there is absolutely *nothing* wrong with teaching basic as a first programming language. I learned it and its simple methods of teaching logic were invaluable. Good programming sytle can come later, logic is everything.
Well sure, back when i was 11 i fantasized about designing my own bios (i thought bios was the most difficult thing ever), but I think I would've gotten quite bored with it had I actually started learning assembler and everything else you need. I think no matter your intelligence, a young programmer would do better designing something that requires less patience and more immediate gratification. Best of all, learn and become experienced with logic and good programming style before diving headfirst into something like a kernel.
i got my start in programming using good ole qbasic, learning very simple things like graphics..making sounds with the computer. Nothing fancy, but to a 10 year old, very very fun and interesting. It kept my interest and taught me logic along the way..paving the way for more dreary forms of programming like server software and database scripting:)
Your average 9 year old doesnt want to learn how to write command scripts..even a prodigy one will WANT to learn more based on doing things with interesting results..like graphics, animation, music...
this is the same reason 1000W halogens are used in stage and screen, while it does take an enormous amount of power (and you wouldnt believe the heat generated by a tiny 1000W bulb thats about the size of one of those large outdoor xmas bulbs), it makes a very natural warm light.
heh, deja vu! when slashdot declared george bush the winner when the supreme court handed the case back to the florida court.. hollywood must be the loser since the lower court must clarify themselves!
heh well he doesnt need quite that much power. Inbetween the power (or lack thereof) of a mac, but he doesnt need an alpha. Nor something as complicated and confusing as linux. Windows works fine for their needs, as it does for most people.
I think that the whole "yay internet hip techno cool!" thing has finally started to die off. the internet is becoming as ubiquitous as TV. in a way this is good as it'll let people look beyond the hype in how to improve whats here. I think the main areas will be in growth of online communities (of course, i'm biased since i write software for this type of thing). Sort of like the BBSes of yesteryear. And I think everything else will be refined as well..more secure, stable, better written...
I would assume this would be much like olestra, and food would just pass right through your system. Only it would be everything. So after every meal you would do a number on your colon:)
Theres a reason we have this gene. I think it's fairly dumb to disable it. Perhaps in dangerously obese people it might be useful, but in the general populai? no.
judging by the other permissions on the book, they sound technical in nature..ie, "copying to clipboard" "printing" etc. Thus, "reading aloud" means there must be some kind of text-to-speech thing available for the reader (i dont know use e-books, so i wouldnt know) and this book doesnt support text-to-speech. I dont think this has anything to do with copyright permissions, but more of technical limitations. It should say "this book cannot be used with a speech synthesizer" or something similar.
If my mom can't use it, it's not ready. All she wants to be able to do is send e-mail, type the occasional letter, and buy things online. She doesnt give a rat's ass about conf files, webservers or kernels.
My dad installs hardware on it..he just wants to plug it in, run the install software and be done with it. He doesnt want to a driver hunt and try to "make" it work.
Linux has a high standard of ease of use to come up against - Windows. And windows has 10 years of lead time.
And this is why microsoft wont collapse. ESR is a lunatic if he truly believes that. Linux is a developer and hobbyist OS. People who like to tinker with their underworkings in their computer... not the mainstream user and other delusions of grandeur. By the time linux becomes such an OS, it will be as crufty and unwieldy as windows.
That monkey has been listening to his own drivel for far too long.
Somehow I dont think computer manufacturers are going to just give up windows for something like linux. "unpolished" is the understatement of the year. Linux has years of work ahead of it before it can even think about being used by Joe Blow, if it ever reaches that point (and I dont really think it will). 6 months from now i'm going to pull this article up and just laugh, as nothing will have changed in 6 months. Probably nothing will change in a year.
I've always said, if my mom cant use it, it's not ready for mainstream.
At a car parts company in japan, a worker forgets to turn on the electrode system that initiates a chemical reaction that makes a protective coating for gasoline tanks in cars. The tanks are then shipped overseas, exposed to salty air, resulting in slight unnoticable corrosion. Cars are built, sold with the gas tanks. Time goes by, corrosion continues. One car gets in a wreck. Corroded tank spills gas, catches on fire, burning occupants alive. Senators then declare that all car parts from japan are unsafe, put tariffs on it. Japan gets pissed, trade war, real war happens.
Check out the book Debt of Honor by Tom Clancy, as this is exactly what happens.
My brother used to work for storagetek installing tape silos at large businesses. These things held something like 100 gb on a single tape, and were arranged in a "silo" that had robotic arms which would swing around, and grab a particular tape you were looking for. These silos could even be hooked up to other silos..the largest of which my brother had seen was some 6 silos in succession. In businesses were you have exabytes of data, tape's are the way to go.
If you want to see one of these nifty things in action, go rent the movie Clear and Present Danger.. in the scene were the guy tries to hack the password on a diskette, if you look in the background you'll see a tape silo, and indeed "storagetek" plastered on the thing's robotic arm.
Particularly the specialization things. Software is too complex and complicated today to learn all of it. While you may be able to learn many fields, none of them well. Specialization will result in higher quality products I think. Another problem is time and deadlines. The industry is moving faster than us developers can keep up with. Resulting in shoddy, untested software. At some point though, it's going to slow down.
Nasa has built most of the thing, invested the most money. Nasa has all the say, just as an investor in a company and owns 85% of the stock basically overrules everyone else.
air force pilots tend to be shorter (being tall is a liability..might get your head shot off), because of cockpit restraints. thus, all space equipment is designed around the average height of pilots.
Same thing happened to me, when I worked at a company..only thing is i didnt realize i was considered an independent contractor until I was given the tax forms... to avoid paying taxes and benefits, my employer considered me and my coworkers "self-employed". This increased my taxes a few hundred dollars..i'm glad i dont work in that shithole anymore.
its alot easier to make something square tough, than it is to take a curved mouse and make it impermeable..furthermore, since this is like the touch pad on your laptop, why in the world does it need to be ergonomically shaped? You're not going to put your hand around it anymore than you put your hand around your laptop.
i'd say mir's fairly reliable. launched in what, 1986? It had a 10 year warranty and it's survived so far.. only reason it's going down is a lack of money.
well considering when the first quantum computer is built, you wont exactly be able to do much with it. It'll have the software equivalent of computers back in the 1950s... simply because of the entirely new architecture.
Of course it'll first be used for solving mathematical problems (much as the original electronic comps were)..but it'll still take 50 years after the innovation to bring the software for a quantum computer to the point where we have electronic software today.
By then we'll all be dead. Wouldnt it be amusing if our grandkids were working on the exact same projects we are..only for quantum comps:)
Slashdot Mirror
there is absolutely *nothing* wrong with teaching basic as a first programming language. I learned it and its simple methods of teaching logic were invaluable. Good programming sytle can come later, logic is everything.
geez i wish i had that when i was a kid. I was amused when i could get 10 circles to draw on the screen in 10 different colors.
Well sure, back when i was 11 i fantasized about designing my own bios (i thought bios was the most difficult thing ever), but I think I would've gotten quite bored with it had I actually started learning assembler and everything else you need. I think no matter your intelligence, a young programmer would do better designing something that requires less patience and more immediate gratification. Best of all, learn and become experienced with logic and good programming style before diving headfirst into something like a kernel.
up into junior high even. very fast and gratifying, and teaches basic logic of loops, if statements... all very useful things.
Your average 9 year old doesnt want to learn how to write command scripts..even a prodigy one will WANT to learn more based on doing things with interesting results..like graphics, animation, music...
this is the same reason 1000W halogens are used in stage and screen, while it does take an enormous amount of power (and you wouldnt believe the heat generated by a tiny 1000W bulb thats about the size of one of those large outdoor xmas bulbs), it makes a very natural warm light.
slushdut can no reeed englich
heh well he doesnt need quite that much power. Inbetween the power (or lack thereof) of a mac, but he doesnt need an alpha. Nor something as complicated and confusing as linux. Windows works fine for their needs, as it does for most people.
I think that the whole "yay internet hip techno cool!" thing has finally started to die off. the internet is becoming as ubiquitous as TV. in a way this is good as it'll let people look beyond the hype in how to improve whats here. I think the main areas will be in growth of online communities (of course, i'm biased since i write software for this type of thing). Sort of like the BBSes of yesteryear. And I think everything else will be refined as well..more secure, stable, better written...
Theres a reason we have this gene. I think it's fairly dumb to disable it. Perhaps in dangerously obese people it might be useful, but in the general populai? no.
judging by the other permissions on the book, they sound technical in nature..ie, "copying to clipboard" "printing" etc. Thus, "reading aloud" means there must be some kind of text-to-speech thing available for the reader (i dont know use e-books, so i wouldnt know) and this book doesnt support text-to-speech. I dont think this has anything to do with copyright permissions, but more of technical limitations. It should say "this book cannot be used with a speech synthesizer" or something similar.
ah my dad does a bit of engineering work that requires Real Processing Power on it.
My dad installs hardware on it..he just wants to plug it in, run the install software and be done with it. He doesnt want to a driver hunt and try to "make" it work.
Linux has a high standard of ease of use to come up against - Windows. And windows has 10 years of lead time.
And this is why microsoft wont collapse. ESR is a lunatic if he truly believes that. Linux is a developer and hobbyist OS. People who like to tinker with their underworkings in their computer... not the mainstream user and other delusions of grandeur. By the time linux becomes such an OS, it will be as crufty and unwieldy as windows.
it will be exactly the thing you all hate. An overblown inefficient and buggy piece of work.
Somehow I dont think computer manufacturers are going to just give up windows for something like linux. "unpolished" is the understatement of the year. Linux has years of work ahead of it before it can even think about being used by Joe Blow, if it ever reaches that point (and I dont really think it will). 6 months from now i'm going to pull this article up and just laugh, as nothing will have changed in 6 months. Probably nothing will change in a year.
I've always said, if my mom cant use it, it's not ready for mainstream.
At a car parts company in japan, a worker forgets to turn on the electrode system that initiates a chemical reaction that makes a protective coating for gasoline tanks in cars. The tanks are then shipped overseas, exposed to salty air, resulting in slight unnoticable corrosion. Cars are built, sold with the gas tanks. Time goes by, corrosion continues. One car gets in a wreck. Corroded tank spills gas, catches on fire, burning occupants alive. Senators then declare that all car parts from japan are unsafe, put tariffs on it. Japan gets pissed, trade war, real war happens.
Check out the book Debt of Honor by Tom Clancy, as this is exactly what happens.
So yes, one mistake can indeed be disasterous.
If you want to see one of these nifty things in action, go rent the movie Clear and Present Danger.. in the scene were the guy tries to hack the password on a diskette, if you look in the background you'll see a tape silo, and indeed "storagetek" plastered on the thing's robotic arm.
Particularly the specialization things. Software is too complex and complicated today to learn all of it. While you may be able to learn many fields, none of them well. Specialization will result in higher quality products I think. Another problem is time and deadlines. The industry is moving faster than us developers can keep up with. Resulting in shoddy, untested software. At some point though, it's going to slow down.
Nasa has built most of the thing, invested the most money. Nasa has all the say, just as an investor in a company and owns 85% of the stock basically overrules everyone else.
air force pilots tend to be shorter (being tall is a liability..might get your head shot off), because of cockpit restraints. thus, all space equipment is designed around the average height of pilots.
Wah wah microsoft this, microsoft that. Christ. It's like a penis-envy game.
Same thing happened to me, when I worked at a company..only thing is i didnt realize i was considered an independent contractor until I was given the tax forms... to avoid paying taxes and benefits, my employer considered me and my coworkers "self-employed". This increased my taxes a few hundred dollars..i'm glad i dont work in that shithole anymore.
its alot easier to make something square tough, than it is to take a curved mouse and make it impermeable..furthermore, since this is like the touch pad on your laptop, why in the world does it need to be ergonomically shaped? You're not going to put your hand around it anymore than you put your hand around your laptop.
i'd say mir's fairly reliable. launched in what, 1986? It had a 10 year warranty and it's survived so far.. only reason it's going down is a lack of money.
Of course it'll first be used for solving mathematical problems (much as the original electronic comps were)..but it'll still take 50 years after the innovation to bring the software for a quantum computer to the point where we have electronic software today.
By then we'll all be dead. Wouldnt it be amusing if our grandkids were working on the exact same projects we are..only for quantum comps :)