... or, back in the day, it was "Hero's Quest." That old sierra game is what really sprung me into computers and programming. Played around with basic at home, and pascal in high school.
Anyway, with the question. First thing a child should know is how to get around on the computer. This includes command prompts and everything. Once they are truely mastered at this, I'd find some free compilers and teach a little bit of basic. If they have a school with an MS partnership, they could pickup visual basic pretty quickly.
Good plan to get them programming, or even creating, music, art, photo editing, etc. Seems to me most people are into computers purely for gaming, and while some game playing is OK in my book, it's not really a very good use of a computer. Might as well get a gaming system instead.
My intro was with some very simple text adventures (two characters command, optional two characters object) in 8K of BASIC. Eventually I got behind the scenes and worked out some of my own games, puzzles, exercises and then took off as a programmer. Not much you can learn from games today, as they're all compiled.
This is very true. How can you expect anybody to figure out how a computer works when all the inner workings are hidden from them, or they aren't even accessible. This is why I like Linux. Even though most of the time I use the GUI, I know that I could do everything by the command prompt if I wanted to. This is what's gone wrong with TV's. You should be able to perform everything with the buttons on the TV, but most of the time, the remote control is needed. If you lose the remote, then you lose a lot of functionality.
Have you noticed the obfuscation (well, actually you're indicating a familiarity with aspects of it) of television? I've had the creeping dread that media entertainment is heading away from the consumers choice to the conglomerates direction of what we get and how we receive it. You think you have choices, but do you really?
It's like computers. Most desktops are GUI, thanks to Windows, and are inexplicable. There's crap I want to turn off, or change or am not even aware of 90% of the time. Sometimes I bring up task manager and start killing processes to see what they were actually doing and how necessary they were.
Most classes on computers, at the outset, do nothing to challenge thinking about why things are the way they are, it is expected the student accept it as a fact and procede. Seems like being handed a credit card at birth and not realising until you're 40 years old that you could actually save up money to buy things, rather than borrow all the time and manage debt. It's seems like there's a debt of knowledge regarding things today , some critical thinking should be a part of any training these days. One thing is certain, things change and what will be in a few years is little like what is today.
Enroll them in a class. If they have the money, it's the best way. Nothing beats a trained instructor
I suggest evaluating that class/instructor yourself, first, or take the class at the same time as your kid. Bad teachers abound, don't just assume people you get on with just fine are good at teaching, some of my friends couldn't and shouldn't teach. (I know, I've sat through some of their courses.)
Step one: Give them a computer with a command line interface.
Step two: Introduce them to GUIs once they've got an understanding of what gets buried under billions of lines of bloated code.
When looking at a brochure-style website dealing with services or products, count how many times the word "solution" is used. The higher the number, the more full of crap they are. The all-time record is held by ibm.com.
Worst of all was when I was driving along, listening to the car radio and heard something about 'meal solutions' I couldn't decide whether I was going to gag or laugh and nearly ran into another driver.
What with all the buzzwords and 'solutions' and what, I remember working on projects for a former employer and hearing at some point the names and hype the marketing people were coming up with for the things I was working on. I thought they were scoring some serious drugs down the other end of Pacific Avenue. I did think at the time that prospective customers wouldn't have a freaking clue what we were offering and that was a weakness, not a strength. If it's a go-faster-process then call it one, not some Actualized Dynamic Solution.
even today my head still spins... no wonder so many companies went belly-up.
Double-blind studies can find no correlation between MSG consumption and physical reactions. But I doubt you'll believe it. One such study:
All well and good for their population, but I do get migraines from food with MSG in it and it's a distinctive type of feeling I get from nothing else. I've nicknamed it 'the velvet hammer' because it initiates as a warmish sensation, like a warm soft hat pulled over my head, followed within minutes by an extremely painful and debilitating headache, which may last for more than 24 hours.
I have, what is regarded as an allergic reaction, which was not always so. I used to be able to eat foods, such as ramen noodles with no ill effect, but about 6 years ago I developed the migraines and made the connection. I've also developed allergic reactions to dairy and peanuts.
I didn't. got a link? or can you describe it? What was wrong with it?
Dunno if it's on the web anywhere. I might have it on tape, but it would take weeks to find it.
In a nutshell it was all conceptual. Some guy in a body suit walks through a shimmering hallway, up some stairs and places his hand on a keyboard and then there was some crap about the future of computing.
This while IBM was hugely successful with their Charlie Chaplin look-alike 'Bubbles' looking all productive and getting things done. Commodore sunk millions into that one 30 second ad and if you asked anyone who didn't know what Amiga was, they'd shrug. Money and opportunity wasted.
I take it you never saw the Superbowl commercial for the Amiga.
It was traumatic for those of us who were trying to get other to buy into it. I've still got my A2000 right here. Excellent product, but the marketing was horrendously inept.
The only people who care about C= are geeks who will know better...
Gee, didn't we just have an article about a joystick with about 30 games in it? Maybe they're thinking along the same lines. Get a bunch of the abandonware and buy cheep some of the titles which companies like EA might still be clinging to and re-market. Heck, many of us know the best games ever were back in the hey-day of the C64, everything else is pretty much the same with window dressing.
There is nothing for you to eat here. Please move along.
I feel that way now, looking at the Progresso soups at the store. In the past couple months Progresso has added Monosodium Glutamate (or disodium guanylate, same thing effectively) to all their soups. I can't eat the stuff for the migraines.
Youre telling me an entire, $X billion space station could possibly been lost cause the last guys in the place ate too much?
You forget that everything is accounted for, as weight, rather mass, is critical. Probably one of those english-metric foul-ups again, damn schools in the USA still teaching lengths of kings noses and shit like that. Small wonder some schools are pushing back the clock on evolution.
I can really relate, I've had roommates eat my food before. Grazing for food was practically a sport in some of the houses which I have lived.
Wait until that shit's happening in your workplace and see how people feel about it.
At a job, years ago, someone pinched a woman's food and she sent out a decidely angry company-wide email, threatening to put rat poison in her food next time. It was all rather amusing, especially when the execs tried to play it down with a follow-up email
I can see it now, the new "candy only space station" diet fad. I can't wait to see how many pounds I lost after eating fudge and chocolate for the past two weeks.
Call it the Dentist Diet, because you'll lose a few teeth to it, too and maybe develope diabetes.
i can just see it, paris hilton showing great care and concern for all the unfortunate spacers, just before she goes down on... uh... a big candy cane.
Slashdot Mirror
"Bob? Sell all my Samsung stock, fast!"
That Bono, he gets everywhere!
And they said that was a power screwdriver. It certainly explains why DoD tools cost so much back then, they were really spybots!
Anyway, with the question. First thing a child should know is how to get around on the computer. This includes command prompts and everything. Once they are truely mastered at this, I'd find some free compilers and teach a little bit of basic. If they have a school with an MS partnership, they could pickup visual basic pretty quickly.
Good plan to get them programming, or even creating, music, art, photo editing, etc. Seems to me most people are into computers purely for gaming, and while some game playing is OK in my book, it's not really a very good use of a computer. Might as well get a gaming system instead.
My intro was with some very simple text adventures (two characters command, optional two characters object) in 8K of BASIC. Eventually I got behind the scenes and worked out some of my own games, puzzles, exercises and then took off as a programmer. Not much you can learn from games today, as they're all compiled.
Have you noticed the obfuscation (well, actually you're indicating a familiarity with aspects of it) of television? I've had the creeping dread that media entertainment is heading away from the consumers choice to the conglomerates direction of what we get and how we receive it. You think you have choices, but do you really?
It's like computers. Most desktops are GUI, thanks to Windows, and are inexplicable. There's crap I want to turn off, or change or am not even aware of 90% of the time. Sometimes I bring up task manager and start killing processes to see what they were actually doing and how necessary they were.
Most classes on computers, at the outset, do nothing to challenge thinking about why things are the way they are, it is expected the student accept it as a fact and procede. Seems like being handed a credit card at birth and not realising until you're 40 years old that you could actually save up money to buy things, rather than borrow all the time and manage debt. It's seems like there's a debt of knowledge regarding things today , some critical thinking should be a part of any training these days. One thing is certain, things change and what will be in a few years is little like what is today.
I suggest evaluating that class/instructor yourself, first, or take the class at the same time as your kid. Bad teachers abound, don't just assume people you get on with just fine are good at teaching, some of my friends couldn't and shouldn't teach. (I know, I've sat through some of their courses.)
Step one: Give them a computer with a command line interface.
Step two: Introduce them to GUIs once they've got an understanding of what gets buried under billions of lines of bloated code.
Worst of all was when I was driving along, listening to the car radio and heard something about 'meal solutions' I couldn't decide whether I was going to gag or laugh and nearly ran into another driver.
What with all the buzzwords and 'solutions' and what, I remember working on projects for a former employer and hearing at some point the names and hype the marketing people were coming up with for the things I was working on. I thought they were scoring some serious drugs down the other end of Pacific Avenue. I did think at the time that prospective customers wouldn't have a freaking clue what we were offering and that was a weakness, not a strength. If it's a go-faster-process then call it one, not some Actualized Dynamic Solution.
even today my head still spins ... no wonder so many companies went belly-up.
So ... what's Lord British actual title and when did the Queen lay it on him?
come forward richard garriott, i dub the mumumbblrlordmbumbumle, arise Lord British!
All well and good for their population, but I do get migraines from food with MSG in it and it's a distinctive type of feeling I get from nothing else. I've nicknamed it 'the velvet hammer' because it initiates as a warmish sensation, like a warm soft hat pulled over my head, followed within minutes by an extremely painful and debilitating headache, which may last for more than 24 hours.
I have, what is regarded as an allergic reaction, which was not always so. I used to be able to eat foods, such as ramen noodles with no ill effect, but about 6 years ago I developed the migraines and made the connection. I've also developed allergic reactions to dairy and peanuts.
Dunno if it's on the web anywhere. I might have it on tape, but it would take weeks to find it.
In a nutshell it was all conceptual. Some guy in a body suit walks through a shimmering hallway, up some stairs and places his hand on a keyboard and then there was some crap about the future of computing.
This while IBM was hugely successful with their Charlie Chaplin look-alike 'Bubbles' looking all productive and getting things done. Commodore sunk millions into that one 30 second ad and if you asked anyone who didn't know what Amiga was, they'd shrug. Money and opportunity wasted.
I take it you never saw the Superbowl commercial for the Amiga.
It was traumatic for those of us who were trying to get other to buy into it. I've still got my A2000 right here. Excellent product, but the marketing was horrendously inept.
Gee, didn't we just have an article about a joystick with about 30 games in it? Maybe they're thinking along the same lines. Get a bunch of the abandonware and buy cheep some of the titles which companies like EA might still be clinging to and re-market. Heck, many of us know the best games ever were back in the hey-day of the C64, everything else is pretty much the same with window dressing.
It was all they could get... names already taken were:
Geronimo
Jironimo
Ghironimo
Geeronimo
Goshronimo
and
Gollyronimo
Good thing I got rid of all those 5.25" floppies, years ago ... well most of them anyway, but they won't find them under all the bodies.
A group of investors actually wants the name associated with a company whose business strategy was best summed up as:
Ready
Fire!
Aim
I feel that way now, looking at the Progresso soups at the store. In the past couple months Progresso has added Monosodium Glutamate (or disodium guanylate, same thing effectively) to all their soups. I can't eat the stuff for the migraines.
Put less spices into food
Add MSG
...
Profit!!!
It was probably that fat Pooh astronaut who got caught in the airlock after eating too much hunny.
You forget that everything is accounted for, as weight, rather mass, is critical. Probably one of those english-metric foul-ups again, damn schools in the USA still teaching lengths of kings noses and shit like that. Small wonder some schools are pushing back the clock on evolution.
Wait until that shit's happening in your workplace and see how people feel about it.
At a job, years ago, someone pinched a woman's food and she sent out a decidely angry company-wide email, threatening to put rat poison in her food next time. It was all rather amusing, especially when the execs tried to play it down with a follow-up email
can't we all just get along?
Call it the Dentist Diet, because you'll lose a few teeth to it, too and maybe develope diabetes.
i can just see it, paris hilton showing great care and concern for all the unfortunate spacers, just before she goes down on ... uh ... a big candy cane.
vice president cheney was appalled, "that should have gone to halliburton!"
I'm just waiting for the first Media Center Worm article on /.
next up: worm brad corkscrew code
I wasn't exactly looking forward to the 30+ years of tossing and turning in bed at night.
instead i'll toss and turn over what the prez is doing to the economy
Yeah, right. Just get out your old Fido Board.