I'm 63. Since 1978, my primary language has been C or C++. In the last four years, I've learned (well enough to write at least one application in the language that saw distribution) Python and Java. If you're not totally brain-damaged from being a manager, you should be able to pick up a new language -- especially if you have to.
Okay, people! What about ADVENTURE? Wonderful descriptive text, all puzzles solved by logical means, available on innumerable platforms in several variations.
http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/info/advent.html
This is the ancestor of all the textual-adventure-puzzle games like Zork and the Infocom Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
(Now where did I put my orange smoke...)
Has anybody else here read the newly-released-in-SFBC title "Windup Girl"? Paulo Bacigalupi has written a cautionary tale of where GM crops, IP and climate change collide with gene hacking and seed banks in Thiland.
I haven't read anything quite so disturbing since "Blood Music".
For all of you who are lusting after a $75 pad with daylight-readable (dual mode) display, just remember this:
OLPC is not promising that any J. Random Individual will ever be able to buy one from the organization.
(I also wouldn't take any of the specifications as gosphel at this point, either. Except it will probably run the Sugar-compliant XO-1 and XO-1.5 applications which were coded in Python.)
Are you sure about that *in the reference frame of the vehicle*?
I'm not a physicist, but won't the Lorentz contraction come into play? At these speeds, 1 cm in the direction of travel as viewed from the ship's reference frame would be something like 1.6 meters, if I did the math right. So the effective density would be 1600 times higher than as viewed by a stationary observer.
As an owner of an XO-1, the thing that keeps me using my little green laptop even though it often gets mistaken for a kid's toy is battery life.
I fly to vacation travel. (I defy anybody to drive to Hawaii.) From Boston, Honolulu is at least 12 hours away. In-flight movies being what they are, I usually read a book or two. With my XO, I can listen to MP3s, keep a journal, read an eBook or play games. (Freecell and Adventure keep me amused.) I can even use my StarChart program to plan star-gazing while out there. [shameless plug]
What I can't do in the air (yet) is browse the web. Having the necessary apps stored locally is therefore a must and a device that needs "the cloud" to function is useless for air travelers. But I digress -- I was saying that battery life is the deal-maker with respect to netbooks for me.
I have two batteries for my XO. In flight, the wifi has to be turned off, which gives the XO over three hours of playing time on one battery -- more if I turn the back-light off and use the monochrome screen mode.
If the layover is sufficiently long, I can re-charge at least one battery while waiting for the flight from the west coast to the islands. Usually, I arrive after the cross-country flight with both batteries discharged, re-charge one and get most of the way to Hawaii before I'm out of power. I know of no other netbook-like device presently on the market that can do as well.
So rather than high-speed CPU, lots of storage, the ability to play HD movies or all the other features that seem to be standard in the current crop of netbooks, give me a machine that's frugal of battery, small enough to fit in coach class and equipped with enough built-in functionality to keep a man amused for six to eight hours.
"When an elderly and respected scientist says something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he says it is impossible, he is almost certainly wrong."
I wouldn't declare commercial fusion power impossible just yet. The more that fissionables become in short supply, the more somebody is going to figure that there's big bucks to be made getting fusion to work and spend money doing the engineering.
It's more like "we need to fight with compatible tools in order to be employed as a mercenary" -- I freely admit that I program in the languages I do simply because that's where most of the jobs are. At 61, I have no intention of changing careers or retiring; I still like to code and I can still make a living doing it.
in the 1970s. I programmed in PL/1. While the language was complex (being a synthesis of the most difficult-to-implement features from FORTRAN, COBOL and Algol), it certainly was a fine development environment *on Multics*.
I still miss the clean user interface (all command-line arguments meant the same thing, no matter which command was being executed) and fine documentation. But the GE645 / Honeywell 6800 architecture was never well-enough documented to make emulation feasible. And the descendants of Multics have implemented most of the features more-or-less. The world has moved on.
I've moved on, too. In 1978 I taught myself C; I've since learned and continue to program in C++, Java and Python, having discarded along the way Lisp, Pascal and Delphi.
And I use Windows mostly now. But my memory tells me that Multics was often faster for routine things like searching the file system. (Though the filesystem back then was only a few hundred MB.) And the processor back then was good for about 1 MIPS. Forget about color graphics. Animation? That was for cartoonists.
Anyway, this old-timer got a chuckle out of the article; thanks for posting the heads-up.
The XO-1.5 is not an upgrade; it's a new model. For all you XO-1.0 owners, you can go back to sleep now.
And the link is to an article dated September 8th. I'm sure most OLPC-watchers have seen it already. (I know I did. And said "ho hum, it won't apply to my XO-1".)
If I download 10,000 pictures of naked, immature cats I may be ga-ga over kittens but it's not porn.
Therefore, if my cat downloads 10,000 pictures of naked, immature humans then it can't be considered porn either.
Now all I have to do is claim I never looked at the images.
Purrfect defense.
... then maybe a no-touch interface is not going to work well for me. I found the Theremin to be almost impossible to play because there was no way to get my hand in exactly the same x-y-z coordinate and with the same roll-yaw-pitch attitude (all of which affected the frequency of the oscillator). YMMV, of course.
Last night's episode of "House" (FOX TV) had a gadget that used EEG to move a cursor so a paralyzed patient could answer yes/no questions. Talk about synchronicity!
Considering that Forrest J. Ackerman [sp?] coined that particular neologism (while the rest of fandom preferred to call it SF!), I doubt that NBC could sue anyone over the name.
We need to begin work on the non-neotenacious version of an ostritch.
(Larry Niven fans will get this. For the rest of you, see "Bird in Hand" from his anthology "Flight of the Horse".)
I went through airport security (twice -- once in BOS and once in OGG) with a 90mm Schmitt-Cassegrain telescope in my carry-on. Now this thing is essentially an aluminum cylinder 4 inches in diameter and 10 inches long. It was never even questioned. This was in addition to my usual assortment of DSLR gear and electronics. And an XO-1 laptop.
I'm disappointed. My first XO lasted about 30 hours and then failed with stuck Alt. I RMA'd it in early January and a replacement machine arrived about two weeks later. I used this machine for around 100 hours until that keyboard failed (stuck Ctrl) on 4/13.
However, there seems to be a lot of mis- (or dis-) information surrounding the problem. First, chase the first link in the article and you'll discover that the failure mode *is* known -- insufficient or missing "foam dots" between the layers of the membrane keyboard. And user repair is *not* recommended.
Second, on 4/19, I opened up my (second, failed) XO and examined its keyboard. Yes, some of my left-edge keys had NO dots and the failing key (Ctrl) had tiny ones, compared to nearby keys such as Shift and A. This appearance is consistent with the failure mechanism OLPC postulates. So the RMA process appears to have been to swap one failed XO with an XO that probably has a keyboard with the same manufacturing defect. (Whether this RMA process has changed since mid-January, I have no idea. If not, I expect that the RMA'd machines will eventually fail, too.)
Third, after reassembly my keyboard works again. I did *not* attempt to "clean" the contacts (or to separate the keyboard beyond peeling back the top rubber keytops sheet a couple of inches so I could see the key contacts). So I conclude that I must have flexed something or shifted something enough to releave mechanical stress to some degree. I doubt that the "fix" will be permanent, but I could get lucky.
In any event, if OLPC ever gets a spare parts supply system in place for G1G1 donors, I'll be ordering a keyboard.
Slashdot Mirror
all I need is a chip with a sleep timer. No other functions are required.
I'm 63. Since 1978, my primary language has been C or C++. In the last four years, I've learned (well enough to write at least one application in the language that saw distribution) Python and Java. If you're not totally brain-damaged from being a manager, you should be able to pick up a new language -- especially if you have to.
Given that this eclipse will not be visible in North America, that's good news.
Okay, people! What about ADVENTURE? Wonderful descriptive text, all puzzles solved by logical means, available on innumerable platforms in several variations. http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/info/advent.html This is the ancestor of all the textual-adventure-puzzle games like Zork and the Infocom Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. (Now where did I put my orange smoke...)
Has anybody else here read the newly-released-in-SFBC title "Windup Girl"? Paulo Bacigalupi has written a cautionary tale of where GM crops, IP and climate change collide with gene hacking and seed banks in Thiland.
I haven't read anything quite so disturbing since "Blood Music".
You mean he didn't find Windows entertaining enough? I sure found it to be a joke.
Apparently (according to this http://www.olpcnews.com/laptops/xo-3/new_xo-3_announced_just_a_marv.html posting), the XO-3 will be a re-branded Marvel Moby tablet. So much for rugged designed-for-kids. Several articles have appeared today on OLPC News about the deal.
For all of you who are lusting after a $75 pad with daylight-readable (dual mode) display, just remember this:
OLPC is not promising that any J. Random Individual will ever be able to buy one from the organization.
(I also wouldn't take any of the specifications as gosphel at this point, either. Except it will probably run the Sugar-compliant XO-1 and XO-1.5 applications which were coded in Python.)
Probably the same ones that control the accelerator in my Prius.
Are you sure about that *in the reference frame of the vehicle*?
I'm not a physicist, but won't the Lorentz contraction come into play? At these speeds, 1 cm in the direction of travel as viewed from the ship's reference frame would be something like 1.6 meters, if I did the math right. So the effective density would be 1600 times higher than as viewed by a stationary observer.
As an owner of an XO-1, the thing that keeps me using my little green laptop even though it often gets mistaken for a kid's toy is battery life.
I fly to vacation travel. (I defy anybody to drive to Hawaii.) From Boston, Honolulu is at least 12 hours away. In-flight movies being what they are, I usually read a book or two. With my XO, I can listen to MP3s, keep a journal, read an eBook or play games. (Freecell and Adventure keep me amused.) I can even use my StarChart program to plan star-gazing while out there. [shameless plug]
What I can't do in the air (yet) is browse the web. Having the necessary apps stored locally is therefore a must and a device that needs "the cloud" to function is useless for air travelers. But I digress -- I was saying that battery life is the deal-maker with respect to netbooks for me.
I have two batteries for my XO. In flight, the wifi has to be turned off, which gives the XO over three hours of playing time on one battery -- more if I turn the back-light off and use the monochrome screen mode.
If the layover is sufficiently long, I can re-charge at least one battery while waiting for the flight from the west coast to the islands. Usually, I arrive after the cross-country flight with both batteries discharged, re-charge one and get most of the way to Hawaii before I'm out of power. I know of no other netbook-like device presently on the market that can do as well.
So rather than high-speed CPU, lots of storage, the ability to play HD movies or all the other features that seem to be standard in the current crop of netbooks, give me a machine that's frugal of battery, small enough to fit in coach class and equipped with enough built-in functionality to keep a man amused for six to eight hours.
> ...will never become a reality...
"When an elderly and respected scientist says something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he says it is impossible, he is almost certainly wrong."
I wouldn't declare commercial fusion power impossible just yet. The more that fissionables become in short supply, the more somebody is going to figure that there's big bucks to be made getting fusion to work and spend money doing the engineering.
It's more like "we need to fight with compatible tools in order to be employed as a mercenary" -- I freely admit that I program in the languages I do simply because that's where most of the jobs are. At 61, I have no intention of changing careers or retiring; I still like to code and I can still make a living doing it.
I still miss the clean user interface (all command-line arguments meant the same thing, no matter which command was being executed) and fine documentation. But the GE645 / Honeywell 6800 architecture was never well-enough documented to make emulation feasible. And the descendants of Multics have implemented most of the features more-or-less. The world has moved on.
I've moved on, too. In 1978 I taught myself C; I've since learned and continue to program in C++, Java and Python, having discarded along the way Lisp, Pascal and Delphi.
And I use Windows mostly now. But my memory tells me that Multics was often faster for routine things like searching the file system. (Though the filesystem back then was only a few hundred MB.) And the processor back then was good for about 1 MIPS. Forget about color graphics. Animation? That was for cartoonists.
Anyway, this old-timer got a chuckle out of the article; thanks for posting the heads-up.
The XO-1.5 is not an upgrade; it's a new model. For all you XO-1.0 owners, you can go back to sleep now.
And the link is to an article dated September 8th. I'm sure most OLPC-watchers have seen it already. (I know I did. And said "ho hum, it won't apply to my XO-1".)
If I download 10,000 pictures of naked, immature cats I may be ga-ga over kittens but it's not porn. Therefore, if my cat downloads 10,000 pictures of naked, immature humans then it can't be considered porn either. Now all I have to do is claim I never looked at the images. Purrfect defense.
... then maybe a no-touch interface is not going to work well for me. I found the Theremin to be almost impossible to play because there was no way to get my hand in exactly the same x-y-z coordinate and with the same roll-yaw-pitch attitude (all of which affected the frequency of the oscillator). YMMV, of course.
Last night's episode of "House" (FOX TV) had a gadget that used EEG to move a cursor so a paralyzed patient could answer yes/no questions. Talk about synchronicity!
I wonder if ABC/Disney would be considering Hulu if they knew it means "body hair" in Hawaiian?
Considering that Forrest J. Ackerman [sp?] coined that particular neologism (while the rest of fandom preferred to call it SF!), I doubt that NBC could sue anyone over the name.
We need to begin work on the non-neotenacious version of an ostritch. (Larry Niven fans will get this. For the rest of you, see "Bird in Hand" from his anthology "Flight of the Horse".)
Yes. Pretty soon the galaxy will be full of spaceships carrying frozen telephone sanitizors.
Works for me. Small, simple and comes with Python.
I went through airport security (twice -- once in BOS and once in OGG) with a 90mm Schmitt-Cassegrain telescope in my carry-on. Now this thing is essentially an aluminum cylinder 4 inches in diameter and 10 inches long. It was never even questioned. This was in addition to my usual assortment of DSLR gear and electronics. And an XO-1 laptop.
:)
I was expecting a strip-search.
I'm disappointed. My first XO lasted about 30 hours and then failed with stuck Alt. I RMA'd it in early January and a replacement machine arrived about two weeks later. I used this machine for around 100 hours until that keyboard failed (stuck Ctrl) on 4/13. However, there seems to be a lot of mis- (or dis-) information surrounding the problem. First, chase the first link in the article and you'll discover that the failure mode *is* known -- insufficient or missing "foam dots" between the layers of the membrane keyboard. And user repair is *not* recommended. Second, on 4/19, I opened up my (second, failed) XO and examined its keyboard. Yes, some of my left-edge keys had NO dots and the failing key (Ctrl) had tiny ones, compared to nearby keys such as Shift and A. This appearance is consistent with the failure mechanism OLPC postulates. So the RMA process appears to have been to swap one failed XO with an XO that probably has a keyboard with the same manufacturing defect. (Whether this RMA process has changed since mid-January, I have no idea. If not, I expect that the RMA'd machines will eventually fail, too.) Third, after reassembly my keyboard works again. I did *not* attempt to "clean" the contacts (or to separate the keyboard beyond peeling back the top rubber keytops sheet a couple of inches so I could see the key contacts). So I conclude that I must have flexed something or shifted something enough to releave mechanical stress to some degree. I doubt that the "fix" will be permanent, but I could get lucky. In any event, if OLPC ever gets a spare parts supply system in place for G1G1 donors, I'll be ordering a keyboard.