Finally! A story pointing this out that Slashdot let slip by. I was starting to think I was the only one who thought "Think Different" was possibly the most untrue and unfitting slogan for Apple. "Think our way, or we'll stop you from thinking different with our next update we force on you."
Microsoft release quite a bit of software as open source as well, they just avoid the term "open source". But that's not the problem, the problem is now when you buy an Apple product Apple is going to do basically everything in their power to prevent you from modifying how it works. That goes beyond the iPhone and iPad as well, OSX is extremely locked down when compared to real OSS operating systems such as Linux or BSD. All they really have open is the things they have to due to the license, such as the kernel. Also, stop being such little bitch fanboy and face reality; this is how things are, Apple is locking down things which if not locked down could lead to much better things.
I'm a software developer, and have done a lot of work in the game and media software industry. You could call me a game developer and that would be accurate, but I've done and still do quite a bit more than that - including hardware (device) development. I've worked a lot with other game developers at many different companies and a lot of the time at the end of the week we end up playing billiards or Mahjong or cards. Not on the computer, not on a game system, with real physical objects. On top of that within the video game making process it's not at all uncommon to make physical representations of things, including drawing out maps, making dioramas, using little figures to represent players, and generally using the physical world as an anchor in the creative process.
If you are so determined to insist perfect virtual editions are just as good as the physical things they represent then that implies to me you do not truly understand their value to begin with. I can't wait to see how sterile and generic your kids turn out, perhaps unable to perceive the richness of the world around them and incapable of imagining with their hands, awkward in confrontation and communication with others. We are shaped by how we play, and learn how to enjoy the world around us by playing with it. Perhaps you didn't do enough of that, and that's why you enjoy the thought of having a bland, flat, streamlined analogue more than having the real physical set of objects.
Actually I'm a software developer, primarily video games and media. I've even done some work for Nintendo, which by the way started out and still continues to make hanafuda (a type of card game). Representing things virtually can often have advantages, but there are inherent advantages to physical advantages to some things which can far outweigh any advantages to be gained through virtualization. Particularly in the case of board games and cards, a large part of playing the game is the communal constructs of how each player understands the rules; and especially in the case of children interaction and organization of physical pieces is a large part of playing these games and efficient manipulation of the pieces is a learned skill. Software however has a pre-defined set of rules which the users can not deviate from, the software handles most of the game so there is little to no need to really learn or understand all the rules, and with no physical pieces a lot is lost in how people interact with the game.
I think you really need to think about what you find enjoyable about playing in general. When you play a video game you are thrust into being the player, your controls generally gave a direct effect on what is going on and the player is confined by the rules of the world which the programmer has set. However, when you were a child you most likely played with toys. Your toys were physical tokens you used to represent a world with constructs and rules you yourself defined. Your interaction with your toys was moving them around inside this world, and when your friends came to play it was a mish-mash of imaginations and physical objects. Board games in particular can be an extension to this for children, so revoking that and turning it into a very controlled set of numbers and images on a screen eliminates a large amount of value. More adult board games like Monopoly you'll note only have a suggested set of rules, the Monopoly rule book has list of rules you *can* use. I don't know about you, but I've played a lot of Monopoly and each time changing and adjusting the rules to the group you are playing with and the time frame you want to play the game in is a very large part of what makes it fun. Not to mention interacting with others and the game verbally and physically at the same time.
So when you say that things change I certainly hope you realize that not all changes are beneficial. Computerized board games are fine in some contexts, but when it comes to playing with others there is an inherent and real value to playing with physical objects together.
I have kids, and we keep a variety of physical toys in the car for them to play with. We do have a TV on the navi and on our phones (Japan) but I can only think of a few occasions the kids watched TV in the car. As for board games, there is no way they would play board games on a tablet when they have DS games. Still, they tend to not bother with the DS in the car.
I have monopoly on my notebook computer and I can put it on my Netwalker Z1 if I wanted to. There's also Monopoly on the DS. I don't need an iPad to achieve what you are suggesting.
What you mean like software! Software is magic! Shit, and here I was playing games with friends and my kids using physical objects, interacting freely and setting our own unique rules each time to make the game more interesting, doing things while we play and talking. But fuck that, I now I can pay a total sum of over $1000 for an iPad and an iPhone and sit at home quietly, playing with people I don't know over the internet on a flat 2d board with pieces I can't actually touch. Oh, but I can multi-touch them, I guess that's better! Hey, maybe I'll just buy two iPhones and an iPad and me and my wife can finally play scrabble without letting each-other make up funny words half way through the game because scrabble is so god damned boring - the game will check our spelling and words against an official dictionary automatically! Or maybe I can have some friends over and we can play cards without actually using cards! You know, playing cards, one pack is $.50. No no no, we'll buy an iPad and all get iPhones with restrictive and expensive 2 year contracts so we'll have spent a combined sum of thousands and thousands of dollars to play with non-tangible cards.
TRRosen, I seriously hope you can pull your head out of your ass long enough to make a physical friend, such that you can play a physical game with them, such that you will realize the same game would be immensly boring and sterile when played on a bunch expensive screens.
Oh, and there is board game software out there already, if you are going to play with something non-physical either way it seems somewhat pointless having the novelty of multitouch and bluetooth so you can clumsily flick letter tiles between screens or try and grab imaginary pieces.
The iPhone OS is completely, 100% capable of full multitasking and uses multithreading extensively.
Yet
Apple has chosen to restrict... applications to run only 1 at a time.
You nullify your own delusional argument with reality. I don't get why Apple fans are so into denying the fact that apple restricts, revokes, and limits the freedoms and abilities of users and developers. Particularly in the case of the iPhone it's easy to point out a myriad of instances in which Apple has done so and each case has been one which revoked the users freedoms and been inhibitive to the development or spread of new technology. Can't put a script interpreter in your code? Well we don't want you circumventing the App store! Can't use VoIP? Our carriers just wouldn't have that. Oh, you opened a terminal and now you can actually do productive things on the phone!? Update to a locked down version or we terminate your service.
I expect to be flamed by a flood of Apple zealots, but just so you all know I won't be reading replies to this post so go nuts guys.
On some points I would agree with you very much, for instance learning how a computer actually computes and implementing your own computations with Assembly. I can read a program as binary, and that's because I understand how a program is actually run and how instructions are built. I can look at a chunk of binary and pick it apart, look up which part corresponds to an Assembler mnemonic and understand which parts are memory addresses etc. Even when I write code in C++, I can envision how that code will end up in binary/asm and often I will take into consideration what kind of hardware that code will be run on. Because of that I was able to write fast 3D engines on low powered hardware, using no more than a single division operation and fixed point, lookup tables, trick multiplcation using shifts, and other things that I would not have realized how that particular hardware worked (no FPU, very fast memory operations and binary operators, and no hardware division so a division operation ended up being a many cycle macro). So yes, knowing hardware and how code is actually built up, stored, executed, etc. is a very important part to not being a generic douchebag "objects are pretty" "I'll just make templates for EVERYTHING" "if it runs slow get a faster computer" programmer.
At the same time using LOGO and "instructional" languages and methods to teach the concepts of programming without actually teaching real practical programming is a bad idea in this era. It's no longer so complex to get sophisticated graphics up on the screen (and I don't mean PyGame, I mean using C/C++ and SFML to get genuine OpenGL code running). And learning limited and older technology is of little benefit. If you must start out with something basic to start grasping concepts then do that, but not LOGO, something you can expand upon and fall back on like Ruby or Python. Ruby for example, while being quite intuitive AND featuring an on-line interpreter (Python does too) so you can try code in real time like LOGO, can also be used to do everything from system scripting to writing real code and applications to web back ends to 3D scientific simulations and more. It's here, now, simple, and practical. LOGO is hard to find, has no practical use, and is so basic that to use it as your basis of the concepts of programming today is an act I can only imagine limiting you.
Programming is a tool. Find out WHAT he wants to make and choose the language (and libraries) that would be best to achieve that. The quicker he can get some gratification and see any spec of what he wants to make come up on the screen the quicker he will want to do more. Once he starts getting into it THEN start getting into the "why" and "how". The key to teaching anyone anything is to 1. Show them the value of the skill. 2. Show them the gratification of using and achieving something with that skill.
As for a "beginner" language, languages that are made just to teach concepts and have limited practicality should be avoided in my opinion. If he can handle learning to program he can handle learning to program in C. Don't discount straight up Assembler either, not on the PC but rather for embedded applications like MicroControllers. Getting an LED to flash on a board is pretty easy and can be done inexpensively and simply if you have the right tools (look into AVR or H8, you can be up and running in under 100USD/10,000JPY). Say he wants to do 3D game programming or simulation; more than the language is the technology - straight OpenGL lets you do things like transformations, rotations, etc. without having to know how to build a matrix or what an affine transformation is, yet if you get more and more into it you can do your own matrixes as you please and introduce things like shaders etc. Libraries like (Free)GLUT will get you up and running demos in no time and samples are plentiful, and once you want more SFML will get you up and building full applications with no nonsense. In Java there is JOGL as well, but getting canvases set up and contexts and blah blah blah is something you may want to do for him at first if you choose JOGL as the underlying concepts are a bit too deep for a beginner.
C scripts are not C, it's just a scripting language that looks like C. You can't actually import normal C libraries and if I recall (I've only used C scripts once) you can't do much in terms of memory operations. On top of that they are scripts, so if they screw up the parser will tell you where thing crashed. Please don't be so critical of something you don't understand, scripts with C like context are nothing new and there are a variety of advantages to using the same syntax between your actual code and your scripting language.
Also, the scripting languages you mentioned are either not easily embeddable or somewhat focused for certain purposes. You should realize simple scripting and embedded scripting can be very different things. Particularly scripting languages like Lua can prove to be quite incredible, offering extremely advanced features (like tables) while still remaining surprisingly quick. Depending on what you are doing Lua can actually allow less capable programmers to write surprisingly complex code to enhance your program - we used it about a half year ago and with our scripts you could get moving objects on the screen in 3 lines, interactivity in 7, and easily an entire interface in less than 100. There are also a variety of scripting languages for actual embedded (as in hardware) applications which focus on being fast and light, but are often equally light on advanced features. I'd like to see you get python running capably on an 8-bit MicroController, or php doing something useful on one....
Two ways that could go: 1. holiday sales hit leading the company to a temporary jump in sales, then an extended period of poor sales ending in purchase of company assets and dissolution by a major toy company. 2. Immediate and total crushing failure.
I'm really not trying to be too negative, the robot itself doesn't seem bad... but they don't really show any of that autonomous navigation they claim and what they do show is an uninteresting looking on-line game and a few remote-control games that have been done before; RC laser tag and RC obstacle course/ball carrying games. I owned a set of laser tag "tanks" as a kid and they were great if you had enough cardboard to make a little battlezone style world in your room, but they were also probably a third the size of these things.
And you determined this how? Did the person who created the image explicitly state that?
And you think it's good for Google to censor images just because you find them offensive? If that's the case I have great news for you! Google has innumerable racist images and sites indexed, but they have a special team of highly trained Internet engineers just waiting for you to e-mail them with a big list of all the things you don't like on the Internet. Upon receipt they will immediately de-list those images and sites, find the people who created the offensive materials, stake them to crosses and light them on fire. They just need you to show them the way, they need you to spend countless hours of your life finding all the things on the Internet you find offensive and compiling detailed lists of them. Go, you haven't a moment to spare master p! Every second you waste is another second billions of young minds are being exposed to offensive materials, you've got to get them all delisted NOW!
1. When someone is censored in a situation where others would feel that censorship was inappropriate, other individuals will mimic the act that was censored to drive a societal point against those who committed the act of censorship. The Internet in particular allows for rapid and anonymous propagation of material, so if you censor one individual and there is really no way to stop or penalize others for committing the same act; then there is no resistance for others ti commit similar acts in opposition or simply out of spite.
2. Things that are forbidden or taboo will appear more attractive to individuals. It's said "forbidden fruit is always sweeter". Particularly to those who have a grudge against some facet of society, their hatred will drive them toward something considered anti-societal. So to make something illegal is also to make it more attractive to those looking for a way to rebel.
Don't forget there are still a lot of sports they could reference. Cricket for example would be particularly good as it could imply either the animal or the sport. Maybe they could start outsourcing their car production and giving the cars sports names that reflect their origin, like Kabaddi or Bandy. Actually Bandy sounds like a somewhat nice name for a car, sporty yet economical, enough pep for the male driver but just cute enough for the female driver. If VW reads this and actually makes a car called the Bandy I demand credit!
I actually had terrible problems with ZFS, a piece of hardware went bad on a ZFS volume distributed over multiple disks, and despite the fact it was supposed to be able to recover from that but instead it decided to just stop working all together. This was about a half year ago, we've now moved back to individual networked disks and one box on the network regularly rsyncs them to a backup-only RAID-5 array off site twice a day. ZFS would be great if it had actually worked, luckily we had all the data on other discs and managed to re-assemble everything and lost maybe max an hour of work.
Most versions of rsync will default to ssh, but if you use the -e flag (rsync -e "rsh") you can set whatever protocol rsynic will support. Rsh being the non-encrypted version of ssh in the example I gave. If I'm not mistaken you can even do vanilla ftp, but I've never personally tried it.
While we are on naming and you've brought up VW, I'd just like to note VW makes some of the worst names for cars possible. Golf? Ok, maybe that's not terrible but I'm not sure if they are trying to reference the game of Golf or what? I'm assuming it is the game because they also have the Polo. Now then, Lupo? That just sounds like an exotic disease. Most of the other names aren't all that bad, but none of them are particularly appealing to me.
I think you are being a bit too vague on what kind of files you are searching for/indexing. We have 5TB of storage that's 70% full, that includes quite a few smaller files/code files, and I've never had an issue with "find -name ". Of course I rarely use that because our files are organized and we have naming standards. Do you have a shared volume full of random files all mashed together? Are you in a college dorm and someone grabbed an external drive and shared it out for everyone to just throw porn and music and movies into and you want to index it so you can find Beastie Boys songs and XXX Blond Anal videos just that much faster?
How about Americans just stop eating crap? Oh wait, your food production companies make it impossible not to. Straight up I don't have a problem with MSG if it's used properly (like with meat or tofu), and it's often used here in Japan. But High Fructose Corn Syrup? That has to be one of the worst food additives ever. Reading an ingredient list on a potato chip package is like chemistry class in America, whereas here the same chips would have a fraction of the ingredients and I'd know what most of them actually are at first glance. Why is America so different?
Fast food in America is out of controll too. I'll just lump pizza in there as well, but in general it seems like there's almost no other choice in the average American town but fast food... unless you want to spend $40 on crummy restaurant food which in general will involve a lot of cheese or grease anyway. Even that Food Network seems to feature insane food items. I haven't seen much of it, but I recall seeing a fat southern woman cooking bacon specifically to extract the grease and use that on something else.
Tonight I'm going for a very fancy meal with some associates of mine (I do this about once every 6 months). We're ging to have 10 courses primarily consisting of fish, shell fish, and vegetables - probably nothing fried. Desert will consist of a variety of rare fruit and perhaps some traditional japanese sweets - nothing super sweet or all that bad for you. I have a feelng most Americans would find the entire meal unapplealing; but I think that's a cultural problem Americans will need to overcome to become healthy. The average American child craves pizza, burgers, nuggets, hot dogs, and macaroni and cheese. The average adult seems to simply prefer adult versions of these things, nuggets turn to fried chicken and macaroni and cheese to fetuchini alfredo (which is an American creation by the way, that is not an Italian dish). Americans are loaded up with so many artificial ingredients that they can't even properly perceive natural flavors. Carrots for example are very high in sugar, they are sweet, but I'm guessing the average American takes in so much HFCS (which is basically not allowed in food here in Japan to begin with) that they can't taste the sweetness. On average, how often does the average American eat fish? How often do they eat fish that isn't fried?
I could keep going on, despite only being in America a short period I found innumerably differences in the American diet to our own, and most of the American way sees extremely unhealthy to me. I also don't think it's the average American who really wants things this way, I think it's the food production companies pushing garbage on the populus and getting them addicted with all sorts of food additives. They really target children a lot as well: Coolaid, soda, even juice explicitly labeled for children would include almost no natural ingredients and would basically just he HFCS and water. Kids meals were terrible as well, a hamburger and fries with apple slices and a coke. Oh yeah those apple slices are really going to make your kid healthy! Perhaps Americans shouldn't be opposing their government trying to make their diets healther, perhaps Americans shouldn't be relying on their government to help them get healthy at all, perhaps they should all just one day stop buying chips and products that have a long list if disgusting chemicals, and just eat fish/meat, vegetables, tofu, start considering cheese a seasoning and not a topping, cut out thick sugary sauces and stop frying things that just don't need to be fried.
I picked "Free on-line educational materials" as well.
Just a rundown of some of the other ideas:
Build real-time, user-reported news service: We already have this, I believe many people call it "news bloging" and there are a variety of index services for it already. Oh, and the regular news is opinionated and one sided (depending on new outlet/reporter) enough
Drive innovation in public transport: That's going to take a lot more money to actually pull off. They argue that many people use methods of public transportation more than 100 years old, but that doesn't mean that newer technology isn't available already and simply hasn't been implemented in a lot of places. Furthermore, depending on location viable solutions would most likely be totally different, so even if they did pull off a "public transportation airship" it sounds doubtful it would be used in population dense areas where public transportation is most needed.
Work toward socially conscious tax policies: in what country? America? Go read the description - dose google have the political power to just implement one of their ideas as they feel? Is the 10^100 money going to just be used on lobbying?
Encourage positive media depictions of engineers and scientists: Wait, since when did we become not cool? I can't immediately recall any negative depictions of scientists in the news other than perhaps people who published fraudulent papers. My 3 year old son watches several cartoons which glorify scientists/engineers and one cartoon that is heavily based on chemistry (Element Hunter). And find one kid who doesn't think robots aren't awesome.
Create real-world issue reporting system: We already have this in Japan, at least where I live. There is a hotline and an online reporting system, and a web page with outstanding issues and when those issues will be attended to. To be honest I very very rarely use the system, and have never actually reported an issue because I have yet to encounter one. This is hands down something that government should do, but I have a feeling most places already do this but there just isn't a pretty AJAX enabled real-time interface with integrated bloging facilities and a tagging system all driven in the cloud. The thing is, if such an interface existed would it really make things better, or would the massive load of user data (complaints) just overload public officials and make the system more of a hindrance?
Out of 150,000 ideas I would have imagined there being much better than this.
I was only pointing out it was great for its day. And it genuinely was, it had a nice smooth interface and many rich features, it was fast, and if I'm not mistaken they chose to not support the blink tag which is an awesome design decision. In case you are interested, even the creator of the blink tag regrets creating it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_element check out his quote: "the worst thing I've ever done for the Internet".
Just in case you were wondering, I use Internet Explorer perhaps once ever two weeks, and even then it's usually only to check some sort of compatibility issue. In its modern form IE is a horrible piece of trash which generally makes life terrible when I have to write something to run on the Internet. I guess I'm lucky I do actual software development, and I can literally bit-bang registers and perform complex memory operations as raw as I please, but still use high level libraries like OpenGL in all in the same application. I have full control of and the capability to make what I want to, without following some obscure set of rules decided on by some bickering international committee of people who wear turtlenecks in the summer, think an 8USD paper cup of shaved ice with burnt coffee grounds, artificial vanilla and high fructose corn syrup (I'm glad I live in a country they don't use that garbage) is "good coffee", and know the unique names and hexadecimal color codes to over 30 varieties of purple. Fuck you W3C, fuck you all.
Flash is just generally terrible. Macromedia decided to make a development system for people who at most perhaps understood some Javascript, so their model is based on weird concepts like frames and putting scripts in objects (objects as in images). Writing a complex application in flash would be an exercise in futility, especially compared Java. As terrible as Java is, a skilled developer can write a significantly better, cleaner, and more technically capable (hardware acceleration etc) in it in less time and have a smaller package. Still, I don't think Java is the answer, but at least it's "better" than flash.
IE 5 was great, but MS making IE5 great and taking the market lead seems to have given them the idea that they could implement their own features all on their own and make everyone conform to their standards, which they are still doing now. The thing is the way Internet explorer implemented a lot of features gave a lot of things that just couldn't be easily done or done at all until HTML5 was actually adopted. The problem there is that HTML 5 took forever. Evolution of the web by its own standards committee has been gruelingly slow and the massive amount of garbage that has come out in-between and the amount of junk included in HTML 5 itself is astounding. Even if you could say some new features submitted are great there is just so much overlapping of features it's hard to tell what is the best way to do anything now. Do you write a site with canvas and hope people using IE will install chrome frame? Do you write two versions of the same site, one using "standard" HTML 5/XML Namespaces/SVG/Canvas and one using whatever Microsoft developed 5 years ago to achieve the same thing but in the Microsoft way? Speaking of SVG, the Adobe SVG plugin for IE can't read modern SVG files and the google SVG to flash translator breaks if you use any other new web technology with it (xlink for example). And don't even get me started on how terrible Flash is, it's just depressing. Java web launch? Has anybody even heard of it? How many general PC users even have the Java plug-in properly installed (I'm betting 3 year old can count that high)? The internet sucks and it sucks in two different directions: the "anything goes and we'll do whatever we want Microsoft direction" and the "we'll do everything you want but we'll fight about how to do it for 5 years, then never actually call the standard finalized so we can just arbitrarily change it and if any browser developers complain we'll just tell them they shouldn't have implemented it if it wasn't finalized" W3C/Gecko/Webkit/Opera direction.
Maybe we should just start over completely. Make a new standard that doesn't rely on the rigid and inflexible concept of tags and use a scripting language and have a standard API. Leave HTML for TEXT formatting, and return it back to a document formatting language, leaving dynamic content to a totally separate system....
Slashdot Mirror
Finally! A story pointing this out that Slashdot let slip by. I was starting to think I was the only one who thought "Think Different" was possibly the most untrue and unfitting slogan for Apple. "Think our way, or we'll stop you from thinking different with our next update we force on you."
Microsoft release quite a bit of software as open source as well, they just avoid the term "open source". But that's not the problem, the problem is now when you buy an Apple product Apple is going to do basically everything in their power to prevent you from modifying how it works. That goes beyond the iPhone and iPad as well, OSX is extremely locked down when compared to real OSS operating systems such as Linux or BSD. All they really have open is the things they have to due to the license, such as the kernel. Also, stop being such little bitch fanboy and face reality; this is how things are, Apple is locking down things which if not locked down could lead to much better things.
I'm a software developer, and have done a lot of work in the game and media software industry. You could call me a game developer and that would be accurate, but I've done and still do quite a bit more than that - including hardware (device) development. I've worked a lot with other game developers at many different companies and a lot of the time at the end of the week we end up playing billiards or Mahjong or cards. Not on the computer, not on a game system, with real physical objects. On top of that within the video game making process it's not at all uncommon to make physical representations of things, including drawing out maps, making dioramas, using little figures to represent players, and generally using the physical world as an anchor in the creative process.
If you are so determined to insist perfect virtual editions are just as good as the physical things they represent then that implies to me you do not truly understand their value to begin with. I can't wait to see how sterile and generic your kids turn out, perhaps unable to perceive the richness of the world around them and incapable of imagining with their hands, awkward in confrontation and communication with others. We are shaped by how we play, and learn how to enjoy the world around us by playing with it. Perhaps you didn't do enough of that, and that's why you enjoy the thought of having a bland, flat, streamlined analogue more than having the real physical set of objects.
Actually I'm a software developer, primarily video games and media. I've even done some work for Nintendo, which by the way started out and still continues to make hanafuda (a type of card game). Representing things virtually can often have advantages, but there are inherent advantages to physical advantages to some things which can far outweigh any advantages to be gained through virtualization. Particularly in the case of board games and cards, a large part of playing the game is the communal constructs of how each player understands the rules; and especially in the case of children interaction and organization of physical pieces is a large part of playing these games and efficient manipulation of the pieces is a learned skill. Software however has a pre-defined set of rules which the users can not deviate from, the software handles most of the game so there is little to no need to really learn or understand all the rules, and with no physical pieces a lot is lost in how people interact with the game.
I think you really need to think about what you find enjoyable about playing in general. When you play a video game you are thrust into being the player, your controls generally gave a direct effect on what is going on and the player is confined by the rules of the world which the programmer has set. However, when you were a child you most likely played with toys. Your toys were physical tokens you used to represent a world with constructs and rules you yourself defined. Your interaction with your toys was moving them around inside this world, and when your friends came to play it was a mish-mash of imaginations and physical objects. Board games in particular can be an extension to this for children, so revoking that and turning it into a very controlled set of numbers and images on a screen eliminates a large amount of value. More adult board games like Monopoly you'll note only have a suggested set of rules, the Monopoly rule book has list of rules you *can* use. I don't know about you, but I've played a lot of Monopoly and each time changing and adjusting the rules to the group you are playing with and the time frame you want to play the game in is a very large part of what makes it fun. Not to mention interacting with others and the game verbally and physically at the same time.
So when you say that things change I certainly hope you realize that not all changes are beneficial. Computerized board games are fine in some contexts, but when it comes to playing with others there is an inherent and real value to playing with physical objects together.
I have kids, and we keep a variety of physical toys in the car for them to play with. We do have a TV on the navi and on our phones (Japan) but I can only think of a few occasions the kids watched TV in the car. As for board games, there is no way they would play board games on a tablet when they have DS games. Still, they tend to not bother with the DS in the car.
I have monopoly on my notebook computer and I can put it on my Netwalker Z1 if I wanted to. There's also Monopoly on the DS. I don't need an iPad to achieve what you are suggesting.
What you mean like software! Software is magic! Shit, and here I was playing games with friends and my kids using physical objects, interacting freely and setting our own unique rules each time to make the game more interesting, doing things while we play and talking. But fuck that, I now I can pay a total sum of over $1000 for an iPad and an iPhone and sit at home quietly, playing with people I don't know over the internet on a flat 2d board with pieces I can't actually touch. Oh, but I can multi-touch them, I guess that's better! Hey, maybe I'll just buy two iPhones and an iPad and me and my wife can finally play scrabble without letting each-other make up funny words half way through the game because scrabble is so god damned boring - the game will check our spelling and words against an official dictionary automatically! Or maybe I can have some friends over and we can play cards without actually using cards! You know, playing cards, one pack is $.50. No no no, we'll buy an iPad and all get iPhones with restrictive and expensive 2 year contracts so we'll have spent a combined sum of thousands and thousands of dollars to play with non-tangible cards.
TRRosen, I seriously hope you can pull your head out of your ass long enough to make a physical friend, such that you can play a physical game with them, such that you will realize the same game would be immensly boring and sterile when played on a bunch expensive screens.
Oh, and there is board game software out there already, if you are going to play with something non-physical either way it seems somewhat pointless having the novelty of multitouch and bluetooth so you can clumsily flick letter tiles between screens or try and grab imaginary pieces.
The iPhone OS is completely, 100% capable of full multitasking and uses multithreading extensively.
Yet
Apple has chosen to restrict ... applications to run only 1 at a time.
You nullify your own delusional argument with reality. I don't get why Apple fans are so into denying the fact that apple restricts, revokes, and limits the freedoms and abilities of users and developers. Particularly in the case of the iPhone it's easy to point out a myriad of instances in which Apple has done so and each case has been one which revoked the users freedoms and been inhibitive to the development or spread of new technology. Can't put a script interpreter in your code? Well we don't want you circumventing the App store! Can't use VoIP? Our carriers just wouldn't have that. Oh, you opened a terminal and now you can actually do productive things on the phone!? Update to a locked down version or we terminate your service.
I expect to be flamed by a flood of Apple zealots, but just so you all know I won't be reading replies to this post so go nuts guys.
On some points I would agree with you very much, for instance learning how a computer actually computes and implementing your own computations with Assembly. I can read a program as binary, and that's because I understand how a program is actually run and how instructions are built. I can look at a chunk of binary and pick it apart, look up which part corresponds to an Assembler mnemonic and understand which parts are memory addresses etc. Even when I write code in C++, I can envision how that code will end up in binary/asm and often I will take into consideration what kind of hardware that code will be run on. Because of that I was able to write fast 3D engines on low powered hardware, using no more than a single division operation and fixed point, lookup tables, trick multiplcation using shifts, and other things that I would not have realized how that particular hardware worked (no FPU, very fast memory operations and binary operators, and no hardware division so a division operation ended up being a many cycle macro). So yes, knowing hardware and how code is actually built up, stored, executed, etc. is a very important part to not being a generic douchebag "objects are pretty" "I'll just make templates for EVERYTHING" "if it runs slow get a faster computer" programmer.
At the same time using LOGO and "instructional" languages and methods to teach the concepts of programming without actually teaching real practical programming is a bad idea in this era. It's no longer so complex to get sophisticated graphics up on the screen (and I don't mean PyGame, I mean using C/C++ and SFML to get genuine OpenGL code running). And learning limited and older technology is of little benefit. If you must start out with something basic to start grasping concepts then do that, but not LOGO, something you can expand upon and fall back on like Ruby or Python. Ruby for example, while being quite intuitive AND featuring an on-line interpreter (Python does too) so you can try code in real time like LOGO, can also be used to do everything from system scripting to writing real code and applications to web back ends to 3D scientific simulations and more. It's here, now, simple, and practical. LOGO is hard to find, has no practical use, and is so basic that to use it as your basis of the concepts of programming today is an act I can only imagine limiting you.
Programming is a tool. Find out WHAT he wants to make and choose the language (and libraries) that would be best to achieve that. The quicker he can get some gratification and see any spec of what he wants to make come up on the screen the quicker he will want to do more. Once he starts getting into it THEN start getting into the "why" and "how". The key to teaching anyone anything is to 1. Show them the value of the skill. 2. Show them the gratification of using and achieving something with that skill.
As for a "beginner" language, languages that are made just to teach concepts and have limited practicality should be avoided in my opinion. If he can handle learning to program he can handle learning to program in C. Don't discount straight up Assembler either, not on the PC but rather for embedded applications like MicroControllers. Getting an LED to flash on a board is pretty easy and can be done inexpensively and simply if you have the right tools (look into AVR or H8, you can be up and running in under 100USD/10,000JPY). Say he wants to do 3D game programming or simulation; more than the language is the technology - straight OpenGL lets you do things like transformations, rotations, etc. without having to know how to build a matrix or what an affine transformation is, yet if you get more and more into it you can do your own matrixes as you please and introduce things like shaders etc. Libraries like (Free)GLUT will get you up and running demos in no time and samples are plentiful, and once you want more SFML will get you up and building full applications with no nonsense. In Java there is JOGL as well, but getting canvases set up and contexts and blah blah blah is something you may want to do for him at first if you choose JOGL as the underlying concepts are a bit too deep for a beginner.
C scripts are not C, it's just a scripting language that looks like C. You can't actually import normal C libraries and if I recall (I've only used C scripts once) you can't do much in terms of memory operations. On top of that they are scripts, so if they screw up the parser will tell you where thing crashed. Please don't be so critical of something you don't understand, scripts with C like context are nothing new and there are a variety of advantages to using the same syntax between your actual code and your scripting language.
Also, the scripting languages you mentioned are either not easily embeddable or somewhat focused for certain purposes. You should realize simple scripting and embedded scripting can be very different things. Particularly scripting languages like Lua can prove to be quite incredible, offering extremely advanced features (like tables) while still remaining surprisingly quick. Depending on what you are doing Lua can actually allow less capable programmers to write surprisingly complex code to enhance your program - we used it about a half year ago and with our scripts you could get moving objects on the screen in 3 lines, interactivity in 7, and easily an entire interface in less than 100. There are also a variety of scripting languages for actual embedded (as in hardware) applications which focus on being fast and light, but are often equally light on advanced features. I'd like to see you get python running capably on an 8-bit MicroController, or php doing something useful on one....
Kojinsha labels the unit as a netbook, it is small and smaller numbers (1GB RAM) also reflect that. They are not trying to compete with Lenovo.
Two ways that could go: 1. holiday sales hit leading the company to a temporary jump in sales, then an extended period of poor sales ending in purchase of company assets and dissolution by a major toy company. 2. Immediate and total crushing failure.
I'm really not trying to be too negative, the robot itself doesn't seem bad... but they don't really show any of that autonomous navigation they claim and what they do show is an uninteresting looking on-line game and a few remote-control games that have been done before; RC laser tag and RC obstacle course/ball carrying games. I owned a set of laser tag "tanks" as a kid and they were great if you had enough cardboard to make a little battlezone style world in your room, but they were also probably a third the size of these things.
And you determined this how? Did the person who created the image explicitly state that?
And you think it's good for Google to censor images just because you find them offensive? If that's the case I have great news for you! Google has innumerable racist images and sites indexed, but they have a special team of highly trained Internet engineers just waiting for you to e-mail them with a big list of all the things you don't like on the Internet. Upon receipt they will immediately de-list those images and sites, find the people who created the offensive materials, stake them to crosses and light them on fire. They just need you to show them the way, they need you to spend countless hours of your life finding all the things on the Internet you find offensive and compiling detailed lists of them. Go, you haven't a moment to spare master p! Every second you waste is another second billions of young minds are being exposed to offensive materials, you've got to get them all delisted NOW!
Two phenomenon here:
1. When someone is censored in a situation where others would feel that censorship was inappropriate, other individuals will mimic the act that was censored to drive a societal point against those who committed the act of censorship. The Internet in particular allows for rapid and anonymous propagation of material, so if you censor one individual and there is really no way to stop or penalize others for committing the same act; then there is no resistance for others ti commit similar acts in opposition or simply out of spite.
2. Things that are forbidden or taboo will appear more attractive to individuals. It's said "forbidden fruit is always sweeter". Particularly to those who have a grudge against some facet of society, their hatred will drive them toward something considered anti-societal. So to make something illegal is also to make it more attractive to those looking for a way to rebel.
Don't forget there are still a lot of sports they could reference. Cricket for example would be particularly good as it could imply either the animal or the sport. Maybe they could start outsourcing their car production and giving the cars sports names that reflect their origin, like Kabaddi or Bandy. Actually Bandy sounds like a somewhat nice name for a car, sporty yet economical, enough pep for the male driver but just cute enough for the female driver. If VW reads this and actually makes a car called the Bandy I demand credit!
I actually had terrible problems with ZFS, a piece of hardware went bad on a ZFS volume distributed over multiple disks, and despite the fact it was supposed to be able to recover from that but instead it decided to just stop working all together. This was about a half year ago, we've now moved back to individual networked disks and one box on the network regularly rsyncs them to a backup-only RAID-5 array off site twice a day. ZFS would be great if it had actually worked, luckily we had all the data on other discs and managed to re-assemble everything and lost maybe max an hour of work.
Most versions of rsync will default to ssh, but if you use the -e flag (rsync -e "rsh") you can set whatever protocol rsynic will support. Rsh being the non-encrypted version of ssh in the example I gave. If I'm not mistaken you can even do vanilla ftp, but I've never personally tried it.
While we are on naming and you've brought up VW, I'd just like to note VW makes some of the worst names for cars possible. Golf? Ok, maybe that's not terrible but I'm not sure if they are trying to reference the game of Golf or what? I'm assuming it is the game because they also have the Polo. Now then, Lupo? That just sounds like an exotic disease. Most of the other names aren't all that bad, but none of them are particularly appealing to me.
I think you are being a bit too vague on what kind of files you are searching for/indexing. We have 5TB of storage that's 70% full, that includes quite a few smaller files/code files, and I've never had an issue with "find -name ". Of course I rarely use that because our files are organized and we have naming standards. Do you have a shared volume full of random files all mashed together? Are you in a college dorm and someone grabbed an external drive and shared it out for everyone to just throw porn and music and movies into and you want to index it so you can find Beastie Boys songs and XXX Blond Anal videos just that much faster?
How about Americans just stop eating crap? Oh wait, your food production companies make it impossible not to. Straight up I don't have a problem with MSG if it's used properly (like with meat or tofu), and it's often used here in Japan. But High Fructose Corn Syrup? That has to be one of the worst food additives ever. Reading an ingredient list on a potato chip package is like chemistry class in America, whereas here the same chips would have a fraction of the ingredients and I'd know what most of them actually are at first glance. Why is America so different?
Fast food in America is out of controll too. I'll just lump pizza in there as well, but in general it seems like there's almost no other choice in the average American town but fast food... unless you want to spend $40 on crummy restaurant food which in general will involve a lot of cheese or grease anyway. Even that Food Network seems to feature insane food items. I haven't seen much of it, but I recall seeing a fat southern woman cooking bacon specifically to extract the grease and use that on something else.
Tonight I'm going for a very fancy meal with some associates of mine (I do this about once every 6 months). We're ging to have 10 courses primarily consisting of fish, shell fish, and vegetables - probably nothing fried. Desert will consist of a variety of rare fruit and perhaps some traditional japanese sweets - nothing super sweet or all that bad for you. I have a feelng most Americans would find the entire meal unapplealing; but I think that's a cultural problem Americans will need to overcome to become healthy. The average American child craves pizza, burgers, nuggets, hot dogs, and macaroni and cheese. The average adult seems to simply prefer adult versions of these things, nuggets turn to fried chicken and macaroni and cheese to fetuchini alfredo (which is an American creation by the way, that is not an Italian dish). Americans are loaded up with so many artificial ingredients that they can't even properly perceive natural flavors. Carrots for example are very high in sugar, they are sweet, but I'm guessing the average American takes in so much HFCS (which is basically not allowed in food here in Japan to begin with) that they can't taste the sweetness. On average, how often does the average American eat fish? How often do they eat fish that isn't fried?
I could keep going on, despite only being in America a short period I found innumerably differences in the American diet to our own, and most of the American way sees extremely unhealthy to me. I also don't think it's the average American who really wants things this way, I think it's the food production companies pushing garbage on the populus and getting them addicted with all sorts of food additives. They really target children a lot as well: Coolaid, soda, even juice explicitly labeled for children would include almost no natural ingredients and would basically just he HFCS and water. Kids meals were terrible as well, a hamburger and fries with apple slices and a coke. Oh yeah those apple slices are really going to make your kid healthy! Perhaps Americans shouldn't be opposing their government trying to make their diets healther, perhaps Americans shouldn't be relying on their government to help them get healthy at all, perhaps they should all just one day stop buying chips and products that have a long list if disgusting chemicals, and just eat fish/meat, vegetables, tofu, start considering cheese a seasoning and not a topping, cut out thick sugary sauces and stop frying things that just don't need to be fried.
I picked "Free on-line educational materials" as well.
Just a rundown of some of the other ideas:
Build real-time, user-reported news service: We already have this, I believe many people call it "news bloging" and there are a variety of index services for it already. Oh, and the regular news is opinionated and one sided (depending on new outlet/reporter) enough
Drive innovation in public transport: That's going to take a lot more money to actually pull off. They argue that many people use methods of public transportation more than 100 years old, but that doesn't mean that newer technology isn't available already and simply hasn't been implemented in a lot of places. Furthermore, depending on location viable solutions would most likely be totally different, so even if they did pull off a "public transportation airship" it sounds doubtful it would be used in population dense areas where public transportation is most needed.
Work toward socially conscious tax policies: in what country? America? Go read the description - dose google have the political power to just implement one of their ideas as they feel? Is the 10^100 money going to just be used on lobbying?
Encourage positive media depictions of engineers and scientists: Wait, since when did we become not cool? I can't immediately recall any negative depictions of scientists in the news other than perhaps people who published fraudulent papers. My 3 year old son watches several cartoons which glorify scientists/engineers and one cartoon that is heavily based on chemistry (Element Hunter). And find one kid who doesn't think robots aren't awesome.
Create real-world issue reporting system: We already have this in Japan, at least where I live. There is a hotline and an online reporting system, and a web page with outstanding issues and when those issues will be attended to. To be honest I very very rarely use the system, and have never actually reported an issue because I have yet to encounter one. This is hands down something that government should do, but I have a feeling most places already do this but there just isn't a pretty AJAX enabled real-time interface with integrated bloging facilities and a tagging system all driven in the cloud. The thing is, if such an interface existed would it really make things better, or would the massive load of user data (complaints) just overload public officials and make the system more of a hindrance?
Out of 150,000 ideas I would have imagined there being much better than this.
I was only pointing out it was great for its day. And it genuinely was, it had a nice smooth interface and many rich features, it was fast, and if I'm not mistaken they chose to not support the blink tag which is an awesome design decision. In case you are interested, even the creator of the blink tag regrets creating it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_element check out his quote: "the worst thing I've ever done for the Internet".
Just in case you were wondering, I use Internet Explorer perhaps once ever two weeks, and even then it's usually only to check some sort of compatibility issue. In its modern form IE is a horrible piece of trash which generally makes life terrible when I have to write something to run on the Internet. I guess I'm lucky I do actual software development, and I can literally bit-bang registers and perform complex memory operations as raw as I please, but still use high level libraries like OpenGL in all in the same application. I have full control of and the capability to make what I want to, without following some obscure set of rules decided on by some bickering international committee of people who wear turtlenecks in the summer, think an 8USD paper cup of shaved ice with burnt coffee grounds, artificial vanilla and high fructose corn syrup (I'm glad I live in a country they don't use that garbage) is "good coffee", and know the unique names and hexadecimal color codes to over 30 varieties of purple. Fuck you W3C, fuck you all.
Flash is just generally terrible. Macromedia decided to make a development system for people who at most perhaps understood some Javascript, so their model is based on weird concepts like frames and putting scripts in objects (objects as in images). Writing a complex application in flash would be an exercise in futility, especially compared Java. As terrible as Java is, a skilled developer can write a significantly better, cleaner, and more technically capable (hardware acceleration etc) in it in less time and have a smaller package. Still, I don't think Java is the answer, but at least it's "better" than flash.
IE 5 was great, but MS making IE5 great and taking the market lead seems to have given them the idea that they could implement their own features all on their own and make everyone conform to their standards, which they are still doing now. The thing is the way Internet explorer implemented a lot of features gave a lot of things that just couldn't be easily done or done at all until HTML5 was actually adopted. The problem there is that HTML 5 took forever. Evolution of the web by its own standards committee has been gruelingly slow and the massive amount of garbage that has come out in-between and the amount of junk included in HTML 5 itself is astounding. Even if you could say some new features submitted are great there is just so much overlapping of features it's hard to tell what is the best way to do anything now. Do you write a site with canvas and hope people using IE will install chrome frame? Do you write two versions of the same site, one using "standard" HTML 5/XML Namespaces/SVG/Canvas and one using whatever Microsoft developed 5 years ago to achieve the same thing but in the Microsoft way? Speaking of SVG, the Adobe SVG plugin for IE can't read modern SVG files and the google SVG to flash translator breaks if you use any other new web technology with it (xlink for example). And don't even get me started on how terrible Flash is, it's just depressing. Java web launch? Has anybody even heard of it? How many general PC users even have the Java plug-in properly installed (I'm betting 3 year old can count that high)? The internet sucks and it sucks in two different directions: the "anything goes and we'll do whatever we want Microsoft direction" and the "we'll do everything you want but we'll fight about how to do it for 5 years, then never actually call the standard finalized so we can just arbitrarily change it and if any browser developers complain we'll just tell them they shouldn't have implemented it if it wasn't finalized" W3C/Gecko/Webkit/Opera direction.
Maybe we should just start over completely. Make a new standard that doesn't rely on the rigid and inflexible concept of tags and use a scripting language and have a standard API. Leave HTML for TEXT formatting, and return it back to a document formatting language, leaving dynamic content to a totally separate system....