By the way, the same thing happened in the US when television was introduced. In fact, if you look at geographic location, you'll see that crime went up in each as soon as television became available. So like, TV would come online in New York, and crime would go up. TV would become available in California, and crime would go up, etc. Although I'm sure that what happened in Bhutan was much worse given the quality of the programming today compared to what was played in the US in the 1940s and 50s.
I know a lot of geeks like to deny the social effects of violence, TV, and video games, but really these denials fall in the same boat as those made by people who don't believe in global warming or evolution. Believing them makes you uncomfortable, so you don't believe. The fact is there's a higher correlation between aggression and TV as there is between safe sex and avoiding pregnancy. (Sorry I don't have a citation, this is stuff that I learned in psych 280 at ISU)
The Bhutanese might want to consider changing their lineup and getting rid of some of the more raucous programming, as well as producing local content themselves.
On the other hand, I would certainly be pissed off if the government decided I couldn't watch television because it might make me 'violent'. So it would be hypocritical for me to proscribe that for some other nation. And the self-proclaimed "dragon king" of this place has no more right either. Everyone hated the Taliban, who imposed a similar ban on Television, but loves the Bhutanese. Sure, the taliban were all-around evil people, and the Dragon King seems genuinely interested in national happiness, but still. People need to be free to make up their own minds about what information they want to take in.
Partly because of these concerns about radioactivity and the cost of containing it, the American public and electric utilities have preferred coal combustion as a power source. Today 52% of the capacity for generating electricity in the United States is fueled by coal, compared with 14.8% for nuclear energy. Although there are economic justifications for this preference, it is surprising for two reasons.
dosn't coal dump like 10 times as much radioactive waste per unit of power then nuclear energy?
And atheistic ideologies are responsible for more butchery than probably all world religions combined. How many people did Hitler and Stalin kill, of their own people? Pol-Pot in Cambodia? At least during the Inquisition, the church had enough fear of God to look into each case individually.
Hitler wasn't an atheist, dumbass. At least he never claimed to be, and mentioned god in his speeches. As for the others, well, they didn't murder people for specifically atheistic. Atheism is not an important part of Communism.
The question is wether or not inducing 'thought' about "saving zion" and "fighting for zion" are is a good thing in a country where most people would prefer to see the real "zion" destroyed. Including people who would probably want to blow up some movie theaters.
The issue has nothing to do with "new ideas" but use of the term "Zion" which is synonymous with "Israel".
I mean imagine if a serious movie was released in the US where the heroes have to save the world by killing Jesus or something. And Christian fundamentalists had a history of blowing shit up.
I'm talking about the IDE. No amount of bad coding should cause me to lose that bad code. I shouldn't need to 'error handle' every single loop, and forgeting a single line of code shouldn't cause me to loose hours of work. That's just idiotic.
The only person who could shut down AIX would be the person who orgionaly signed it. So SCO would have to actualy win the suit before they could do anything.
2) Firewire. Apple MADE firewire, but because they refused to let anybody use firewire as the name of the device all these odd names like IEEE1394, i.Link, and others crowded the market. Later on Apple wised up and said that Firewire was so generic now that anybody can use it to describe IEEE1394 devices.
Uh, no. Firewire was made by lots of diffrent companies
SCO dosn't own a trademark on the name UNIX. SCO dosn't own patents on POSIX or any of the other standards. What exactly does this license allow? What will IBM need to stop doing?
Even if SCO could legaly stop IBM from selling AIX (which I doubt) people who had already purchaced AIX licenses would not be affected
Why the heck should a kid who's never coded before download a bunch of incredibly obscure (to THEM, not US) crap like Cygwin
They won't. They'll download things like sphere an Javascript interpreter optimized for writing RPGs or any one of the hundreds of other programming systems designed for fun rather then UNIX hacking.
And anyway, they'll almost certainly start hacking together web pages with Javascript and stuff.
I mean, the kids who learned everything about their computer 10 years ago didn't do it because the tools were there. The computer was something that interested them and they soaked up all they could when they could. The same is still true.
Back when I first got my computer, in 1995, I didn't even have an ISP account. Then I got AOL on 2400bps (hey, it was a small town, OK?). Eventually I got unlimited dialup, but we only had one phone line.
Now I live in the dorms and have 24/7 internet connectivity.
But it sucks, I spend all my time surfing the web and posting on slashdot and fark rather then coding, like I used to.
So I wonder, maybe having access to the web isn't the greatest thing for kids who want to learn to program:P.
But other then that, I agree. This article is totally pointless. Not having DOS with built in basic isn't going to hurt kids. I cut my teeth coding win16 programs with copy of Turbo C++ I paid for with summer job money (along with the rest of my computer). Later I moved on to Java with JDK1.0. Along the way I picked up C, Pascal, VB, Scheme, X86 assembler, Qbasic (okay, so my computer did have basic built in after all. I didn't discover this for quite some time though:P), and a lot more. I didn't learn to program because it was the only thing I could do with my computer, I learned to program because I loved computers.
The point of the article is to hilight programming languages and environments that are approachable for kids and can teach some basic logic and simple programming.
VB would be good for this except for the required overhead (Visual Studio).
Whats wrong with overhead? The helpfull environment of Visual Studio would be great for kids. (I mean, if it wasn't for the fact that it was single threaded and an unbound loop in your code would crash the program, killing all your work since the last save... ahem...)
A powerfull IDE with a good programming language would be a lot better for kids to learn on then shell scripts and command line compilers.
Most windows machines have web browsers with a built-in Javascript interpreter that kids can learn to program with. There are also hundreds of other free platforms kids can download to play around with, from perl to the JDK to custom RPG engines and game engines.
I really don't think the fact that computers were more limited in the past meant they were easier to program. I remember trying to hack some GWbasic once and it was difficult just to edit the text! The editor didn't even have the smoothness of MS-DOS edit!
A kid today using a free copy of the JDK and any one of the free fantastic IDEs is going to be able to do way more then I was with my paid-for copy of Borland TurboC++ for win3.1 that I got with my first computer.
The person who wrote this needs to learn that "The way I learned" is not "the best way to learn".
I'd like to see mobile providers concentrate more on getting their 2G (voice) networks rolled out and matured across America and Canada. You in Europe are lucky -- you have almost 100% coverage. Here in America that is patently not the case - even in large cities such as San Francisco, Dallas, and Los Angeles.
Have you SEEN the GSM map of the US? Looks like a road atlas with smudges.
That's because GSM sucks. CDMA/FDMA coverage in the US is better then GSM coverage in europe.
Ok, first of all, wi-fi is great and all but it's range is very limited, and the lack of regulation means that no one can 'own' any piece of spectrum. The range is so small that it would only have a chance of working in dense city places, while cell phone towers can handle miles of land. If anything Wi-fi will augment standard 3g connections when available.
And second of all, what the hell is OFDM? I've never heard of it. Why link to the company page and not a page that actually explains what it is? And anyway, FDMA/TDMA/CDMA are not 'g' technologies, but rather the underlying technology behind them. A new modulation technique (if it turns out to be useful) would take a long time to roll out. CDMA took four or five years before it became all that wide spread.
Slashdot Mirror
By the way, the same thing happened in the US when television was introduced. In fact, if you look at geographic location, you'll see that crime went up in each as soon as television became available. So like, TV would come online in New York, and crime would go up. TV would become available in California, and crime would go up, etc. Although I'm sure that what happened in Bhutan was much worse given the quality of the programming today compared to what was played in the US in the 1940s and 50s.
I know a lot of geeks like to deny the social effects of violence, TV, and video games, but really these denials fall in the same boat as those made by people who don't believe in global warming or evolution. Believing them makes you uncomfortable, so you don't believe. The fact is there's a higher correlation between aggression and TV as there is between safe sex and avoiding pregnancy. (Sorry I don't have a citation, this is stuff that I learned in psych 280 at ISU)
The Bhutanese might want to consider changing their lineup and getting rid of some of the more raucous programming, as well as producing local content themselves.
On the other hand, I would certainly be pissed off if the government decided I couldn't watch television because it might make me 'violent'. So it would be hypocritical for me to proscribe that for some other nation. And the self-proclaimed "dragon king" of this place has no more right either. Everyone hated the Taliban, who imposed a similar ban on Television, but loves the Bhutanese. Sure, the taliban were all-around evil people, and the Dragon King seems genuinely interested in national happiness, but still. People need to be free to make up their own minds about what information they want to take in.
Partly because of these concerns about radioactivity and the cost of containing it, the American public and electric utilities have preferred coal combustion as a power source. Today 52% of the capacity for generating electricity in the United States is fueled by coal, compared with 14.8% for nuclear energy. Although there are economic justifications for this preference, it is surprising for two reasons.
dosn't coal dump like 10 times as much radioactive waste per unit of power then nuclear energy?
And atheistic ideologies are responsible for more butchery than probably all world religions combined. How many people did Hitler and Stalin kill, of their own people? Pol-Pot in Cambodia? At least during the Inquisition, the church had enough fear of God to look into each case individually.
Hitler wasn't an atheist, dumbass. At least he never claimed to be, and mentioned god in his speeches. As for the others, well, they didn't murder people for specifically atheistic. Atheism is not an important part of Communism.
The question is wether or not inducing 'thought' about "saving zion" and "fighting for zion" are is a good thing in a country where most people would prefer to see the real "zion" destroyed. Including people who would probably want to blow up some movie theaters.
And why on earth would you have a doctor for the right eye and a doctor for the left eye? They are exactly the same.
Egypt whent to war with "Zion" as little as fourty years ago. To the average middle-easterner "Zion" == "Isreal".
The issue has nothing to do with "new ideas" but use of the term "Zion" which is synonymous with "Israel".
I mean imagine if a serious movie was released in the US where the heroes have to save the world by killing Jesus or something. And Christian fundamentalists had a history of blowing shit up.
I always thought michael was the most disliked slashdot poster.
And why no biz questions? Is this only to protect you from enbarasment, or what?
I'm talking about the IDE. No amount of bad coding should cause me to lose that bad code. I shouldn't need to 'error handle' every single loop, and forgeting a single line of code shouldn't cause me to loose hours of work. That's just idiotic.
The only person who could shut down AIX would be the person who orgionaly signed it. So SCO would have to actualy win the suit before they could do anything.
Other then that they don't comment on litigation.
Well, seems reasonable. Most investigation is secret. As long as they publish the charges if they actually indict
In order to call a product 'unix' it has to be compatable with the standard. In order to prove you're compatable, you have to pay huge testing fees.
2) Firewire. Apple MADE firewire, but because they refused to let anybody use firewire as the name of the device all these odd names like IEEE1394, i.Link, and others crowded the market. Later on Apple wised up and said that Firewire was so generic now that anybody can use it to describe IEEE1394 devices.
Uh, no. Firewire was made by lots of diffrent companies
That was a 3d shell that ran on IRIX, a licensed version of UNIX made by SGI.
SCO dosn't own a trademark on the name UNIX. SCO dosn't own patents on POSIX or any of the other standards. What exactly does this license allow? What will IBM need to stop doing?
Even if SCO could legaly stop IBM from selling AIX (which I doubt) people who had already purchaced AIX licenses would not be affected
The speed at the edge of the disk is equal to the circumfrence times the 1/frequency.
Saddam, is that you?
Why the heck should a kid who's never coded before download a bunch of incredibly obscure (to THEM, not US) crap like Cygwin
They won't. They'll download things like sphere an Javascript interpreter optimized for writing RPGs or any one of the hundreds of other programming systems designed for fun rather then UNIX hacking.
And anyway, they'll almost certainly start hacking together web pages with Javascript and stuff.
I mean, the kids who learned everything about their computer 10 years ago didn't do it because the tools were there. The computer was something that interested them and they soaked up all they could when they could. The same is still true.
:P.
:P), and a lot more. I didn't learn to program because it was the only thing I could do with my computer, I learned to program because I loved computers.
Back when I first got my computer, in 1995, I didn't even have an ISP account. Then I got AOL on 2400bps (hey, it was a small town, OK?). Eventually I got unlimited dialup, but we only had one phone line.
Now I live in the dorms and have 24/7 internet connectivity.
But it sucks, I spend all my time surfing the web and posting on slashdot and fark rather then coding, like I used to.
So I wonder, maybe having access to the web isn't the greatest thing for kids who want to learn to program
But other then that, I agree. This article is totally pointless. Not having DOS with built in basic isn't going to hurt kids. I cut my teeth coding win16 programs with copy of Turbo C++ I paid for with summer job money (along with the rest of my computer). Later I moved on to Java with JDK1.0. Along the way I picked up C, Pascal, VB, Scheme, X86 assembler, Qbasic (okay, so my computer did have basic built in after all. I didn't discover this for quite some time though
The point of the article is to hilight programming languages and environments that are approachable for kids and can teach some basic logic and simple programming.
VB would be good for this except for the required overhead (Visual Studio).
Whats wrong with overhead? The helpfull environment of Visual Studio would be great for kids. (I mean, if it wasn't for the fact that it was single threaded and an unbound loop in your code would crash the program, killing all your work since the last save... ahem...)
A powerfull IDE with a good programming language would be a lot better for kids to learn on then shell scripts and command line compilers.
Most windows machines have web browsers with a built-in Javascript interpreter that kids can learn to program with. There are also hundreds of other free platforms kids can download to play around with, from perl to the JDK to custom RPG engines and game engines.
I really don't think the fact that computers were more limited in the past meant they were easier to program. I remember trying to hack some GWbasic once and it was difficult just to edit the text! The editor didn't even have the smoothness of MS-DOS edit!
A kid today using a free copy of the JDK and any one of the free fantastic IDEs is going to be able to do way more then I was with my paid-for copy of Borland TurboC++ for win3.1 that I got with my first computer.
The person who wrote this needs to learn that "The way I learned" is not "the best way to learn".
I'd like to see mobile providers concentrate more on getting their 2G (voice) networks rolled out and matured across America and Canada. You in Europe are lucky -- you have almost 100% coverage. Here in America that is patently not the case - even in large cities such as San Francisco, Dallas, and Los Angeles.
Have you SEEN the GSM map of the US? Looks like a road atlas with smudges.
That's because GSM sucks. CDMA/FDMA coverage in the US is better then GSM coverage in europe.
Ok, first of all, wi-fi is great and all but it's range is very limited, and the lack of regulation means that no one can 'own' any piece of spectrum. The range is so small that it would only have a chance of working in dense city places, while cell phone towers can handle miles of land. If anything Wi-fi will augment standard 3g connections when available.
And second of all, what the hell is OFDM? I've never heard of it. Why link to the company page and not a page that actually explains what it is? And anyway, FDMA/TDMA/CDMA are not 'g' technologies, but rather the underlying technology behind them. A new modulation technique (if it turns out to be useful) would take a long time to roll out. CDMA took four or five years before it became all that wide spread.