Not to mention the fact that the aim of the OLPC project is to enhance "learning about learning", not "learning about Windows so Microsoft can outsource tech support to you for $0.30/hr in 20 years" (though I'm sure they wouldn't mind that). It's not learning about computers, it's learning with computers and the logical/critical thinking skills that operating and tinkering with a computer gives. The stylized, idealized open-source and (almost) infinitely modifiable OS of the OLPC is ideal for that. Windows is decidedly less so.
I still get bitten by that, trying to right-click an item in a right-click menu. Seems like it should work, but it just brings up the menu in a different location... (on Windows, anyway. You can select menu items with the RMB in OSX).
Re:Sixth column of a series
on
DRM Causes Piracy
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
But DRM radically reduces the value of legally-acquired media, while raising the value of pirated ones. Furthermore, I think there is a strong philosophical argument against the bare concept of DRM, as the rules it imposes restrict our actions to such a large degree as to remove our liberty as moral agents, preventing us from acting as moral agents at all.
The first point is one of utility. Case in point: cleaning out my inbox today, I found a note from the iTunes store that the Good, the Bad and the Queen's album is only $8 for a limited time. I almost jumped at it, even clicked the "Buy this album..." button (I'm a big Albarn/Gorillaz fan), and then, filling in my password, I stopped to think. "This is only 128kbits," I thought to myself. "That sounds kinda chintzy on my headphones. I won't be able to send good tracks to my friends, or upload them to the poolhall jukebox at my school. I won't ever be able to play them on non-Apple DAPs without even more of a quality loss, or make them into ringtones for my friends' phones, or possibly be able to even listen to them at all once Apple gets over this DRM nonsense in 10 years. Shit, I don't even know if this album is any good, the free single was only so-so. I have food to buy. Huh."
The problem with DRM'ed media, and this leads into my second point, is that you don't actually buy anything. If I buy a CD, or download an album off the internet, it is my property: I have the right to use it and abuse it, as far as my own system of morality allows. (For me this includes making mix CDs for my friends, emailing them hott traxx, dropping cool songs on my friends' iPods, playing on my radio shows, and all the uses I described above.) By restricting my use of the things I buy to a predefined set of "correct" actions, DRM removes my freedom to act as a moral agent.
So I fired up Soulseek and—well, you know the rest of the story. I will happily agree that stealing the music is less moral than paying for it (though the profit split of $0.80 to Apple, $6.50 to the RIAA, and $0.70 to Damon Albarn seems a little off to me, as I would really like Damon Albarn to be as rich as he needs to be to keep making music—the people demand a new Gorillaz album!). But for the reasons above I think it's less immoral than what the RIAA and iTunes do to me when I buy into their DRM.
That's my call, as a human being and a moral agent, and I should be free to make it. DRM restricts my freedom to a rigid set of rules, predetermined by a cartel of people completely removed from my life and reasons for action. We get the old saw: everything not compulsory is forbidden; everything not forbidden is compulsory. It destroys the possibility of agency, and in turn the possibility of any kind of moral action.
I: just want to listen to music, where and how I want to. I'm happy to pay for it (and I do, more than I should), as long as my rights of property and agency are respected. They: want to destroy my personhood with an absolute and top-down system of "morality".
I think that this is key, and not many of the commentors yet seem to have noticed it. A 30" display would be much less useful for a Windows user because they are used to working with maximized windows, and the OS has been designed to optimize for that case. When your monitor has a 30" diagonal, maximizing a web page or a Word doc or even Eclipse is just a waste. That effectively removes any utility the "maximize" button has. The Mac OS lends itself much more nicely to spatial organizations of windows, which is helped a lot by the "smart" zoom button. (Always hated that maximize button.)
Expose also gets more intuitive on a huge display: in that case, it's mostly just spreading out the (predominantly visible) windows slightly to give you a better look at them. On a small screen, it's often just dozens of windows shooting out from the middle (and being reduced to wheat thin sized white rectangles), since you don't have much choice but to stack everything.
All in all, I much prefer a single huge monitor to several small ones. I enjoy the ad hoc organization that comes from a large screen better than the "my IM and email are over here, my Eclipse is over here" mentality that smaller monitors encourage. (This sort of thing is much better handled by virtual desktops, in my opinion.)
Volkswagen sells several diesel compacts in the United States. (I believe all of their cars may be bought with diesel engines, actually.) They call it "Turbo Diesel Injection", ooooh doesn't that sound fast. My parents bought a diesel Golf. Doesn't get terribly great mileage (maybe 30-35mpg, though they live in a cold climate and do mostly city driving), and they've been unlucky with its reliability (oh VW, you make such sexxy cars, why can't you make them hold together better...), but it's very nice overall. They did like it a lot better back in the good ol' days when diesel was consistently $0.15 cheaper than gas, instead of vice versa, however.
I look forward to the music video that is supposed to air on Yahoo music at 10:00 PM Pacific Time tonight (August 22nd).
The music video is by Bill Plympton, one of the grand old indie animators. He did a lot of stuff for MTV back when it was starting out, and you've probably seen his sketchy, hand-drawn Geico commercials. Other famous works: 25 Ways to Quit Smoking, The Tune, Your Face, and Guard Dog (Guard Dog is hilariously cute, by the way, and worth a watch).
I saw a talk Bill gave up in Juneau, Alaska a few weeks ago, and he's a very interesting and talented guy. He showed the Weird Al video and it was well done--the video is better than the song, in my opinion. So yeah, check it out, is my gist, as well as his other stuff--kind of like raunchy animated Far Side, kind of like nothing you've ever seen. A strange man.
It allows IE6 to render transparent PNGs (using ActiveX[?] hooks built-in to IE that allow it to render 8-bit transparency, but is mysteriously not enabled for PNGs by default) and programmatically alters the DOM and parsed CSS to enable complex subselectors and a smattering of CSS2/3 selectors as well (including fixed background positioning!). It adds ~20K to pages using it, but it's a one-time cost as IE caches Javascript.
It's not a magic bullet, and sometimes causes issues itself, but definitely worth a look. Cause no one likes hacking their carefully-constructed divs back to tables, just to support a broken POS browser. (I also enjoy the irony that third-party Javscript hackers seem to be able to make more progress with IE's CSS compatibility than the actual IE team.)
Ha! That seems to have been removed recently. Wonder if they meant for it to go live with that comment on it. I didn't see any links to Leopard XCode from the preview page earlier.
You should think about getting some more RAM. I have a G4 Powerbook 1.5GHz as well, and it was frustratingly slow with the stock 512MB of RAM, especially for things like Dashboard and Spotlight. Widgets and the Spotlight index get swapped out to disk if you don't use them for maybe half an hour, resulting in 5-10sec lag every time you use the Dashboard or the search field. With a gig more RAM in my PB (1.5GB total) they are both nearly instantaneous, unless I've been doing Eclipse stuff or browser testing (Eclipse, 5 browsers, and 2-3 VNC sessions open at once will eat your RAM real fast).
Seriously, invest in some RAM. OSX is probably the single most memory-hungry OS out there (the bits for all those nifty WebKit/double-buffered/dozens-of-daemons/OpenGL things don't just grow on trees, you know), and feeding it makes it much, much happier. It'll be like getting a whole new computer. Seriously.
I always thought the most emotional moments in the FF series came in FFVI (or FFIII for all y'all 'muricans gamers). I found the opera scene especially teary, though the fantastic music the FF games are blessed with are kind of cheating.
In summary, the evidence collected for this evaluation indicates that a
large majority of Maine's middle schools have successfully implemented the
one-to-one laptop program, and there is already substantial self-reported
evidence that student learning has increased and improved. Additional
research needs to be conducted in the coming years to document and
understand the long-term impacts of the laptop initiative on teachers and
teaching, students and learning, and on schools.
The report notes that there likely needs to be much more professional development and integration of technology into curricula, but it seems that even in its nascent stages the 1-1 program has helped keep students interested in and proactive about their learning, and improved the quality of their work.
One neat thing about technology in schools is that it lets you do completely new kinds of schoolwork. A new kind of project that many of my English-teaching acquaintances are starting to like is the fake-novel-movie-adaptation-trailer, or artsy-literature-inspired-music-video. Going outside the bounds of the traditional two-page book report or reading journal really helps students think differently and more deeply about the subject (especially for students not compatible with the text-based US school system). Film also really lends itself to literary tropes like symbolism, foreshadowing, and irony. This kind of thinking is just not possible (or at least very difficult) without prevalent access to technology. I've heard anecdotally that music students love GarageBand for recording state honor band/choir audition tapes, or just for practicing in general (recording yourself is notoriously one of the best ways to figure out all the myriad ways you suck). And the sheer amount of good information and media available on the internet is rapidly rivaling even the best-equipped public school libraries.
Obviously the $100 laptop isn't going to be a great video editing machine (though, if you can do it on an Amiga...), but even the basic functions of word processing and Internet capability (the Wikipedia, for chrissake! how great would the world be if everyone had the Wikipedia?) have the capability to dramatically improve the baseline quality of education for developing populations.
From my own experience, I have been lucky enough to use computers since I began school in the mid-80s, and I feel that they shaped my development in a very positive way. Computers are fantastic tools for teaching critical thinking, reading comprehension, model-forming and abstraction, mathematical concepts (especially geometry), and with the internet, efficient internalization of data from multiple sources. David Chalmers and Andy Clark have argued that external resources, when properly utilized, can effectively become part of our cognitive process. By teaching children to take advantage of the astounding power and resources that computers make available to them, we do them a far greater service than cramming multiplication tables and D'Nelian handwriting exercises down their throats for 180 days a year from the age of 5 to 13.
After all, people should be generalists, and computers are the generalist's tool. What would we humans be without tools? Shivering, unathletic apes. $100 is cheap for a tool that
Actually, I always thought that was a great advantage of CSS layouts. Theoretically, you should start with a well-written and clean HTML document with H1s and Ps and OLs for navigation lists, etc. Then you add style to that. So when you view the page without the stylesheet, it looks like, say, an academic's website--not terribly pretty, but extremely readable and functional.
The nightly builds of Safari have also gained a similar feature. See this WebKit blog post. It's pretty slick, and very helpful for debugging CSS nits.
I agree on all points. I also find the average Ruby script infinitely more readable than most of the Perl I've read (or written). Ruby's syntax is just so perfect and clean. I was pretty skeptical when I first started reading Ruby books, the way everyone always waxed so ridiculously lyrical about how writing Ruby after using other languages was like a walk in a park on a damp spring day with the sun just barely shining through the low wispy fog etc. etc. etc. But it's true. I hope it can maintain its momentum, the world would be a better place if people spent as much effort learning/improving/extending Ruby as they did Java (*shudder*).
I got the impression (Mac user) that that's exactly what Picasa does. See http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ans wer=19610&topic=1044 for example. It sounds like you set up various folders on your disk for Picasa to watch, and that's how they are organized in the left pane. Sounds kind of confusing to me (can you only have a photo in one collection at once?), but if that's what you need, you should check Picasa out.
iPhoto 6 also now has an option to keep your photos in their original location when you add them to your library. (Versions are created in the default iPhoto library if you do any tweaks, I believe, but I'm not sure exactly how that works.)
Give the man a cigar. Swing's file chooser on OSX is just about the worst thing in the known universe. No sidebar, no columns, no standard keyboard shortcuts, inconsistent behavior, always starts you out in your root user folder, suck suck suck.
Actually, pretty much all Swing apps on OSX are just 10% too wonky and ugly to really pass as native programs. SWT programs (Azuerus, Eclipse) look like they should be running on Windows (wish they would bundle at least separate icons for running on X), but I prefer that to Swing's barely-native-but-all-crap rendering. (Now if Apple would do for SWT widgets what they did for Swing, then you'd have something--I'd love some sensibly Aqufied SWT tabs, tree views, etc.)
I agree that this is probably the way to go. The only way to become a better writer is to read a lot of good writing. Make them read 2-3 really good essays per week--Orwell, Baldwin, Douglas Adams, E. B. White, Michael Frayn, even Dave Barry. (Actually, of these, I'd recommend Barry and Adams more than the "serious" essayists. They have a great command of the language, and have a fantastic sense of voice--probably the most important aspect of good writing. And turning someone on to Douglas Adams--and by proxy, reading in general--is probably one of the best things you can do for their writing, in the long-term.)
I'd also recommend, as another poster said, assigning them to write 1-2 short essays per week, on any topic they like. Meet regularly with each of them, ask them to read one of their essays out loud, and as they read point out places where there could be improvement--better sentence structure, unnecessary words, unclear/inapt phrasing, etc.
The long and short of it is that they won't be good writers unless they write a lot and read a lot. Tying this in with their specialties, as the parent poster said, will help with this greatly; I think that avoiding "literary" writers in general, and sticking to more approachable names like Orwell, Douglas Adams, Dave Barry--or David Sedaris, for that matter--and writers of that ilk will also keep them interested. Good luck!
I second the Mario Kart. Playing on "Frantic" mode at 50 or 100cc really levels out the playing field, especially if you stick to the easier tracks to start off with. At 150cc a good player can pretty much own anyone, but at the lower levels it's a lot easier to keep up. Also, Mario Kart has a really fun co-op grand prix mode, so you can drive and she can learn how to shoot/blue spark, or vice versa.
I find that the Mario franchise games in general are very good for players of uneven skill. Mario Golf is great, Mario Tennis was really good on the 64 (haven't played the GC version yet). The new soccer game is slightly more difficult, just because it's easy to lose track of who you're controlling at any given moment, but I found it to have a very friendly learning curve.
I admire your inclusive, informative, and well-exposited approach to the discussion.
Now, does "fuzzy" mean something more than non-deterministic processes? Because these are also well-simulable by deterministic (Turing) computations. I expect you mean something closer to "noncomputable", which in this context would really amount to your begging the question... If you can point to a natural process that is demonstrably noncomputable, you should notify the Nobel people immediately and queue up for your prize. Even these newfangled quantum computers perform fundamentally the same kinds of computations as Turing machines, they just happen to be able to implement a certain class of algorithms in constant (or greatly reduced) time.
Slashdot Mirror
The construction of proteins from genetic code works essentially like a Turing machine, with a read head moving linearly along a data tape (DNA).
Not to mention the fact that the aim of the OLPC project is to enhance "learning about learning", not "learning about Windows so Microsoft can outsource tech support to you for $0.30/hr in 20 years" (though I'm sure they wouldn't mind that). It's not learning about computers, it's learning with computers and the logical/critical thinking skills that operating and tinkering with a computer gives. The stylized, idealized open-source and (almost) infinitely modifiable OS of the OLPC is ideal for that. Windows is decidedly less so.
I still get bitten by that, trying to right-click an item in a right-click menu. Seems like it should work, but it just brings up the menu in a different location... (on Windows, anyway. You can select menu items with the RMB in OSX).
But DRM radically reduces the value of legally-acquired media, while raising the value of pirated ones. Furthermore, I think there is a strong philosophical argument against the bare concept of DRM, as the rules it imposes restrict our actions to such a large degree as to remove our liberty as moral agents, preventing us from acting as moral agents at all.
The first point is one of utility. Case in point: cleaning out my inbox today, I found a note from the iTunes store that the Good, the Bad and the Queen's album is only $8 for a limited time. I almost jumped at it, even clicked the "Buy this album..." button (I'm a big Albarn/Gorillaz fan), and then, filling in my password, I stopped to think. "This is only 128kbits," I thought to myself. "That sounds kinda chintzy on my headphones. I won't be able to send good tracks to my friends, or upload them to the poolhall jukebox at my school. I won't ever be able to play them on non-Apple DAPs without even more of a quality loss, or make them into ringtones for my friends' phones, or possibly be able to even listen to them at all once Apple gets over this DRM nonsense in 10 years. Shit, I don't even know if this album is any good, the free single was only so-so. I have food to buy. Huh."
The problem with DRM'ed media, and this leads into my second point, is that you don't actually buy anything. If I buy a CD, or download an album off the internet, it is my property: I have the right to use it and abuse it, as far as my own system of morality allows. (For me this includes making mix CDs for my friends, emailing them hott traxx, dropping cool songs on my friends' iPods, playing on my radio shows, and all the uses I described above.) By restricting my use of the things I buy to a predefined set of "correct" actions, DRM removes my freedom to act as a moral agent.
So I fired up Soulseek and—well, you know the rest of the story. I will happily agree that stealing the music is less moral than paying for it (though the profit split of $0.80 to Apple, $6.50 to the RIAA, and $0.70 to Damon Albarn seems a little off to me, as I would really like Damon Albarn to be as rich as he needs to be to keep making music—the people demand a new Gorillaz album!). But for the reasons above I think it's less immoral than what the RIAA and iTunes do to me when I buy into their DRM.
That's my call, as a human being and a moral agent, and I should be free to make it. DRM restricts my freedom to a rigid set of rules, predetermined by a cartel of people completely removed from my life and reasons for action. We get the old saw: everything not compulsory is forbidden; everything not forbidden is compulsory. It destroys the possibility of agency, and in turn the possibility of any kind of moral action.
I: just want to listen to music, where and how I want to. I'm happy to pay for it (and I do, more than I should), as long as my rights of property and agency are respected. They: want to destroy my personhood with an absolute and top-down system of "morality".
Who's the bad guy?
I think that this is key, and not many of the commentors yet seem to have noticed it. A 30" display would be much less useful for a Windows user because they are used to working with maximized windows, and the OS has been designed to optimize for that case. When your monitor has a 30" diagonal, maximizing a web page or a Word doc or even Eclipse is just a waste. That effectively removes any utility the "maximize" button has. The Mac OS lends itself much more nicely to spatial organizations of windows, which is helped a lot by the "smart" zoom button. (Always hated that maximize button.) Expose also gets more intuitive on a huge display: in that case, it's mostly just spreading out the (predominantly visible) windows slightly to give you a better look at them. On a small screen, it's often just dozens of windows shooting out from the middle (and being reduced to wheat thin sized white rectangles), since you don't have much choice but to stack everything. All in all, I much prefer a single huge monitor to several small ones. I enjoy the ad hoc organization that comes from a large screen better than the "my IM and email are over here, my Eclipse is over here" mentality that smaller monitors encourage. (This sort of thing is much better handled by virtual desktops, in my opinion.)
Actually, JavaScript doesn't need semicolons. You only have to use them if you inline more than one line's worth of JS, so grandparent is correct.
Volkswagen sells several diesel compacts in the United States. (I believe all of their cars may be bought with diesel engines, actually.) They call it "Turbo Diesel Injection", ooooh doesn't that sound fast. My parents bought a diesel Golf. Doesn't get terribly great mileage (maybe 30-35mpg, though they live in a cold climate and do mostly city driving), and they've been unlucky with its reliability (oh VW, you make such sexxy cars, why can't you make them hold together better...), but it's very nice overall. They did like it a lot better back in the good ol' days when diesel was consistently $0.15 cheaper than gas, instead of vice versa, however.
The music video is by Bill Plympton, one of the grand old indie animators. He did a lot of stuff for MTV back when it was starting out, and you've probably seen his sketchy, hand-drawn Geico commercials. Other famous works: 25 Ways to Quit Smoking, The Tune, Your Face, and Guard Dog (Guard Dog is hilariously cute, by the way, and worth a watch).
I saw a talk Bill gave up in Juneau, Alaska a few weeks ago, and he's a very interesting and talented guy. He showed the Weird Al video and it was well done--the video is better than the song, in my opinion. So yeah, check it out, is my gist, as well as his other stuff--kind of like raunchy animated Far Side, kind of like nothing you've ever seen. A strange man.
The "IE7" Javascript library by Web guru Dean Edwards has helped me a lot with the IE6 blues.
It allows IE6 to render transparent PNGs (using ActiveX[?] hooks built-in to IE that allow it to render 8-bit transparency, but is mysteriously not enabled for PNGs by default) and programmatically alters the DOM and parsed CSS to enable complex subselectors and a smattering of CSS2/3 selectors as well (including fixed background positioning!). It adds ~20K to pages using it, but it's a one-time cost as IE caches Javascript.
It's not a magic bullet, and sometimes causes issues itself, but definitely worth a look. Cause no one likes hacking their carefully-constructed divs back to tables, just to support a broken POS browser. (I also enjoy the irony that third-party Javscript hackers seem to be able to make more progress with IE's CSS compatibility than the actual IE team.)
Ha! That seems to have been removed recently. Wonder if they meant for it to go live with that comment on it. I didn't see any links to Leopard XCode from the preview page earlier.
You should think about getting some more RAM. I have a G4 Powerbook 1.5GHz as well, and it was frustratingly slow with the stock 512MB of RAM, especially for things like Dashboard and Spotlight. Widgets and the Spotlight index get swapped out to disk if you don't use them for maybe half an hour, resulting in 5-10sec lag every time you use the Dashboard or the search field. With a gig more RAM in my PB (1.5GB total) they are both nearly instantaneous, unless I've been doing Eclipse stuff or browser testing (Eclipse, 5 browsers, and 2-3 VNC sessions open at once will eat your RAM real fast).
Seriously, invest in some RAM. OSX is probably the single most memory-hungry OS out there (the bits for all those nifty WebKit/double-buffered/dozens-of-daemons/OpenGL things don't just grow on trees, you know), and feeding it makes it much, much happier. It'll be like getting a whole new computer. Seriously.
I always thought the most emotional moments in the FF series came in FFVI (or FFIII for all y'all 'muricans gamers). I found the opera scene especially teary, though the fantastic music the FF games are blessed with are kind of cheating.
The Alaska Association of School Boards is implementing a 1-1 laptop program, based on a similar successful program in Maine (which I believe has just gotten its funding renewed). From the executive summary of Maine's two-year retrospective report:
The report notes that there likely needs to be much more professional development and integration of technology into curricula, but it seems that even in its nascent stages the 1-1 program has helped keep students interested in and proactive about their learning, and improved the quality of their work.
One neat thing about technology in schools is that it lets you do completely new kinds of schoolwork. A new kind of project that many of my English-teaching acquaintances are starting to like is the fake-novel-movie-adaptation-trailer, or artsy-literature-inspired-music-video. Going outside the bounds of the traditional two-page book report or reading journal really helps students think differently and more deeply about the subject (especially for students not compatible with the text-based US school system). Film also really lends itself to literary tropes like symbolism, foreshadowing, and irony. This kind of thinking is just not possible (or at least very difficult) without prevalent access to technology. I've heard anecdotally that music students love GarageBand for recording state honor band/choir audition tapes, or just for practicing in general (recording yourself is notoriously one of the best ways to figure out all the myriad ways you suck). And the sheer amount of good information and media available on the internet is rapidly rivaling even the best-equipped public school libraries.
Obviously the $100 laptop isn't going to be a great video editing machine (though, if you can do it on an Amiga...), but even the basic functions of word processing and Internet capability (the Wikipedia, for chrissake! how great would the world be if everyone had the Wikipedia?) have the capability to dramatically improve the baseline quality of education for developing populations.
From my own experience, I have been lucky enough to use computers since I began school in the mid-80s, and I feel that they shaped my development in a very positive way. Computers are fantastic tools for teaching critical thinking, reading comprehension, model-forming and abstraction, mathematical concepts (especially geometry), and with the internet, efficient internalization of data from multiple sources. David Chalmers and Andy Clark have argued that external resources, when properly utilized, can effectively become part of our cognitive process. By teaching children to take advantage of the astounding power and resources that computers make available to them, we do them a far greater service than cramming multiplication tables and D'Nelian handwriting exercises down their throats for 180 days a year from the age of 5 to 13.
After all, people should be generalists, and computers are the generalist's tool. What would we humans be without tools? Shivering, unathletic apes. $100 is cheap for a tool that
Actually, I always thought that was a great advantage of CSS layouts. Theoretically, you should start with a well-written and clean HTML document with H1s and Ps and OLs for navigation lists, etc. Then you add style to that. So when you view the page without the stylesheet, it looks like, say, an academic's website--not terribly pretty, but extremely readable and functional.
The nightly builds of Safari have also gained a similar feature. See this WebKit blog post. It's pretty slick, and very helpful for debugging CSS nits.
I hate to be that guy, but the word is inclement.
I agree on all points. I also find the average Ruby script infinitely more readable than most of the Perl I've read (or written). Ruby's syntax is just so perfect and clean. I was pretty skeptical when I first started reading Ruby books, the way everyone always waxed so ridiculously lyrical about how writing Ruby after using other languages was like a walk in a park on a damp spring day with the sun just barely shining through the low wispy fog etc. etc. etc. But it's true. I hope it can maintain its momentum, the world would be a better place if people spent as much effort learning/improving/extending Ruby as they did Java (*shudder*).
This is the only slashdot post I have wanted to mod up in recent memory. I love it. Thanks for the link, too.
Wasn't Ocarina a 512Mb game? I remember taking it out of the box for the first time and being struck at how heavy it was compared to, say, Mario 64.
I got the impression (Mac user) that that's exactly what Picasa does. See http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ans wer=19610&topic=1044 for example. It sounds like you set up various folders on your disk for Picasa to watch, and that's how they are organized in the left pane. Sounds kind of confusing to me (can you only have a photo in one collection at once?), but if that's what you need, you should check Picasa out.
iPhoto 6 also now has an option to keep your photos in their original location when you add them to your library. (Versions are created in the default iPhoto library if you do any tweaks, I believe, but I'm not sure exactly how that works.)
Give the man a cigar. Swing's file chooser on OSX is just about the worst thing in the known universe. No sidebar, no columns, no standard keyboard shortcuts, inconsistent behavior, always starts you out in your root user folder, suck suck suck.
Actually, pretty much all Swing apps on OSX are just 10% too wonky and ugly to really pass as native programs. SWT programs (Azuerus, Eclipse) look like they should be running on Windows (wish they would bundle at least separate icons for running on X), but I prefer that to Swing's barely-native-but-all-crap rendering. (Now if Apple would do for SWT widgets what they did for Swing, then you'd have something--I'd love some sensibly Aqufied SWT tabs, tree views, etc.)
I agree that this is probably the way to go. The only way to become a better writer is to read a lot of good writing. Make them read 2-3 really good essays per week--Orwell, Baldwin, Douglas Adams, E. B. White, Michael Frayn, even Dave Barry. (Actually, of these, I'd recommend Barry and Adams more than the "serious" essayists. They have a great command of the language, and have a fantastic sense of voice--probably the most important aspect of good writing. And turning someone on to Douglas Adams--and by proxy, reading in general--is probably one of the best things you can do for their writing, in the long-term.)
I'd also recommend, as another poster said, assigning them to write 1-2 short essays per week, on any topic they like. Meet regularly with each of them, ask them to read one of their essays out loud, and as they read point out places where there could be improvement--better sentence structure, unnecessary words, unclear/inapt phrasing, etc.
The long and short of it is that they won't be good writers unless they write a lot and read a lot. Tying this in with their specialties, as the parent poster said, will help with this greatly; I think that avoiding "literary" writers in general, and sticking to more approachable names like Orwell, Douglas Adams, Dave Barry--or David Sedaris, for that matter--and writers of that ilk will also keep them interested. Good luck!
I think you meant to say, "Java is not a suitable replacement for Smalltalk". :)
I second the Mario Kart. Playing on "Frantic" mode at 50 or 100cc really levels out the playing field, especially if you stick to the easier tracks to start off with. At 150cc a good player can pretty much own anyone, but at the lower levels it's a lot easier to keep up. Also, Mario Kart has a really fun co-op grand prix mode, so you can drive and she can learn how to shoot/blue spark, or vice versa.
I find that the Mario franchise games in general are very good for players of uneven skill. Mario Golf is great, Mario Tennis was really good on the 64 (haven't played the GC version yet). The new soccer game is slightly more difficult, just because it's easy to lose track of who you're controlling at any given moment, but I found it to have a very friendly learning curve.
I admire your inclusive, informative, and well-exposited approach to the discussion.
Now, does "fuzzy" mean something more than non-deterministic processes? Because these are also well-simulable by deterministic (Turing) computations. I expect you mean something closer to "noncomputable", which in this context would really amount to your begging the question... If you can point to a natural process that is demonstrably noncomputable, you should notify the Nobel people immediately and queue up for your prize. Even these newfangled quantum computers perform fundamentally the same kinds of computations as Turing machines, they just happen to be able to implement a certain class of algorithms in constant (or greatly reduced) time.