Like it or not, graphics programming is what's going to get kids hooked on coding. It's relatively easy to do (assuming you're somewhat creatively inclined), and kids can start hacking and see immediate results from their changes. After playing with this for a while, kids will tend to get bored with doing just that and they will try and figure out how to do more stuff with the language they've used. Of course, there will always be some kids who find the whole thing immensely boring, but you can't win 'em all...
On the subject of Linux vs. OSX, I believe this article is sadly mistaken on a number of points. These points are enumerated below:
1)"Apple will become the highest-volume vendor of Unix in the world, and it'll bring all that *Nixy power to folks who don't know a thing about command line terminals".
This is very wrong - one of the most powerful things about *nix is the ability to chain together multiple commands in a pipeline to perform some desired task. This is why most *nix commands are very simple and only accomplish a very limited task. The ability to pipeline commands is something that currently can only be had at the command line; I have seen a couple of discussions on/. about possibly extending this concept to a GUI, but as of now, it hasn't been done.
The article talks about *nixy power at the fingertips of OSX users, but if they don't take the time to learn the command line interface, where is the power in that?
2)"it's nowhere near ready for prime time as a consumer operating system. Ever try to print from Linux or add a new hard drive? Forget it."
I have used a number of different flavors of Linux, and I really don't have a favorite. However, the flavor I've had the most experience with is RedHat. As far as the two tasks here are concerned, the article is mistaken about their complexity. If I want to configure my printer to work with RedHat 7, I:
Su to root.
Start up printtool
Click the Add button
Choose the printer make/model
Check the "Fix Stair-stepping text" button
Click OK.
Choose the "Lpd | Restart lpd" menu option
And that's it! It's not very hard to do - yes, there are other ways to do it, and if you're a hardcore *nix user, you can always go into/etc/printcap and write your own printer entries in there. But the way that I've outlined here is easy, contrary to what the article says.
Adding a new hard drive? Forget about it - fdisk to create your partitions (disk druid for the people out there that don't like fdisk's arcane commands) and mkfs to format it. Then you mount it - add the mount point to/etc/fstab basing it on one of the entries already there. This is not rocket science. However, most people can't even install their own hard drives, so this is a moot point as far as the article is concerned.
3) "Mac OS X simply works."
And why is that? Because Apple has a stranglehold on the hardware market for their machines. Sure, it'll work. But you'll pay through the nose to get the box. On the other hand, Linux is free, and Intel hardware is much cheaper than Apple hardware.
On a final note, consider the source of the article: macaddict.com. Need I say more about the bias of the article?
Just my $0.02 on how wildcard substitution works in shells...
In my experience, if you're in a non-empty directory and type "echo *" (no quotes), the output will be a space-separated list of all the files in the current directory (no dotfiles though). However, if you try that in an empty directory (or, more accurately, in a directory that only has dotfiles in it), remarkably enough, the output is a single asterisk.
It seems that the shell will try to substitute files for the * wherever it can, but if it can't, it will pass the * straight through to the command underneath. This also works with other wildcards like the ? or the [] wildcards. FWIW, all these experiments were run under ksh.
This is just another example of the fact that at school, students have _NO_ rights, plain and simple. First amendment? Doesn't apply in school. Freedom of expression? Also doesn't apply.
When I was in high school, we had an incident which involved a student writing a racist poem as a joke. The poem ended up circulating through our email system so that a good portion of the school ended up reading it. If this had happened outside of school, there's no way he could have been touched by the authorities - it's protected under the First Amendment. Since it happened in school, the administration decided to suspend him for 5 days as a result of the incident. (BTW, the whole episode didn't exactly help his chances to be elected class president.) The point is that school officials can do whatever they want as long as they can spin it to look like it's in the best interests of the school and the students there as a whole.
Ever since the Columbine shootings, school officials have been more and more eager to strip away students' rights to ensure the safety of the school as a whole. Granted, that doesn't really apply here (unless they were worried about a riot at the homecoming), but the reasoning behind it is probably to discourage this sort of behavior in the future (which could lead to a breakdown of order in the school).
Where I work, we use a bunch of Linux boxes to serve our website. Currently, all of our content is located in ramdisk, as well as a data cache used by the web applications that we run. I'm currently on a project to evaluate the merits of using hard disk for this as opposed to the ramdisk that we're currently using.
The results of the performance test that I ran were somewhat surprising - it seems the machine with the hard disk actually performed _better_ than the machine with the ramdisk. I'm not a kernel hacker so I don't know exactly why this is the case, but I know that the buffer caching in the kernel really kicks ass (we're running 2.2.10) and I suspect having a ramdisk hampers the kernel's ability to manage the buffer cache (i.e., it takes up space that could be used for buffer cache). Just my $.02...
I currently do not own a DVD player even though many of my friends and co-workers do. I have been asked many times why I haven't purchased one yet and my reply is that "I currently refuse to purchase one because of the strongarm tactics the MPAA is using to control the industry." I try to educate as many people as I can on the events that are going on with the 2600 case and most people seem to agree with me.
The question I have for you is how do you feel about a boycott of the DVD industry until this case comes to a favorable conclusion? Is it worth pursuing, and is it possible that enough interest could be stirred up through an organized effort to really make a difference?
The only point I was trying to make in the article submission was that Sun's reasons for initially deciding to open Solaris up may have been less than noble. Now that they actually have to follow through on their promise, they're finding out that there's a good deal of work involved in getting the source out there, and they might not make the deadline. Personally, I think Sun should never have put a deadline on the release of the code - releasing a code base that large is bound to have some problems or delays...
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Like it or not, graphics programming is what's going to get kids hooked on coding. It's relatively easy to do (assuming you're somewhat creatively inclined), and kids can start hacking and see immediate results from their changes. After playing with this for a while, kids will tend to get bored with doing just that and they will try and figure out how to do more stuff with the language they've used. Of course, there will always be some kids who find the whole thing immensely boring, but you can't win 'em all...
1)"Apple will become the highest-volume vendor of Unix in the world, and it'll bring all that *Nixy power to folks who don't know a thing about command line terminals".
This is very wrong - one of the most powerful things about *nix is the ability to chain together multiple commands in a pipeline to perform some desired task. This is why most *nix commands are very simple and only accomplish a very limited task. The ability to pipeline commands is something that currently can only be had at the command line; I have seen a couple of discussions on
The article talks about *nixy power at the fingertips of OSX users, but if they don't take the time to learn the command line interface, where is the power in that?
2)"it's nowhere near ready for prime time as a consumer operating system. Ever try to print from Linux or add a new hard drive? Forget it."
I have used a number of different flavors of Linux, and I really don't have a favorite. However, the flavor I've had the most experience with is RedHat. As far as the two tasks here are concerned, the article is mistaken about their complexity. If I want to configure my printer to work with RedHat 7, I:
And that's it! It's not very hard to do - yes, there are other ways to do it, and if you're a hardcore *nix user, you can always go into
Adding a new hard drive? Forget about it - fdisk to create your partitions (disk druid for the people out there that don't like fdisk's arcane commands) and mkfs to format it. Then you mount it - add the mount point to
3) "Mac OS X simply works."
And why is that? Because Apple has a stranglehold on the hardware market for their machines. Sure, it'll work. But you'll pay through the nose to get the box. On the other hand, Linux is free, and Intel hardware is much cheaper than Apple hardware.
On a final note, consider the source of the article: macaddict.com. Need I say more about the bias of the article?
-VoR
Just my $0.02 on how wildcard substitution works in shells...
In my experience, if you're in a non-empty directory and type "echo *" (no quotes), the output will be a space-separated list of all the files in the current directory (no dotfiles though). However, if you try that in an empty directory (or, more accurately, in a directory that only has dotfiles in it), remarkably enough, the output is a single asterisk.
It seems that the shell will try to substitute files for the * wherever it can, but if it can't, it will pass the * straight through to the command underneath. This also works with other wildcards like the ? or the [] wildcards. FWIW, all these experiments were run under ksh.
-VoR
This is just another example of the fact that at school, students have _NO_ rights, plain and simple. First amendment? Doesn't apply in school. Freedom of expression? Also doesn't apply.
When I was in high school, we had an incident which involved a student writing a racist poem as a joke. The poem ended up circulating through our email system so that a good portion of the school ended up reading it. If this had happened outside of school, there's no way he could have been touched by the authorities - it's protected under the First Amendment. Since it happened in school, the administration decided to suspend him for 5 days as a result of the incident. (BTW, the whole episode didn't exactly help his chances to be elected class president.) The point is that school officials can do whatever they want as long as they can spin it to look like it's in the best interests of the school and the students there as a whole.
Ever since the Columbine shootings, school officials have been more and more eager to strip away students' rights to ensure the safety of the school as a whole. Granted, that doesn't really apply here (unless they were worried about a riot at the homecoming), but the reasoning behind it is probably to discourage this sort of behavior in the future (which could lead to a breakdown of order in the school).
Where I work, we use a bunch of Linux boxes to serve our website. Currently, all of our content is located in ramdisk, as well as a data cache used by the web applications that we run. I'm currently on a project to evaluate the merits of using hard disk for this as opposed to the ramdisk that we're currently using.
The results of the performance test that I ran were somewhat surprising - it seems the machine with the hard disk actually performed _better_ than the machine with the ramdisk. I'm not a kernel hacker so I don't know exactly why this is the case, but I know that the buffer caching in the kernel really kicks ass (we're running 2.2.10) and I suspect having a ramdisk hampers the kernel's ability to manage the buffer cache (i.e., it takes up space that could be used for buffer cache). Just my $.02...
-VoR
I currently do not own a DVD player even though many of my friends and co-workers do. I have been asked many times why I haven't purchased one yet and my reply is that "I currently refuse to purchase one because of the strongarm tactics the MPAA is using to control the industry." I try to educate as many people as I can on the events that are going on with the 2600 case and most people seem to agree with me.
The question I have for you is how do you feel about a boycott of the DVD industry until this case comes to a favorable conclusion? Is it worth pursuing, and is it possible that enough interest could be stirred up through an organized effort to really make a difference?
The only point I was trying to make in the article submission was that Sun's reasons for initially deciding to open Solaris up may have been less than noble. Now that they actually have to follow through on their promise, they're finding out that there's a good deal of work involved in getting the source out there, and they might not make the deadline. Personally, I think Sun should never have put a deadline on the release of the code - releasing a code base that large is bound to have some problems or delays...
Just my $.02
The HTTP/1.1 error code for "Internal Server Error" is 500, not 50.