Scratch is awesome. It's designed for little kids, but older kids (and even adults) can do cool stuff with it too. Alice from Carnegie-Mellon is similar in many ways, but is designed for older kids (all the way up through college). Scratch is 2D, Alice is 3D.
Update: Got my Android dev phone, and the SIM card from the prepaid T-Mobile phone works fine (note that several people below pointed out that Sprint is using CDMA, so it will NOT work with that carrier).
Caveat: the phone is set up to require a data plan for activation, which you don't get with the prepaid T-Mobile plans. Fortunately, there's a way around that.:-) (note my comment on replacing the single quotes with the proper characters).
After tweaking the database, setting up the phone to talk to my WiFi network, and plugging in the SIM from the cheap phone, everything seems to be working fine. Obviously I haven't tried everything yet, but I can browse the web, make calls, etc.
Couldn't you just buy an Android dev phone now and swap the SIM out of your Sprint phone?
More money up front, of course, but no contract obligation and you have root access to the phone.
Disclaimer: I haven't received my dev phone yet (it's supposed to arrive today!), so I'm not certain this will work. I'm planning to toss in the SIM card out of a Walmart Special prepaid phone I have hanging around, but that's a T-Mobile unit.
You're ignoring the scenario where the person who gets pwned has access rights to your sensitive information (bank, school, government agency, employer).
Some kind of joint venture might be practical, though. If you could get all the various utilities to cooperate (yeah, I know, good luck with that) you could dig one tunnel for water, sewer, electricity, gas, cable, phone, and package delivery. It'd save a fortune over all those entities having to dig their own trenches (or set up their own poles for above-ground service), and repairs and upgrades could be accomplished without having to dig anything up.
Probably never happen, though.
You could maybe make an argument that this would be a public good like roads and bridges, and fund it with tax money (yeah, good luck with that, too:-)
You do see this shared-tunnel setup in some cities for major distribution lines, but I don't know of anywhere that it's done down to the level of individual house (except in the high Arctic in Alaska, where you have to run water lines through heated tunnels).
The culture has definitely changed. Back in those days, you could drink malt liquor for lunch at work and not cause any comments, other than being congratulated on your taste, savvy, and and thriftiness.
Yeah, it sounds sort of like chroma keying turned on its head. Rather than shooting the actor against a background that's easy to remove, you just paint the parts that you do want to show up with the fluorescent paint. I'd guess that this would make shooting in an ad hoc environment much easier. No need to set up a soundstage with a green screen, just set up the special lighting rig wherever you want.
While I haven't programmed using wxWidgets myself (keep meaning to), I believe the Audacity application that's been mentioned repeatedly in this thread also uses wxWidgets.
It definitely works great on Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows, and looks very polished on all three platforms.
1) Bigger screen than a phone. I read novels on my PDA while waiting in line, on a plane, etc. I don't think I could do that on a phone with any degree of comfort, especially not since (as you say) they're getting smaller all the time.
2) My laptop won't fit in my pocket.
I agree that $650 is way too expensive for a PDA, though.
Yes. Note that almost all existing spaceports are close to the equator (or as close as is practical given national boundaries). The United States launches from Florida. Russia launches from Baikonur in Kazakhstan (not all that far south, but about as far as you can get and still be in the boundaries of the former Soviet Union). The European Space Agency launches from French Guiana in South America.
Hmm.... sounds interesting, but that would only work if the user was actually reading mail from the ISP.
I don't use my ISP email account because I prefer having control of my own mail. Also, all I get on that account is spam (mostly from the ISP itself... no, I *don't* want "Yahoo DSL", thanks:-)).
The users who are most likely to be infected, on the other hand, are also likely to be the ones using Hotmail or something like that.
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Scratch is awesome. It's designed for little kids, but older kids (and even adults) can do cool stuff with it too. Alice from Carnegie-Mellon is similar in many ways, but is designed for older kids (all the way up through college). Scratch is 2D, Alice is 3D.
Update: Got my Android dev phone, and the SIM card from the prepaid T-Mobile phone works fine (note that several people below pointed out that Sprint is using CDMA, so it will NOT work with that carrier).
Caveat: the phone is set up to require a data plan for activation, which you don't get with the prepaid T-Mobile plans. Fortunately, there's a way around that. :-) (note my comment on replacing the single quotes with the proper characters).
After tweaking the database, setting up the phone to talk to my WiFi network, and plugging in the SIM from the cheap phone, everything seems to be working fine. Obviously I haven't tried everything yet, but I can browse the web, make calls, etc.
It looks like they have several models which use SIM cards. For example, this one.
PS. Every single prepaid phone that walmart sells uses CDMA as well, no SIM cards there either.
The one I have was definitely purchased at Walmart, definitely is a T-Mobile unit, and definitely has a SIM card.
Couldn't you just buy an Android dev phone now and swap the SIM out of your Sprint phone?
More money up front, of course, but no contract obligation and you have root access to the phone.
Disclaimer: I haven't received my dev phone yet (it's supposed to arrive today!), so I'm not certain this will work. I'm planning to toss in the SIM card out of a Walmart Special prepaid phone I have hanging around, but that's a T-Mobile unit.
You're ignoring the scenario where the person who gets pwned has access rights to your sensitive information (bank, school, government agency, employer).
+1 on both Scratch and Alice.
They're both a lot of fun for adults to play with, too, even those of us who already know how to program.
Some kind of joint venture might be practical, though. If you could get all the various utilities to cooperate (yeah, I know, good luck with that) you could dig one tunnel for water, sewer, electricity, gas, cable, phone, and package delivery. It'd save a fortune over all those entities having to dig their own trenches (or set up their own poles for above-ground service), and repairs and upgrades could be accomplished without having to dig anything up.
:-)
Probably never happen, though.
You could maybe make an argument that this would be a public good like roads and bridges, and fund it with tax money (yeah, good luck with that, too
You do see this shared-tunnel setup in some cities for major distribution lines, but I don't know of anywhere that it's done down to the level of individual house (except in the high Arctic in Alaska, where you have to run water lines through heated tunnels).
Yep, it would cost a fortune to develop the new technology to make waterproof pipes. :-)
Dude! Where have you been?
(crosses fingers and hopes this doesn't herald the return of hot grits, Natalie Portman trolls, and Jon Katz).
NoScript lets you approve sites on an individual basis.
They should not be given the rights of someone who holds a press card.
Funny, I don't remember seeing anything about "press cards" in the First Amendment.
Critics fear that the poorest countries need food, malaria protection and clean water far more than computers.
'Cause there's no way that you could possibly use one of these things to learn about sustainable agriculture, malaria prevention, or safe drinking water, right?
The culture has definitely changed. Back in those days, you could drink malt liquor for lunch at work and not cause any comments, other than being congratulated on your taste, savvy, and and thriftiness.
Yeah, it sounds sort of like chroma keying turned on its head. Rather than shooting the actor against a background that's easy to remove, you just paint the parts that you do want to show up with the fluorescent paint. I'd guess that this would make shooting in an ad hoc environment much easier. No need to set up a soundstage with a green screen, just set up the special lighting rig wherever you want.
Definitely a clever and newsworthy idea.
I think my favorite ones of all time were Don Knuth finally sells out and Scenes Cut from Jurassic Park.
Thanks for all the laughs, Dave.
You can see a similar phenomenon in these high speed photos of water droplets.
Word docs, etc. open just fine with double-clicking on my Mac.
Look for an app called Start OpenOffice.org that comes with the Mac package. It works great.
While I haven't programmed using wxWidgets myself (keep meaning to), I believe the Audacity application that's been mentioned repeatedly in this thread also uses wxWidgets.
It definitely works great on Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows, and looks very polished on all three platforms.
At least for me, the PDA wins on two counts:
1) Bigger screen than a phone. I read novels on my PDA while waiting in line, on a plane, etc. I don't think I could do that on a phone with any degree of comfort, especially not since (as you say) they're getting smaller all the time.
2) My laptop won't fit in my pocket.
I agree that $650 is way too expensive for a PDA, though.
Yes. Note that almost all existing spaceports are close to the equator (or as close as is practical given national boundaries). The United States launches from Florida. Russia launches from Baikonur in Kazakhstan (not all that far south, but about as far as you can get and still be in the boundaries of the former Soviet Union). The European Space Agency launches from French Guiana in South America.
You could use Runtime.exec() to call grep from Java. A simiilar observation applies for the other languages.
I think the original poster has a point.
Hmm.... sounds interesting, but that would only work if the user was actually reading mail from the ISP.
:-)).
I don't use my ISP email account because I prefer having control of my own mail. Also, all I get on that account is spam (mostly from the ISP itself... no, I *don't* want "Yahoo DSL", thanks
The users who are most likely to be infected, on the other hand, are also likely to be the ones using Hotmail or something like that.
That's an awesome project, all right, but I don't know that it's ready for an award yet.
If they get the speed up to something a bit more reasonable, it'd definitely be a worthy candidate.
These are MUCH brighter than LCDs, too, if I recall correctly.
The article says they've got a 15" prototype.
Maybe we'll finally get a notebook display that you can read in sunlight?