If you really want a language "designed to teach programming and problem-solving", try Scheme or Haskell. Those are truly stable languages that will help students learn sound computer science principles, basic data structures, and programming principles.
Once that's in place, learning a "real-world" programming language is straightforward. No programmer should master only a single language.
And, yeah - C wouldn't be my choice for a first programming language either.
IT is an expense. A necessary one, and if done well the cost will be under control and things won't break down too much or otherwise get in the way of whatever business we have. As with most professions, there's elements of engineering and craftsmanship, and we should rightly take pride in doing it well.
'round here, 100 sms/day is not unusual. Certainly chatty teenagers will do that. And so what - it takes a few seconds to send one, and it's free if you have anything like a decent plan. They keep their social network alive all the time with this; different from what I did back in the late bronze age, but then I didn't do thing like my parents did either. Sound like the US is catching up with where we've been over here for some time.
I'm always surprised by how much fuss people make of changing habits and cultural patterns. It's just people using technology for what people have always used technology for - communicating.
Of course it's OK to text while working. After all, it's a darn efficient way to communicate with co-workers.
As for being on time - well, for lots of jobs what matters is that people do the job, not when. Giving people time flexibility usually pays of big time. Doesn't work for all jobs, of course, but for many jobs it is indeed "not a big deal".
I gave my daughter a cellphone when she turned 7, and she's been using it quite responsibly since she got it. At 8, I'd say about half the kids in her class have one. It's not used to a whole lot, mostly for short messages ("can I go with X after school"). There's not a huge amount of texting between the kids yet - she mostly texts with her grandma and with a couple of cousins.
Given that everyone else in her family have a cellphone and is texting, it would feel really off to me if she didn't have one.
To be sociable in a world full of social technologies, you have to master those technologies.
In this part of the world (Scandinavia), it's generally recommended that kids 10 or above shouldn't be without a cellphone, or they will be socially isolated. Texting is how kids runs their social life - it's how they spread ideas, it's how they agree to meet up after school or go play ball, it's how everything happens. If you don't have a cellphone, you're just not part of what's going on.
Also, remember that kids are good at developing a relaxed attitude to technology. Few kids will let it take over their life. Having a cellphone will not send a 7 yo texting all the time. It will just be one more way in which they communicate with the world.
It's rather amusing to see a bunch of geeks complaining about youngsters these days and how their choice of tech platform is destroying conversation and spelling and so on. This from a generation that was the first to adopt email and web discussion boards.
Happily, youngsters don't care what old farts think.
Re:As long as you have the space
on
Digital Packrats
·
· Score: 1
Agreed. Storing - and in particular finding - paper is a hassle. Not so with digital format.
My habits have changed in the past 10 years. I used to be a packrat for publicly available stuff. Software, documentation, papers, all kinds of neat stuff. These days with google and del.icio.us and the like I don't bother.
But as storage capacity has grown, I'm definitely a packrat for personal stuff and media content. Why delete digital pictures? Having 10k or more pictures around is no problem. And why not have a copy on the laptop. Ditto personal video, though storage limitations still force me to delete stuff here. I expect that will change. And why ever delete email? It's easy to store and you can index the stuff.
As for media, I'm storing around the.ogg files of a few thousand legally bought CDs. Why not? And quite a few on my laptop, too. By I guess this will change. Just as google freed me from storing copies of things found on the next, I expect that there will spring of a service where I can listen to all the music I've paid for, keep my personal index, etc. - without any downloading and without buying silver discs. But until that day I'll be a packrat for music files.
Indy always was a dignified fellow, so there's no reason he can be the older professor, gray hair and all, saving the world. Heck, it worked for Connery - as Bond and as Indy's sidekick. I have no problem with at all with a 60+ Indy.
Need better hardware? Packet forwarding at the NIC level? Support for filtering in hardware? Look here: http://www.liberouter.org/. Liberouter not only support hardware-accelerated packet forwarding and prefix matching at the NIC level for 1GbE and 10GbE, at actually already implementes full router functionality with IPv4 and IPv6 suppport, and is in use in production networks.
What's more, the COMBO family of NICs is free hardware (speech, not beer). The desing is open.
Conspiracy theory of the day
on
SCO.com Defaced
·
· Score: 5, Funny
"SCO defaced their own site to discredit the Linux Community". You heard it here first.
"Unix System Resources"? Come, now. Think 1974. There was not "Unix System" then. There was no men in suits talking "resources" or other management lingo anywhere near a UNIX box.
There was, on the other hand, a few hackers forced to use TTYs. Real ttys. Ever used on of those? You know, 3 characters per second output and a serious noise, and a keyboard that feels more like doing kung fu than "typing". If that's all the "user interface" you have, you wan't to minimize the number of keystrokes you have to do, and the amount of output you get.
That's what gave the nice and quiet unix we all love. That and a fondness on the part of its creatores for saying only what is absolutely necessary.
Well, right now the thing is limited to USA and Canada (I just tried to register, it wouldn't let me).
I don't see why it should be limited to USA and Canada, but at least they don't have to worry about how "community" is defined elsewhere.
Interesting to see someone trying to apply the internet (inherently global) to a strict local use. I suspect it will fail with users, but it shall be interesting to follow.
Weird? Really? When I moved into the house I live in at the moment (a few years ago) neighbours would come up an introduce themselves ("Hi, I'm XX, I live XX. Welcome").
I do the same when new people move in a few houses down the street. Chat them up the street, asked them where they lived before, how they like the new house, offer help where needed, etc.
I know - at least casually - all the people living in the same street as me. And, yes - I do live in a reasonably large city (~1.5M citizens).
Indeed. I shot a bit more than an hour of digital video, plus some 100 photos, at a family get-together last week. That's substantial amount of data. Sure, I can edit the video, compress it with DivX or some such - but it's still a lot of data.
Heck - once you get in the (bad?) habit of doing video of the kids, there's no limit to how much legitimate content you can have.
Well, don't sweat it. Most Europeans can't find Hungary on a map - not to mention name the capital or tell you anything about history, economy, politics, whatever of Hungary.
Let's face it - irrespecitive of where they live -can't be bothered to learn about other countries, or even other parts of their own country. Out of sight, out of mind. Most people care about the near and local.
We may think of that as ignorance, and in a way it is. However, since remote parts of the world rarely have a practical impact on most peoples lives, it's just not on their radar. The world outside their own neighbourhood remains fuzzy.
What I don't understand is when act like (geographic) ignorance is something to strive for; when people are proud not to know. Remarks that go "your part of the world is insignificant, so I don't want to know - hahaha" I just don't get. It's an awfully utilitarian approach to knowledge.
For a business, of course, it's different. Ignoring parts of the world means ignoring potential customers. But then, if your home (whatever home is to you) market is sufficient to sustain your business, it may not be worth your while to go outside your expand your geographic reach. You may decide it's better for you business to expand product line and sell more to existing customers, or whatever.
Yes, the economy (and the internet) is global, but that does not mean that every single business is required to be.
Actually, this could be pretty interesting. It's difficult to predict what the effects of something like this could be. However, if this recommendation is implemented in the EU countries, it certainly will have an effect on things like online newspapers, magazines, etc.
We may fear that it will only mean that every single news story will have a link to a boring press release from the politician/company/government entity in question. However, it may effect a deeper change in online news media towards something more oriented towards dialogue than towards the pure distribution that is common now.
This could be interesting to watch - another little step in this collective experiement that is the internet.
Of course, all this favours again the big entities who have the resources to Kibose the world and reply to everything - even though Google should help the rest of us should we want to do the same thing.
No bigger waste of ressources? Well, there's always Iridium.
Anyways, I don't really grok this "we should have only one of X in order to save ressources" thing. It may sound like a good idea on the short term, but have a look at history to see what happened when men tried that kind of planning. The typical result is no development, no challenge to the status quo, and in the end being surpassed by people who did less planning.
Planning to avoid wasting ressources was something the USSR and the east block where really good at (Planned Economy, remember?). Worked really well for them, I hear.
Or think of the Chinese in the 15th and 16th century. They where actually more advanced than the Europeans, had explores in India and Africa - but then central command decided to focus all ressources on wars in central Asia. In contrast, even though central Europe was in the process of being overrun by the Muslims (siege of Vienna and all that), there was no-one to tell the Portugese to "stop wasting ressources on all this exploration business". Result: the Europeans took the world, the Chinese went no-where.
Or think about US history. Think about how many ressources have been wasted in all the false starts, and all the unplanned priviate initiatives. Think about how rich we all have become that way.
If there's one thing that have driven the West to success, it's that we've allowed a level of creative chaos, rivalry, and competition. That we have done some large-scale trial-and-error and picked what worked. Sure, it's a waste of time and money, but so far it has worked better than trying to do large-scale social planning.
Maybe one days we'll get really good at central planning. Maybe one day we'll go the way of the USSR and the Chinese will have a go at running the world./Lars
Slashdot Mirror
If you really want a language "designed to teach programming and problem-solving", try Scheme or Haskell. Those are truly stable languages that will help students learn sound computer science principles, basic data structures, and programming principles.
Once that's in place, learning a "real-world" programming language is straightforward. No programmer should master only a single language.
And, yeah - C wouldn't be my choice for a first programming language either.
IT is an expense. A necessary one, and if done well the cost will be under control and things won't break down too much or otherwise get in the way of whatever business we have. As with most professions, there's elements of engineering and craftsmanship, and we should rightly take pride in doing it well.
But glory? Never saw any of that.
'round here, 100 sms/day is not unusual. Certainly chatty teenagers will do that. And so what - it takes a few seconds to send one, and it's free if you have anything like a decent plan. They keep their social network alive all the time with this; different from what I did back in the late bronze age, but then I didn't do thing like my parents did either. Sound like the US is catching up with where we've been over here for some time.
I'm always surprised by how much fuss people make of changing habits and cultural patterns. It's just people using technology for what people have always used technology for - communicating.
Of course it's OK to text while working. After all, it's a darn efficient way to communicate with co-workers.
As for being on time - well, for lots of jobs what matters is that people do the job, not when. Giving people time flexibility usually pays of big time. Doesn't work for all jobs, of course, but for many jobs it is indeed "not a big deal".
I gave my daughter a cellphone when she turned 7, and she's been using it quite responsibly since she got it. At 8, I'd say about half the kids in her class have one. It's not used to a whole lot, mostly for short messages ("can I go with X after school"). There's not a huge amount of texting between the kids yet - she mostly texts with her grandma and with a couple of cousins.
Given that everyone else in her family have a cellphone and is texting, it would feel really off to me if she didn't have one.
To be sociable in a world full of social technologies, you have to master those technologies.
In this part of the world (Scandinavia), it's generally recommended that kids 10 or above shouldn't be without a cellphone, or they will be socially isolated. Texting is how kids runs their social life - it's how they spread ideas, it's how they agree to meet up after school or go play ball, it's how everything happens. If you don't have a cellphone, you're just not part of what's going on.
Also, remember that kids are good at developing a relaxed attitude to technology. Few kids will let it take over their life. Having a cellphone will not send a 7 yo texting all the time. It will just be one more way in which they communicate with the world.
Happily, youngsters don't care what old farts think.
My habits have changed in the past 10 years. I used to be a packrat for publicly available stuff. Software, documentation, papers, all kinds of neat stuff. These days with google and del.icio.us and the like I don't bother.
But as storage capacity has grown, I'm definitely a packrat for personal stuff and media content. Why delete digital pictures? Having 10k or more pictures around is no problem. And why not have a copy on the laptop. Ditto personal video, though storage limitations still force me to delete stuff here. I expect that will change. And why ever delete email? It's easy to store and you can index the stuff.
As for media, I'm storing around the .ogg files of a few thousand legally bought CDs. Why not? And quite a few on my laptop, too. By I guess this will change. Just as google freed me from storing copies of things found on the next, I expect that there will spring of a service where I can listen to all the music I've paid for, keep my personal index, etc. - without any downloading and without buying silver discs. But until that day I'll be a packrat for music files.
Oh, sure. No one will ever need more than 640 kB of RAM and all that.
Indy always was a dignified fellow, so there's no reason he can be the older professor, gray hair and all, saving the world. Heck, it worked for Connery - as Bond and as Indy's sidekick. I have no problem with at all with a 60+ Indy.
Go for it.
What's more, the COMBO family of NICs is free hardware (speech, not beer). The desing is open.
"SCO defaced their own site to discredit the Linux Community". You heard it here first.
There was, on the other hand, a few hackers forced to use TTYs. Real ttys. Ever used on of those? You know, 3 characters per second output and a serious noise, and a keyboard that feels more like doing kung fu than "typing". If that's all the "user interface" you have, you wan't to minimize the number of keystrokes you have to do, and the amount of output you get.
That's what gave the nice and quiet unix we all love. That and a fondness on the part of its creatores for saying only what is absolutely necessary.
I'll wait.
/Lars
I don't see why it should be limited to USA and Canada, but at least they don't have to worry about how "community" is defined elsewhere.
Interesting to see someone trying to apply the internet (inherently global) to a strict local use. I suspect it will fail with users, but it shall be interesting to follow.
Weird? Really? When I moved into the house I live in at the moment (a few years ago) neighbours would come up an introduce themselves ("Hi, I'm XX, I live XX. Welcome"). I do the same when new people move in a few houses down the street. Chat them up the street, asked them where they lived before, how they like the new house, offer help where needed, etc. I know - at least casually - all the people living in the same street as me. And, yes - I do live in a reasonably large city (~1.5M citizens).
Heck - once you get in the (bad?) habit of doing video of the kids, there's no limit to how much legitimate content you can have.
Let's face it - irrespecitive of where they live -can't be bothered to learn about other countries, or even other parts of their own country. Out of sight, out of mind. Most people care about the near and local.
We may think of that as ignorance, and in a way it is. However, since remote parts of the world rarely have a practical impact on most peoples lives, it's just not on their radar. The world outside their own neighbourhood remains fuzzy.
What I don't understand is when act like (geographic) ignorance is something to strive for; when people are proud not to know. Remarks that go "your part of the world is insignificant, so I don't want to know - hahaha" I just don't get. It's an awfully utilitarian approach to knowledge.
For a business, of course, it's different. Ignoring parts of the world means ignoring potential customers. But then, if your home (whatever home is to you) market is sufficient to sustain your business, it may not be worth your while to go outside your expand your geographic reach. You may decide it's better for you business to expand product line and sell more to existing customers, or whatever.
Yes, the economy (and the internet) is global, but that does not mean that every single business is required to be.
We may fear that it will only mean that every single news story will have a link to a boring press release from the politician/company/government entity in question. However, it may effect a deeper change in online news media towards something more oriented towards dialogue than towards the pure distribution that is common now.
This could be interesting to watch - another little step in this collective experiement that is the internet.
Of course, all this favours again the big entities who have the resources to Kibose the world and reply to everything - even though Google should help the rest of us should we want to do the same thing.
/Lars
No bigger waste of ressources? Well, there's always Iridium. Anyways, I don't really grok this "we should have only one of X in order to save ressources" thing. It may sound like a good idea on the short term, but have a look at history to see what happened when men tried that kind of planning. The typical result is no development, no challenge to the status quo, and in the end being surpassed by people who did less planning. Planning to avoid wasting ressources was something the USSR and the east block where really good at (Planned Economy, remember?). Worked really well for them, I hear. Or think of the Chinese in the 15th and 16th century. They where actually more advanced than the Europeans, had explores in India and Africa - but then central command decided to focus all ressources on wars in central Asia. In contrast, even though central Europe was in the process of being overrun by the Muslims (siege of Vienna and all that), there was no-one to tell the Portugese to "stop wasting ressources on all this exploration business". Result: the Europeans took the world, the Chinese went no-where. Or think about US history. Think about how many ressources have been wasted in all the false starts, and all the unplanned priviate initiatives. Think about how rich we all have become that way. If there's one thing that have driven the West to success, it's that we've allowed a level of creative chaos, rivalry, and competition. That we have done some large-scale trial-and-error and picked what worked. Sure, it's a waste of time and money, but so far it has worked better than trying to do large-scale social planning. Maybe one days we'll get really good at central planning. Maybe one day we'll go the way of the USSR and the Chinese will have a go at running the world. /Lars