Are you looking to dive in with practical information or learn pure theory first? I personally like to learn by building first, and then start learning theory after I fried a couple of components. I just spent the last three years at an art school in an Interactive Media program. (Art school and electronics? Yes - there's a growing amount of interactive works - not to mention the increasing demand for User Interface Design) We learned some very practical information in Physical Computing: interacting between the real world and computers. We began by building our own temperature sensors, pressure sensors, and then learning how to connect them with computers, without any formal programming experience, using a combination of serial communication, arduino and basic stamps, python, MaxMSP, Processing and Flash.
You may want to check out the art world for some really creative uses of technology:
I had an opportunity to speak with Norm White, an artist who has been building with electronics since the 60's , he made some amazing artwork, such as the "The Helpless Robot" - which runs off an old 386 and Delphi. Details here. (He's looking for someone to translate it to a modern language)
Alan Rath is another artist who builds interactive robots.
Conflux is a street art festival in Brooklyn that often attracts artists who mix technology with art. There have been some really cool interactive games that use modified cellphones
Aram Bartholl does some cool work, mixing virtual world concepts such as IM'ing with very low tech. See Chat
Some other practical suggestions:
For a great hands on approach, check out Tom Igoe and Dan O'Sullivan's Pysical Computing Tom Igoe is the head of Physical Computing at New York University.
Amphibionics by Karl Williams was my first attempt at building my own circuit board and robot.
I usually buy my components online at DigiKey. Navigating their site and trying to choose between the 100s of varieties of 1uF capacitors was a learning experience in itself.
This answers my first question - viruses on *nix can run as with regular user permissions - and still access that user's data and surfing right?
So about the only thing a virus on a nix system can't do is spam on ports under 1024, or attack other user's accounts on the system. So that stops it from directly email spamming, right? That leaves the user's personal data open for attack.
Isn't this the real issue with clogging 'tubes'? How can the government and ISPs keep up with the computational resources needed to continue this as we demand greater and greater amounts of bandwidth? OK, so they could only inspect http traffic, rather than say, bittorrent traffic, but OMG what happens when 'terrorists' start communicating with other protocols?
I wonder if this has anything to do with the large amount of spam originating from South Korea? For my less internationally inclined clients, I sometimes suggested using the DNSBL cn-kr.blackholes.us to help fight some of the unwanted spam.
I spent a month at a S. Korean University, and there was a lot of junk installed on the public computers on campus. Every evening they rebooted, and and started with a clean image each morning - so IE was clogged after a day's worth of surfing. Needless to say, I rebooted before using one.
I agree that Probes give better scientific, objective information - and it is very important....But a probe can't write poetry. The reason for sending Humans to explore is that human can convey the experience so that others can experience it, if only vicariouly.
I am reminded of the line in Contact when Jodi Foster says "They should've sent a poet..."
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Are you looking to dive in with practical information or learn pure theory first? I personally like to learn by building first, and then start learning theory after I fried a couple of components. I just spent the last three years at an art school in an Interactive Media program. (Art school and electronics? Yes - there's a growing amount of interactive works - not to mention the increasing demand for User Interface Design) We learned some very practical information in Physical Computing: interacting between the real world and computers. We began by building our own temperature sensors, pressure sensors, and then learning how to connect them with computers, without any formal programming experience, using a combination of serial communication, arduino and basic stamps, python, MaxMSP, Processing and Flash.
You may want to check out the art world for some really creative uses of technology:
I had an opportunity to speak with Norm White, an artist who has been building with electronics since the 60's , he made some amazing artwork, such as the "The Helpless Robot" - which runs off an old 386 and Delphi. Details here. (He's looking for someone to translate it to a modern language)
Alan Rath is another artist who builds interactive robots.
Conflux is a street art festival in Brooklyn that often attracts artists who mix technology with art. There have been some really cool interactive games that use modified cellphones
Aram Bartholl does some cool work, mixing virtual world concepts such as IM'ing with very low tech. See Chat
Some other practical suggestions:
For a great hands on approach, check out Tom Igoe and Dan O'Sullivan's Pysical Computing Tom Igoe is the head of Physical Computing at New York University.
Amphibionics by Karl Williams was my first attempt at building my own circuit board and robot.
I usually buy my components online at DigiKey. Navigating their site and trying to choose between the 100s of varieties of 1uF capacitors was a learning experience in itself.
This answers my first question - viruses on *nix can run as with regular user permissions - and still access that user's data and surfing right?
So about the only thing a virus on a nix system can't do is spam on ports under 1024, or attack other user's accounts on the system. So that stops it from directly email spamming, right? That leaves the user's personal data open for attack.
Isn't this the real issue with clogging 'tubes'? How can the government and ISPs keep up with the computational resources needed to continue this as we demand greater and greater amounts of bandwidth? OK, so they could only inspect http traffic, rather than say, bittorrent traffic, but OMG what happens when 'terrorists' start communicating with other protocols?
I wonder if this has anything to do with the large amount of spam originating from South Korea? For my less internationally inclined clients, I sometimes suggested using the DNSBL cn-kr.blackholes.us to help fight some of the unwanted spam.
I spent a month at a S. Korean University, and there was a lot of junk installed on the public computers on campus. Every evening they rebooted, and and started with a clean image each morning - so IE was clogged after a day's worth of surfing. Needless to say, I rebooted before using one.
I agree that Probes give better scientific, objective information - and it is very important. ...But a probe can't write poetry. The reason for sending Humans to explore is that human can convey the experience so that others can experience it, if only vicariouly.
I am reminded of the line in Contact when Jodi Foster says "They should've sent a poet..."