How did that get modded flaimbait? It raises a good point. The boundary between vital and optional OS components is not clear cut at all. It's probably changing. So answer the question.
Definitely python. Here's a few unmentioned-so-far reasons:
Widely used, not obscure,
Great intro to OSS as there are tons of great OSS libraries to do almost everything -- website development, science, games, guis, etc.
I.e. when the kid asks, "how can I do X?", you don't have to say "Learn another programming language."
Legibility of the language streamlines your ability to teach the algorithmic aspects of the code.
Has a command line shell, so you can be teaching them to use it as both a super-calculator as well as a programming language. Makes it easy to get the "Hello, World" stage.
Inferring a compound's behavior from the individual elements is error-prone. Carbon is great and nitrogen is great, but CN, well, not so much.
On the other hand, this is more true with organic compounds (containing carbon).
is the engineering. I recently attended a talk where the speaker presented a theoretical way to completely cloak a large object (i.e. person, car, etc.). It was possible to completely prevent detection within a reasonable range of the visible spectrum. (I don't think it's been published yet, or I'd post a link.) The assumption was that the object was surrounded by a material in which you had complete control of the metric space properties, i.e. the propagation coefficient of light at each point. Now there's a challenge for the engineers...
A really small piece of space debris + reasonable speed + very sensitive satellite equipment in a sensitive orbit = someone seriously ticked. The general goal is to minimize the quantity of space debris, as even a golf ball sized hunk can put most satellites out of commission. Quality is not the issue.
Impossible. Running an emulator on the same exact hardware will never produce faster results under emulation - that is utter BS.
This may be true if cpu cycles are all that matters, but in a full OS there's a lot of things to consider. In XP (And Vista I assume) allocating new memory is abysmally slow relative to linux, and the process threads are pretty heavy so cycling processes takes a lot longer. Page file swapping has been very well tuned. The list goes on.
A friend of mine tried a program to calculate pi to 10^7 digits (I forget which); it took something like 230 seconds under straight windows and 150 under linux/wine.
Quiet about that one -- Microsoft doesn't want anyone to know their secret for implementing the vista kernel. It might give someone a business advantage.
If it's human power, the people are probably not sitting around doing nothing waiting for the occasional captcha to show up on their screens.
In other words, a lot of the 80% not correct probably never got seen by a human.
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How did that get modded flaimbait? It raises a good point. The boundary between vital and optional OS components is not clear cut at all. It's probably changing. So answer the question.
Pull harder, mom. I miss you.
You should get tested.
+1 insightful, assuming we're talking about a virtual world of AI copper thieves...
http://xkcd.com/447/
Inferring a compound's behavior from the individual elements is error-prone. Carbon is great and nitrogen is great, but CN, well, not so much. On the other hand, this is more true with organic compounds (containing carbon).
is the engineering. I recently attended a talk where the speaker presented a theoretical way to completely cloak a large object (i.e. person, car, etc.). It was possible to completely prevent detection within a reasonable range of the visible spectrum. (I don't think it's been published yet, or I'd post a link.) The assumption was that the object was surrounded by a material in which you had complete control of the metric space properties, i.e. the propagation coefficient of light at each point. Now there's a challenge for the engineers...
That would be sweet, the cat may not like it though.
No, but it would be inline with the confusing-the-heck-out-of-life-from-other-planets objective.
Oh, wait, that was regarding intelligent life. My bad.
Better is: cat /bin/bash > /dev/dsp
Blasting these things is as good an idea as beached whale disposal using dynamite.
A really small piece of space debris + reasonable speed + very sensitive satellite equipment in a sensitive orbit = someone seriously ticked. The general goal is to minimize the quantity of space debris, as even a golf ball sized hunk can put most satellites out of commission. Quality is not the issue.
Impossible. Running an emulator on the same exact hardware will never produce faster results under emulation - that is utter BS.
This may be true if cpu cycles are all that matters, but in a full OS there's a lot of things to consider. In XP (And Vista I assume) allocating new memory is abysmally slow relative to linux, and the process threads are pretty heavy so cycling processes takes a lot longer. Page file swapping has been very well tuned. The list goes on.
A friend of mine tried a program to calculate pi to 10^7 digits (I forget which); it took something like 230 seconds under straight windows and 150 under linux/wine.
IIRC, the biggest problem about skype in this case is that its license explicitly forbids commercial use. At least w/ the free version.
Quiet about that one -- Microsoft doesn't want anyone to know their secret for implementing the vista kernel. It might give someone a business advantage.
If it's human power, the people are probably not sitting around doing nothing waiting for the occasional captcha to show up on their screens. In other words, a lot of the 80% not correct probably never got seen by a human.