I think these things would be more useful going the thin-client approach. E.g., just use it to ssh+vnc into a persistent desktop on your home PC. That way you have all your settings preserved, and the performance will likely be much better for anything more complicated than reading.
I think the opera browser for most smartphones / blackberries use a thin client approach, where they render your web page on their servers and send screenscrapes to your device which you can pan and zoom around in their interface.
Anyway, I've been looking for something to eventually replace my Palm T|X, and don't really see anything I like too much. The N810 looks nice, but seems like the PIM functionality will be taking a step back from what I have now (granted it wasn't really designed for PIM at all to begin with).
Get him access to a small bundle of O'Reilley books... make sure he's a bit bored or at least doesn't have any other distractions, and leave him alone.
Also might consider eventually getting him a little Eee PC or Nokia N810 or OpenMoko device once he gets into it a little more. Install Python or an compiler on it and let him find a creative use for it somewhere with a bit of hacking.
When I was young, we just had graphing calculators to play with, and we'd play with little programs on them in our free time on the school bus or wherever just because there wasn't all that much to do.
Something I read about on Popular Mechanics 10 years ago actually coming to fruition? Implausible! They had pictures (unlike the linked article), but I don't think I'll have any luck searching for them:/
Actually, come to think of it, the PM version just used gravity to rotate a set of internal buckets like a partially submerged water mill... would have been a lot of sloshing around.
So I eventually got a MS in System's Engineering, because I kept getting hired for systems engineering jobs and I wanted to find out what the heck it was. Basically, it's a lot like a "lite" version of what you learned in software engineering classes. You can fetch pretty decent salaries just sitting around doing project management-type things, such as writing white papers, keeping track of processes, and traveling the world going to various kinds of conferences and training. And lots of talking to people to keep things chill. So if this appeals to you (it doesn't to me, but at least I'm free to occasionally hang out in the trenches with the technology and the people who do the deep interesting work once in a while), this might be your ticket. If you're consistent with solving people's problems by doing things the smart/lazy way as opposed to furiously turning the crank, maybe you'll get bumped up to "Systems Architect" and get into even more abstract drawings of boxes that vaguely resemble UML diagrams.
Right on! I voted Wikileaks because I think it's the only thing on the list that the higher-up bureaucrats even have a hope of comprehending. Plus it's the only thing that could really get them in trouble (at least in such a way that people would actually find out about it).
As for the encryption and anonymization services, what they don't know can't hurt them, right? I think (hope) the techies in the NSA / FBI who actually understand this stuff are more sympathetic to our need for privacy and won't try to target these services with their bosses.
The worst that can happen is that some terrorist cell uses encryption services to coordinate an attack. In which case there are plenty of other avenues to use to intercept the attack or hold those responsible accountable even if it is successful. Yes, a free and open society has got to be able to take a sucker punch once in a while. It's not like the politicians will take a lot of heat for not being able to divert an attack. They hardly took any for allowing 9/11 to happen, and the enemy communications there weren't even hidden.
No, the global war against terrorism is more of a war for hearts and minds... one which is not effectively fought with guns and bombs.
OK, so I went to relatively good (public) schools in the US, but I think some of the most important things I learned from my teachers of Math and Chemistry was to read and learn directly from the textbook. I never really learned much from the teachers, and many of them were considered at the top of their field. To me, the only function of the teacher was to assign a subset of problems from the book for homework, grade papers, and go through some examples in class (which I usually wouldn't be able to follow unless I already read that chapter/section in advance and attempted at least some of the homework).
So I might be biased in saying that the teachers have a huge impact on the content learned, since I guess I've never had particularly bad ones. I still support raising teacher pay and quality for them to take care of all the administrative, motivational, and social classroom tasks. But I think students can learn the content fine from the math textbook if they go through it at the correct pace.
I acted as a teaching assistant for a summer school for bright children, and their math program was basically a bunch of kids working independently through advanced math textbooks. A small team of us assistants would just roam around and administer chapter tests occasionally and give help and motivation when necessary (I wasn't very good at the motivational parts:P )
As far as exams and assessments go, I'd think they're most useful as a measuring tool when a histogram of the results from all students form a nice bell curve distribution. If it's skewed or clipped by a bunch of scores at the extreme low or high end, then you're essentially throwing away data. On the other hand, you're also losing fidelity if you have a wide range of scores, but all the "normal" people score within a narrow band... say 80% +/- 5%. There's not much point in having strong differentiation between a few people in the tail so that a handful of students who scored 95% could say they're better than the handful who scored 90%, and yet there's no way to distinguish the performance of the thousands who scored 81%. So in this case it makes sense to adjust the test to give the bulk of the bell curve some more "spread".
The SATs went through such a "recentering" in the late 90s. But I think that was mainly driven by their desire to have 1200 / 1600 be the "average score". The recentering gave slightly boosted everyone's Math SAT score. Which in essence was truly lowering the expectations of the test.
Need not dive in to the expensive airplanes right away... I built a rubber-band powered, balsa wood and tissue paper Spitfire (~$20 + ~$40 of basic wood tools, baseboards, and paints) and then a 2 channel R/C glider (~$60 + ~$100 for the radio) as practice for the 4 channel gas powered trainer (~$100 kit, ~$100 engine, and shared the same radio as the glider). It was very educational, gave me a lot of time to work on my woodworking skills, and was quite motivational and therapeutic (I'd often start working on them in the mornings before school, so the glue could set during the day, and it was quite relaxing to spend time sanding and filing late into the evening).
Actually spent much more time working on the cheap rubber band airplane, since it used more old-fashioned but cheaper construction methods.
I eventually made it through an aerospace program at an ivy league school. My grades were quite threatened by my side hobby of playing with computers. The irony is that my entire professional career has revolved around doing reasonably fun stuff with Linux & Windows on pretty nice computer hardware, and I pretty much only get to play with aviation things for fun on the side. As a minor consolation, at least I'm doing computer stuff for an aerospace company.:P
The military-industrial complex seems to be using it a lot... Lockheed was supposedly planning on using IBM Rational Rose to do all of the JSF software development, and Boeing's been playing around with the Ilogix Rhapsody tools to do various simulation things.
A complete working toolchain is of course prohibitively expensive to use in any other setting (with ClearCase to do version control, and all of the full time admins needed to keep the system organized enough to keep from falling flat on its face).
But as long as the PHBs and other management types think it gives them simple enough pictures to have at least a glimmer of hope of appearing to know how any of the SW projects they manage work, then I have a feeling they will mandate that developers use UML-to-code tools regardless of the cost.
I worked on a decent-sized development effort using the Rhapsody thing, and I have to admit I was surprised that it actually worked pretty well. Most of the "real" code was embedded in traditional blocks of text attached as properties to the UML elements, but the additional structure enforced by the software kinda helped organize everything. And it was pretty neat to be able to visually navigate the code tree.
You still needed pretty skilled developers to make the thing worse, and of course they could do their job better without having management trying to interject things they half-learned from a design pattern seminar. And ultimately, management will point to how easy development now looks, and will use that to justify hiring cheaper, less qualified developers.
Bottom line, I think UML-to-code development styles have shown that they can work, and will persevere, even if only as a learning tool. I think it just depends on how fast the open-source tools like Umbrello reach the level of capability of the expensive commercial tools.
... drove me to switch from Redhat 4 to Debian while cleaning up from a remote root compromise. Granted, it was pretty entertaining discovering the rootkit and tracing it back through a few other compromised servers.
Anyway, hoping I won't be driven from Debian to, uh, Gentoo or something.
Well, in my engineering physics classes we were put through lots of different programming regimes, ranging from: Excel, Matlab, and also NI Labview and C for collecting and processing data directly from sensors. They were all very different, but the emphasis was always to be able to graphically plot and present your data repeatably and consistently to others. If your students won't be able to do this, they will have to rely on others that can... and frankly you don't want to put them in that position. And even if they are in that position, they'll still have to have some rudimentary understand what the programmers will be doing with their equations and algorithms downstream.
On the other hand, the pure physics courses I took rarely needed anything more than a nice calculator - they were much more algebra and calculus dependent.
To support your arguments on expanding upon Excel, it might be fine for doing basic statistics but any "real" number crunching for analysis will be qualitatively different using just about any "real" language, and it's important to get your students to be able to think a little different. For example, they ought to know how to operate on variables and matrices rather than cells and cell ranges. Plus, it's much easier to show your work.
These days I'd recommend Python... in particular look at the SciPy and SimPy packages, which both have very good tutorials on doing very interesting things.
Obviously you just modify your space bar and numlock LED drivers to perform all I/O in morse code.
Then you type in and display bunch of misleading information to entrap the eavesdropper into doing something silly / stupid / illegal and nab 'em on it.
As far as still being able to check your email and bank accounts and stuff without compromising your passwords, just set up some kind of password vault that uses biometric authentication or something so you never have to type in your actual login / password on the untrusted machine. You'd have to do the setup for the private key and all on a trusted system of course.
Dude, you need to have kids (or borrow some) and take them to see Finding Nemo on the big screen, if just for the whale scene. It will totally give you awesome nightmares. For some definition of awesome.
To anyone concerned about frying the microbes, Wired had a very readable story on what can happen sometimes when the ballast is handled the conventional way:
*spoiler* essentially current cargo ships headed to the U.S. have to flush their ballast in international waters and refill with local seawater. The Cougar Ace somehow managed to screw up this step and went askew (see pic). There were many quite grave consequences.
Granted, it's not standard operating protocol to end up with losses like this just too keep out invasive species, but it does illustrate some of the challenges and extent of trouble people go to to comply with this kind of ecological directive. Plus it was a damn well-written story I enjoyed reading.
A much better plan would be oxygen sequestration... then you could sell it back to people when we run out!
But really, carbon credits seem to be a good idea. Without such a carbon economy, what's really to stop people from sucking up all of the oxygen and pumping out carbon dioxide on a massive, teraformational scale?
I have two kids aged 3 & 5 and here are a few things that they've taken well to (even though they're a bit young for them, should be perfect for your target age group):
Hyperspace http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0273608/ I'm not a big fan of Sam Neill, but they've done a pretty good job making the basics interesting, even though they go quite a bit over the top sometimes.
Cosmic Voyage http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115952/ This is the updated version of that old "Powers of Ten" video you must have seen back in the 70s / 80s. It might be a bit slow at times, but it nevertheless helps fuse the "big parts" and the "small parts" of physics and astronomy together.
I was pretty surprised my kids took to this at all, since they're still at the stage where they usually tune out anything that's not a cartoon.
I pretty much learned about both of these through visiting the local science center. I just got the annual membership this year and it's been great... I can use it at just about any science / children's museum in the country and it pretty much means I never have to worry about having nowhere interesting to take the kids on a rainy Sunday. It's already paid for itself several times over the past few months.
Also don't forget Magic School Bus.
Of course, I have to admit that the thing that initially got my son turned on to space was from watching the Futurama episode where the Titanic gets sucked into a black hole. We've since gotten rid of Futurama from our repertoire once he learned to talk and imitate Bender a bit more, though:P
I came here to mention that Vice City mission... it was awesome and I was kicking myself that I didn't have a saved game so I could do it again.
There was also another story linked on slashdot a few years ago about university researchers creating a drunk driving simulator that basically delayed all of your conrol inputs, so you'd steer or brake or something an the car would react a second or two later.
I was kinda annoyed that the moonshine mission in Vice City basically just gave you vertigo through extra graphics filters, but other than nudging your steering every once in a while, it didn't really add the control delay.
Ultimately, I think these intoxication simulations send the right message that drugs don't help you perform, or even have fun... mostly they make you very frustrated. I think ingesting shrooms often have similar detrimental effects in most RPGs (Mario Bros. aside). So I think this is a actually a worthwhile anti-drug message to put in video games.
Yeah, the main deficiency is that I actually have to set up the special clone modes used by the nVidia drivers. nVidia does ship with a handy profile manager tool as part of nView, but I haven't figured out how to launch it from the command line in such a way that it actually restores a profile. Maybe if I played around with AutoHotKey some more I could create a script/macro that does it by manipulating the GUI, but yuck.
Another nVidia / nView problem I'm running into is launching applications on other displays. I can set up nView to automatically place applications with a certain name on the 2nd display. But when I launch the same thing remotely through ssh, it always comes up on the primary desktop, even if I launch it via a batch script or AutoHotKey script. I've tried comparing and tweaking various environment variables between the local command prompt and the ssh command prompt, but no joy.
A lot of my work these days deals with getting Windows boxes to act more like *NIX boxes so I can operate them remotely from a central Linux box.
It's working out pretty well, actually... I set up cygwin with sshd installed in interactive mode, so I can run a script on the central server and have a cluster of WinXP machines all open an application simultaneously, such as play a video simultaneously or connect to a set of VNC servers all at once. I can also use rsync to efficiently distribute and keep a set of files up to date.
Still running into a bunch of limitations of what I can do remotely, such as set the display mode to a certain resolution, etc. so it ultimately won't keep me from replacing the remote machines with a bunch of custom Knoppix LiveCDs eventually. But at least this way I can still leverage the other Windows sysadmins we have an abundance of.
There are valid manufacturing reasons to move from full screen (4:3) to widescreen (16:9) formats. In the old days displays were made from cathode ray tubes, which are cheaper to make in square formats. In the heyday of the CRT monitor, you even had it driving a change in aspect ratio from 4:3 to 5:4 (1280x1024) to get displays even more square.
With the advent and proliferation of digital LCD screens and projectors, it now becomes cheaper to build widescreens, since the fab kinda rolls them out at a fixed width. So you'd have a machine that could crank out parts for 1200 pixel wide panels, and "cut" and finish wiring them into 1600 or 1920 pixel wide displays. It doesn't cost all that much more to produce the "wider" display, whereas if you wanted to also make it "higher" you'd need a whole new set of machines.
Palm was just being a typical business... If you read about Jeff Hawkins and the other initial inventors of the Palm Pilot, it's pretty apparent that the design innovation followed them around with the invention of the first couple of palm pilots. They got bored with the direction that USRobotics and then 3com took the device, so they spun off to form Handspring so they'd have the freedom to add what was missing (expansion modules, speed). And then they got reabsorbed by 3Com, spun off as Palm, and finally got bored and left to do other things in AI and augmented memory and stuff.
I guess some of the interesting tidbits was that they originally designed the Palm Pilot to compete with a pad a paper instead of a portable PC. Jeff would actually go around with a block of wood carved up into a dummy palm pilot and would whip it out and pretend to use it for what he wanted while he was designing the interface for a real one. This contributed to a lot of the usability apparent in the design. That's also part of the reason that color was never that big a deal for them... it wasn't strictly a priority for its success as a information-gathering PDA, and most of the color LCDs at the time were too power hungry and they favored long battery life more.
To be fair, 3Com / Palm contributed a lot of technical improvements on their watch... such as adding the color displays (probably part of the reason Handspring merged, since they were still doing greyscale displays at the time) and bluetooth and wifi. I'd say their major failing was that they simply couldn't get the OS port to Linux fully working.
Slashdot Mirror
I think these things would be more useful going the thin-client approach. E.g., just use it to ssh+vnc into a persistent desktop on your home PC. That way you have all your settings preserved, and the performance will likely be much better for anything more complicated than reading.
I think the opera browser for most smartphones / blackberries use a thin client approach, where they render your web page on their servers and send screenscrapes to your device which you can pan and zoom around in their interface.
Anyway, I've been looking for something to eventually replace my Palm T|X, and don't really see anything I like too much. The N810 looks nice, but seems like the PIM functionality will be taking a step back from what I have now (granted it wasn't really designed for PIM at all to begin with).
Get him access to a small bundle of O'Reilley books... make sure he's a bit bored or at least doesn't have any other distractions, and leave him alone.
Also might consider eventually getting him a little Eee PC or Nokia N810 or OpenMoko device once he gets into it a little more. Install Python or an compiler on it and let him find a creative use for it somewhere with a bit of hacking.
When I was young, we just had graphing calculators to play with, and we'd play with little programs on them in our free time on the school bus or wherever just because there wasn't all that much to do.
Something I read about on Popular Mechanics 10 years ago actually coming to fruition? Implausible! They had pictures (unlike the linked article), but I don't think I'll have any luck searching for them :/
Actually, come to think of it, the PM version just used gravity to rotate a set of internal buckets like a partially submerged water mill... would have been a lot of sloshing around.
Seriously, I'm surprised no one has posted a link to http://xkcd.com/413/ yet.
And seriously, $300 for the 2GB surf model will give you a 7" screen and a keyboard/trackpad. Can't beat that for convenience.
OK, maybe the $200 Nokia N800 would work well too, if you don't mind using the onscreen keyboard.
So I eventually got a MS in System's Engineering, because I kept getting hired for systems engineering jobs and I wanted to find out what the heck it was. Basically, it's a lot like a "lite" version of what you learned in software engineering classes. You can fetch pretty decent salaries just sitting around doing project management-type things, such as writing white papers, keeping track of processes, and traveling the world going to various kinds of conferences and training. And lots of talking to people to keep things chill. So if this appeals to you (it doesn't to me, but at least I'm free to occasionally hang out in the trenches with the technology and the people who do the deep interesting work once in a while), this might be your ticket. If you're consistent with solving people's problems by doing things the smart/lazy way as opposed to furiously turning the crank, maybe you'll get bumped up to "Systems Architect" and get into even more abstract drawings of boxes that vaguely resemble UML diagrams.
Right on! I voted Wikileaks because I think it's the only thing on the list that the higher-up bureaucrats even have a hope of comprehending. Plus it's the only thing that could really get them in trouble (at least in such a way that people would actually find out about it).
As for the encryption and anonymization services, what they don't know can't hurt them, right? I think (hope) the techies in the NSA / FBI who actually understand this stuff are more sympathetic to our need for privacy and won't try to target these services with their bosses.
The worst that can happen is that some terrorist cell uses encryption services to coordinate an attack. In which case there are plenty of other avenues to use to intercept the attack or hold those responsible accountable even if it is successful. Yes, a free and open society has got to be able to take a sucker punch once in a while. It's not like the politicians will take a lot of heat for not being able to divert an attack. They hardly took any for allowing 9/11 to happen, and the enemy communications there weren't even hidden.
No, the global war against terrorism is more of a war for hearts and minds... one which is not effectively fought with guns and bombs.
OK, so I went to relatively good (public) schools in the US, but I think some of the most important things I learned from my teachers of Math and Chemistry was to read and learn directly from the textbook. I never really learned much from the teachers, and many of them were considered at the top of their field. To me, the only function of the teacher was to assign a subset of problems from the book for homework, grade papers, and go through some examples in class (which I usually wouldn't be able to follow unless I already read that chapter/section in advance and attempted at least some of the homework).
:P )
So I might be biased in saying that the teachers have a huge impact on the content learned, since I guess I've never had particularly bad ones. I still support raising teacher pay and quality for them to take care of all the administrative, motivational, and social classroom tasks. But I think students can learn the content fine from the math textbook if they go through it at the correct pace.
I acted as a teaching assistant for a summer school for bright children, and their math program was basically a bunch of kids working independently through advanced math textbooks. A small team of us assistants would just roam around and administer chapter tests occasionally and give help and motivation when necessary (I wasn't very good at the motivational parts
As far as exams and assessments go, I'd think they're most useful as a measuring tool when a histogram of the results from all students form a nice bell curve distribution. If it's skewed or clipped by a bunch of scores at the extreme low or high end, then you're essentially throwing away data. On the other hand, you're also losing fidelity if you have a wide range of scores, but all the "normal" people score within a narrow band... say 80% +/- 5%. There's not much point in having strong differentiation between a few people in the tail so that a handful of students who scored 95% could say they're better than the handful who scored 90%, and yet there's no way to distinguish the performance of the thousands who scored 81%. So in this case it makes sense to adjust the test to give the bulk of the bell curve some more "spread".
The SATs went through such a "recentering" in the late 90s. But I think that was mainly driven by their desire to have 1200 / 1600 be the "average score". The recentering gave slightly boosted everyone's Math SAT score. Which in essence was truly lowering the expectations of the test.
Yep, sounds a lot like my childhood!
:P
Need not dive in to the expensive airplanes right away... I built a rubber-band powered, balsa wood and tissue paper Spitfire (~$20 + ~$40 of basic wood tools, baseboards, and paints) and then a 2 channel R/C glider (~$60 + ~$100 for the radio) as practice for the 4 channel gas powered trainer (~$100 kit, ~$100 engine, and shared the same radio as the glider). It was very educational, gave me a lot of time to work on my woodworking skills, and was quite motivational and therapeutic (I'd often start working on them in the mornings before school, so the glue could set during the day, and it was quite relaxing to spend time sanding and filing late into the evening).
Actually spent much more time working on the cheap rubber band airplane, since it used more old-fashioned but cheaper construction methods.
I eventually made it through an aerospace program at an ivy league school. My grades were quite threatened by my side hobby of playing with computers. The irony is that my entire professional career has revolved around doing reasonably fun stuff with Linux & Windows on pretty nice computer hardware, and I pretty much only get to play with aviation things for fun on the side. As a minor consolation, at least I'm doing computer stuff for an aerospace company.
The military-industrial complex seems to be using it a lot... Lockheed was supposedly planning on using IBM Rational Rose to do all of the JSF software development, and Boeing's been playing around with the Ilogix Rhapsody tools to do various simulation things.
A complete working toolchain is of course prohibitively expensive to use in any other setting (with ClearCase to do version control, and all of the full time admins needed to keep the system organized enough to keep from falling flat on its face).
But as long as the PHBs and other management types think it gives them simple enough pictures to have at least a glimmer of hope of appearing to know how any of the SW projects they manage work, then I have a feeling they will mandate that developers use UML-to-code tools regardless of the cost.
I worked on a decent-sized development effort using the Rhapsody thing, and I have to admit I was surprised that it actually worked pretty well. Most of the "real" code was embedded in traditional blocks of text attached as properties to the UML elements, but the additional structure enforced by the software kinda helped organize everything. And it was pretty neat to be able to visually navigate the code tree.
You still needed pretty skilled developers to make the thing worse, and of course they could do their job better without having management trying to interject things they half-learned from a design pattern seminar. And ultimately, management will point to how easy development now looks, and will use that to justify hiring cheaper, less qualified developers.
Bottom line, I think UML-to-code development styles have shown that they can work, and will persevere, even if only as a learning tool. I think it just depends on how fast the open-source tools like Umbrello reach the level of capability of the expensive commercial tools.
... drove me to switch from Redhat 4 to Debian while cleaning up from a remote root compromise. Granted, it was pretty entertaining discovering the rootkit and tracing it back through a few other compromised servers.
Anyway, hoping I won't be driven from Debian to, uh, Gentoo or something.
Well, in my engineering physics classes we were put through lots of different programming regimes, ranging from: Excel, Matlab, and also NI Labview and C for collecting and processing data directly from sensors. They were all very different, but the emphasis was always to be able to graphically plot and present your data repeatably and consistently to others. If your students won't be able to do this, they will have to rely on others that can... and frankly you don't want to put them in that position. And even if they are in that position, they'll still have to have some rudimentary understand what the programmers will be doing with their equations and algorithms downstream.
On the other hand, the pure physics courses I took rarely needed anything more than a nice calculator - they were much more algebra and calculus dependent.
To support your arguments on expanding upon Excel, it might be fine for doing basic statistics but any "real" number crunching for analysis will be qualitatively different using just about any "real" language, and it's important to get your students to be able to think a little different. For example, they ought to know how to operate on variables and matrices rather than cells and cell ranges. Plus, it's much easier to show your work.
These days I'd recommend Python... in particular look at the SciPy and SimPy packages, which both have very good tutorials on doing very interesting things.
Yep...
Just wanted to point out that I typically use this with screen and export TERM=ansi .
CTRL is kinda unnecessarily cumbersome to get to, but it's manageable.
C'mon, this is Slashdot.
Obviously you just modify your space bar and numlock LED drivers to perform all I/O in morse code.
Then you type in and display bunch of misleading information to entrap the eavesdropper into doing something silly / stupid / illegal and nab 'em on it.
As far as still being able to check your email and bank accounts and stuff without compromising your passwords, just set up some kind of password vault that uses biometric authentication or something so you never have to type in your actual login / password on the untrusted machine. You'd have to do the setup for the private key and all on a trusted system of course.
Dude, you need to have kids (or borrow some) and take them to see Finding Nemo on the big screen, if just for the whale scene. It will totally give you awesome nightmares. For some definition of awesome.
Drat, I think you're right. I was really looking forward to mapping out all of the interesting barnacles or something.
But come to think of it, this is really something we need more of. Especially of humans. You'd think the porn industry would already be on top of it.
To anyone concerned about frying the microbes, Wired had a very readable story on what can happen sometimes when the ballast is handled the conventional way:
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-03/ff_seacowboys?currentPage=all
*spoiler* essentially current cargo ships headed to the U.S. have to flush their ballast in international waters and refill with local seawater. The Cougar Ace somehow managed to screw up this step and went askew (see pic). There were many quite grave consequences.
Granted, it's not standard operating protocol to end up with losses like this just too keep out invasive species, but it does illustrate some of the challenges and extent of trouble people go to to comply with this kind of ecological directive. Plus it was a damn well-written story I enjoyed reading.
A much better plan would be oxygen sequestration... then you could sell it back to people when we run out!
But really, carbon credits seem to be a good idea. Without such a carbon economy, what's really to stop people from sucking up all of the oxygen and pumping out carbon dioxide on a massive, teraformational scale?
I have two kids aged 3 & 5 and here are a few things that they've taken well to (even though they're a bit young for them, should be perfect for your target age group):
:P
Hyperspace http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0273608/
I'm not a big fan of Sam Neill, but they've done a pretty good job making the basics interesting, even though they go quite a bit over the top sometimes.
Cosmic Voyage http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115952/
This is the updated version of that old "Powers of Ten" video you must have seen back in the 70s / 80s. It might be a bit slow at times, but it nevertheless helps fuse the "big parts" and the "small parts" of physics and astronomy together.
I was pretty surprised my kids took to this at all, since they're still at the stage where they usually tune out anything that's not a cartoon.
I pretty much learned about both of these through visiting the local science center. I just got the annual membership this year and it's been great... I can use it at just about any science / children's museum in the country and it pretty much means I never have to worry about having nowhere interesting to take the kids on a rainy Sunday. It's already paid for itself several times over the past few months.
Also don't forget Magic School Bus.
Of course, I have to admit that the thing that initially got my son turned on to space was from watching the Futurama episode where the Titanic gets sucked into a black hole. We've since gotten rid of Futurama from our repertoire once he learned to talk and imitate Bender a bit more, though
I came here to mention that Vice City mission... it was awesome and I was kicking myself that I didn't have a saved game so I could do it again.
There was also another story linked on slashdot a few years ago about university researchers creating a drunk driving simulator that basically delayed all of your conrol inputs, so you'd steer or brake or something an the car would react a second or two later.
I was kinda annoyed that the moonshine mission in Vice City basically just gave you vertigo through extra graphics filters, but other than nudging your steering every once in a while, it didn't really add the control delay.
Ultimately, I think these intoxication simulations send the right message that drugs don't help you perform, or even have fun... mostly they make you very frustrated. I think ingesting shrooms often have similar detrimental effects in most RPGs (Mario Bros. aside). So I think this is a actually a worthwhile anti-drug message to put in video games.
Yeah, the main deficiency is that I actually have to set up the special clone modes used by the nVidia drivers. nVidia does ship with a handy profile manager tool as part of nView, but I haven't figured out how to launch it from the command line in such a way that it actually restores a profile. Maybe if I played around with AutoHotKey some more I could create a script/macro that does it by manipulating the GUI, but yuck.
:P
Another nVidia / nView problem I'm running into is launching applications on other displays. I can set up nView to automatically place applications with a certain name on the 2nd display. But when I launch the same thing remotely through ssh, it always comes up on the primary desktop, even if I launch it via a batch script or AutoHotKey script. I've tried comparing and tweaking various environment variables between the local command prompt and the ssh command prompt, but no joy.
Sorry to hijack thread with work woes
A lot of my work these days deals with getting Windows boxes to act more like *NIX boxes so I can operate them remotely from a central Linux box.
It's working out pretty well, actually... I set up cygwin with sshd installed in interactive mode, so I can run a script on the central server and have a cluster of WinXP machines all open an application simultaneously, such as play a video simultaneously or connect to a set of VNC servers all at once. I can also use rsync to efficiently distribute and keep a set of files up to date.
Still running into a bunch of limitations of what I can do remotely, such as set the display mode to a certain resolution, etc. so it ultimately won't keep me from replacing the remote machines with a bunch of custom Knoppix LiveCDs eventually. But at least this way I can still leverage the other Windows sysadmins we have an abundance of.
There are valid manufacturing reasons to move from full screen (4:3) to widescreen (16:9) formats. In the old days displays were made from cathode ray tubes, which are cheaper to make in square formats. In the heyday of the CRT monitor, you even had it driving a change in aspect ratio from 4:3 to 5:4 (1280x1024) to get displays even more square.
With the advent and proliferation of digital LCD screens and projectors, it now becomes cheaper to build widescreens, since the fab kinda rolls them out at a fixed width. So you'd have a machine that could crank out parts for 1200 pixel wide panels, and "cut" and finish wiring them into 1600 or 1920 pixel wide displays. It doesn't cost all that much more to produce the "wider" display, whereas if you wanted to also make it "higher" you'd need a whole new set of machines.
Does anyone here understand the "football varsity team" analogy? As a CS nerd, I'm afraid I don't get it, please explain :P
http://www.jailbaitgallery.com/
:P )
(no I don't think that's one of the FBI ones... really... trust me... I'm just a random internet dude
Palm was just being a typical business... If you read about Jeff Hawkins and the other initial inventors of the Palm Pilot, it's pretty apparent that the design innovation followed them around with the invention of the first couple of palm pilots. They got bored with the direction that USRobotics and then 3com took the device, so they spun off to form Handspring so they'd have the freedom to add what was missing (expansion modules, speed). And then they got reabsorbed by 3Com, spun off as Palm, and finally got bored and left to do other things in AI and augmented memory and stuff.
I guess some of the interesting tidbits was that they originally designed the Palm Pilot to compete with a pad a paper instead of a portable PC. Jeff would actually go around with a block of wood carved up into a dummy palm pilot and would whip it out and pretend to use it for what he wanted while he was designing the interface for a real one. This contributed to a lot of the usability apparent in the design. That's also part of the reason that color was never that big a deal for them... it wasn't strictly a priority for its success as a information-gathering PDA, and most of the color LCDs at the time were too power hungry and they favored long battery life more.
To be fair, 3Com / Palm contributed a lot of technical improvements on their watch... such as adding the color displays (probably part of the reason Handspring merged, since they were still doing greyscale displays at the time) and bluetooth and wifi. I'd say their major failing was that they simply couldn't get the OS port to Linux fully working.
Anyway, links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Hawkins
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/1999/10/32010
Over the years, I've used a: Handspring Visor, Palm Edge Visorphone, Palm Tungsten, Palm TX