Installs are easy, you're just copying files. But do apps run? The only reports I've read indicate that every app crashes immediately on launch, taking down the OS with it. Even clicking on the Dock causes a crash. This is not a successful install.
Like I've been saying for quite a while, Apple finally announced that all their Pro AV products will support distributed processing with QMaster. Currently Shake, Compressor, and Maya are supported, soon Final Cut Pro support will be added. Everyone will go nuts once they see the performance of FCP with distributed processing. And then there's XGrid, designed for cooperative processing in scientific tasks. I haven't used it so I can't judge its utility. Yep, Apple is leading the way with this sort of Grid Computing software. This is what you can do with a bit of your own proprietary software built on top of Open Source unix. And I don't see any reason why people couldn't extend QMaster and XGrid support to other platforms, creating a compatible OSS version.
My professors (native nihonjin) all said I should not do grad school in Japan. They said you just end up slaving away for the senior professors, who get all the credit for your work. They universally described it as inferior to US grad schools. Of course these same professors had no problems exploiting grad students for their own benefit while teaching at a US school.
This is exactly the sort of strategery that made baseball into the most boring game on earth. People don't come to watch the managers' decisions, they come to watch the players pitch, catch, hit, and run.
My old grandpa had a good joke he used to play on people like you. When he'd hear football fans arguing strategy, he'd impart one of his little gems of wisdom, "over 90% of all football games are won in the 4th quarter." Of course nobody ever got it. Most football games are won at exactly the end of the 4th quarter, because that is when the score is recorded. The only exceptions are overtime games.
..let's grant for the sake of argument that the players are stupid. Ants are much stupider, and eubacteria more stupid still, but smart people can still observe them and reach interesting, non-trivial conclusions."
Right, but intense statistical analysis won't make the ants and bacteria any more intelligent, or affect how they perform. I'm not convinced that analysis has much, if any effect on the game. Steroids had a much bigger effect. It's still brawn, not brains, that makes baseball what it is.
This whole premise is ridiculous. Baseball is a game played by a bunch of drunken, tobacco chewing goons, illiterates from third world countries, and other assorted misfits who make their living playing a kid's game. A long time ago, a sports-fan friend of mine told me about an article he read in Sporting News that analyzed baseball vs. football rules. At the time, the NFL was changing a few minor rules which had an unexpectedly great impact on how the game was played. So the writer decided to interview players from both baseball and football about how the rules affected play. The NFL players all could give detailed answers, some even pulled out their NFL Rulebooks. But of all the baseball players he interviewed, not one single player had ever SEEN a rulebook let alone OWNED one, and none of them cared to even investigate rule changes. I find it highly ironic that baseball players really don't give a damn about how the game is played, they just do their thing just like they've done since little league, but the FANS do all this intense statistical analysis on the game. Too bad the players actions don't support such analysis. I often quote my grandfather, who had the only sensible approach to baseball fandom that I ever heard of. He always said, "the best thing about baseball is that on a hot summer day, you can turn on the game on TV, sit down in your recliner and open up a beer, fall asleep, and wake up just in time to find out who won."
Yes, efficiency can easily be ignored. You're forgetting the old "80/20" rule, which states something to the effect that "the final 20% of the job takes 80% of the effort." Or in this case, 80% of the expense. If being 100% efficient requires a considerably higher expense in generators and transmission, the project may never have a positive return on investment. And besides, when did you EVER see something that was 100% efficient? There's a good reason for that (see above). Even nuclear reactors aren't 100% efficient.
Doesn't sound like the one I have, but it could be a later edition. Your cite is a revised edition from 1917, mine is much older. There's nothing in my book to indicate it's part of a 2 vol set. That probably came later. I suspect your 2 vol set is an expanded version of my book, broken down into 2 vols, since the "mechanics of machines" seems to describe the last half of my book. Of course we could be shooting in the dark, "Principles of Mechanism" is a pretty generic title for a mechanical principles textbook. The best way to tell if we're talking about the same book is if the it has that engraving of the guy standing at the base of a 100 foot gear. It's standing upright like a wheel, not on it's side, and it's impressive as all hell.
I would have to dig through storage boxes to find it, it's deeply buried so unfortunately I don't have a full citation handy, but I guarantee you the title I cited is accurate. It appears to be a college textbook, most likely grad school since the book is pretty heavy on calculus at times (I had no idea it took calculus to design gears). The book is about 150 years old so it's going to be pretty hard to find. I'm sure there are similar books in any older library. I initially grabbed this book because I was doing some animations of gears and I wanted them to look authentic. I was surprised to learn about the intense engineering that goes into the tiniest details of gears, even the shape of the teeth is a work of engineering art. But the coolest things I learned from the book were about gear ratios. With the book's help, I invented some really great animation shortcuts, like if I want to animate two gears with a 2:3 ratio, if I pick just the right number of gear teeth, I can just animate the first 1/3 of the primary gear rotation and just loop it three times to make a complete cycle. That saves a LOT of rendering time. But if you pick the wrong number of teeth, the gear teeth don't return to the same position at 1/3 through the cycle, or at any convenient divisor of the cycle, and you can't loop it due to the discontinuity, you have to render the whole cycle. That costs a LOT of render time.
That's freaking brilliant. I'm sure the massive gear and belt-driven factories that were the peak technology of the Industrial Revolution were designed by engineers that constantly thought to themselves, "what a disaster, I'm wasting 20% of this FREE ENERGY."
Precisely. One of my most treasured books is a little volume I found at a garage sale, entitled "Principles of Mechanism." It's a detailed look at mechanically distributed power systems used in factories circa 1850. The book primarily focuses on how to convert waterwheel power via gear systems. Most factories had one huge low speed high torque paddle wheel, with one huge driveshaft. Rubberized cloth belts from the main shaft drive each floor's secondary driveshaft. The secondary driveshafts used further belts, gears, etc. to drive each individual machine. This is a wonderful system if you have to distribute rotary power to a whole factory full of lathes, looms, etc, but obviously it's a lost art today. One of my favorite illustrations in the book is an full page etching of a man standing beside a set of gears that are about 100ft in diameter. Anyway, it should be obvious you can gear down a slow waterwheel to provide higher speed rotations sufficient to drive any modern generator. That's probably easier than finding a generator that provides sufficient juice at low rotations.
When I read that article, I kept thinking about an old SCTV episode, it's a christmas special and Johnny LaRue has been told he's fired and it's his last show. He gets drunk live on camera, and as he's lying in the snowy gutter, Santa comes and asks him what he wants for christmas. Johnny LaRue asks for a crane shot.
Yeah, they do make commercial verisons of this. Well, not Sony, but there are plenty of cheapo handheld cantilever camera platforms for sale. They're useful, but not all that useful.
If you REALLY want to impress people, try building your own camera crane, bonus geek points for computer motion control.
I beat all these guys, I made a glowing Tron costume in 1983, the year the movie came out. Of course electroluminescent materials were far in the future, so I came up with a novel solution. I bought a whole bunch of Cyalume light sticks, they contain a chemical and a sealed plastic capsule containing the catalyst that makes them glow, break the capsule and the chemicals mix. I tried to buy the chemical in bulk from American Cynamid but they wouldn't sell it to me. So I laboriously cut apart several dozen tubes (oh man was that expensive), and separated the liquid from the catalyst capsules. Then I got a whole bunch of clear plastic aquarium tubing and taped it all over my costume, looping everywhere in one continuous circuit. Just before I was ready to appear in the glowing costume at the party, I broke all the catalyst capsules, filtered out the broken capsule bits, and mixed the two chemicals together. I put the whole batch of glowing Cyalume into a huge syringe I got at a veterinarian, and injected it into the tubing. Then I clamped off both ends of the tube to keep it from leaking back out. The glowing costume was a huge hit at the party, and I've used it as my excuse for never having to do a costume ever again, how could I top it? But a few years later, I was surprised to see someone copied my idea. I'm sure you've been to concerts or raves where they sell Cyalume chemiluminescent tubes, but not the light sticks, they sell something called "Neon Leon" that comes in long thin flexible tubes like the aquarium tubing I'd used. Dammit, if I'd only patented my costume idea, someone would owe me big bucks!
Umm.. not quite. Vannevar Bush did not predict color photography.
Color photography was invented in 1850 by Levi Hill. Commercial color prints first appeared in 1903 with the Autochrome process. Kodachrome was widely available in 1945 when Bush wrote that article.
I remember attending a panel discussion at a Leica School of Photography seminar in 1973, photographer Robert Heinecken declared that in the future there would be always-on cameras, sort of like eyeglasses, with a massive memory storage (he suggested holographic memory because that was the cutting edge of research at the time). You'd be able to pick out any moment of time and pull up a stored photo of what you were seeing at that moment. The other panelists disagreed vehemently and said it was impossible, it would never happen.
Well now I feel really old. The first mainframe I ever got an account on was a descendant of the 1604, an early CDC Cyber. Our university's system operators were so proud that they'd rescued this monster CPU from a scrap heap at another university. They got it for free, it was so old and underpowered by the mid 1970s that nobody wanted it, even though it was perfectly usable and in working condition. So they fired it up and gave out free timeshare accounts to students. It made sense to them, it cost nothing to set up and very little to maintain, it ran BASIC and FORTRAN, so they let the students use it freely. In those days, a student account on our IBM 360s was hideously expensive, you got something like $50 worth of CPU cycles, when I finally was permitted to use the 360 (CS class students only) I burned through those $50 of play money in 2 weeks, I offered to pay $50 cash for more CPU time but they wouldn't do it. So I went back to the Cyber.
Oh man, do I have some bad memories of one of my first development jobs ever, way back in the late 1970s. I had just dropped out of school, and anyone with a few computer coding courses could get a job almost anywhere. I got a job in Denver, I figured I could spend my winter weekends on the ski slopes. So I went to work for the US Geological Survey. They put me to work translating some old FORTRAN II programs into FORTRAN IV, the programs were old NASA programs used for data analysis. I had an old Hazeltine dumb terminal hooked up to a fancy new Data General Nova with an array processor. Everything had to be tediously edited with a line editor, one line at a time, no full screen editor was available. The first part of the job was translating everything from 8 bit words to 16 bit. This was the first step to getting them ready to conversion for the array processor. It was incredibly fucking tedious. But the worst part was testing the programs. When my first conversion was ready for testing, I took it to the boss and asked him how I was supposed to test it, did he have a data set to run against it? And if I could get them to run, was there someone who could check the results for accuracy? And then I got the shock of my life, the boss admitted he had NO IDEA what the programs DID, so I was completely on my own. Life in a cubicle began to really suck. I didn't think it could get worse, but all that sitting at a desk aggravated a medical condition, I developed "Jeep Rider's Disease," a pilonidal cyst. Sitting down was unbearable, so I had surgery to remove the cyst. It was horrible, essentially they cut out a big chunk of your ass crack, and leave the raw meat exposed so it slowly grows back together. After a week or so of recuperation, I returned to cubicle-land and sat on a little inflatable donut shaped pillow. It was even more painful than my prior condition. I tried to work at home, sitting on my stomach while typing on my homebrew computer, via a dialup. I was still getting the work done, putting in well more than 8 hours a day, but nobody saw me in the office, so I got fired for chronic absenteeism. Actually, it was kind of a relief. I hung around Denver for a couple of years total, working at a couple of different developers. And here's the punchline: for the two winters I was in Colorado, there was a freak winter drought, it only snowed ONCE in two years. There was never enough snow to ski, and they didn't have artificial snow machines yet, this was the Rockies and nobody ever figured they'd need artificial snow. I never got to go skiing even once.
It always amazes me that people think computers are the solution to everything. In this case, you're just making device that can only be maintained by experts, and is likely to break down due to abuse by every little kiddie who can push a button. DVD players are ubiquitous and cheap, and any idiot could replace it when it dies of old age.
Skip the computer. Create a video presentation on a DVD, use DVD Studio Pro or anything you like. Get a cheapo Apex DVD player. You can set the player to autorepeat your video, or put it in a box and rig a little button with a mechanical link to hit the Play button to play on demand. Note that good DVD authoring software like DVDSP2 can use still photos with audio, as well as video. This is a lot more straightforward than the previous suggestions like Macromedia Director, which is more designed for highly interactive kiosks, not straight-through video presentations.
Maybe you're wrong, maybe they just don't want to listen to YOU. With that sort of attitude, I wouldn't blame them. I remember having trouble with an older student, back when I was about 19 years old and teaching BASIC classes at a computer store. I guarantee you the problem was MY attitude, not the student's. Once the boss gave me a reality check, we got along fine and she was an excellent student.
You are forgetting the original question, the guy's mom ASKED for instruction. She's predisposed to learn new things.
Sounds like the long-discontinued Apple eMate is just what you want. I saw a new-in-box eMate 300 on eBay for a buy-it-now price of $200, you could probably find a good one for around $100. It's basically a Newton with a keyboard, it seems designed for writing, good keyboard, basic B&W screen, good battery life. Zap your text over a serial cable to your main CPU for further work.
I note that Bill Gates is one of the largest single shareholders in Home Depot, if not THE largest. Is there any surprise here that Home Depot is bending over backwards to accommodate their big stockholder? But I'm more interested in Aventis Pharmaceuticals. Gates is shifting all his personal wealth into Big Pharma stocks. I haven't been able to find out if he's an investor in Aventis, but he's a huge investor in their direct competitors. I can just see the pitch MS made, they'll offer Aventis a tech testbed platform, and if they don't go for it, they'll offer it to one of Bill's cronys, and Aventis will have difficulty with MS support in the future.
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Installs are easy, you're just copying files. But do apps run? The only reports I've read indicate that every app crashes immediately on launch, taking down the OS with it. Even clicking on the Dock causes a crash. This is not a successful install.
Like I've been saying for quite a while, Apple finally announced that all their Pro AV products will support distributed processing with QMaster. Currently Shake, Compressor, and Maya are supported, soon Final Cut Pro support will be added. Everyone will go nuts once they see the performance of FCP with distributed processing.
And then there's XGrid, designed for cooperative processing in scientific tasks. I haven't used it so I can't judge its utility.
Yep, Apple is leading the way with this sort of Grid Computing software. This is what you can do with a bit of your own proprietary software built on top of Open Source unix. And I don't see any reason why people couldn't extend QMaster and XGrid support to other platforms, creating a compatible OSS version.
My professors (native nihonjin) all said I should not do grad school in Japan. They said you just end up slaving away for the senior professors, who get all the credit for your work. They universally described it as inferior to US grad schools. Of course these same professors had no problems exploiting grad students for their own benefit while teaching at a US school.
This is exactly the sort of strategery that made baseball into the most boring game on earth. People don't come to watch the managers' decisions, they come to watch the players pitch, catch, hit, and run.
My old grandpa had a good joke he used to play on people like you. When he'd hear football fans arguing strategy, he'd impart one of his little gems of wisdom, "over 90% of all football games are won in the 4th quarter." Of course nobody ever got it. Most football games are won at exactly the end of the 4th quarter, because that is when the score is recorded. The only exceptions are overtime games.
You're only moderately offended? I hope you never read a biography of Ty Cobb or Babe Ruth.
Right, but intense statistical analysis won't make the ants and bacteria any more intelligent, or affect how they perform. I'm not convinced that analysis has much, if any effect on the game. Steroids had a much bigger effect. It's still brawn, not brains, that makes baseball what it is.
This whole premise is ridiculous. Baseball is a game played by a bunch of drunken, tobacco chewing goons, illiterates from third world countries, and other assorted misfits who make their living playing a kid's game.
A long time ago, a sports-fan friend of mine told me about an article he read in Sporting News that analyzed baseball vs. football rules. At the time, the NFL was changing a few minor rules which had an unexpectedly great impact on how the game was played. So the writer decided to interview players from both baseball and football about how the rules affected play. The NFL players all could give detailed answers, some even pulled out their NFL Rulebooks. But of all the baseball players he interviewed, not one single player had ever SEEN a rulebook let alone OWNED one, and none of them cared to even investigate rule changes.
I find it highly ironic that baseball players really don't give a damn about how the game is played, they just do their thing just like they've done since little league, but the FANS do all this intense statistical analysis on the game. Too bad the players actions don't support such analysis.
I often quote my grandfather, who had the only sensible approach to baseball fandom that I ever heard of. He always said, "the best thing about baseball is that on a hot summer day, you can turn on the game on TV, sit down in your recliner and open up a beer, fall asleep, and wake up just in time to find out who won."
Yes, efficiency can easily be ignored. You're forgetting the old "80/20" rule, which states something to the effect that "the final 20% of the job takes 80% of the effort." Or in this case, 80% of the expense. If being 100% efficient requires a considerably higher expense in generators and transmission, the project may never have a positive return on investment. And besides, when did you EVER see something that was 100% efficient? There's a good reason for that (see above). Even nuclear reactors aren't 100% efficient.
Doesn't sound like the one I have, but it could be a later edition. Your cite is a revised edition from 1917, mine is much older. There's nothing in my book to indicate it's part of a 2 vol set. That probably came later. I suspect your 2 vol set is an expanded version of my book, broken down into 2 vols, since the "mechanics of machines" seems to describe the last half of my book.
Of course we could be shooting in the dark, "Principles of Mechanism" is a pretty generic title for a mechanical principles textbook. The best way to tell if we're talking about the same book is if the it has that engraving of the guy standing at the base of a 100 foot gear. It's standing upright like a wheel, not on it's side, and it's impressive as all hell.
I would have to dig through storage boxes to find it, it's deeply buried so unfortunately I don't have a full citation handy, but I guarantee you the title I cited is accurate. It appears to be a college textbook, most likely grad school since the book is pretty heavy on calculus at times (I had no idea it took calculus to design gears). The book is about 150 years old so it's going to be pretty hard to find. I'm sure there are similar books in any older library.
I initially grabbed this book because I was doing some animations of gears and I wanted them to look authentic. I was surprised to learn about the intense engineering that goes into the tiniest details of gears, even the shape of the teeth is a work of engineering art. But the coolest things I learned from the book were about gear ratios. With the book's help, I invented some really great animation shortcuts, like if I want to animate two gears with a 2:3 ratio, if I pick just the right number of gear teeth, I can just animate the first 1/3 of the primary gear rotation and just loop it three times to make a complete cycle. That saves a LOT of rendering time. But if you pick the wrong number of teeth, the gear teeth don't return to the same position at 1/3 through the cycle, or at any convenient divisor of the cycle, and you can't loop it due to the discontinuity, you have to render the whole cycle. That costs a LOT of render time.
That's freaking brilliant. I'm sure the massive gear and belt-driven factories that were the peak technology of the Industrial Revolution were designed by engineers that constantly thought to themselves, "what a disaster, I'm wasting 20% of this FREE ENERGY."
Sheesh.
Precisely. One of my most treasured books is a little volume I found at a garage sale, entitled "Principles of Mechanism." It's a detailed look at mechanically distributed power systems used in factories circa 1850. The book primarily focuses on how to convert waterwheel power via gear systems. Most factories had one huge low speed high torque paddle wheel, with one huge driveshaft. Rubberized cloth belts from the main shaft drive each floor's secondary driveshaft. The secondary driveshafts used further belts, gears, etc. to drive each individual machine. This is a wonderful system if you have to distribute rotary power to a whole factory full of lathes, looms, etc, but obviously it's a lost art today. One of my favorite illustrations in the book is an full page etching of a man standing beside a set of gears that are about 100ft in diameter.
Anyway, it should be obvious you can gear down a slow waterwheel to provide higher speed rotations sufficient to drive any modern generator. That's probably easier than finding a generator that provides sufficient juice at low rotations.
Well, it's just a crane shot demo.
When I read that article, I kept thinking about an old SCTV episode, it's a christmas special and Johnny LaRue has been told he's fired and it's his last show. He gets drunk live on camera, and as he's lying in the snowy gutter, Santa comes and asks him what he wants for christmas. Johnny LaRue asks for a crane shot.
Yeah, they do make commercial verisons of this. Well, not Sony, but there are plenty of cheapo handheld cantilever camera platforms for sale. They're useful, but not all that useful.
If you REALLY want to impress people, try building your own camera crane, bonus geek points for computer motion control.
I beat all these guys, I made a glowing Tron costume in 1983, the year the movie came out. Of course electroluminescent materials were far in the future, so I came up with a novel solution.
I bought a whole bunch of Cyalume light sticks, they contain a chemical and a sealed plastic capsule containing the catalyst that makes them glow, break the capsule and the chemicals mix. I tried to buy the chemical in bulk from American Cynamid but they wouldn't sell it to me. So I laboriously cut apart several dozen tubes (oh man was that expensive), and separated the liquid from the catalyst capsules. Then I got a whole bunch of clear plastic aquarium tubing and taped it all over my costume, looping everywhere in one continuous circuit. Just before I was ready to appear in the glowing costume at the party, I broke all the catalyst capsules, filtered out the broken capsule bits, and mixed the two chemicals together. I put the whole batch of glowing Cyalume into a huge syringe I got at a veterinarian, and injected it into the tubing. Then I clamped off both ends of the tube to keep it from leaking back out.
The glowing costume was a huge hit at the party, and I've used it as my excuse for never having to do a costume ever again, how could I top it? But a few years later, I was surprised to see someone copied my idea. I'm sure you've been to concerts or raves where they sell Cyalume chemiluminescent tubes, but not the light sticks, they sell something called "Neon Leon" that comes in long thin flexible tubes like the aquarium tubing I'd used. Dammit, if I'd only patented my costume idea, someone would owe me big bucks!
Umm.. not quite. Vannevar Bush did not predict color photography.
Color photography was invented in 1850 by Levi Hill. Commercial color prints first appeared in 1903 with the Autochrome process. Kodachrome was widely available in 1945 when Bush wrote that article.
I remember attending a panel discussion at a Leica School of Photography seminar in 1973, photographer Robert Heinecken declared that in the future there would be always-on cameras, sort of like eyeglasses, with a massive memory storage (he suggested holographic memory because that was the cutting edge of research at the time). You'd be able to pick out any moment of time and pull up a stored photo of what you were seeing at that moment. The other panelists disagreed vehemently and said it was impossible, it would never happen.
Well now I feel really old. The first mainframe I ever got an account on was a descendant of the 1604, an early CDC Cyber. Our university's system operators were so proud that they'd rescued this monster CPU from a scrap heap at another university. They got it for free, it was so old and underpowered by the mid 1970s that nobody wanted it, even though it was perfectly usable and in working condition. So they fired it up and gave out free timeshare accounts to students. It made sense to them, it cost nothing to set up and very little to maintain, it ran BASIC and FORTRAN, so they let the students use it freely. In those days, a student account on our IBM 360s was hideously expensive, you got something like $50 worth of CPU cycles, when I finally was permitted to use the 360 (CS class students only) I burned through those $50 of play money in 2 weeks, I offered to pay $50 cash for more CPU time but they wouldn't do it. So I went back to the Cyber.
Oh man, do I have some bad memories of one of my first development jobs ever, way back in the late 1970s. I had just dropped out of school, and anyone with a few computer coding courses could get a job almost anywhere. I got a job in Denver, I figured I could spend my winter weekends on the ski slopes.
So I went to work for the US Geological Survey. They put me to work translating some old FORTRAN II programs into FORTRAN IV, the programs were old NASA programs used for data analysis. I had an old Hazeltine dumb terminal hooked up to a fancy new Data General Nova with an array processor. Everything had to be tediously edited with a line editor, one line at a time, no full screen editor was available. The first part of the job was translating everything from 8 bit words to 16 bit. This was the first step to getting them ready to conversion for the array processor. It was incredibly fucking tedious. But the worst part was testing the programs. When my first conversion was ready for testing, I took it to the boss and asked him how I was supposed to test it, did he have a data set to run against it? And if I could get them to run, was there someone who could check the results for accuracy? And then I got the shock of my life, the boss admitted he had NO IDEA what the programs DID, so I was completely on my own.
Life in a cubicle began to really suck. I didn't think it could get worse, but all that sitting at a desk aggravated a medical condition, I developed "Jeep Rider's Disease," a pilonidal cyst. Sitting down was unbearable, so I had surgery to remove the cyst. It was horrible, essentially they cut out a big chunk of your ass crack, and leave the raw meat exposed so it slowly grows back together. After a week or so of recuperation, I returned to cubicle-land and sat on a little inflatable donut shaped pillow. It was even more painful than my prior condition. I tried to work at home, sitting on my stomach while typing on my homebrew computer, via a dialup. I was still getting the work done, putting in well more than 8 hours a day, but nobody saw me in the office, so I got fired for chronic absenteeism. Actually, it was kind of a relief.
I hung around Denver for a couple of years total, working at a couple of different developers. And here's the punchline: for the two winters I was in Colorado, there was a freak winter drought, it only snowed ONCE in two years. There was never enough snow to ski, and they didn't have artificial snow machines yet, this was the Rockies and nobody ever figured they'd need artificial snow. I never got to go skiing even once.
It always amazes me that people think computers are the solution to everything. In this case, you're just making device that can only be maintained by experts, and is likely to break down due to abuse by every little kiddie who can push a button. DVD players are ubiquitous and cheap, and any idiot could replace it when it dies of old age.
Skip the computer. Create a video presentation on a DVD, use DVD Studio Pro or anything you like. Get a cheapo Apex DVD player. You can set the player to autorepeat your video, or put it in a box and rig a little button with a mechanical link to hit the Play button to play on demand.
Note that good DVD authoring software like DVDSP2 can use still photos with audio, as well as video. This is a lot more straightforward than the previous suggestions like Macromedia Director, which is more designed for highly interactive kiosks, not straight-through video presentations.
It would probably go something more like this:
Mugger: Your iPod our your life...
Mr. Benny: What?
Mugger: I SAID, your iPOD or your LIFE!
Mr. Benny: WHAT??
Mugger: Gimme that damn iPod!
Mr. Benny: What?
Yes of course there is easily found verification of this claim.
Maybe you're wrong, maybe they just don't want to listen to YOU. With that sort of attitude, I wouldn't blame them. I remember having trouble with an older student, back when I was about 19 years old and teaching BASIC classes at a computer store. I guarantee you the problem was MY attitude, not the student's. Once the boss gave me a reality check, we got along fine and she was an excellent student.
You are forgetting the original question, the guy's mom ASKED for instruction. She's predisposed to learn new things.
Sounds like the long-discontinued Apple eMate is just what you want. I saw a new-in-box eMate 300 on eBay for a buy-it-now price of $200, you could probably find a good one for around $100. It's basically a Newton with a keyboard, it seems designed for writing, good keyboard, basic B&W screen, good battery life. Zap your text over a serial cable to your main CPU for further work.
I note that Bill Gates is one of the largest single shareholders in Home Depot, if not THE largest. Is there any surprise here that Home Depot is bending over backwards to accommodate their big stockholder?
But I'm more interested in Aventis Pharmaceuticals. Gates is shifting all his personal wealth into Big Pharma stocks. I haven't been able to find out if he's an investor in Aventis, but he's a huge investor in their direct competitors. I can just see the pitch MS made, they'll offer Aventis a tech testbed platform, and if they don't go for it, they'll offer it to one of Bill's cronys, and Aventis will have difficulty with MS support in the future.