Rob was my big boss when I worked for freshmeat.net (above scoop, of course). A kind hearted man who took a lot of pride in his work. Rest in peace, Rob.
I'm in Australia, and I've had extensive experience with the service centres around Sydney, because of a G4 tibook that essentially was a lemon. It had its screen replaced twice, motherboard replaced 5+ times, two batteries, and the final straw was the hard drive going. I think the motherboard was being fried somehow and frying other things in the process, but successive replacements didn't fix the problem. Anyway, after about the 5th time dragging it to the service centre in 8 months (never EVER go with Next Byte, Australians, they are the suckiest suck suck suck sucks that ever sucked for service - they never call you back and have absolutely no idea when it comes to isolating the problem; I ended up taking it to Computers Now at Nth Sydney and they were very good about calling me and getting things done quickly) I rang up Apple and talked to a really friendly chick in "Customer Care" who essentially told me that this was bizarre and that she'd get it replaced for me the next time it died. So when it died again a month or so after that, I rang again and am currently waiting for a new laptop to arrive from Singapore. So it can be done! You just have to persist with the services for a while and then discuss the issue with apple - 5+ motherboards and two AU$2.5k screens seems to be the point where they take you seriously - but don't expect the service centre to initiate things, you have to go out and call Apple directly yourselves:-)
Despite this, I'd like to give a good rap to Apple Australia for their ipod service - I very obviously dropped mine once (to the point where it had gravel sticking in the plexiglass) which broke it seriously, and sent it off to be fixed (knowing that I would probably have to foot the costs) - they couriered it away for me at their expense, then couriered me a brand new one with a really apologetic letter saying that they couldn't fix it and were sorry I'd lost all my music. So thumbs up to them for that!:-)
I'd suggest the reason why an owner shouldn't know their PRIVEK is the same reason why many social engineering hacks work very well. If the owner had access to his/her own keys, then a malicious entity could easily craft a method for getting them to give up their keys. Just look at the number of credit card scams and similar things that abound on the 'net today. If I were to call up a person and say that I was from Microsoft, and could they please read me the number that is located in the X folder, many people would quite happily tell me exactly what I wanted to know, because it's a computer thing, and what would they know about computers?
And *that* is the reason behind the restriction of knowledge about the private keys stored in the system.
I totally agree, LPG, I'm another who looks at Halo and says "I want to play too!":-)
I have also been totally addicted to various RPGs (most notably Baldur's Gate II and recently, Knights of the Old Republic (awesome game, how NWN should have been)), but my suggestion would be an online RTS like Warcraft III (even though it hasn't voice-chat, it has type-chat) - that game totally had me hooked. It had an excellent storyline (I've found myself more interested in storylines recently, and with good reason - many games are now focussing on storylines as well as kickarse graphics) and a fantastic online experience - battle.net makes for fun multiplayer experience and you can just sit in the chat channels if you're not up for gaming.
Other than that, my sister (who is not a nerd in the slightest) loves the Yahoo and other similar online games of things like Solitaire and Monopoly. I don't see the appeal myself but she plays online with people every day and loves it.
It seems strange to me that if Apple is on a sneaky sideline "iOffice"-style venture that they would release token parts of it to the world (in the form of.doc support in TextEdit). Why not just do it all at once rather than slowly introduce it? Surely once MS gets their act together they'll just do what they did with IE, and if Apple are caught without a fully working suite they'd be in trouble...
I'll be interested in, if they do get this iOffice suite out, what will happen when the doc format changes. Do you think they will have licensed it out from Microsoft? Will we see Apple's iOffice suite playing the catchup game we see a lot of other Office suites play? I'd say there'll be some sort of licensing deal with Microsoft (such as the one that currently gets them Office) if this goes that way so that Apple can stay in the business game and put up the competition required by Fair Trade laws.
In saying this, however, I quite like MS Office for Mac; it's nice to be able to show Windows users that they won't lose out on much by moving to Mac. The only people I haven't been able to convince so far have been my younger siblings who like to play lots of games.
I think by losing MS Office and not having a workable, well-designed and implemented replacement, Apple will lose out big-time. It makes me wonder, however, that they offer up such a challenge with the rather under-powered TextEdit.
Kudos to Mark Dowd who found this, he's a great guy. He also found that OpenBSD vulnerability (through OpenSSH IIRC) and threw great parties when he was still in Sydney:-)
if it only runs on Windows, please drop the editors a line (from the contact page on freshmeat). We like to keep our database as clean as possible wrt Windows-only projects!
I didn't so much "switch" as fall into OS X's loving embrace.
Having seen the Titanium PowerBook G4s on display in the Apple shops, that drool-worthy stop outside the display window became a regular pausing point on my way home from Uni. The student discount price made it even more attractive, so after a while of saving up the sweet silvery sexiness that is a TiBook was mine.
A Linux user of 4 years, I used to boot into Windows to play games like Baldur's Gate II, knowing that I would be able to combine the excellence and stability that I'd come to take for granted with Linux with the ease of use and hardware integration that Windows offered, but with a much sexier look and feel, and no hideous Start bar, I was hooked instantly.
I tried for a while running rootless X in order to have my favourite Linux apps (XChat for one - available through the rather excellent 'fink'), but soon gave that up because even with the "Aqua-esque" themes, GTK and the WMs I was using just didn't quite make the aesthetic grade. I've since found an XChat-alike (Snak) and either ports of or apps that are similar to the ones I used to use under Linux. Sure, you have to pay for some of them, but I found that I didn't have a problem with this (I'm not really in the FS philosophy camp, preferring the BSD license anyway) and figured that if the programs I used regularly under Linux were shareware I'd probably pay for them too;-) (It's not like they're much, I think the most I've for shareware far has been US$20). There are, of course, plenty of excellent free (and Free, for those who care) apps available for OS X.
However, the best point of OS X is all the excellent bundled software that comes with it. iTunes is simply divine, iPhoto is... man, that program *rocks*. I'd "switch" to OS X from Linux just for that. The inbuilt PDF stuff is also very cool, and the fact that I can run Photoshop and the (surprisingly excellent) MS Office brings OS X a suite of much more stable apps than are available under Linux.
Don't get me started on the *hardware*. The networking is as simple as a very simple thing, wander between WLAN and traditional cables and OS X doesn't miss a beat. Not to mention that the Airport cards are seriously kickarse. Great range (due to the aerial being lined up the screen), and fantastic integration with the OS. Under Linux I'd be fiddling around with ifconfig and routing tables and such - not so under OS X. Turn on Apache with a checkbox, ready to go. FTP? No problem, another checkbox. SSH? Certainly! Check that box too! I hear 10.2 has a seriously nice firewall configuration tool coming with it, I'm looking forward to *that*. The display is something that has to be seen to be believed. Never have I seen such luscious crisp images on a laptop LCD. And the machine is *quiet*. Unless you're doing something graphics-intensive or spinning up the seriously kickarse combo drive (CDRW/CDROM/DVD), it's virtually silent. A fan kicks in when there's some excitement happening, but in my experience it's only when I've been playing games/watching DVDs or using the combo drive a lot. And yes, you *can* use a 3-button mouse.
So where does that leave my trusty desktop Linux box? Acting as a local mail server and backup machine;-) I didn't think it would ever come to that, but I've taken the sweet delicious Apple bait, hook, line, and sinker.
When I heard a coworker of mine in the US talking about this extremely entertaining and intriguing show, I looked through both the local (Sydney) cable and free-to-air TV guides for it and was somewhat disappointed to not see it mentioned anywhere. My coworker very kindly made an mpg of one of the episodes (sorry!) and sent it to me; it was one of the most interesting cooking shows I've ever seen! (It was the Cheesecake ep.).
I was just wondering if there were any plans to make this show a little more global, as I think the rest of the world is missing out!
Thanks for being so entertaining:-)
Theoretically, though, you'd need to have an active exploit in order to discover the vulnerability? I mean, to go to your boss and say, "Hey, look here" sort of thing. Once proof of concept has been displayed, then get into the code and mechanism for it *shrug*
I say kudos to Mark Dowd for his months of work on this, and next time I come round, Mark, bottle of vodka for inducing mass hysteria!;-)
Yes, but they don't *backlight*. Nor do they fit within the GBA itself - I don't want to have to drag out a separate apparatus just to play - the GBA fits in my pocket as it is, and wouldn't if it were larger by way of an external light... I was disappointed there was no backlight when I bought it, but I guess secretly hoped a project like this would come out:-) Especially after seeing projects on modding your mobile phone LEDs and things - it seems people are more likely to pull things apart and put cool lights and stuff in them these days:-)
I'm really looking forward to this - my GBA is virtually unplayable unless I have a strong light directly above me. That rules out trains and buses, where I'm most likely to sit back and play some to while away the hours (so to speak). It also looks fun to install to a certain extent, though it'd probably be good to brush up my soldering skills first!:-) In any case, major kudos to those guys for doing what most people would have just sat back and bitched about... backlighting for the GBA should have been a fairly high priority for Nintendo, what with the prevalence of PDAs and mobile phones, etc, that use this technology. Silly Nintendo. Classy Portable Monopoly!
I am totally shocked by this news. I have read and loved Douglas Adams' novels since I was young... I know that people will be inspired and will love his novels for years to come; he has made a definite mark on this world in a way that many will attempt to emulate, but none will ever be as witty, scathing and fascinating as the original.
I'm a 3rd year student at Sydney University; last year one of our lecturers sent a message to the local ugrad newsgroup saying that he'd written a program that supposedly detected plagiarism. Apparently he then busted about 20 or so people for plagiarism.
One of the people who got caught claimed that the people had "hacked" his ugrad directory... it turned out that he didn't have a clue about UNIX permissions - he'd left his directory world-readable.
This script also apparently checked for things such as "same idea different variable names" which I guess is the first step to avoiding plagiarism that people think of;-)
So I doubt that this story is so "breakthrough" as it seems... although it does seem to have enticed a good deal of conversation:-)
In Sydney, there are three major newspapers (and their Sunday offsprings) - the Sydney Morning Herald, the Daily Telegraph and The Australian. I read the SMH daily (which would have to be the biggest one in Sydney), and all of the usual columnists publish their email addresses at the end of their columns... I think this makes the gap between journalists and the public much narrower, and although I'm sure they receive plenty of really crap email every day, it means that they are more approachable. Maybe the NY Times has a different strategy behind their newsplan - to keep that gap and be like an "ultimate news source" or something. *shrug* I think that they're just behind the times:-)
At uni we learned MIPS asm which was quite easy to handle considering about half the class couldn't really even handle higher order languages... The textbook we used is by David Patterson and John Hennessy (Computer Organisation and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface) and is quite easy to understand. MIPS is much simpler apparently than x86 to learn on, but I'm not really in a position to compare because I've only learned the MIPS:-)
I just finished an assignment on the Crusoe chip for 2nd year Uni at Sydney Uni, and as far as I know, the x86 emulation is essentially software but is pretty tweaked for the x86 instruction set. This isn't to say it's impossible for it to be made able to emulate the PPC, but I think the team would have to completely rewrite their "code morphing" software that handles the x86 emulation; it has a lot of exception handling that is very specific to the architecture - they even had to study how blue screens of death were caused under windows so that these were produced when "necessary" *grin*
I guess what I'm saying is that a lot of work would have to go in to it because of the difference in architecture between the PPC and x86 - it'd be like redoing it for MIPS or something:-)
Ah yes, and me too, in kindy... I remember doing the little martian guy who wandered up and down the screen... but somehow, mine managed to decapitate itself as part of the performance. Ah well, and it was back to Granny's Garden for me then:-) Otherwise, I'd have to agree that Basic is the way to go for young children... However, I found that at uni (after not programming at all since kindy) the Eiffel-like language they teach at Sydney Uni (Blue) was a good teaching language for older people, even if the teaching method wasn't so good for beginners. After that, Java was the next step, and I'll finally get onto a real language next semester when we start C++;-)
I agree completely with grrl22 here about sites like Chickclickers being just another special interest site. I've been browsing the web and using various forms of communications (from email to IRC to ICQ to MOOs etc) and I've not really ever joined/read/signed up for any girly thing except for LinuxChix... and this mainly for the technical discussion. Otherwise I'm not interested in girly sites, although I am in the target demographic for many of them; and I'm certainly not interested in visiting a site called "Chickclickers" on an everyday basis simply because I feel the name lumps all the women out there online into a large stereotypical group. Actually, on that note, I guess something else I object to in the general mass-generalisations of groups of women is the usual naming of the group as 'girls' - which I have always thought to be rather patronising... "Chick" is such a name given by guys to women; I've never called myself a chick except in jest. I wonder why women have accepted this labelling? I'm no feminist, but even this jumps out at me. In fact, the first impression I got when I read the title to this article was that there was some new porn site up... I'm not sure exactly whether that will affect how people, especially women, see the site either...
Otherwise I use a female nick in IRC, and have been bothered a few times by dickheaded guys, but usually I have no problems there... but I can see why women would prefer to remain anonymous... I seem to find channels where there is at least *some* intelligent conversation, and I am treated like an equal, which is all I ask, really. It's a pity that some guys out there can spoil the reputation of so many though, but that is another discussion topic:-)
Overall though, I guess I encourage as many women out there to get on the net, get educated (heh) and meet new people in their own way, according to their own interests... but I guess in the future I'd like to perhaps see a "Boyclickers" site as well:-p -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Liedra ~ www.liedra.net
Slashdot Mirror
Rob was my big boss when I worked for freshmeat.net (above scoop, of course). A kind hearted man who took a lot of pride in his work. Rest in peace, Rob.
I'm in Australia, and I've had extensive experience with the service centres around Sydney, because of a G4 tibook that essentially was a lemon. It had its screen replaced twice, motherboard replaced 5+ times, two batteries, and the final straw was the hard drive going. I think the motherboard was being fried somehow and frying other things in the process, but successive replacements didn't fix the problem. Anyway, after about the 5th time dragging it to the service centre in 8 months (never EVER go with Next Byte, Australians, they are the suckiest suck suck suck sucks that ever sucked for service - they never call you back and have absolutely no idea when it comes to isolating the problem; I ended up taking it to Computers Now at Nth Sydney and they were very good about calling me and getting things done quickly) I rang up Apple and talked to a really friendly chick in "Customer Care" who essentially told me that this was bizarre and that she'd get it replaced for me the next time it died. So when it died again a month or so after that, I rang again and am currently waiting for a new laptop to arrive from Singapore. So it can be done! You just have to persist with the services for a while and then discuss the issue with apple - 5+ motherboards and two AU$2.5k screens seems to be the point where they take you seriously - but don't expect the service centre to initiate things, you have to go out and call Apple directly yourselves :-)
:-)
Despite this, I'd like to give a good rap to Apple Australia for their ipod service - I very obviously dropped mine once (to the point where it had gravel sticking in the plexiglass) which broke it seriously, and sent it off to be fixed (knowing that I would probably have to foot the costs) - they couriered it away for me at their expense, then couriered me a brand new one with a really apologetic letter saying that they couldn't fix it and were sorry I'd lost all my music. So thumbs up to them for that!
I'd suggest the reason why an owner shouldn't know their PRIVEK is the same reason why many social engineering hacks work very well. If the owner had access to his/her own keys, then a malicious entity could easily craft a method for getting them to give up their keys. Just look at the number of credit card scams and similar things that abound on the 'net today. If I were to call up a person and say that I was from Microsoft, and could they please read me the number that is located in the X folder, many people would quite happily tell me exactly what I wanted to know, because it's a computer thing, and what would they know about computers?
And *that* is the reason behind the restriction of knowledge about the private keys stored in the system.
I totally agree, LPG, I'm another who looks at Halo and says "I want to play too!" :-)
I have also been totally addicted to various RPGs (most notably Baldur's Gate II and recently, Knights of the Old Republic (awesome game, how NWN should have been)), but my suggestion would be an online RTS like Warcraft III (even though it hasn't voice-chat, it has type-chat) - that game totally had me hooked. It had an excellent storyline (I've found myself more interested in storylines recently, and with good reason - many games are now focussing on storylines as well as kickarse graphics) and a fantastic online experience - battle.net makes for fun multiplayer experience and you can just sit in the chat channels if you're not up for gaming.
Other than that, my sister (who is not a nerd in the slightest) loves the Yahoo and other similar online games of things like Solitaire and Monopoly. I don't see the appeal myself but she plays online with people every day and loves it.
It seems strange to me that if Apple is on a sneaky sideline "iOffice"-style venture that they would release token parts of it to the world (in the form of .doc support in TextEdit). Why not just do it all at once rather than slowly introduce it? Surely once MS gets their act together they'll just do what they did with IE, and if Apple are caught without a fully working suite they'd be in trouble...
I'll be interested in, if they do get this iOffice suite out, what will happen when the doc format changes. Do you think they will have licensed it out from Microsoft? Will we see Apple's iOffice suite playing the catchup game we see a lot of other Office suites play? I'd say there'll be some sort of licensing deal with Microsoft (such as the one that currently gets them Office) if this goes that way so that Apple can stay in the business game and put up the competition required by Fair Trade laws.
In saying this, however, I quite like MS Office for Mac; it's nice to be able to show Windows users that they won't lose out on much by moving to Mac. The only people I haven't been able to convince so far have been my younger siblings who like to play lots of games.
I think by losing MS Office and not having a workable, well-designed and implemented replacement, Apple will lose out big-time. It makes me wonder, however, that they offer up such a challenge with the rather under-powered TextEdit.
Kudos to Mark Dowd who found this, he's a great guy. He also found that OpenBSD vulnerability (through OpenSSH IIRC) and threw great parties when he was still in Sydney :-)
now I don't need to bring in my dodgy mini-microphone voice recorder thingy :-)
Ssshh, autechre, you're not supposed to let our secret out! I much preferred the OSDN/Apple conspiracy theories! ;-)
- Catie
if it only runs on Windows, please drop the editors a line (from the contact page on freshmeat). We like to keep our database as clean as possible wrt Windows-only projects!
- liedra (liedra at freshmeat dot net)
I didn't so much "switch" as fall into OS X's loving embrace.
;-) (It's not like they're much, I think the most I've for shareware far has been US$20).
... man, that program *rocks*. I'd "switch" to OS X from Linux just for that. The inbuilt PDF stuff is also very cool, and the fact that I can run Photoshop and the (surprisingly excellent) MS Office brings OS X a suite of much more stable apps than are available under Linux.
;-) I didn't think it would ever come to that, but I've taken the sweet delicious Apple bait, hook, line, and sinker.
Having seen the Titanium PowerBook G4s on display in the Apple shops, that drool-worthy stop outside the display window became a regular pausing point on my way home from Uni. The student discount price made it even more attractive, so after a while of saving up the sweet silvery sexiness that is a TiBook was mine.
A Linux user of 4 years, I used to boot into Windows to play games like Baldur's Gate II, knowing that I would be able to combine the excellence and stability that I'd come to take for granted with Linux with the ease of use and hardware integration that Windows offered, but with a much sexier look and feel, and no hideous Start bar, I was hooked instantly.
I tried for a while running rootless X in order to have my favourite Linux apps (XChat for one - available through the rather excellent 'fink'), but soon gave that up because even with the "Aqua-esque" themes, GTK and the WMs I was using just didn't quite make the aesthetic grade. I've since found an XChat-alike (Snak) and either ports of or apps that are similar to the ones I used to use under Linux. Sure, you have to pay for some of them, but I found that I didn't have a problem with this (I'm not really in the FS philosophy camp, preferring the BSD license anyway) and figured that if the programs I used regularly under Linux were shareware I'd probably pay for them too
There are, of course, plenty of excellent free (and Free, for those who care) apps available for OS X.
However, the best point of OS X is all the excellent bundled software that comes with it. iTunes is simply divine, iPhoto is
Don't get me started on the *hardware*. The networking is as simple as a very simple thing, wander between WLAN and traditional cables and OS X doesn't miss a beat. Not to mention that the Airport cards are seriously kickarse. Great range (due to the aerial being lined up the screen), and fantastic integration with the OS. Under Linux I'd be fiddling around with ifconfig and routing tables and such - not so under OS X.
Turn on Apache with a checkbox, ready to go. FTP? No problem, another checkbox. SSH? Certainly! Check that box too! I hear 10.2 has a seriously nice firewall configuration tool coming with it, I'm looking forward to *that*.
The display is something that has to be seen to be believed. Never have I seen such luscious crisp images on a laptop LCD. And the machine is *quiet*. Unless you're doing something graphics-intensive or spinning up the seriously kickarse combo drive (CDRW/CDROM/DVD), it's virtually silent. A fan kicks in when there's some excitement happening, but in my experience it's only when I've been playing games/watching DVDs or using the combo drive a lot.
And yes, you *can* use a 3-button mouse.
So where does that leave my trusty desktop Linux box? Acting as a local mail server and backup machine
When I heard a coworker of mine in the US talking about this extremely entertaining and intriguing show, I looked through both the local (Sydney) cable and free-to-air TV guides for it and was somewhat disappointed to not see it mentioned anywhere. My coworker very kindly made an mpg of one of the episodes (sorry!) and sent it to me; it was one of the most interesting cooking shows I've ever seen! (It was the Cheesecake ep.). :-)
I was just wondering if there were any plans to make this show a little more global, as I think the rest of the world is missing out!
Thanks for being so entertaining
Theoretically, though, you'd need to have an active exploit in order to discover the vulnerability? I mean, to go to your boss and say, "Hey, look here" sort of thing. Once proof of concept has been displayed, then get into the code and mechanism for it *shrug*
;-)
I say kudos to Mark Dowd for his months of work on this, and next time I come round, Mark, bottle of vodka for inducing mass hysteria!
- Liedra
Yes, but they don't *backlight*. Nor do they fit within the GBA itself - I don't want to have to drag out a separate apparatus just to play - the GBA fits in my pocket as it is, and wouldn't if it were larger by way of an external light... I was disappointed there was no backlight when I bought it, but I guess secretly hoped a project like this would come out :-) Especially after seeing projects on modding your mobile phone LEDs and things - it seems people are more likely to pull things apart and put cool lights and stuff in them these days :-)
--
http://liedra.net
I'm really looking forward to this - my GBA is virtually unplayable unless I have a strong light directly above me. That rules out trains and buses, where I'm most likely to sit back and play some to while away the hours (so to speak). It also looks fun to install to a certain extent, though it'd probably be good to brush up my soldering skills first! :-) In any case, major kudos to those guys for doing what most people would have just sat back and bitched about... backlighting for the GBA should have been a fairly high priority for Nintendo, what with the prevalence of PDAs and mobile phones, etc, that use this technology. Silly Nintendo. Classy Portable Monopoly!
--
http://liedra.net
I am totally shocked by this news. I have read and loved Douglas Adams' novels since I was young... I know that people will be inspired and will love his novels for years to come; he has made a definite mark on this world in a way that many will attempt to emulate, but none will ever be as witty, scathing and fascinating as the original.
My thoughts are with his family and friends.
I'm a 3rd year student at Sydney University; last year one of our lecturers sent a message to the local ugrad newsgroup saying that he'd written a program that supposedly detected plagiarism. Apparently he then busted about 20 or so people for plagiarism.
;-)
:-)
One of the people who got caught claimed that the people had "hacked" his ugrad directory... it turned out that he didn't have a clue about UNIX permissions - he'd left his directory world-readable.
This script also apparently checked for things such as "same idea different variable names" which I guess is the first step to avoiding plagiarism that people think of
So I doubt that this story is so "breakthrough" as it seems... although it does seem to have enticed a good deal of conversation
Just thought you'd like to hear my experiences...
- Liedra
In Sydney, there are three major newspapers (and their Sunday offsprings) - the Sydney Morning Herald, the Daily Telegraph and The Australian. :-)
I read the SMH daily (which would have to be the biggest one in Sydney), and all of the usual columnists publish their email addresses at the end of their columns... I think this makes the gap between journalists and the public much narrower, and although I'm sure they receive plenty of really crap email every day, it means that they are more approachable.
Maybe the NY Times has a different strategy behind their newsplan - to keep that gap and be like an "ultimate news source" or something. *shrug* I think that they're just behind the times
At uni we learned MIPS asm which was quite easy to handle considering about half the class couldn't really even handle higher order languages... The textbook we used is by David Patterson and John Hennessy (Computer Organisation and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface) and is quite easy to understand. MIPS is much simpler apparently than x86 to learn on, but I'm not really in a position to compare because I've only learned the MIPS :-)
Hope that helps!
I just finished an assignment on the Crusoe chip for 2nd year Uni at Sydney Uni, and as far as I know, the x86 emulation is essentially software but is pretty tweaked for the x86 instruction set. This isn't to say it's impossible for it to be made able to emulate the PPC, but I think the team would have to completely rewrite their "code morphing" software that handles the x86 emulation; it has a lot of exception handling that is very specific to the architecture - they even had to study how blue screens of death were caused under windows so that these were produced when "necessary" *grin*
:-)
I guess what I'm saying is that a lot of work would have to go in to it because of the difference in architecture between the PPC and x86 - it'd be like redoing it for MIPS or something
Otherwise, I'd have to agree that Basic is the way to go for young children... However, I found that at uni (after not programming at all since kindy) the Eiffel-like language they teach at Sydney Uni (Blue) was a good teaching language for older people, even if the teaching method wasn't so good for beginners.
After that, Java was the next step, and I'll finally get onto a real language next semester when we start C++
---------
www.liedra.net
Actually, on that note, I guess something else I object to in the general mass-generalisations of groups of women is the usual naming of the group as 'girls' - which I have always thought to be rather patronising... "Chick" is such a name given by guys to women; I've never called myself a chick except in jest.
I wonder why women have accepted this labelling? I'm no feminist, but even this jumps out at me.
In fact, the first impression I got when I read the title to this article was that there was some new porn site up... I'm not sure exactly whether that will affect how people, especially women, see the site either...
Otherwise I use a female nick in IRC, and have been bothered a few times by dickheaded guys, but usually I have no problems there... but I can see why women would prefer to remain anonymous... I seem to find channels where there is at least *some* intelligent conversation, and I am treated like an equal, which is all I ask, really. It's a pity that some guys out there can spoil the reputation of so many though, but that is another discussion topic :-)
Overall though, I guess I encourage as many women out there to get on the net, get educated (heh) and meet new people in their own way, according to their own interests... but I guess in the future I'd like to perhaps see a "Boyclickers" site as well :-p -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Liedra ~ www.liedra.net