My family used a service like this, called Streamline, for years in the 2000's before they went bust. Streamline installed a garage door keypad opener and even provided a refrigerator in your garage. This gave them access to whatever was in your garage, sure; we never had a single issue. When they went bust they even let us keep the full size refrigerator!
The android platform supports an alternative keyboard called 8pen. It redesigns the interface to optimize for mobile screens. After continual use, i can now type on my mobile screen without even showing letters. Makes it great for confusing any screen watchers in public as well.
I just wanted to thank all of you for your help. This was my first Ask Slashdot, and though I have been a reader for many years, I have never contributed. The trolling in the responses was very minimal (and only offensive in one post, which others didn't even reply to!), and for that I am appreciative, but better yet, there have been some excellent responses and points of discussion made. I tried to respond and help clarify my own position where appropriate, and I wish I could attach a screenshot of all the tabs I opened to pursue your suggestions. I am not sure which one I will settle on as of yet, and this may take a few months of trial and error before I get a sim that I am happy with (or end up hacking my own), but your support has been much valued, thank you! Also, as one last shameless plug, if you are interested in following up on my work in the lab, feel free to head over to my blog at http://jonmcleanpcv.wordpress.com/ where I blog about everything from life in Kenya, to Ubuntu problems in the lab, to some Kiswahili lessons. Thank you again everyone!
I do use a whiteboard, and will continue to do so even if I begin using a simulator. Part of the problem is that my students have NO experience with a computer as is, and so I really want to try and maximize the time they are simply interacting with one. There is too much, "sit and listen and look at the whiteboard," and it's getting to the point where they need to be clicking with the mouse (to practice their mouse skills), and learning at their own pace (to help combat issues we have with language differences). These are also primarily goals of getting software to aid my teaching, but the key is aid and augment, not replace:)
Thanks Paul. I do appreciate the all-angles approach CISCO takes to their products, and you guys do some fantastic work in the developing world, but sadly I am not at a level in the organization to make any type of recommendation this way. Also, to become a CISCO academy is a bit more than what my institution is aiming to do now, which is focus on getting people to type well and be able to troubleshoot and repair basic problems. Now, if there is a way to get the Packet Tracer app for free to use not as an academy, I would love to talk, haha. Cheers!
That is the tricky part about assumptions in the developing world, they don't always hold accurate. I have 24 gorgeous, brand new, Lenovo computers, courtesy of the Chinese government (trying to make trade inroads into Africa), but I have no network. I had a small network set up running a home router and a 24-port switch, purchased using the normal requisition process at my institution (Peace Corps volunteers are strongly encouraged not to use their own money, a point to which I strong adhere), but we lost the switch during a terribly grid-spike that surged through our, "surge protectors." As a result, no network at the moment, and thus the desire for a visual simulator.
Don't confused proprietary and industry-standardized. Yes, pens can inter-operate, but it is not because the inherent nature of a pen is, "open," in a business sense. In fact, some pen designs have patents on them, the essence of proprietary.
What you are talking about are industry-standards, where manufacturers come together and agree upon the best way for them (or at least a specific subset of them) can compete and still make money while not focusing on brand lock-in. As a result you get specific standards, such as lead core sizes or inkwell tube lengths. In the software world, one might make the comparison to open data formats which force software vendors to sell based on product features and usability and support and not just because of data lock-in. Or finally, look at web standards. We have the open Gecko and WebKit engines, but then there is also the closed, proprietary, IE and Opera engines, which all are able to display web-based content in relatively standard and uniform ways.
What you find is that when markets mature, the tools, the long-term products, remain proprietary, while the short term commodity consumables often become standardized.
You make a perfectly good point, and though I make decisions in my own computing life based on principles, I am not morally opposed to proprietary solutions either in my personal life or when making decisions for other computing situations. However, as another commenter pointed out when replying to your post, I am a volunteer working in Kenya. Individuals may take those words for however they like, and this post is not an argument on what we all think those words mean, but the long story short is that for all intents and purposes I cannot purchase software and legally abide by licensing restrictions. Based on that, I try my hardest, when possible, to not infringe on the US interpretation of software law, with notable exceptions including the use of legally-grey MP3 codecs and other media-related software. It is a fine line we walk between paying for what is best and standing by the principle of should we need to pay. Ultimately, the only ones who can answer that are coders, as it is their work being fought over, and much like musicians having split answers on downloading digital music and paying for it, so does the coding camp split. I guess the end argument would be, there are proprietary solutions available, and if cost becomes the hindering factor to using them, then the FOSS world should respond by replicating functionality on their own.
I am not using an RMS certified distro, sorry. I am using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
Kenyan IT is plagued by pirated copies of software floating around everywhere, where the concept of getting any software is easy, as long as you know a guy. Thus, there are actually expectations that the lab will be fully Windows equipped, with Adobe products, Arc/AutoCAD, music-production suites, all because there is no concept of licensing and whatnot.
I co-teach with individuals who group up in this IT environment, and though I am slowly migrating them over to a FOSS environment, there is still a need for a hybrid design so that other teachers can teach with the tools they are comfortable teaching (while taking the time to learn the new tools). As a result, I run a virtualized instance of Windows XP with just enough resources to run Microsoft Office
I must also admit to the shame of using the GStreamer stack, making it possible to play non-free-codec encoded files, such as MP3. In this case, the tactic is to peak interest in computers using something that my Kenyan students are already very interested in: music. Sadly, all music here is distributed on MP3 CDs, so I must be able to accommodate those, or else nobody would come into the lab.
It's a constant battle between practical and principal. Feel free to follow it on my blog: http://jonmcleanpcv.wordpress.com/
Cheers!
I am a currently serving development worker in Kenya (serving in IT work actually) and Kenya is a popular destination for voluntourism vacations due to its beautiful beaches (you do get a break after your hard work) and relatively stability.
However, from an actual development standpoint, this voluntourism is effectively useless. It serves two main purposes: 1) is to create a feel good factor for those people who do decided to work above and 2) is to provide basic labor services for free to organizations. One cannot deny the feel good factor, and it is a truly nice feeling to see smiling childrens' faces and the fruits of your labor, but in actuality there are some problems with this.
First off, the organizations that usually receive voluntourism aid are the ones that usually need it the least. In order to ensure the safety of their tourists, the arranging companies end up picking the safest and most productive development sites, which are also the ones that need it the least. These are the sites that have become so successful that their next stage of success is to finally cut the tether with handouts and free work and evolve into a self-sustaining entity (what the development industry calls sustainable development). By utilizing voluntourists to do work that can be done by locals, the voluntourists are actually promoting non-sustainable work practices, as well as taking potentially paying positions away from other members of the community who could benefit.
In your particular case also, there is very little voluntourism that is oriented towards your professions. My suggestion here is to look for non profits based in your home country, which oftentimes have trips and plans set up where skills can be put to use. for example, I partner with the world computer exchange (http://worldcomputerexchange.org) and just this past july they sent volunteers to Kenya to do IT-related work through their own series of partnerships and contacts. The volunteers were put to hard work and had to pay their own way, but were actually helping implement a plan that need the expert advice and extra helping hands. These are not continuously operating trips, but rather targeted, goal-specific trips.
Ultimately if your goal therefore is to help, donate money. Pick wisely. And don't let the fact that you cannot completely control where money is going affect where you donate. There are some bad examples, for example what used to be the Christian Childrens' Fund had terrible mismanagement, but take for example the Interational Red Cross. If you donate to them, will your specific $5 go to buy a specific pillbox that gets distributed to a specific person? No. But that's ok. Non-profits and NGO's don't operate with profit models guiding their decisions, but that doesn't mean they don't have overheads and administrative costs that NEED to be fulfilled. Many of these are run by full-time staff, and they need to eat to. At least in Kenya, I can assure you that these local NGO workers are not living in the lap of luxury. Though I can't make the same claim about those working for orgs like the UN or USAID, who get paid Western salaries while living in Kenya.
I worked for the non-profit World Computer Exchange (http://worldcomputerexchange.org) and their entire effort is to provide working hardware (not software) to developing nations. They have been successful, a fact which I would attribute to their focusing on education and children's programs. But they do not simply dump machines on nations and then forget them, they also provide support and information on how to deal with e-waste in the developing nation. And though they aren't perfect (who is...?) I feel their efforts are worth noticing.
I am a 4th year CS major at a small liberal arts college in New England, and am a Teaching Assistant for the intro to computer science course, as well as the Data Structures course. This year, the faculty made a key decision to switch from teaching Java in the intro course, to teaching python. Those who believe C should be taught probably consider this even more blasphemous that teaching Java, because at least with java you have to compile, etc.
I disagree however. Computer science is not simply being able to program in different languages, it's being able to understand logic and how computers operate. These concepts need to comprise a foundation long before a student ever needs to worry about pointers and whatnot. The fact of the matter is, a computer is whatever we make of it, and if we can build a system that does not need pointers, that system is no less a computer than a PDP-11 or Eclipse or DeepBlue.
First year students in particular should not have to fight the language to achieve end results. Python provides this functionality, enabling the professors and TA's to introduce even recursion in the first semester course, which would have been unheard of with our previous Java course.
But, like all good liberal arts students, learning is not about the specifics it's about the process and the patterns that we uncover and can be applied to other languages in the field. Once concepts of programming are understood, learning different languages becomes mostly a chore of learning different syntax notation. How quickly did you learn your second language compared to your first? Your first program in your second (or third) language was probably not "Hello World," (unless you are like me and you just wrote it for kicks), but instead was probably a program designed to accomplish a task for which that language was geared. "No, I am not going to write this log parser in C, that would be silly. Hmmmm, I hear Perl is good for that stuff..."
However, the result of computers becoming more powerful, enabling higher levels of abstraction from the hardware, does present different issues in the industry. Computers are becoming utilities, and abstraction allows schools to produce utility programmers, in comfortable utility languages like Java or even python. The industry is creating more and more single points of failure in terms of capability and know-how. Students might become less and less interested in writing interpreters and virtual machines because they no longer appreciate what those programs accomplish (in allowing for abstraction in the first place). Thus the knowledge to do so, to talk intimately with the hardware with languages such as C, will disappear, much like how assembly programmers make up smaller and smaller portions of the market.
But what is the true impact of such a progression. Is there an expanding role for people who can write in C, or are there a finite number of jobs, that as long as they get filled by at lease one competent programmer the industry is safe? Will there always be that university student who is striving to control more and more of his machine, or will all university student's curiosity stop once they can program a bouncing ball in Java? Is my college wrong in attempting to teach "how to think," before we teach "this is where you place the curly bracket,?" These are the questions of our times, and like most things CS, will probably boil down to yet-another-reiligious-war (YARW). But as long as both sides have supporters, I have hope for the industry. It takes all sorts of people to make the world go round.
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My family used a service like this, called Streamline, for years in the 2000's before they went bust. Streamline installed a garage door keypad opener and even provided a refrigerator in your garage. This gave them access to whatever was in your garage, sure; we never had a single issue. When they went bust they even let us keep the full size refrigerator!
The android platform supports an alternative keyboard called 8pen. It redesigns the interface to optimize for mobile screens. After continual use, i can now type on my mobile screen without even showing letters. Makes it great for confusing any screen watchers in public as well.
I just wanted to thank all of you for your help. This was my first Ask Slashdot, and though I have been a reader for many years, I have never contributed. The trolling in the responses was very minimal (and only offensive in one post, which others didn't even reply to!), and for that I am appreciative, but better yet, there have been some excellent responses and points of discussion made. I tried to respond and help clarify my own position where appropriate, and I wish I could attach a screenshot of all the tabs I opened to pursue your suggestions. I am not sure which one I will settle on as of yet, and this may take a few months of trial and error before I get a sim that I am happy with (or end up hacking my own), but your support has been much valued, thank you! Also, as one last shameless plug, if you are interested in following up on my work in the lab, feel free to head over to my blog at http://jonmcleanpcv.wordpress.com/ where I blog about everything from life in Kenya, to Ubuntu problems in the lab, to some Kiswahili lessons. Thank you again everyone!
I do use a whiteboard, and will continue to do so even if I begin using a simulator. Part of the problem is that my students have NO experience with a computer as is, and so I really want to try and maximize the time they are simply interacting with one. There is too much, "sit and listen and look at the whiteboard," and it's getting to the point where they need to be clicking with the mouse (to practice their mouse skills), and learning at their own pace (to help combat issues we have with language differences). These are also primarily goals of getting software to aid my teaching, but the key is aid and augment, not replace :)
Thanks Paul. I do appreciate the all-angles approach CISCO takes to their products, and you guys do some fantastic work in the developing world, but sadly I am not at a level in the organization to make any type of recommendation this way. Also, to become a CISCO academy is a bit more than what my institution is aiming to do now, which is focus on getting people to type well and be able to troubleshoot and repair basic problems. Now, if there is a way to get the Packet Tracer app for free to use not as an academy, I would love to talk, haha. Cheers!
That is the tricky part about assumptions in the developing world, they don't always hold accurate. I have 24 gorgeous, brand new, Lenovo computers, courtesy of the Chinese government (trying to make trade inroads into Africa), but I have no network. I had a small network set up running a home router and a 24-port switch, purchased using the normal requisition process at my institution (Peace Corps volunteers are strongly encouraged not to use their own money, a point to which I strong adhere), but we lost the switch during a terribly grid-spike that surged through our, "surge protectors." As a result, no network at the moment, and thus the desire for a visual simulator.
Don't confused proprietary and industry-standardized. Yes, pens can inter-operate, but it is not because the inherent nature of a pen is, "open," in a business sense. In fact, some pen designs have patents on them, the essence of proprietary. What you are talking about are industry-standards, where manufacturers come together and agree upon the best way for them (or at least a specific subset of them) can compete and still make money while not focusing on brand lock-in. As a result you get specific standards, such as lead core sizes or inkwell tube lengths. In the software world, one might make the comparison to open data formats which force software vendors to sell based on product features and usability and support and not just because of data lock-in. Or finally, look at web standards. We have the open Gecko and WebKit engines, but then there is also the closed, proprietary, IE and Opera engines, which all are able to display web-based content in relatively standard and uniform ways. What you find is that when markets mature, the tools, the long-term products, remain proprietary, while the short term commodity consumables often become standardized.
You make a perfectly good point, and though I make decisions in my own computing life based on principles, I am not morally opposed to proprietary solutions either in my personal life or when making decisions for other computing situations. However, as another commenter pointed out when replying to your post, I am a volunteer working in Kenya. Individuals may take those words for however they like, and this post is not an argument on what we all think those words mean, but the long story short is that for all intents and purposes I cannot purchase software and legally abide by licensing restrictions. Based on that, I try my hardest, when possible, to not infringe on the US interpretation of software law, with notable exceptions including the use of legally-grey MP3 codecs and other media-related software. It is a fine line we walk between paying for what is best and standing by the principle of should we need to pay. Ultimately, the only ones who can answer that are coders, as it is their work being fought over, and much like musicians having split answers on downloading digital music and paying for it, so does the coding camp split. I guess the end argument would be, there are proprietary solutions available, and if cost becomes the hindering factor to using them, then the FOSS world should respond by replicating functionality on their own.
I am not using an RMS certified distro, sorry. I am using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Kenyan IT is plagued by pirated copies of software floating around everywhere, where the concept of getting any software is easy, as long as you know a guy. Thus, there are actually expectations that the lab will be fully Windows equipped, with Adobe products, Arc/AutoCAD, music-production suites, all because there is no concept of licensing and whatnot. I co-teach with individuals who group up in this IT environment, and though I am slowly migrating them over to a FOSS environment, there is still a need for a hybrid design so that other teachers can teach with the tools they are comfortable teaching (while taking the time to learn the new tools). As a result, I run a virtualized instance of Windows XP with just enough resources to run Microsoft Office I must also admit to the shame of using the GStreamer stack, making it possible to play non-free-codec encoded files, such as MP3. In this case, the tactic is to peak interest in computers using something that my Kenyan students are already very interested in: music. Sadly, all music here is distributed on MP3 CDs, so I must be able to accommodate those, or else nobody would come into the lab. It's a constant battle between practical and principal. Feel free to follow it on my blog: http://jonmcleanpcv.wordpress.com/ Cheers!
I am a currently serving development worker in Kenya (serving in IT work actually) and Kenya is a popular destination for voluntourism vacations due to its beautiful beaches (you do get a break after your hard work) and relatively stability.
However, from an actual development standpoint, this voluntourism is effectively useless. It serves two main purposes: 1) is to create a feel good factor for those people who do decided to work above and 2) is to provide basic labor services for free to organizations. One cannot deny the feel good factor, and it is a truly nice feeling to see smiling childrens' faces and the fruits of your labor, but in actuality there are some problems with this.
First off, the organizations that usually receive voluntourism aid are the ones that usually need it the least. In order to ensure the safety of their tourists, the arranging companies end up picking the safest and most productive development sites, which are also the ones that need it the least. These are the sites that have become so successful that their next stage of success is to finally cut the tether with handouts and free work and evolve into a self-sustaining entity (what the development industry calls sustainable development). By utilizing voluntourists to do work that can be done by locals, the voluntourists are actually promoting non-sustainable work practices, as well as taking potentially paying positions away from other members of the community who could benefit.
In your particular case also, there is very little voluntourism that is oriented towards your professions. My suggestion here is to look for non profits based in your home country, which oftentimes have trips and plans set up where skills can be put to use. for example, I partner with the world computer exchange (http://worldcomputerexchange.org) and just this past july they sent volunteers to Kenya to do IT-related work through their own series of partnerships and contacts. The volunteers were put to hard work and had to pay their own way, but were actually helping implement a plan that need the expert advice and extra helping hands. These are not continuously operating trips, but rather targeted, goal-specific trips.
Ultimately if your goal therefore is to help, donate money. Pick wisely. And don't let the fact that you cannot completely control where money is going affect where you donate. There are some bad examples, for example what used to be the Christian Childrens' Fund had terrible mismanagement, but take for example the Interational Red Cross. If you donate to them, will your specific $5 go to buy a specific pillbox that gets distributed to a specific person? No. But that's ok. Non-profits and NGO's don't operate with profit models guiding their decisions, but that doesn't mean they don't have overheads and administrative costs that NEED to be fulfilled. Many of these are run by full-time staff, and they need to eat to. At least in Kenya, I can assure you that these local NGO workers are not living in the lap of luxury. Though I can't make the same claim about those working for orgs like the UN or USAID, who get paid Western salaries while living in Kenya.
I worked for the non-profit World Computer Exchange (http://worldcomputerexchange.org) and their entire effort is to provide working hardware (not software) to developing nations. They have been successful, a fact which I would attribute to their focusing on education and children's programs. But they do not simply dump machines on nations and then forget them, they also provide support and information on how to deal with e-waste in the developing nation. And though they aren't perfect (who is...?) I feel their efforts are worth noticing.
I am a 4th year CS major at a small liberal arts college in New England, and am a Teaching Assistant for the intro to computer science course, as well as the Data Structures course. This year, the faculty made a key decision to switch from teaching Java in the intro course, to teaching python. Those who believe C should be taught probably consider this even more blasphemous that teaching Java, because at least with java you have to compile, etc.
I disagree however. Computer science is not simply being able to program in different languages, it's being able to understand logic and how computers operate. These concepts need to comprise a foundation long before a student ever needs to worry about pointers and whatnot. The fact of the matter is, a computer is whatever we make of it, and if we can build a system that does not need pointers, that system is no less a computer than a PDP-11 or Eclipse or DeepBlue.
First year students in particular should not have to fight the language to achieve end results. Python provides this functionality, enabling the professors and TA's to introduce even recursion in the first semester course, which would have been unheard of with our previous Java course.
But, like all good liberal arts students, learning is not about the specifics it's about the process and the patterns that we uncover and can be applied to other languages in the field. Once concepts of programming are understood, learning different languages becomes mostly a chore of learning different syntax notation. How quickly did you learn your second language compared to your first? Your first program in your second (or third) language was probably not "Hello World," (unless you are like me and you just wrote it for kicks), but instead was probably a program designed to accomplish a task for which that language was geared. "No, I am not going to write this log parser in C, that would be silly. Hmmmm, I hear Perl is good for that stuff..."
However, the result of computers becoming more powerful, enabling higher levels of abstraction from the hardware, does present different issues in the industry. Computers are becoming utilities, and abstraction allows schools to produce utility programmers, in comfortable utility languages like Java or even python. The industry is creating more and more single points of failure in terms of capability and know-how. Students might become less and less interested in writing interpreters and virtual machines because they no longer appreciate what those programs accomplish (in allowing for abstraction in the first place). Thus the knowledge to do so, to talk intimately with the hardware with languages such as C, will disappear, much like how assembly programmers make up smaller and smaller portions of the market.
But what is the true impact of such a progression. Is there an expanding role for people who can write in C, or are there a finite number of jobs, that as long as they get filled by at lease one competent programmer the industry is safe? Will there always be that university student who is striving to control more and more of his machine, or will all university student's curiosity stop once they can program a bouncing ball in Java? Is my college wrong in attempting to teach "how to think," before we teach "this is where you place the curly bracket,?" These are the questions of our times, and like most things CS, will probably boil down to yet-another-reiligious-war (YARW). But as long as both sides have supporters, I have hope for the industry. It takes all sorts of people to make the world go round.