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Hackable Christmas Presents?
An Anonymous Coward asks what many of you may start thinking about in another month...if you already haven't: "While sitting thru various classes..I started wondering today what I'll drop hints to people with money for what
to get me for Christmas..I want something to hack on and with..but preferably in the sub $300 dollar category. Remember the fun of hacking things like the C64 or
Spectrum or whatever? A fun home machine to hack on.. preferably not a PC (though I know you can get them in that price range) but something a little different. A cheap ARM or Mips based machine or something. Suggestions from anyone?"
PDAs are a lot of fun to hack. The Agenda runs GNU/Linux and is powerful enough for most tasks.
On "http://www.agendacomputing.com/", it's available for $249.
How about you ask for a cure for your greed?
Fuck an XTerm, you have a $300 rackmount Linux server with a 6 GB disk.
Why can't people do both?
Geez; before, it was "clean your plate because there are people starving in China" which lead a whole generation to be fat and guilty about it. Now it's "why are you enjoying christmas when people are out there who have nothing" to spoil the whole holidays. Didn't you know that before 9/11, there were still people who didn't have anything for Christmas? And now, because of 9/11, so many people are focused on the disaster in New York that more poor children who would otherwise receive a donated present for Christmas this year will get nothing?
I don't mean to be a killjoy, and yes, I donated money to the Red Cross for the 9/11 disaster, but that doesn't mean we have to alter our entire existance. I still intend to get my wife Christmas presents, and I still intend to donate a present to a poor child this year.
It would be a pathetic world if people altered their behavior this Christmas and started feeling guilty or vengeful or whatever because of the terrorists. In fact, I would say if people did alter their behavior substantially this Christmas, we would have allowed the terrorists to win.
Most of the old systems were pretty much self-sufficient, so it's just a matter of hooking them up to the TV, plugging them in, and turning them on...no need to load editors, compilers, etc since BASIC was in ROM and ready to go at powerup.
And regarding BASIC, I can hear the sneering already, but think of it as a challenge: what's more likely to be a fun hack, writing C++ for an embedded system (in days when that can mean a Pentium-class CPU, megs of memory, even running Linux) or making a Timex-Sinclair do something cool with only 2K memory and BASIC to work with?