalk or Common Lisp.

Just some thoughts...

Hi, its a great question you are asking... I think its a big art to teach stuff to children, because one must really understand it to do so in order to know that a simplification is not too simple. Do you know the great books of David Macaulay (like "the way things work")? He has a great approach, explaining everything using mammouths :-) What I would do is: - Ask them, if they have used computers before - Try to explain that a computer is something simple (maybe use an abacus as abstraction) - Show them some nice program to give them somthing to try themselves (Logo or even better Squeak) I think generally its important to be enthusiastic and humourous about the topic! Cheers, Dani

Let them run amuck in a Squeak environment. There are a ton of educational resources over at SqueakLand. It's a multimedia platform and a programming environment.

Holy cow.

It's rare that I see a post of blatant fear mongering lies such as this one.

Tell me, is your tin foil hat working today? Good, because TIN has been off the market in foil form for YEARS in trade for aluminum. You better check what metal it really is! It might not be protecting you the way you think!

Ack the panic!

I only have time to punch a few holes in your nonsensical arguments, so I'll focus on big ones.

Some 6600 people have contracted SARS worldwide, and that _is_ an epidemic

Yes, however SARS takes down otherwise healthy adults, does not seem to have a normal low frequency background infection rate, and is fairly new to modern medicine. It's an epidemic for that reason.

For the paragraph below, I leave it as is with the lies in bold;

AIDS is the best. Its an untreatable/uncurable disease that is supposedly spread by contact with fluids such as blood or sex goo. We've all been told that "AIDS does not discriminate", but it does! In the US, its mostly black gay men (and some IV drug users) that get it, whereas in Africa its black heterosexual women that get it. After 20 years and I'm guessing millions if not billions of dollars in research have not even provided any kind of explanation of AIDS nor has the virus even been isolated.

"untreatable" There are many drugs and treatments available on the market. Ask your doctor! Remember AZT? Maybe interferon boosters? Try going to Google and searching on "aids treatment" for once eh?

"supposedly" AIDS is spread by and present in many fluids; blood, plasma, tears, saliva, seminal fluids, vaginal fluids, feces. All forms of transfer require fluid or moist environments very similar to transmission of sexually transmitted diseases. AIDS is caused by the HIV virus, the HIV virus is spread through close contact. There's no "supposedly" about it, it's a medical fact.

"AIDS does not discriminate" is absolutely true. Once exposed every human has a more or less equal chance once the exposure type and frequency has been accounted for. YES there are various types of populations that one can define that have different infection rates. YES gay men got it more frequently because they were a) trading semen b) doing so anally (causing bleeding during/after sex). The hertrosexual women in Africa are getting it because they have OTHER STDs (many are prostitutes full time or engage in prostitution) that cause open sores in their sexual organs... so when exposed to a male that has it they are much more likely to get an AIDS infection. Same for the IV drug users, trading needles is trading blood. By your reasoning, there would be no relation to your mom walking down the street licking DOG FECES to her getting stomach and intestinal bacterial infections all the time.

"explanation of AIDS". All I have to say is this, there are TENS OF THOUSANDS medical studies that closely or directly link the HIV virus with the collection if symptoms collectively known as "AIDS".

Furthermore, AIDS (so far) is one of the few diseases that could potentially be completely stopped with the combination of not taking stupid risks (inprotected sex, IV needle sharing, turning tricks, etc.) and relatively easy upgrades in the health care processes that would make tissue sharing done only on known AIDS free blood/organs.

If you are worried about the number of black people getting the disease (which your post implies) maybe the black people should wise the fuck up and start heeding the warnings.

You sir, are a paranoid, FUD spreading cunt. What is the address of your "earth is flat" web site? Or are you this guy? Also, whomever modded you as insightful is a MORON.

Yeah, its interesting/amusing what gets classified as an epidemic. AIDS is an epidemic where there are ~ 42 million people living with it (tested positive for the HIV virus, not necessarily sick or whatever), and ~ 3.1 million people die from it annually.

TB is _not_ an epidemic, but it infects an estimated 8.7 million people a year and kills 2 million a year despite widespread control efforts.

Some 6600 people have contracted SARS worldwide, and that _is_ an epidemic.

Influenza (flu) is said to be a seasonally epidemic kinda thing where about 20,000 people die a year, but thats not scary enough for the news (although they pushed it last winter in the US a little). Its not too exciting, because most (90%) of the people that die are over 65. It was a "big epidemic" in 1918 when 500,000 people died from it.

AIDS is the best. Its an untreatable/uncurable disease that is supposedly spread by contact with fluids such as blood or sex goo. We've all been told that "AIDS does not discrimiate", but it does! In the US, its mostly black gay men (and some IV drug users) that get it, whereas in Africa its black heterosexual women that get it. After 20 years and I'm guessing millions if not billions of dollars in research have not even provided any kind of explanation of AIDS nor has the virus even been isolated.

here is some more causes of death info, here is more death info. Its interesting because the last link because it puts wars, random human-to-human violence, drowning, traffic accidents, and diarrhea above AIDS.

Also, I belive that suicide is somewhere in the top 20 causes of death _across all age groups_ in the US, but noone cares about that.

Intercepting message sends and messages-as-data are commonplace in Smalltalk. The syntax of HOM is kind of neat, granted.

P.S. in Smalltalk you'd say 'array select: [:each | each isFroody]'

Notice how you don't have to play tricks with method dispatching? That's because I'm using a block to inject current context into another context (that created by sending #select:), which , IMHO, is much, much nicer than forwarding messages.

see http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/, http://www.squeak.org/, or http://www.ambrai.com/ (for a Mac specific dialect, unfortunately based on Carbon)

Pfft. What liars! On their site they say:

"The Most Portable VM Available"

Pfft. Every platform listed is supported by Squeak Smalltalk, with the exception of the JVM itself, though it makes up for it by supporting many other platforms, including Psion/EPOC32.

Sorry, not really relevant, but I hate it when developers make claims that aren't true. :P

Something like this?

I wonder why we're cursed to continually reinvent concepts and features that are already in Lisp and SmallTalk and have been for decades. Maybe people just can't believe that we can create stuff that cool yet and pretend it doesn't exist.

Actually, Squeak has had fantastic support for pen-based computing for many years now. It can run over any OS, or even over bare hardware (Smalltalk only relies on a small set of primitives, which can and has been implemented in a few days to bare hardware.) Squeak offers not only pen-based control and text recognition, but also a very rich visual programming model (Morphic). There are an amazing array of app's at http://www.squeakland.org/ to play with. Since Squeak is extremely visual, interactive, and open to hacking (in the positive sense that you can inspect and tweak anything) it's very popular in educational settings. It is, of course, open source.

So yes, it'd be a bit geeky trying to do "real work" in Squeak, it has all of the capabilities you're looking for (Morphic is far more powerful than Windows' imaging model, so you can make presentations that go *far* beyond PowerPoint, Squeak has decent handwriting recognition, etc.).

I'm with you; my DSL costs more than the 15 Mbit service mentioned in the article and has a pathetic upstream cap. It wouldn't bug me quite as much if I didn't know it was a totally artificial and arbitrary limit.

I understand ISPs' arguments that Joe Shmoe users shouldn't run web/ftp/shell/mail servers on their $499 WinXP boxes, but come on! Joe Shmoe ain't gonna pay $60 a month for his internet link either! It used to be an ISP would give you your login credentials and a pile of software for everything from ftp to gopher to telnet to usenet. Now you're given an autorun CD that splatters the ISP's logo onto IE, overwrites your prefs and tells you to think of the internet as a TV you can click on.

Perhaps when another killer P2P app comes along, one that doesn't get crushed and forced into selling out *coughnapster* perhaps demand for real, two-way internet throughput will reach a level ISPs will care about. Something like Squeak perhaps, but with that special-something that makes it a killer app.

I suggest P2P as a possible catalyst for upstream equality, but it could be anything really. For a while I thought blogging might do it, but people don't seem to mind not being in total control of their blogs (hell, I even don't) so I guess I'll keep my fingers crossed as each Next Big Thing® crops up. :^)

He should just advocate Free Software or Creative Commons or any number of other good initiatives as good solutions, rather than whining and then waxing mysterious about his vapourware

I suppose though in your book, Alan Kay, who invented the GUI and object-oriented programming, is someone who talks instead of does. In my opinion, however, that is far from being the case.