"Must be tired. Just noticed who's funding this, and I'm not so sure I would like to be a part of it anymore.
And with those words, the pioneers of what would have been a fault-tolerant computer communication network called "The Internet" allowed a beautiful idea to die.
Autonomous vehicles have incredible potential for changing the way society works. Just think about all the millions of hours wasted in the car, how many lives are ended by user error (about 50,000 a year in the US), and how much smoother traffic would flow if computers were in control. It would be disappointing if we ignored all the possible benefits just because the technology could also be used to drive a tank around.
Also, there is already a great deal of effort into similar questions of machine autonomy. A contest like this might take some intriguing, yet unfocused research and motivate the researchers into creating something concrete.
I like how you're thinking, and it sounds like it would be sufficient for the purposes of this contest. But let's not let these things roam off the test courses until they become more sophisticated. For example, collision avoidance should be upgraded from the simple "don't run into anything" to "classify object X as a human child, and object Y as a tumbleweed, and give 'avoid X' priority."
That's a good point, but a point *for* this WM, not against it.
Linux is "easy enough" to convert to, for those who are absolutely sick of Windows for whatever reason. Not everyone falls into that category. Some highly technical people, whether interested in Linux or not, are pretty well satisfied with their computing XPerience. They might be convinced to try a new OS, if they thought they would find something familiar once their new system launched.
I'm all in favor of this, and would like to see it succeed. Whatever the relative merits of Windows vs. the various Linux WMs, giving users another means to smooth the transition seems like a good thing.
Re:SCO Threatens To Revoke IBM's Unix License
on
Analysis of SCO vs. IBM
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The first, important point: SCO doesn't own AIX.
I don't know the details of the "Unix contract" that IBM is said to have with SCO. According to ESR's brief, Unix vendors continued to buy licenses to the original AT&T/Bell Labs code long after that source code ceased to be relevant to the marketplace. If IBM bought such a license, it presumably would have been transmitted to Caldera, then Novell, then SCO.
He also points out that none of the "Enterprise Scalability Features" such as SMP, NUMA, journaling file systems, etc., are actually present in the original Bell Labs code bought by SCO. This is important, because SCO appears to be claiming intellectual property rights over all the features in all descendants of the original Bell Labs code.
Finally, the Novell case is strong evidence that there is very little proprietary code in the original UNIX. Again from ESR:
The key provisions [of the settlement] are, however, described in Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix: From AT&T-Owned to Freely Redistributable, [McKusick99]. Only three files out of eighteen thousand in the distribution were found to be the licit property of Novell and removed. The rest were ruled to be freely redistributable, and continue to form the basis of the open-source BSD distributions today.
- The donator is obviously making the donation for ideological reasons. The people deciding whether to accept the donation, however, can make that decision based on non-ideological criteria.
- If someone who has been using StarOffice/OpenOffice over the course of a four year education, there's almost zero learning curve when they sit down in front of MSOffice.
- Students are fully capable of running Micrsoft software on their own computers, if they feel that they're losing out on valuable experience.
1) The university gets millions of dollars from an unnamed donor. A lot of the rougher parts of the transition could be smoothed over by this money. The other points will focus on the transition itself.
2) The university saves a bundle on licensing fees. This may be especially important since Microsoft is trying to move towards a subscription model.
3) While open source solutions aren't drop-in replacements for Microsoft products, the end user apps are similar enough to minimize the need for retraining. If someone knows their way around a Windows desktop, Gnome and KDE are pretty easy to grasp. The same goes for Office vs. OpenOffice and IE vs. Mozilla. With power users, its sometimes trickier, since they may have come to rely on certain obscure features.
4) With OSS, you don't need to rely on Microsoft for technical support. The fact is, Microsoft is the only company capable of adding features and fixing bugs in Microsoft products. So if you have a problem with those products, and MS isn't interested in fixing them, you're out of luck. Open source is more flexible in this regard.
5) A better CS program. If we assume that dropping MS will substantially increase the use of open source software, then it's very likely that CS students will have reasons to explore the code of the products they use every day. So they're being exposed to non-trivial implementations of structures, algorithms, software design decisions, and everything else that comes along with it.
I realize that Microsoft's "Shared Source Initiative" also allows some level of access to the code. But the barriers are much higher (NDAs), and the rewards are much lower (can't recompile, bugfix, or experiment).
Cons:
1) Ten years is a long time. You don't know what new products and services Microsoft will be coming out with over that time, or how useful they might be to the campus. Think about how the computing world has changed since 1993, and ask if the school really should be making such long term decisions about their IT infrastructure.
2) You lose the option to buy Microsoft products. By itself, this fact is too obvious to mention. But what are the ramifications?
3) You lose compatability with important Windows-only software (like certain CAD products). The university may be able to hobble along with the licenses they already own, but that's going to be more and more difficult.
4) People don't like change. Such a transition could make for an ugly political brawl.
[note: Five pros, four cons! Obviously, this means they should take it.]
The ability to zap a commercial arguably makes the commercials more valuable. It will take some clever advertising to keep people from hitting the button, but on the upside, we no longer have to watch ads we despise.
Every time I see an Old Navy ad, I make a solemn vow never to set foot in one of their stores. Were I allowed to zap these commercials, I wouldn't loathe their store quite so much.
The fact that the commercials are being skipped could be useful information in and of itself. If such information were collected in an aggregate, private way, maybe advertisers would take the hint and stop running stupid commercials.
To me, he^H^Hshe^H^H^Hthe author just seems happy that Safari is based on an open source, standards-compliant rendering engine. The openness of the browser itself is really a secondary issue.
Correction: Business plans are driven by the goal of obtaining customers' money. Satisfying their needs is just one way of doing this. For a counterexample, think about how many people buy a MS Office upgrade for versus the number who upgrade because their older software can't read the new.doc format.
So there could be a lot of very valuable innovations that never make it into commercial projects because, despite the potential benefits to the end user, it doesn't fit the business plan.
Set the ship to self-destruct in fifteen minutes. 90% of the time, whatever problem you have will resolve itself within fourteen minutes and forty-seven seconds.
Actually, I think this program *would* revive the SDI. Given such a high-profile target, a lot of security precautions would have to be taken.
The first and best precaution would be to make sure that it's in everyone's interests to keep the elevator up and running, by giving everyone equal access to it. But you can't please everyone, which is where the missiles come in.
The platform at the base is for prepping payloads, maintenance crews, and 24-hour dry-cleaning kiosks. It would be difficult to have that much mass underneath it to keep it taut (especially if the platform is supposed to be mobile). Nor is it really necessary, since the cable itself weighs more than enough to keep itself anchored. They just have to position the cable properly.
Perhaps instead of a flat, ribbon-like structure, the cable could be composed of "braided" nanotubes. The point would be to increase the total surface area so that most of the cable burned up in the atmosphere.
The cable could be wrapped at points with a much weaker material to hold it together, which would release if it started falling. Though I still stand by my explosive-laced cable design.:)
If it breaks close to the ground, then it will fly off into space. If it breaks closer to the top, the cable will fall towards the Earth (since everything below the geosynchronous point is moving slower than required to maintain Earth orbit. It ends up wrapping the equator a couple of times, causing severe damage.
My suggestion would be to line the cable with explosives, and vaporize it if it started falling. Which is probably why nobody will be commissioning me to design this bugger.
Is this the kind of output we can expect from the modern, computer-savvy student? Please learn to spell:
technophobia ridiculous you're, not your computer classroom overreliance that's h ave-nots morally reflect relevant because uni versally instances successful disseminating ai n't
I'm not usually pedantic like this, but you're a prime example of my concern: computers make people lazy. If you're going to argue that spelling doesn't matter in a forum like this, then I have to ask: Why did you bother posting your thoughts here if you don't care how your ideas are taken by others.
Computer-savvy != educated != smart. You have some decent ideas here, but the organization, spelling, and punctuation are reprehensible.
1) According to the article, "The cost of the four-year program is 37.5 million." It mentions a million from the Gates Foundation, and a $400 million software donation (that probably consisted of a hundred CDs and a thousand licenses, and will probably cost a fortune when it comes time to upgrade). But I don't see where the rest of the money was supposed to come from. The article could be wrong, so would you please clarify how all the money was privately generated?
5) Equality of access is important, and should be done to the extent that resources allow. Within that constraint, the question becomes, "What things are most important for kids to access?" There's a huge list of possibilities: The attention of a competent teacher, nutritious food, computers, textbooks and library books, livable schools, musical instruments, sports equipment, and arts and crafts materials, just to name a few.
By claiming that computer access is a basic educational need, you may be ignoring the possibility that you could do more to improve overall education by diverting that money towards one or more of these other items. To me, it would make more sense to have two or three well-furnished computer labs shared by all the students, and this program is just spending scarce resources on sexy toys.
6) It's pointless to argue about what sort of arguments were going on in the 1930's, when Maine is collecting valuable data on how kids treat these computers. Let's wait a couple of years, then pull out the books and see if the repair costs are really worth it.
Other options are available, ranging from "chained to the desk" to "practical ownership." For example, students could sign machines out for special projects.
I agree that computers are the future of education. They'll replace textbooks, they'll allow for constant access to school resources and libraries of data, and they'll be valuable for easy collaboration on projects. But remember the infantry mentality: He who leads is he who steps on the landmines.
I hope this program does great things for your state. But my gut tells me that Maine is in for some pretty expensive lessons.
Right. I'd just LOOOVVVVEEEE to go to the school where they just axed the football program to buy all us geeks laptops. Do the words "death wedgie" hold no fear for you?
I have nothing but the utmost respect for your obvious commitment to your daughter's education. Yet I've never quite grasped this, "prop your toddler up in front of the keyboard or doom her to life in a trailer park" mentality. Computers are great tools for learning about computers.
I started programming in BASIC when I was nine, using a Commodore 128. I was drawing shapes on the screen, filling them in with colors, solving math problems, and whatnot. It was fun, it made me a better programmer, and probably gave me some thinking skills.
But I also remember hundreds and hundreds of hours in school spent learning applications of dubious value, that were obsolete even as we were learning them.
There's a right way and a wrong way to use computers to further childrens' educations. It sounds like you're doing it the right way. You seem to have the right idea.
But most people don't, and that's why I reflexively cringe when I hear about programs like this. "Here's Google, kids. Type in the word "wolf." Click on the second link. See the picture of the wolf? Now cut-n-paste the text on the page into your word processor, type your name at the top, and hit "print." You just wrote a report on wolves! Yay!"
Okay, technically the kids figure out this educational hack on their own. The point is, the act of studying a subject, organizing the information in your mind, and putting it down on paper in your own words is a powerful way to learn. The Internet makes it easy to learn about a subject, but it also makes it easy to create the illusion that you've learned about a subject.
I think computers with net access are a horrible idea if the class is too large for the teacher to closely monitor how they're being used. If the kids are researching, solving problems, creating art, and whatnot, then it's all good. If they're IM'ing their friends, railing each other in Quake, messing up the settings, and plagarizing material they only half-digested, then they're a total waste of time and money. Get the class size down to eight or ten students per classroom, *then* we can talk about giving every child a laptop.
In the end, I think your child is benefitting mostly from the amount of attention you give her education; the computer seems secondary. A computer-illiterate parent who was so devoted could also raise an impressive child. Their education might be more weighted towards liberal arts or biology, but they could still be rightfully proud.
I hope she sticks with the programming thing. Good luck.
Just a dispassionate analysis of what Microsoft needs to do to maintain its dominance. The article is most definitely not saying that.NET is the solution to all the lock-in problems it pointed out earlier. All it's doing is pointing out that, to keep from slipping, Microsoft has to convince people that.NET is an amazing architecture that will keep it safe from competitors like Macs and Linux.
And the thing about Apple? The author never said Apple was dying, just that it had lost the desktop wars. The reason he pointed it out, in fact, is because they lost primarily because it became "common knowledge" that Apple was losing, and they just couldn't climb out of that hole.
It seemed to me as though the author was pointing out.NET as a continuation of the trend towards lock-in, not as a solution to the trend.
I see all the claims about "lack of innovation" in the gaming industry, and while I can't wholly disagree, I think many of the complaints come from simply taking too narrow a view.
What we have is akin to an evolutionary process. Good ideas (easter eggs, puzzle games, platform games) get copied shamelessly, until you have hundreds of games that fully explore the design space. First we had simple games like Breakout and Galaga, because that was really all that computers were equipped to handle. Then when the hardware was sufficiently beefed up, we got scrollers like SMB and Metroid. Within that one genre, a lot of new ideas were incorporated. Just look at how much evolution happened between Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario World, despite sticking to the same "run/jump/scroll" formula.
The way you describe it, Tetris was the only "real" puzzle game, and the rest were merely wanna-bes. That's a difficult assertion to make, since Tetris wasn't even the first puzzle game (Q-bert, for example, preceded Tetris by three years). All that can really be said is that the success of Tetris led all the other game publishers to see the potential of the genre.
It's especially strange that you dismiss Dr. Mario as "just another Tetris clone." Its conceptual lineage is blindingly obvious, but I would say that it was just as playable and addictive.
Ideas get stolen, rehashed, reworked, combined, pushed to the limit, and distilled back down until they're nearly unrecognizeable. What you need to understand is, this process actually strengthens the gaming industry. Sure, it sucks when some company decides to dash off a half-hearted clone of Warcraft. But if a great game spawns ten paint-by-numbers clones and one mind-blowing twist on the original formula, gamers are better off than they would be if nobody had copied it for fear of being "derivative."
"The day's fast coming when we'll be able to record every moment of our entire lives in HDTV-quality on a single drive."
When this tragic, terrible day comes, I will weep. What is there to stop boring, old people from rounding up friends, neighbors, random passers-by, and presenting their entire Carribbean vacation? Fifty minutes into "that quaint little diner in St. Lucia," there's not a person here who wouldn't start a thermonuclear war just to give themselves an excuse to clear out.
Now, I recognize that most people don't have the ability to initiate a nuclear exchange. But there are those among us who happen to be the heads of nuclear powers, and the temptation would just be too great. "I'm sorry, Mr. Putin, but as much as I'd love to see all ninety hours of your vacation to the Riv, we've just declared war on...erm, Bolivia. Give my love to the missus."
Slashdot Mirror
Autonomous vehicles have incredible potential for changing the way society works. Just think about all the millions of hours wasted in the car, how many lives are ended by user error (about 50,000 a year in the US), and how much smoother traffic would flow if computers were in control. It would be disappointing if we ignored all the possible benefits just because the technology could also be used to drive a tank around.
Also, there is already a great deal of effort into similar questions of machine autonomy. A contest like this might take some intriguing, yet unfocused research and motivate the researchers into creating something concrete.
I like how you're thinking, and it sounds like it would be sufficient for the purposes of this contest. But let's not let these things roam off the test courses until they become more sophisticated. For example, collision avoidance should be upgraded from the simple "don't run into anything" to "classify object X as a human child, and object Y as a tumbleweed, and give 'avoid X' priority."
Police ask that citizens be on the lookout for the suspect known as "The Slashdot Cruiser". Do not approach, do not try to apprehend.
That's a good point, but a point *for* this WM, not against it.
Linux is "easy enough" to convert to, for those who are absolutely sick of Windows for whatever reason. Not everyone falls into that category. Some highly technical people, whether interested in Linux or not, are pretty well satisfied with their computing XPerience. They might be convinced to try a new OS, if they thought they would find something familiar once their new system launched.
I'm all in favor of this, and would like to see it succeed. Whatever the relative merits of Windows vs. the various Linux WMs, giving users another means to smooth the transition seems like a good thing.
I don't know the details of the "Unix contract" that IBM is said to have with SCO. According to ESR's brief, Unix vendors continued to buy licenses to the original AT&T/Bell Labs code long after that source code ceased to be relevant to the marketplace. If IBM bought such a license, it presumably would have been transmitted to Caldera, then Novell, then SCO.
He also points out that none of the "Enterprise Scalability Features" such as SMP, NUMA, journaling file systems, etc., are actually present in the original Bell Labs code bought by SCO. This is important, because SCO appears to be claiming intellectual property rights over all the features in all descendants of the original Bell Labs code.
Finally, the Novell case is strong evidence that there is very little proprietary code in the original UNIX. Again from ESR:
A few points:
- The donator is obviously making the donation for ideological reasons. The people deciding whether to accept the donation, however, can make that decision based on non-ideological criteria.
- If someone who has been using StarOffice/OpenOffice over the course of a four year education, there's almost zero learning curve when they sit down in front of MSOffice.
- Students are fully capable of running Micrsoft software on their own computers, if they feel that they're losing out on valuable experience.
- Mac OSX is ready for the desktop.
Pros:
1) The university gets millions of dollars from an unnamed donor. A lot of the rougher parts of the transition could be smoothed over by this money. The other points will focus on the transition itself.
2) The university saves a bundle on licensing fees. This may be especially important since Microsoft is trying to move towards a subscription model.
3) While open source solutions aren't drop-in replacements for Microsoft products, the end user apps are similar enough to minimize the need for retraining. If someone knows their way around a Windows desktop, Gnome and KDE are pretty easy to grasp. The same goes for Office vs. OpenOffice and IE vs. Mozilla. With power users, its sometimes trickier, since they may have come to rely on certain obscure features.
4) With OSS, you don't need to rely on Microsoft for technical support. The fact is, Microsoft is the only company capable of adding features and fixing bugs in Microsoft products. So if you have a problem with those products, and MS isn't interested in fixing them, you're out of luck. Open source is more flexible in this regard.
5) A better CS program. If we assume that dropping MS will substantially increase the use of open source software, then it's very likely that CS students will have reasons to explore the code of the products they use every day. So they're being exposed to non-trivial implementations of structures, algorithms, software design decisions, and everything else that comes along with it.
I realize that Microsoft's "Shared Source Initiative" also allows some level of access to the code. But the barriers are much higher (NDAs), and the rewards are much lower (can't recompile, bugfix, or experiment).
Cons:
1) Ten years is a long time. You don't know what new products and services Microsoft will be coming out with over that time, or how useful they might be to the campus. Think about how the computing world has changed since 1993, and ask if the school really should be making such long term decisions about their IT infrastructure.
2) You lose the option to buy Microsoft products. By itself, this fact is too obvious to mention. But what are the ramifications?
3) You lose compatability with important Windows-only software (like certain CAD products). The university may be able to hobble along with the licenses they already own, but that's going to be more and more difficult.
4) People don't like change. Such a transition could make for an ugly political brawl.
[note: Five pros, four cons! Obviously, this means they should take it.]
The ability to zap a commercial arguably makes the commercials more valuable. It will take some clever advertising to keep people from hitting the button, but on the upside, we no longer have to watch ads we despise.
Every time I see an Old Navy ad, I make a solemn vow never to set foot in one of their stores. Were I allowed to zap these commercials, I wouldn't loathe their store quite so much.
The fact that the commercials are being skipped could be useful information in and of itself. If such information were collected in an aggregate, private way, maybe advertisers would take the hint and stop running stupid commercials.
To me, he^H^Hshe^H^H^Hthe author just seems happy that Safari is based on an open source, standards-compliant rendering engine. The openness of the browser itself is really a secondary issue.
Correction: Business plans are driven by the goal of obtaining customers' money. Satisfying their needs is just one way of doing this. For a counterexample, think about how many people buy a MS Office upgrade for versus the number who upgrade because their older software can't read the new .doc format.
So there could be a lot of very valuable innovations that never make it into commercial projects because, despite the potential benefits to the end user, it doesn't fit the business plan.
Set the ship to self-destruct in fifteen minutes. 90% of the time, whatever problem you have will resolve itself within fourteen minutes and forty-seven seconds.
Actually, I think this program *would* revive the SDI. Given such a high-profile target, a lot of security precautions would have to be taken.
The first and best precaution would be to make sure that it's in everyone's interests to keep the elevator up and running, by giving everyone equal access to it. But you can't please everyone, which is where the missiles come in.
The platform at the base is for prepping payloads, maintenance crews, and 24-hour dry-cleaning kiosks. It would be difficult to have that much mass underneath it to keep it taut (especially if the platform is supposed to be mobile). Nor is it really necessary, since the cable itself weighs more than enough to keep itself anchored. They just have to position the cable properly.
:)
Perhaps instead of a flat, ribbon-like structure, the cable could be composed of "braided" nanotubes. The point would be to increase the total surface area so that most of the cable burned up in the atmosphere.
The cable could be wrapped at points with a much weaker material to hold it together, which would release if it started falling. Though I still stand by my explosive-laced cable design.
If it breaks close to the ground, then it will fly off into space. If it breaks closer to the top, the cable will fall towards the Earth (since everything below the geosynchronous point is moving slower than required to maintain Earth orbit. It ends up wrapping the equator a couple of times, causing severe damage.
My suggestion would be to line the cable with explosives, and vaporize it if it started falling. Which is probably why nobody will be commissioning me to design this bugger.
Spin a basketball? WTF?
How dare you call me an unwashed mass? What evidence do you have to substantiate...
[sniff sniff]
When I get out of the shower, I'm lodging a formal complaint.
Is this the kind of output we can expect from the modern, computer-savvy student? Please learn to spell:
h ave-notsi versallyi n't
technophobia
ridiculous
you're, not your
computer
classroom
overreliance
that's
morally
reflect
relevant
because
un
instances
successful
disseminating
a
I'm not usually pedantic like this, but you're a prime example of my concern: computers make people lazy. If you're going to argue that spelling doesn't matter in a forum like this, then I have to ask: Why did you bother posting your thoughts here if you don't care how your ideas are taken by others.
Computer-savvy != educated != smart. You have some decent ideas here, but the organization, spelling, and punctuation are reprehensible.
I will only respond to points 1, 5, and 6:
1) According to the article, "The cost of the four-year program is 37.5 million." It mentions a million from the Gates Foundation, and a $400 million software donation (that probably consisted of a hundred CDs and a thousand licenses, and will probably cost a fortune when it comes time to upgrade). But I don't see where the rest of the money was supposed to come from. The article could be wrong, so would you please clarify how all the money was privately generated?
5) Equality of access is important, and should be done to the extent that resources allow. Within that constraint, the question becomes, "What things are most important for kids to access?" There's a huge list of possibilities: The attention of a competent teacher, nutritious food, computers, textbooks and library books, livable schools, musical instruments, sports equipment, and arts and crafts materials, just to name a few.
By claiming that computer access is a basic educational need, you may be ignoring the possibility that you could do more to improve overall education by diverting that money towards one or more of these other items. To me, it would make more sense to have two or three well-furnished computer labs shared by all the students, and this program is just spending scarce resources on sexy toys.
6) It's pointless to argue about what sort of arguments were going on in the 1930's, when Maine is collecting valuable data on how kids treat these computers. Let's wait a couple of years, then pull out the books and see if the repair costs are really worth it.
Other options are available, ranging from "chained to the desk" to "practical ownership." For example, students could sign machines out for special projects.
I agree that computers are the future of education. They'll replace textbooks, they'll allow for constant access to school resources and libraries of data, and they'll be valuable for easy collaboration on projects. But remember the infantry mentality: He who leads is he who steps on the landmines.
I hope this program does great things for your state. But my gut tells me that Maine is in for some pretty expensive lessons.
Right. I'd just LOOOVVVVEEEE to go to the school where they just axed the football program to buy all us geeks laptops. Do the words "death wedgie" hold no fear for you?
I have nothing but the utmost respect for your obvious commitment to your daughter's education. Yet I've never quite grasped this, "prop your toddler up in front of the keyboard or doom her to life in a trailer park" mentality. Computers are great tools for learning about computers.
I started programming in BASIC when I was nine, using a Commodore 128. I was drawing shapes on the screen, filling them in with colors, solving math problems, and whatnot. It was fun, it made me a better programmer, and probably gave me some thinking skills.
But I also remember hundreds and hundreds of hours in school spent learning applications of dubious value, that were obsolete even as we were learning them.
There's a right way and a wrong way to use computers to further childrens' educations. It sounds like you're doing it the right way. You seem to have the right idea.
But most people don't, and that's why I reflexively cringe when I hear about programs like this. "Here's Google, kids. Type in the word "wolf." Click on the second link. See the picture of the wolf? Now cut-n-paste the text on the page into your word processor, type your name at the top, and hit "print." You just wrote a report on wolves! Yay!"
Okay, technically the kids figure out this educational hack on their own. The point is, the act of studying a subject, organizing the information in your mind, and putting it down on paper in your own words is a powerful way to learn. The Internet makes it easy to learn about a subject, but it also makes it easy to create the illusion that you've learned about a subject.
I think computers with net access are a horrible idea if the class is too large for the teacher to closely monitor how they're being used. If the kids are researching, solving problems, creating art, and whatnot, then it's all good. If they're IM'ing their friends, railing each other in Quake, messing up the settings, and plagarizing material they only half-digested, then they're a total waste of time and money. Get the class size down to eight or ten students per classroom, *then* we can talk about giving every child a laptop.
In the end, I think your child is benefitting mostly from the amount of attention you give her education; the computer seems secondary. A computer-illiterate parent who was so devoted could also raise an impressive child. Their education might be more weighted towards liberal arts or biology, but they could still be rightfully proud.
I hope she sticks with the programming thing. Good luck.
I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of the Communist Party.
Does that cover it?
Just a dispassionate analysis of what Microsoft needs to do to maintain its dominance. The article is most definitely not saying that .NET is the solution to all the lock-in problems it pointed out earlier. All it's doing is pointing out that, to keep from slipping, Microsoft has to convince people that .NET is an amazing architecture that will keep it safe from competitors like Macs and Linux.
.NET as a continuation of the trend towards lock-in, not as a solution to the trend.
And the thing about Apple? The author never said Apple was dying, just that it had lost the desktop wars. The reason he pointed it out, in fact, is because they lost primarily because it became "common knowledge" that Apple was losing, and they just couldn't climb out of that hole.
It seemed to me as though the author was pointing out
I see all the claims about "lack of innovation" in the gaming industry, and while I can't wholly disagree, I think many of the complaints come from simply taking too narrow a view.
What we have is akin to an evolutionary process. Good ideas (easter eggs, puzzle games, platform games) get copied shamelessly, until you have hundreds of games that fully explore the design space. First we had simple games like Breakout and Galaga, because that was really all that computers were equipped to handle. Then when the hardware was sufficiently beefed up, we got scrollers like SMB and Metroid. Within that one genre, a lot of new ideas were incorporated. Just look at how much evolution happened between Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario World, despite sticking to the same "run/jump/scroll" formula.
The way you describe it, Tetris was the only "real" puzzle game, and the rest were merely wanna-bes. That's a difficult assertion to make, since Tetris wasn't even the first puzzle game (Q-bert, for example, preceded Tetris by three years). All that can really be said is that the success of Tetris led all the other game publishers to see the potential of the genre.
It's especially strange that you dismiss Dr. Mario as "just another Tetris clone." Its conceptual lineage is blindingly obvious, but I would say that it was just as playable and addictive.
Ideas get stolen, rehashed, reworked, combined, pushed to the limit, and distilled back down until they're nearly unrecognizeable. What you need to understand is, this process actually strengthens the gaming industry. Sure, it sucks when some company decides to dash off a half-hearted clone of Warcraft. But if a great game spawns ten paint-by-numbers clones and one mind-blowing twist on the original formula, gamers are better off than they would be if nobody had copied it for fear of being "derivative."
Now, I recognize that most people don't have the ability to initiate a nuclear exchange. But there are those among us who happen to be the heads of nuclear powers, and the temptation would just be too great. "I'm sorry, Mr. Putin, but as much as I'd love to see all ninety hours of your vacation to the Riv, we've just declared war on...erm, Bolivia. Give my love to the missus."
This technology must be stopped.
At least the "a" drive isn't the floppy, unlike certain OTHER operating systems he might be running.