Re:Des Moines
on
GnomeDex 3.0
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· Score: 2, Insightful
There's a lot of nice bars downtown, too. On one side of Java Joe's is a really comfy (but smokey) English pub called the Royal Mile, and on the other side is The Lift, a smoke-free bar with art on the walls and amazing martinis. Spaghetti Works is often really crowded, but the food is good, and there's often live bands, and Nolen Plaza is a great place to sit and chat with friends.
Des Moines (or Iowa, for that matter) has a totally unjustified reputation as being full of nothing but hicks and uneducated bumpkins. Come to GnomeDex, and you just might change your opinion.
Karel++ is a great starting point. Karel is a simulated robot that exists in a virtual space that can be modified like a Skinner box.
Karel takes simple commands (for example, turnLeft(), moveForward(), or pickUpBall()) and has boolean functions that act as sensers (such as hitWall() or wallOnRight().
When coupled with basic control structures, it's a fun and easy language to learn, and most Karel implementations have a graphic display of Karel moving around its world, so a wall-hugging function like the following isn't purely academic, it can be experienced just by watching.
You can make Karel programs that solve mazes or that clear the room of balls, etc.
It's obviously not a good programming language to do anything of use (although I have seen a Karel half-adder accomplished by picking up and dropping balls), it's a great introduction to OO programming that seems more like a game than education.
It's a reference to the old spy spoof show, Get Smart. Secret Agent Max Smart (Agent 86) had a phone in his shoe. Whenever he and the Chief needed to speak privately, they had to use the Cone of Silence, which was essentially a big semisphere that droped down from the ceiling. Thus, everything in the show was analog.
Back when Half.com was its own entity, I managed to get some foreign CDs at very reasonable prices. I haven't had much experience with it since it merged with eBay, but it's definitely worth a shot. If you're looking for Japanese stuff, it may be worth checking to see if there's a Mitsuwa Marketplace that isn't prohibitively far.
It has also been my experience that the average Mac user is more inclined to pay for something that works than not pay for something that somewhat works.
Well,/.ers aren't, for the most part, average Mac users. It may not look have Apple's look & feel, but I think it's certainly a step in the right direction, and those of us who use Macs and support open-sourced software would do well to either use it if we feel so inclined, or wait until its look & feel improves rather than belittling it.
I graduated as a Math/CS double major from Drake University, where almost all CS majors also got a Math degree because the CS prereqs covered all but 3 of the Math prereqs. It has actually helped me enormously as a programmer to know math: in the past month, I've needed transformation matrices, sine/cosine stuff, and a bunch of other things that, granted, could have been lifted verbatim from Google groups, but it's often faster (and the code is better) if I just do it myself.
Technically, Clarus is a she, not a he. In an interview, the author of Apple's Technote 31 said, "She's a female, as are all cows; males would be referred to as dogbulls, but none exist because there are already bulldogs, and God doesn't like to have naming problems." (Interview here)
Regardless of the degree of difficulty in kludging darwin to run on the POP boards, you're still missing out on the one thing that has set Apple apart in the computer industry: the tight interweaving of hardware and software. The most attractive feature of a mac, the guarantee that your mac stuff will run, is not really available to those who use the POP board.
I can't understand why it excites any of you to be able to by a PowerPC chip from someone other than Apple. My dual processor G4 was reasonably cheap, Apple was friendly, and the package arrived quickly and was ready to go 90 seconds out of the box. Just don't buy an Apple monitor and don't get a ram upgrade (it takes regular PC133). It came out to be something like $2300, quite a bit cheaper than the $3500 for the board, plus (as noted previously), the GeForce *grin*.
There is repository of Infocom walkthroughs at the
Infocom Walkthrough Archive.
I used to maintain it before I went off to college, but I handed it down quite a few years ago.
Additionally, the Underdogs have a company profile posted at the Infocom Profile.
The error rate would be almost nil. Most errors on standard wires are caused by surrounding data inadvertantly manipulating the bits, known as 'bursts'. Light, on the other hand, isn't succeptable to such manipulations. The only error that I can think of that would happen in the fiber optic line would be an error in the process of making the cable, and would manifest itself every single time, instead of in the random way standard errors appear. Granted, there could be all sorts of errors converting data to light and back, but that certainly can't be written off as a fault of the cable. As long as you are able to accurately and quickly convert your data to light and back again, you should see almost no errors at all. Additionally, one could use Hamming code (certainly appropriate for Bell to use), for error correction. Granted, this would slow conversions, but it is the current error-correction on computers anyway.
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There's a lot of nice bars downtown, too. On one side of Java Joe's is a really comfy (but smokey) English pub called the Royal Mile, and on the other side is The Lift, a smoke-free bar with art on the walls and amazing martinis. Spaghetti Works is often really crowded, but the food is good, and there's often live bands, and Nolen Plaza is a great place to sit and chat with friends.
Des Moines (or Iowa, for that matter) has a totally unjustified reputation as being full of nothing but hicks and uneducated bumpkins. Come to GnomeDex, and you just might change your opinion.
Karel takes simple commands (for example, turnLeft(), moveForward(), or pickUpBall()) and has boolean functions that act as sensers (such as hitWall() or wallOnRight().
When coupled with basic control structures, it's a fun and easy language to learn, and most Karel implementations have a graphic display of Karel moving around its world, so a wall-hugging function like the following isn't purely academic, it can be experienced just by watching.
You can make Karel programs that solve mazes or that clear the room of balls, etc. It's obviously not a good programming language to do anything of use (although I have seen a Karel half-adder accomplished by picking up and dropping balls), it's a great introduction to OO programming that seems more like a game than education.I'm a little slow?
It's a reference to the old spy spoof show, Get Smart. Secret Agent Max Smart (Agent 86) had a phone in his shoe. Whenever he and the Chief needed to speak privately, they had to use the Cone of Silence, which was essentially a big semisphere that droped down from the ceiling. Thus, everything in the show was analog.
Cheers!
It has also been my experience that the average Mac user is more inclined to pay for something that works than not pay for something that somewhat works.
/.ers aren't, for the most part, average Mac users. It may not look have Apple's look & feel, but I think it's certainly a step in the right direction, and those of us who use Macs and support open-sourced software would do well to either use it if we feel so inclined, or wait until its look & feel improves rather than belittling it.
Well,
I graduated as a Math/CS double major from Drake University, where almost all CS majors also got a Math degree because the CS prereqs covered all but 3 of the Math prereqs. It has actually helped me enormously as a programmer to know math: in the past month, I've needed transformation matrices, sine/cosine stuff, and a bunch of other things that, granted, could have been lifted verbatim from Google groups, but it's often faster (and the code is better) if I just do it myself.
Technically, Clarus is a she, not a he. In an interview, the author of Apple's Technote 31 said, "She's a female, as are all cows; males would be referred to as dogbulls, but none exist because there are already bulldogs, and God doesn't like to have naming problems." (Interview here)
Could someone host a screenshot? I'd love to see this work, but the java on my browser craps out on me, so I only see an empty grey box.
Regardless of the degree of difficulty in kludging darwin to run on the POP boards, you're still missing out on the one thing that has set Apple apart in the computer industry: the tight interweaving of hardware and software. The most attractive feature of a mac, the guarantee that your mac stuff will run, is not really available to those who use the POP board.
I can't understand why it excites any of you to be able to by a PowerPC chip from someone other than Apple. My dual processor G4 was reasonably cheap, Apple was friendly, and the package arrived quickly and was ready to go 90 seconds out of the box. Just don't buy an Apple monitor and don't get a ram upgrade (it takes regular PC133). It came out to be something like $2300, quite a bit cheaper than the $3500 for the board, plus (as noted previously), the GeForce *grin*.
There is repository of Infocom walkthroughs at the Infocom Walkthrough Archive.
I used to maintain it before I went off to college, but I handed it down quite a few years ago.
Additionally, the Underdogs have a company profile posted at the Infocom Profile.
.... One world, one web, one program - Bill Gates
The error rate would be almost nil. Most errors on standard wires are caused by surrounding data inadvertantly manipulating the bits, known as 'bursts'. Light, on the other hand, isn't succeptable to such manipulations. The only error that I can think of that would happen in the fiber optic line would be an error in the process of making the cable, and would manifest itself every single time, instead of in the random way standard errors appear. Granted, there could be all sorts of errors converting data to light and back, but that certainly can't be written off as a fault of the cable. As long as you are able to accurately and quickly convert your data to light and back again, you should see almost no errors at all.
Additionally, one could use Hamming code (certainly appropriate for Bell to use), for error correction. Granted, this would slow conversions, but it is the current error-correction on computers anyway.