"There are several HDD based mp3 players out there which are just as small as an iPod, hold just as much (or more) data as an iPod, look like mp3 players (although I have no idea why that matters) and COST SIGNIFICANTLY LESS THAN AN IPOD."
OK, name one that they could have used to carry LOTR dailies (without a time travel device). There were HDD-based MP3 players that cost less than the iPod, but they are much larger. There are RAM-based MP3 players that are smaller than the iPod, but don't have enough storage.
For a little trip back in time, read Transportable FireWire Hard Drives from December 2001. The drives are larger and heavier than an iPod, and the costs are "Price: $219 (10GB), $269 (20GB), $349 (30GB), $699 (48GB)". The closest in size to the iPod is a Toshiba PCMCIA card for $399 that provided 5 GB of storage (and didn't play music, etc.).
Heck, even considering all of the iPod copies that came out since LOTR was finished shooting, the iPod is probably still the best choice, because it's a firewire device (i.e. much better than USB for playing video), and almost all other MP3 players are USB.
The only HDD-based MP3 player that's smaller than the iPod is the iRiver oHP-120 which doesn't have Firewire, and they "cheat" on size because all of the controls are on a remote control that they don't count against the size and weight. Still, it plays Ogg Vorbis, which is cool, even if they do calculate their capacity using 64 Kbps WMA's in order to inflate their numbers.
"The 9th is by far the most reversed court in the country"
I did a little digging, trying to find actual counts of reviewed cases and cases overturned. and found facts such as "The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals was overturned 75% percent of the time in 2002. The 4th, 5th, 8th, and 10th Circuit Courts were overturned 100% of the time." You don't see the Republicans complaining about the Appeals Court That Always Veers to the Right.
But it's (IMO) if different courts lean one way or another -- people in different regions have different ideas, and it's hardly shocking that the people in California would be more progressive than the people in Virginia.
The person asking the question just wants a simple GUI for a non-engineer to use to build a database. Like, say, FileMaker.
Yes, every database _should_ be designed by someone who really understands database design. But most databases in the real world are running in FileMaker and Access, created by non-engineers in order to keep track of relatively simple information. For example, a call log, or a list of donations to a school, or an inventory at a bookstore. These systems don't need to scale, they just need to be good enough to let people do their jobs. And since they don't _have_ an engineer to do a proper requirements documentation, normalize the design, etc., the options are either (1) a simple GUI tool, and (2) no database.
Actually, QuickTime has (last time I saw the numbers) about 80% market penetration, since so many CD-ROM's install QT to play video clips, etc. So it's not as high as Windows Media Player (which is pre-installed on all Windows PC's and Mac's) but should be higher than Real, so that shouldn't be an issue.
On the "plus" side for QT, it costs nothing to stream the video beyond the raw hardware and network.
"http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/broadcast e r/
Thanks, we'll give that a try when we get our xserves. (Right now we're using linux and solaris)"
Actually, QT Broadcaster can run on a desktop -- it digitizes a single stream, which can then be sent to any streaming server (e.g. the open source QT streaming server) to unicast or multicast to lots of receivers. It's free, so if you have a G4 around there shouldn't be any cost to streaming QT (assuming that you have servers and bandwidth that can stream Real or MS).
Also, it supports both "real-time" streaming and "video on demand".
"Does anybody know if the DDJB has battery life issues, if the battery is replaceable, and how much replacement costs?"
The DDJB has a sealed battery ("not user replacable"), so if the iPod has any "battery issues" it will as well. There's no replacement program (yet).
BTW, if you do the replacement yourself, you can get a replacement iPod battery for $49, and if you scrounge around should be able to find the battery (wholesale channels) for around $25.
"CONS - slightly wider (not that much) - slightly thicker (not that much) - slightly heavier (not that much) - not as many songs (after 2500, does it make a difference?) PROS - cheaper - twice the battery life"
And then there's: - installation process so bad that a "mom" would have returned it - unfinished product (doesn't work with many USB hubs, etc.) " buy the device now before Dell spends the development money to get it right" vs. "something that works out of the box without any trouble and does what you expect". - No automatic synching of music from PC to player (i.e. have to manually manage music on the player as well as on the PC).
Sounds like it's going to cost them a fortune in product returns to me.
"This sounds like a well-designed system, based on your description. I don't think it is a coincidence that it can be mapped pretty directly to the traditional voting method."
Yes, the people designing it are a lot smarter than I am, and have been working on voting systems for a long time.
"One of the favourite forms of lunacy among computer systems designers is the (generally unspoken) assumption that the people who designed the old, "pre-computer" systems were all idiots."
"Diebold seems to be in the business of selling solitions that are worse than the problems they claim to solve."
Not true, they're just solving a different problem than you want solved. You want a solution to "how do we run elections efficiently and honestly" and they're solving the problem "how to get get as much of the $4B of HAVA funding as possible at the lowest cost possible."
AppleScript is actually at a higher level than this. In AppleScript you say things like "select the first line of the third paragraph" or "Tell the Application 'Microsoft Word' to open a new document" or "Turn on the option named 'auto-save'". This is important because AppleScripts are independent of the GUI, and many AppleEvents are even independent of specific applications, because there are suites of AppleEvents that are supported across many applications.
It's actually pretty easy to make an application recordable and scriptable, if you build your application the right way. Specifically, if all of your interactions between the front-end and the back end go through a clean interface, that's where you plug in scripting. Apple's development frameworks make it easy to do this.
The problem is that many developers don't want to learn more, and do more work, to support a capability that not too many people are asking for. So while many applications are scriptable, only a few are recordable.
Still, to disagree with the parent, scriptability is much more important than recordability, because if the app isn't scriptable you can't even get started in plugging things together. Recordability just makes it easier to write scripts.
Yes, and they give you a paper receipt. And the banks are audited by a third party. And they can count the money still left in the machine to see if it matches what the machine says it should have, and that money is paper cash."
Yes, and with all of that, there's a significant amount of money stolen from ATM's every year. The electronic voting systems are far less secure than ATM's, and the stakes are higher...
http://www.openvotingconsortium.org is the answer.
The systems being sold are "black boxes" that collect votes through a touchscreen and communicate them digitally, so there's no paper trail and no way to independently audit the results.
The system being built by the The Open Voting Consortium has a two step process. First, you use a touchscreen computer to ener your votes. When you're done, it prints out a ballot which you can read, then place in a folder (so it's private), with a barcode exposed.
Then you bring your ballot to a tallying machine, where a poll worker scans your vote, then puts the paper ballot into a sealed box. The separation between the voting station and the tallying station is important, because it means that the ballot is the vote, and there's no possibility (as is present with the commercial systems currently) of printing one thing and actually tallying another.
Thus, you have an immediate, accurate tally, but you also have paper ballots that can be audited.
Since the system is open source, anyone can audit the system to convince themselves that it's secure. Since the only connection
" Anyone notice Darl's comment toward the end of the interview?
What's odd to people is you have SCO against the world on one level. On another level, you have intellectual-property people who think operating systems shouldn't be free in our camp, and you have people over there who think operating systems should be free in IBM's camp.
This guy actually believes in a blanket statement like that?"
Yeah, Sun, IBM, Oracle, HP, etc., sure don't believe in proprietary software. Good thing that they have SCO to show them how the software business really works...
SUV's have an "interesting" dynamic, which is that they're not safer for you to drive (except when you hit another SUV), but they are more dangerous to the rest of the people on the road. So while I can imagine some situations where an SUV would be useful (imagine having a bunch of kids with hockey gear, or having a career that involves moving a lot of equipment), but for the most part, I think that SUV drivers are somehat anti-social -- they drive vehicles that are huge, expensive, consume absurd resources, and are great at killing other drivers in accidents. Specifically, in accidents, SUV drivers die a little more often than non-SUV drivers (because they don't wear seatbelts more often for some reason), and kill
non-SUV's that they collide with. So while people are "sold" SUV's as being safe, the statistics don't support that.
I'm not too sure how this applies to MP3 players, though.
" I want audio and video software as part of my OS, nicely bundled and integrated. I don't want to a half-baked OS that requires a lot more decisions to get a useful modern OS."
Right, I suspect that most people want that. The issue, though, is in _how_ Microsoft bundles and integrates their media player into their OS. If they did it in a nice, clean way so that there was a well documented API for integration into the OS so that anyone could implement competing players that provided the same benefits, that would be better.
Of course, there's the issue that MS Windows is a "monopoly" and MS has repeatedly violated settlements that it negotiated, so it has to live with restrictions that wouldn't apply generically to any OS company. Most importantly, it's _illegal_ for MS to use its monopoly power in the operating system market to promote products in any other market. So if they bundle Windows Media Player (etc.) with Windows in order to promote it over its competition (QuickTime, RealAudio), that's _illegal_, just as it was rulled _illegal_ for them to have bundled the web browser into the operating system in order to suppress competition in the web browser market. And _illegal_ for them to bundle DOS into Windows in order to suppress competition in the DOS market. And _illegal_ for them to bundle a disk compression program into the operating system in order to suppress competition in the disk compression market. You get the idea -- repeated use of the same _illegal_ tactics in market after market.
In the US, the settlements tend to slant heavily towards a "slap on the wrist and a promise not to do it again", which is meaningless since MS doesn't need to do it again in that market because they've "won" by the time the courts make any rulings, but I suspect that the dynamics in the EU are rather different.
The author was documenting his experiences setting up MacOS X 10.3 Server, not writing a more general review, and (I'm guessing) he doesn't have any Windows comptuters around.
SMB/Samba works fine with MacOS X 10.3 client, though to do anything interesting with it you need to edit config files (by deafult it only shares user home directories, so you have to add a line to the Samba config to create new mountpoints), so I'd assume that it also works on the server version.
"I know people keep saying over and over again that MS use focus groups for their GUI. But there are so many examples of weird limitations and designs that illustrate this must be a big fat lie."
Nope, I've seen their testing labs, and met the guy who ran them. Smart guy.
The problem with usability testing labs is that they can only help you identify trouble spots, or pick between alternatives. They can't help you come up with a good design.
So, for example, usability testing can tell you that people can figure out how to do A, but can't figure out how to do B. This tells you that you need to work on improving B.
So let's say that you come up with two variations of B, call then B1 and B2. Usability testing can tell you which one works better.
But what usability testing can't tell you is that there's another option, B3, that would be much better, or that if you thought about things differently you could eliminate B alltogether by combining it with very similar function C.
Usability testing also can't correct for bad specs. They can't override marketing people who have decided that they like shiny blue things, or business development people who insist in bundling random products into the OS, or pestering users into buying services that they don't want.
Please go visit the Open Voting Consortium. They are working on an open souce voting platform. Their system is nearly ready for a public demonstration, and will need all sorts of volunteers in order to ramp up for the "production" version for certification. The people involved are pretty amazing.
"An intelligent person can learn BASIC quite easily, and it does not destroy their mind."
Keep in mind that modern dialects of BASIC are really closer to interpreted Pascal than the BASIC that screwed up so many kids back in the day. So aside from a few random leftovers, modern BASIC is a pretty decent language (though it's still crappy compared to Ruby or even Perl).
So, in the context of the primal BASIC that the poster was referring to...
I used to teach programming to kids; the official sequence then was Logo for little kids, then BASIC, then Pascal. The kids who went straight from Logo to Pascal had no problems at all, other than getting bored waiting for the compiler -- Logo and Pascal are conceptually quite similar. The kids who wasted a year learning BASIC had to spend _ages_ unlearning stupid ideas like "computers know what line to go to next because of the line number" and "string variables end in $" and "you can't indent" and "subroutines start with line numbers in thousands so you can remember the number". And there was actually _nothing_ that they'd learned from programming in BASIC that wasn't in Logo. It was really frustrating several times every day having to leave half the classroom bored (the Logo kids) so that I could straighten the BASIC kids out, over and over again. Recursion? To Logo kids its obvious, and to BASIC kids it's impossible. Graphics? Variable scoping? Dynamic data structures? Inline commenting? Named subroutines?
Yes, people can eventually unlearn all of the stupid things that BASIC teaches you. Heck, I did -- I started with DEC BASIC, then TRS-80, then Apple ][. But why make the kids suffer through a meaningless waste of time (and worse, that makes it harder for them to learn anything useful later) instead of teaching them something constructive? It's not like anyone uses BASIC for anything significant these days (unless you're really excited about using VBA to write Word Macro's).
But rather than read about it, download and run it. It's fantastic!
Morphic is approachable to little kids, assuming that they're old enough to read a bit (or you sit with them to tell then what's what). And Smalltalk is deep and open enough that they can learn as much as they want. Want to understand how the event handler works? Walk through it in the (source level) debugger. Since the entire environment (including the Smalltalk virtual machine) is open source and written in Smalltalk, it's completely open to exploration and experimentation. Very liberating!
To get started, run Squeak, open one of the "worlds" and play around in it. Check out some screenshots.
Slashdot Mirror
"There are several HDD based mp3 players out there which are just as small as an iPod, hold just as much (or more) data as an iPod, look like mp3 players (although I have no idea why that matters) and COST SIGNIFICANTLY LESS THAN AN IPOD."
OK, name one that they could have used to carry LOTR dailies (without a time travel device). There were HDD-based MP3 players that cost less than the iPod, but they are much larger. There are RAM-based MP3 players that are smaller than the iPod, but don't have enough storage.
For a little trip back in time, read Transportable FireWire Hard Drives from December 2001. The drives are larger and heavier than an iPod, and the costs are "Price: $219 (10GB), $269 (20GB), $349 (30GB), $699 (48GB)". The closest in size to the iPod is a Toshiba PCMCIA card for $399 that provided 5 GB of storage (and didn't play music, etc.).
Heck, even considering all of the iPod copies that came out since LOTR was finished shooting, the iPod is probably still the best choice, because it's a firewire device (i.e. much better than USB for playing video), and almost all other MP3 players are USB.
The only HDD-based MP3 player that's smaller than the iPod is the iRiver oHP-120 which doesn't have Firewire, and they "cheat" on size because all of the controls are on a remote control that they don't count against the size and weight. Still, it plays Ogg Vorbis, which is cool, even if they do calculate their capacity using 64 Kbps WMA's in order to inflate their numbers.
"The 9th is by far the most reversed court in the country"
I did a little digging, trying to find actual counts of reviewed cases and cases overturned. and found facts such as "The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals was overturned 75% percent of the time in 2002. The 4th, 5th, 8th, and 10th Circuit Courts were overturned 100% of the time." You don't see the Republicans complaining about the Appeals Court That Always Veers to the Right.
But it's (IMO) if different courts lean one way or another -- people in different regions have different ideas, and it's hardly shocking that the people in California would be more progressive than the people in Virginia.
The person asking the question just wants a simple GUI for a non-engineer to use to build a database. Like, say, FileMaker.
Yes, every database _should_ be designed by someone who really understands database design. But most databases in the real world are running in FileMaker and Access, created by non-engineers in order to keep track of relatively simple information. For example, a call log, or a list of donations to a school, or an inventory at a bookstore. These systems don't need to scale, they just need to be good enough to let people do their jobs. And since they don't _have_ an engineer to do a proper requirements documentation, normalize the design, etc., the options are either (1) a simple GUI tool, and (2) no database.
Actually, QuickTime has (last time I saw the numbers) about 80% market penetration, since so many CD-ROM's install QT to play video clips, etc. So it's not as high as Windows Media Player (which is pre-installed on all Windows PC's and Mac's) but should be higher than Real, so that shouldn't be an issue.
On the "plus" side for QT, it costs nothing to stream the video beyond the raw hardware and network.
Any MPEG4 player can receive and play QuickTime streams, since it's simply an MPEG4 file delivered using RTSP. Gotta love those open standards...
"http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/broadcast e r/
Thanks, we'll give that a try when we get our xserves. (Right now we're using linux and solaris)"
Actually, QT Broadcaster can run on a desktop -- it digitizes a single stream, which can then be sent to any streaming server (e.g. the open source QT streaming server) to unicast or multicast to lots of receivers. It's free, so if you have a G4 around there shouldn't be any cost to streaming QT (assuming that you have servers and bandwidth that can stream Real or MS).
Also, it supports both "real-time" streaming and "video on demand".
Not bad for free...
"Mormons, actually. It's like Christ++."
Hmm, isn't that ((Moses++)++)++? (Can't forget the jews and Muslims)
"Does anybody know if the DDJB has battery life issues, if the battery is replaceable, and how much replacement costs?"
The DDJB has a sealed battery ("not user replacable"), so if the iPod has any "battery issues" it will as well. There's no replacement program (yet).
BTW, if you do the replacement yourself, you can get a replacement iPod battery for $49, and if you scrounge around should be able to find the battery (wholesale channels) for around $25.
"CONS
- slightly wider (not that much)
- slightly thicker (not that much)
- slightly heavier (not that much)
- not as many songs (after 2500, does it make a difference?)
PROS
- cheaper
- twice the battery life"
And then there's:
- installation process so bad that a "mom" would have returned it
- unfinished product (doesn't work with many USB hubs, etc.) " buy the device now before Dell spends the development money to get it right" vs. "something that works out of the box without any trouble and does what you expect".
- No automatic synching of music from PC to player (i.e. have to manually manage music on the player as well as on the PC).
Sounds like it's going to cost them a fortune in product returns to me.
"This sounds like a well-designed system, based on your description. I don't think it is a coincidence that it can be mapped pretty directly to the traditional voting method."
Yes, the people designing it are a lot smarter than I am, and have been working on voting systems for a long time.
"One of the favourite forms of lunacy among computer systems designers is the (generally unspoken) assumption that the people who designed the old, "pre-computer" systems were all idiots."
Brilliant observation, and far too true!
"Diebold seems to be in the business of selling solitions that are worse than the problems they claim to solve."
Not true, they're just solving a different problem than you want solved. You want a solution to "how do we run elections efficiently and honestly" and they're solving the problem "how to get get as much of the $4B of HAVA funding as possible at the lowest cost possible."
AppleScript is actually at a higher level than this. In AppleScript you say things like "select the first line of the third paragraph" or "Tell the Application 'Microsoft Word' to open a new document" or "Turn on the option named 'auto-save'". This is important because AppleScripts are independent of the GUI, and many AppleEvents are even independent of specific applications, because there are suites of AppleEvents that are supported across many applications.
It's actually pretty easy to make an application recordable and scriptable, if you build your application the right way. Specifically, if all of your interactions between the front-end and the back end go through a clean interface, that's where you plug in scripting. Apple's development frameworks make it easy to do this.
The problem is that many developers don't want to learn more, and do more work, to support a capability that not too many people are asking for. So while many applications are scriptable, only a few are recordable.
Still, to disagree with the parent, scriptability is much more important than recordability, because if the app isn't scriptable you can't even get started in plugging things together. Recordability just makes it easier to write scripts.
"ATMs exist.
Yes, and they give you a paper receipt. And the banks are audited by a third party. And they can count the money still left in the machine to see if it matches what the machine says it should have, and that money is paper cash."
Yes, and with all of that, there's a significant amount of money stolen from ATM's every year. The electronic voting systems are far less secure than ATM's, and the stakes are higher...
http://www.openvotingconsortium.org is the answer.
Not all electronic voting systems are the same.
The systems being sold are "black boxes" that collect votes through a touchscreen and communicate them digitally, so there's no paper trail and no way to independently audit the results.
The system being built by the The Open Voting Consortium has a two step process. First, you use a touchscreen computer to ener your votes. When you're done, it prints out a ballot which you can read, then place in a folder (so it's private), with a barcode exposed.
Then you bring your ballot to a tallying machine, where a poll worker scans your vote, then puts the paper ballot into a sealed box. The separation between the voting station and the tallying station is important, because it means that the ballot is the vote, and there's no possibility (as is present with the commercial systems currently) of printing one thing and actually tallying another.
Thus, you have an immediate, accurate tally, but you also have paper ballots that can be audited.
Since the system is open source, anyone can audit the system to convince themselves that it's secure. Since the only connection
This is roughly how the system built by The Open Voting Consortium works. Their project, EVM2003, is available on SourceForge.
" Anyone notice Darl's comment toward the end of the interview?
What's odd to people is you have SCO against the world on one level. On another level, you have intellectual-property people who think operating systems shouldn't be free in our camp, and you have people over there who think operating systems should be free in IBM's camp.
This guy actually believes in a blanket statement like that?"
Yeah, Sun, IBM, Oracle, HP, etc., sure don't believe in proprietary software. Good thing that they have SCO to show them how the software business really works...
SUV's have an "interesting" dynamic, which is that they're not safer for you to drive (except when you hit another SUV), but they are more dangerous to the rest of the people on the road. So while I can imagine some situations where an SUV would be useful (imagine having a bunch of kids with hockey gear, or having a career that involves moving a lot of equipment), but for the most part, I think that SUV drivers are somehat anti-social -- they drive vehicles that are huge, expensive, consume absurd resources, and are great at killing other drivers in accidents. Specifically, in accidents, SUV drivers die a little more often than non-SUV drivers (because they don't wear seatbelts more often for some reason), and kill non-SUV's that they collide with. So while people are "sold" SUV's as being safe, the statistics don't support that. I'm not too sure how this applies to MP3 players, though.
" I want audio and video software as part of my OS, nicely bundled and integrated. I don't want to a half-baked OS that requires a lot more decisions to get a useful modern OS."
Right, I suspect that most people want that. The issue, though, is in _how_ Microsoft bundles and integrates their media player into their OS. If they did it in a nice, clean way so that there was a well documented API for integration into the OS so that anyone could implement competing players that provided the same benefits, that would be better.
Of course, there's the issue that MS Windows is a "monopoly" and MS has repeatedly violated settlements that it negotiated, so it has to live with restrictions that wouldn't apply generically to any OS company. Most importantly, it's _illegal_ for MS to use its monopoly power in the operating system market to promote products in any other market. So if they bundle Windows Media Player (etc.) with Windows in order to promote it over its competition (QuickTime, RealAudio), that's _illegal_, just as it was rulled _illegal_ for them to have bundled the web browser into the operating system in order to suppress competition in the web browser market. And _illegal_ for them to bundle DOS into Windows in order to suppress competition in the DOS market. And _illegal_ for them to bundle a disk compression program into the operating system in order to suppress competition in the disk compression market. You get the idea -- repeated use of the same _illegal_ tactics in market after market.
In the US, the settlements tend to slant heavily towards a "slap on the wrist and a promise not to do it again", which is meaningless since MS doesn't need to do it again in that market because they've "won" by the time the courts make any rulings, but I suspect that the dynamics in the EU are rather different.
The author was documenting his experiences setting up MacOS X 10.3 Server, not writing a more general review, and (I'm guessing) he doesn't have any Windows comptuters around.
SMB/Samba works fine with MacOS X 10.3 client, though to do anything interesting with it you need to edit config files (by deafult it only shares user home directories, so you have to add a line to the Samba config to create new mountpoints), so I'd assume that it also works on the server version.
"I know people keep saying over and over again that MS use focus groups for their GUI. But there are so many examples of weird limitations and designs that illustrate this must be a big fat lie."
Nope, I've seen their testing labs, and met the guy who ran them. Smart guy.
The problem with usability testing labs is that they can only help you identify trouble spots, or pick between alternatives. They can't help you come up with a good design.
So, for example, usability testing can tell you that people can figure out how to do A, but can't figure out how to do B. This tells you that you need to work on improving B.
So let's say that you come up with two variations of B, call then B1 and B2. Usability testing can tell you which one works better.
But what usability testing can't tell you is that there's another option, B3, that would be much better, or that if you thought about things differently you could eliminate B alltogether by combining it with very similar function C.
Usability testing also can't correct for bad specs. They can't override marketing people who have decided that they like shiny blue things, or business development people who insist in bundling random products into the OS, or pestering users into buying services that they don't want.
Damn, typo in the link. Here it is: http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/.
Please go visit the Open Voting Consortium. They are working on an open souce voting platform. Their system is nearly ready for a public demonstration, and will need all sorts of volunteers in order to ramp up for the "production" version for certification. The people involved are pretty amazing.
"An intelligent person can learn BASIC quite easily, and it does not destroy their mind."
Keep in mind that modern dialects of BASIC are really closer to interpreted Pascal than the BASIC that screwed up so many kids back in the day. So aside from a few random leftovers, modern BASIC is a pretty decent language (though it's still crappy compared to Ruby or even Perl).
So, in the context of the primal BASIC that the poster was referring to...
I used to teach programming to kids; the official sequence then was Logo for little kids, then BASIC, then Pascal. The kids who went straight from Logo to Pascal had no problems at all, other than getting bored waiting for the compiler -- Logo and Pascal are conceptually quite similar. The kids who wasted a year learning BASIC had to spend _ages_ unlearning stupid ideas like "computers know what line to go to next because of the line number" and "string variables end in $" and "you can't indent" and "subroutines start with line numbers in thousands so you can remember the number". And there was actually _nothing_ that they'd learned from programming in BASIC that wasn't in Logo. It was really frustrating several times every day having to leave half the classroom bored (the Logo kids) so that I could straighten the BASIC kids out, over and over again. Recursion? To Logo kids its obvious, and to BASIC kids it's impossible. Graphics? Variable scoping? Dynamic data structures? Inline commenting? Named subroutines?
Yes, people can eventually unlearn all of the stupid things that BASIC teaches you. Heck, I did -- I started with DEC BASIC, then TRS-80, then Apple ][. But why make the kids suffer through a meaningless waste of time (and worse, that makes it harder for them to learn anything useful later) instead of teaching them something constructive? It's not like anyone uses BASIC for anything significant these days (unless you're really excited about using VBA to write Word Macro's).
And then run Squeak! Squeak's Morphic is a fantastic teaching environment!
Squeak Smalltalk
Morphic Tutorial
But rather than read about it, download and run it. It's fantastic!
Morphic is approachable to little kids, assuming that they're old enough to read a bit (or you sit with them to tell then what's what). And Smalltalk is deep and open enough that they can learn as much as they want. Want to understand how the event handler works? Walk through it in the (source level) debugger. Since the entire environment (including the Smalltalk virtual machine) is open source and written in Smalltalk, it's completely open to exploration and experimentation. Very liberating!
To get started, run Squeak, open one of the "worlds" and play around in it. Check out some screenshots.