What's going to be the long-term effect on these kids? Is this education or advertising?
Or is it evangelism? It is said that when Steve Jobs saw Apple ]['s in a classroom that he realized the great good that could be done with computers for children.
Apple and IBM both competed vigorously in the school space (oh no am I begining to think like a marketdroid shoot me now shoot shoot!), Pascal and BASIC.
It would have to be a very limited set of "Intel" hardware. I can't even get Linux to run on my ASUS mobo w/K6-2, and I've tried SIX of them. LinuxPPC went on my Mac 7600 with no problems.
Folks, the reasons PeeCees are so much cheaper is that they are so much crappier! "PC" stands for "Peice of Crap" after all.
Troll, flame, or mere observation: your pick.
-Toddhisattva
Oh, don't talk to me about "family businesses & family farms". That's been debunked, big time. The effect of the inheritance tax on small and mid-sized family business is virtually nil today. Nil.
Brin is just plain wrong here. To put it in the venacular of the victims of death taxes, "Brin is full of BULLSHIT."
Let's just use an average here of about $1000/acre. A modest spread of 2000 acres is worth two million dollars. The government will take half of that when the owner dies.
Brin is well-known for writing fiction. This is more of his fiction, and should be labelled as such!
If he doesn't think it's fiction, he has his head up his ass so that he's on a steady diet of his own shit.
As the 4th-generation descendant of two ranch families, I know the effects of the death tax in its painful details. I ain't no rich kid whining here, I am a future land steward who will help feed the world. Beat that, Brin, you second-rate Sci-Fi hack!
Many, many, many ranch families have had to sell their ranches just to cover the death taxes on them. Just go to a rural town and ask a few folks.
And don't forget -- these landowners have been paying property taxes all along. Basically, they have to rent their own land. Then they die, and the government takes what's left.
Another frightening aspect of Gorespeak is that he keeps talking about "family farms" never ranches. As anyone slightly familiar with agriculture knows, ranchers are ranchers and farmers are farmers, again visit a rural town for all the information on the difference. It is safe to assume that farmers will get all the goodies and the ranchers, as usual, will work their 18-hour days and keep getting screwed by the taxman.
Bwwhahaha! There really should be a closing italics tag after the quote.
Perhaps, instead of suggesting the use of the "preview" button, the "Post Comment" page should force a preview. I don't know the intricacies of the code, but seems to me forcing a preview would about as easy as adding the suggestion to use it.
And this brings up a point I forgot to mention: there are many times that a tiny bit of thought and effort on a programmer's part can save his users enormous amounts of effort. Ws_ftp, mentioned in the Dilger peice, has an especially crappy UI. The programmer went through the trouble of implementing drag-n-drop for uploading, but not for downloading.
Hmm, I wonder how many of Dilger's student's problems can be traced to using such a wretched, non-standard, shit program like Ws_ftp. I would be very interested in how much better they fared with Fetch.
In such an architecture [Linux, *BSD, and Unix], you can make the GUI as "easy to use" as you want....
Sure you can, after you learn C, the Unix APIs, X-Windows, and GNOME.
I agree that the Dilger article is mostly beef by-product, but he points out that inconsistency is the hobgoblin of inexperienced minds.
The problem is the "hack-uber-alles" mentality, where even users are an afterthought to the glory of the hack. A sado-machismo: if it was hard to write, it should be hard to use.
There is no reason at all that an easy-to-use tool cannot also be powerful. "Pushbutton warfare" is a rather extreme example of this principle:-) But too many sado-macho folk get an ego boost from mastering arcane, inconsistent, poorly-implemented interfaces. It would damage their egos severely to find out that a trained monkey with a Mac can do immediately what it took them a day to figure out on Unix.
Dilger's example of inconsistent file save dialogs is quite illustrative. There are perfectly good, standard, consistent open/save dialogs in Windows and MacOS. If you need a special feature, there are provisions to add it in a consistent manner. But sado-machismo programmers won't RTFHIG (human interface guidelines).
This inconsistency is rampant in games, where nearly every game has its own look-n-feel. Game GUIs rarely resemble their host operating system, even with mundane tasks like dismissing a dialog. Game programmers seem to take pride in reinventing the wheel poorly.
Sadly, the Unix world is years behind Microsoft, and a dozen years behind Macintosh, when it comes to thinking about users. Maybe Eazel will help, but it runs the risk of being shunned by hack-oriented programmers, or forgotten when the next GUI-du-jour comes along.
The fault is not with ease-of-use, the fault is with programmers.
Next week, we'll see if Unix is about to leapfrog Windows and even MacOS 9. Watch/. to see the ignorant hollerings of the sado-machismo progs.
-toddhisattva
ps: this isn't a troll, I can be much more provocative;-) Rather, see it as criticism.
1a. Immediate consciousness of the transcendent or ultimate reality or God.
1b. The experience of such communion as described by mystics.
2. A belief in the existence of realities beyond perceptual or intellectual apprehension that are central to being and directly accessible by subjective experience.
3. Vague, groundless speculation
Zen certainly fits definitions 1 and 2. It does not fit definition 3: it has definite progressive goals and the provable acheivement of those goals
by individuals constitutes a grounding in experience.
And I have no idea how anyone could lump it together with paganism, either!
Steve Jobs is God. His vision and Woz's talent ignited the personal computer revolution. He was cast out of Heaven, and created the mother-of-web, Next. He also brought toys to life. Then, when Heaven saw its darkest hour, he returned like the Prodigal Savior, with Satan himself providing support.
Next week, Steve's youngest brainchild will reach its penultimate incarnation. The two most energetic and visionary threads in computer history, Unix and Apple, will be clasped as never before in a divine father-mother transcendant Great Symbol.
Just call me an OS X-tian!
-Toddhisattva
ps I could go on like this for hours...any requests?
It is unfortunate that in order to use a nice friendly Apple OS, I have to buy one of those expensive and downright ugly i-whatever machines. I would much prefer to run MacOS on a nice beige desktop machine.
The answer is beige paint, my friend. If you are careful of cooling considerations, appropriate protheses can be sculpted from styrofoam to make the iMac all angular and pretty. Add a few fans for that soothing white noise and you got yer dream box, dewd!
In a debate on what OS was easiest to install, an Anonymous Coward said,
When's the last time you had to install MacOS on a blank system?........................yeah, I thought so.
Heh heh: when I deleted LinuxPPC from my system! Mildly impressed with Linux, but it adds no value to my life, and I want the disk space for audio.
I booted from the OS 9 CD and everything was much, much easier than Linux. In the Mac's favor, installing LinuxPPC on Mac is easier than Mandrake, Red Hat, Slack, or the other Linuxes I tried on my PeeCee!
-Toddhisattva, posting from PeeCee going through a Mac doing the IP masquerade and running Falcon 4.0 at the same time and it's been up since Friday.
Well, your degree is too scratchy to use as toilet paper, perhaps you can use it as a blotter.
that evolution is a random changes in organisms that, over time, result in massive variation in organisms.
The mutations are random. The "survival of fittest" is not. This is so basic to evolution that I cannot believe you understand it, you are not qualified to talk about it because you slept through your classes.
But it's likely that the Mac version will actually work before the Linux one, or like an Ethernet card I own, work fine on Mac Linux but not PeeCee. Also, which Linux? Which Unix? Which MacOS for that matter? Really, every other Unix except MacOS X?
Sounds like some salesdroid talking with the usual amount of intelligence that salesdroids have. Salesdroids and other imbeciles are very used to giving the Mac short shrift.
Stop whining. Take the bus. In addition to saving a couple of bucks, it'll help prevent your kids from getting skin cancer.
Cars *help create* ozone. Nitrogen oxides + O2 + sunlight = O3 + (some other stuff you do the chemistry). Tropospheric ozone absorbs UV even more efficiently than stratospheric ozone.
So, drive the most NOxious car you can, as much as you can. Not only will you get somewhere, it'll help prevent your kids from getting skin cancer.
If Apple had allowed clones back in the late 80s, the platform would have degraded and become more like the trouble-prone PeeCee clones: cheap junk. Apple's reputation for ease-of-use would have collapsed under a pile of bad hardware.
As for using the RISC-iest subset of a CISC, this is why RISC was developed: good fast CISC stuff only uses a reduced set and stays away from time hogs.
Similarly, EPIC derives from the fact that good fast RISC code is that which is scheduled well. EPIC moves the scheduling to compile-time, rather than runtime.
the ability to edit digital video isn't much good unless you can get *at* the digital video so what you're really getting is another incentive to buy a Firewire (aka 1394 aka iLink) Mac
You can make any QuickTime movie into a digital video stream with the QuickTime player.
I am entirely sick of having to put up with that crashing pile of useless trash called "Windows Media Player." Real and Quicktime are practically flawless compared to WiMP (n.b. use of "practically").
Some cars do a lot more with a lot less! My 50MHz mobo w/300MHz proc is sometimes 64% faster than my 100MHz mobo w/333MHz proc, and the 100MHz mobo has all kinds of advantages like UDMA. Compiling the same huge wads of code.
MHz has, unfortunately, become marketing crap.
Notice I did not specify which processors I'm using, so that those who know and buy good architectures can gloat without chumming the waters.
Slashdot Mirror
Or is it evangelism? It is said that when Steve Jobs saw Apple ]['s in a classroom that he realized the great good that could be done with computers for children.
Apple and IBM both competed vigorously in the school space (oh no am I begining to think like a marketdroid shoot me now shoot shoot!), Pascal and BASIC.
This is an old game. Welcome to it!
-Todd
I love how ignorant PeeCee folks are -- 256M, really, just how stupid do you have to be to make up stuff like that?
I'm typing from my Linux-unable PeeCee, which has a K6-2 at 333MHz, and it compiles code some 40% slower than my Mac with G3 at 300MHz.
Let's just fire CmdrTaco for starting this price/performance crap for no good reason.
-Toddhisattva
Folks, the reasons PeeCees are so much cheaper is that they are so much crappier! "PC" stands for "Peice of Crap" after all.
Troll, flame, or mere observation: your pick. -Toddhisattva
Oh, don't talk to me about "family businesses & family farms". That's been debunked, big time. The effect of the inheritance tax on small and mid-sized family business is virtually nil today. Nil.
Brin is just plain wrong here. To put it in the venacular of the victims of death taxes, "Brin is full of BULLSHIT."
Let's just use an average here of about $1000/acre. A modest spread of 2000 acres is worth two million dollars. The government will take half of that when the owner dies.
Brin is well-known for writing fiction. This is more of his fiction, and should be labelled as such!
If he doesn't think it's fiction, he has his head up his ass so that he's on a steady diet of his own shit.
As the 4th-generation descendant of two ranch families, I know the effects of the death tax in its painful details. I ain't no rich kid whining here, I am a future land steward who will help feed the world. Beat that, Brin, you second-rate Sci-Fi hack!
Many, many, many ranch families have had to sell their ranches just to cover the death taxes on them. Just go to a rural town and ask a few folks.
And don't forget -- these landowners have been paying property taxes all along. Basically, they have to rent their own land. Then they die, and the government takes what's left.
Another frightening aspect of Gorespeak is that he keeps talking about "family farms" never ranches. As anyone slightly familiar with agriculture knows, ranchers are ranchers and farmers are farmers, again visit a rural town for all the information on the difference. It is safe to assume that farmers will get all the goodies and the ranchers, as usual, will work their 18-hour days and keep getting screwed by the taxman.
DAVID BRIN IS FULL OF BULLSHIT!!!
-Todd Hartmann
When I payed for Mandrake in a box.
more anti-consumer
The beta is not meant for consumers, you idiot.
Besides, this is /. a Linux hotbed. Linux, where consumers are an afterthought.
-toddhisattva
Perhaps, instead of suggesting the use of the "preview" button, the "Post Comment" page should force a preview. I don't know the intricacies of the code, but seems to me forcing a preview would about as easy as adding the suggestion to use it.
And this brings up a point I forgot to mention: there are many times that a tiny bit of thought and effort on a programmer's part can save his users enormous amounts of effort. Ws_ftp, mentioned in the Dilger peice, has an especially crappy UI. The programmer went through the trouble of implementing drag-n-drop for uploading, but not for downloading.
Hmm, I wonder how many of Dilger's student's problems can be traced to using such a wretched, non-standard, shit program like Ws_ftp. I would be very interested in how much better they fared with Fetch.
-toddhisattva
Sure you can, after you learn C, the Unix APIs, X-Windows, and GNOME.
I agree that the Dilger article is mostly beef by-product, but he points out that inconsistency is the hobgoblin of inexperienced minds.
The problem is the "hack-uber-alles" mentality, where even users are an afterthought to the glory of the hack. A sado-machismo: if it was hard to write, it should be hard to use.
There is no reason at all that an easy-to-use tool cannot also be powerful. "Pushbutton warfare" is a rather extreme example of this principle :-) But too many sado-macho folk get an ego boost from mastering arcane, inconsistent, poorly-implemented interfaces. It would damage their egos severely to find out that a trained monkey with a Mac can do immediately what it took them a day to figure out on Unix.
Dilger's example of inconsistent file save dialogs is quite illustrative. There are perfectly good, standard, consistent open/save dialogs in Windows and MacOS. If you need a special feature, there are provisions to add it in a consistent manner. But sado-machismo programmers won't RTFHIG (human interface guidelines).
This inconsistency is rampant in games, where nearly every game has its own look-n-feel. Game GUIs rarely resemble their host operating system, even with mundane tasks like dismissing a dialog. Game programmers seem to take pride in reinventing the wheel poorly.
Sadly, the Unix world is years behind Microsoft, and a dozen years behind Macintosh, when it comes to thinking about users. Maybe Eazel will help, but it runs the risk of being shunned by hack-oriented programmers, or forgotten when the next GUI-du-jour comes along.
The fault is not with ease-of-use, the fault is with programmers.
Next week, we'll see if Unix is about to leapfrog Windows and even MacOS 9. Watch /. to see the ignorant hollerings of the sado-machismo progs.
-toddhisattva
ps: this isn't a troll, I can be much more provocative ;-) Rather, see it as criticism.
mysticism
1a. Immediate consciousness of the transcendent or ultimate reality or God.
1b. The experience of such communion as described by mystics.
2. A belief in the existence of realities beyond perceptual or intellectual apprehension that are central to being and directly accessible by subjective experience.
3. Vague, groundless speculation
Zen certainly fits definitions 1 and 2. It does not fit definition 3: it has definite progressive goals and the provable acheivement of those goals by individuals constitutes a grounding in experience.
And I have no idea how anyone could lump it together with paganism, either!
-toddhisattva
Next week, Steve's youngest brainchild will reach its penultimate incarnation. The two most energetic and visionary threads in computer history, Unix and Apple, will be clasped as never before in a divine father-mother transcendant Great Symbol.
Just call me an OS X-tian!
-Toddhisattva
ps I could go on like this for hours...any requests?
The answer is beige paint, my friend. If you are careful of cooling considerations, appropriate protheses can be sculpted from styrofoam to make the iMac all angular and pretty. Add a few fans for that soothing white noise and you got yer dream box, dewd!
-toddhisattva
When's the last time you had to install MacOS on a blank system?........................yeah, I thought so.
Heh heh: when I deleted LinuxPPC from my system! Mildly impressed with Linux, but it adds no value to my life, and I want the disk space for audio.
I booted from the OS 9 CD and everything was much, much easier than Linux. In the Mac's favor, installing LinuxPPC on Mac is easier than Mandrake, Red Hat, Slack, or the other Linuxes I tried on my PeeCee!
-Toddhisattva, posting from PeeCee going through a Mac doing the IP masquerade and running Falcon 4.0 at the same time and it's been up since Friday.
Just imagine how worthless he'd be without an education. Sounds like this guy just plain sucks.
I agree that higher education needs higher standards, it produces too many of these trained monkeys. But I don't expect perfection.
-Todd
Perhaps NASA should team up with the Survivor producers?
-Todd
Typical of Godwin followers is a complete inability to actually read what is written. -TH
that evolution is a random changes in organisms that, over time, result in massive variation in organisms.
The mutations are random. The "survival of fittest" is not. This is so basic to evolution that I cannot believe you understand it, you are not qualified to talk about it because you slept through your classes.
You are an incompetent with a faked degree.
-Todd Hartmann
Sounds like some salesdroid talking with the usual amount of intelligence that salesdroids have. Salesdroids and other imbeciles are very used to giving the Mac short shrift.
Cars *help create* ozone. Nitrogen oxides + O2 + sunlight = O3 + (some other stuff you do the chemistry). Tropospheric ozone absorbs UV even more efficiently than stratospheric ozone.
So, drive the most NOxious car you can, as much as you can. Not only will you get somewhere, it'll help prevent your kids from getting skin cancer.
-Toddhisattva
I think you mean kneaded.
-Todd
Hindsight isn't always 20/20.
-Todd
Similarly, EPIC derives from the fact that good fast RISC code is that which is scheduled well. EPIC moves the scheduling to compile-time, rather than runtime.
When x86 dies, that's the end of CISC. Yay!
You can make any QuickTime movie into a digital video stream with the QuickTime player.
I am entirely sick of having to put up with that crashing pile of useless trash called "Windows Media Player." Real and Quicktime are practically flawless compared to WiMP (n.b. use of "practically").
MHz has, unfortunately, become marketing crap.
Notice I did not specify which processors I'm using, so that those who know and buy good architectures can gloat without chumming the waters.