As a data processing professional and erstwhile graduate student in oceanography, I side with Rob here. Trying to foist the latest cool language on them is far worse than giving them something that's relatively lightweight, _QUICK_, free (as in beer) and useful.
Your infatuation with modern languages is great and all, but every time I look, there's another "latest, greatest" that everyone HAS to learn. Science departments rarely have time to keep porting code. And I've never seen a modern language that is any more or less intuitive than vanilla PERL; they just have a different programmer's concept of what constitutes "intuitive" built into them!
Argggh... I've run a variety of Linuxes, and now I'm sitting here with my powerbook, running a variety of open source software, including NeoOffice, which works better than any Office I've ever run on Linux (which isn't saying much... OO.org produces better bloatware than Micro$oft!!!). I did BUY one piece of software (Pages/Keynote), which I barely use. The rest either came standard or was downloaded from sourceforge and it's ilk (no piracy).
Yeah, the laptops for kids guys had principles... the sort of principles that make people wear hair shirts and give up bacon. They shot their intended users in the arm just so they can play with themselves in a dark room and produce something that is a half-a***d replica of Windows and OS-X and less reliable than either one.
My experience:
Dual Athlon, Tyan Motherboard, hung on boot for every stock fedora 2.6 kernel, though it eventually booted after much silence.
Dell Dimension 8300 (or something), STOCK MACHINE. Refused to boot Mandrake 10, Fedora 3+ kernels after 2.6.9. No idea why, DON'T CARE, don't want to waste another day on Google trying to find out why.
Winbook X1 laptop, much touchpad badness before I discovered the legacy options and changed some BIOS settings.
Homebuild Athlon (forget the motherboard) no wireless driver available.
And don't get me started on what happened to any of these when you tried to do complicated things on the USB chain!!!!!
This is F***ed!!! This is not a user ready OS. The closest thing I've seen to a user-ready Linux Distro is KNOPPIX, which worked on all of the above except the last one, for which I suspect wireless drivers are just not available (Broadcom G series PCI).
Yeah, I could do something arcane to insert the windows drivers. THIS IS NOT A SOLUTION!!! THIS IS A F^&*ing HACK!
OS X just works for me. It allows me to do work, rather than debug arcane hardware conflicts.
My original//e had some lame-ass program to "meet the machine", it had routines to deal with typists who cheated by using l's for ones s and o's for zeros...
Cheated, hell! My first... TYPEWRITER (yes, mechanical, yes, really, no power cord... no "correction paper", either)... didn't have a "1" or "0" key, it expected you to use l and O. I remember being confused by this the very first time I tried to type on it.
I'd really like to get my hands on one of those now. I sort of miss slapping it upside the carriage every time you were finishing a line. And a typo at the end of a page REALLY hurt.
I bought a PDA. It was big, and clunky. And it didn't play music, and it ate batteries for breakfast, lunch and dinner (yes, I bought a charger, but my rechargables cycled so many times even they are dying).
Then I bought an iPod mini... two days before they announced the Nano. And it was good!? I carry little scraps of paper until I get back to my laptop, then I update iCal and Address Book. Then I sync my iPod. And it works. Ok, I'm not a road warrior, but it works, and it charges easily, and it plays for a long (>1 day) time. And it is good enough.
Ah, come on. The best customers are the ones who fail at number 6. Bill them $80 for 2 hours and $150 a new "electronic supply stabilization device" to connect your computer to the "electron supply and recovery conduit".
And, while RTFM (Questions 12-16) is funny and all, have any of you ever SEEN a manual worth its weight in pennies recently. Most manuals I've gotten with computers extend as far as "put the thing with the three metal prongs on the end into the wall." That's not much help when the hard drive crashes or the BIOS battery dies. I usually recycle them the first time my electronic device boots into a functional OS.
You can ride in the street, but this is very dangerous, and most bicyclists can't keep up with cars even on a 20 mph street (because most motorists drive 30-35).
In 25 years and about 10 significant road bike wrecks, only two have even indirectly involved a car and neither were entirely the driver's fault (poor signalling and bad bike handling on my part). OTOH, two were on bike paths, which comprised
And then there's the issue of weather. You can't ride a bike when it's pouring down rain or when it's below freezing (which it is most mornings in the Winter here in Ohio).
Only Americans really seem to buy this argument; most civilized countries have a large enough cadre of people who bike to work in any weather to make this an obvious red herring. One of the most bike-intense cities in the world is Amsterdam, noted for its fine, balmy, desert-like NORTHERN EUROPEAN FREEZING MISERABLE WET WEATHER! Ruining your hair gel is not an excuse to ruin the environment; and who knows, you might lose some fat and make up for your more utilitarian fashion choices! Yeah, if it's pouring, I might drive; or not. Waterproof paniers and a change of clothes and/or shower at work and I'm fine.
And finally, people sweat when they exercise.
Yes, and then they shower. In places where someone has 1/10th of a brain, buildings have showers. Get up, eat breakfast, bike to work, shower, work, bike home. You've taken care of exercise AND commute.
Yes, those nasty Christians. The ones who kept learning alive inside monasteries during the Middle Ages. The ones who started the universities. Christians like Newton, Darwin and Galileo.
Yep, the ones who carefully horded, occasionally translated and sometimes overwrote the shreds of Islamic (c.f. Al-Khwarizmi) and pagan (c.f. Euclid, Pythagoras, and Eratosthenes) learning that survived sacks of christian barbarians, protecting it from other "christians". Until the Renaissance, christianity was dominated by european barbarian rabble barely able to read the scribblings on the cold stone walls of their caves. The first century of the Renaissance consisted primarily of rediscovering, reinventing and claiming ownership of what the Chinese, Muslims and Greeks had known for centuries or millenia.
No argument that Christian Europe (and its American black sheep cousin) eventually became a technological and philosophical master of the world, but lets not glorify early Christianity as anything more, in the main, than nasty, brutish, and cruel.
By that standard, there is no such thing as free. You pay in advertising budgets, inflation, environmental damage, time invested, or some other currency for every "free" item out there.
IMHO, a politician has a responsibility to make statements that are verifiably true; which is not to say that they may not be wildly misleading.
Lie: "We have evidence proving that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction."
Not-Lie: "We have evidence suggesting (or strongly suggesting, or indicating) that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction."
And yes, I would say the statement, "Susie is going to McDonalds for lunch," is a lie. You state with certainty something for which you have no proof. The statement has no conditionals. That Susie might someday go to McDonald's someday for lunch is unverifiable and therefor also untrue. A vareity of plausible, if extremely unlikely, conditions exist which would prevent Susie from ever again going to McDonalds, or having lunch.
"I think Susie is going to McDonalds for lunch" is perfectly reasonable. "Susie said she is going to McDonalds for lunch" is also a lie; she merely implied it in stating she was hungry for a big Mac. Your intuition is not fact!!!
Oh, and if you feel like wasting mod points calling me off-topic, go ahead.
On the countrary, this kid probably got an education far better than he was getting from most of his teachers. As someone who slept through %90 of high school and %40 of university, I TOTALLY understand his motivation... and yes, MANY years ago, I wrote "cookie-monster" worms for TRS-80's.
Limping back into my cave, cane in hand... where DID I put my teeth... now.
I am talking about a slightly wierd language... Fortran 90. I've tried both g95 projects with no luck, and really haven't had the time to dig into the details. Yep, not everyone uses C*!
Don't buy them any nice computers... make sure the programs are always way ahead of the CPU's, so they get annoyed and bored and head outside. Put the computer in the most cold, uncomfortable corner of the house. Make sure they don't have access to yours.
When they reach the age to have a good computer, they're probably old enough to work for it. Then pay them to them work outside (lawns, gardens, etc.). Or pay them to "volunteer" with a local parks program with you.
They will need a computer for schoolwork; but they don't need a good one to websurf and write papers. This culture seems to think that kids absolutely require all the latest in technology, clothes, cars and toys to turn out OK.
THEY DON'T!!!
Give them a crap computer, some good books, and lots of your time. When they're old enough to escape your clutches and buy their own computers, let them. But don't enable them with the latest in games and toys. If YOU have them around the house, then remember, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree!.
I've been using Linux for 5 years and UNIX for 15. I stopped using Mac's about 5 years ago, then bought one this spring. Why? I got tired of having every stock kernel crash on BOTH of my linux boxes. One is a stock Dell, the other a slightly more oddly configured Winbook laptop. My UNIX and Linux familiarity has given me a head start on doing some unusual mods on the Mac, but still...
Mac OSX 10.3 is WAYYYY ahead of any linux distro I've played with. IT JUST WORKS! No kernel recompiles, no digging through esoteric web pages in Hungarian, etc. Unless I really want something odd, then it's there! The robust hardware and kernel combined with the comparitive ease in accepting open source is a godsend.
Do I still use Linux? Yes, for work, where certain esoteric pieces of software haven't been successfully ported, and my boss won't get me a compiler for the Mac. But I greatly enjoy the fact that I can actually get 90% of my work done on my laptop while downloading my podcasts and not having to reboot because my USB connections are FUBARed, again.
I can't say much about Windows. Its administrative interface seems to be some really odd mix of GUIs, command line and random stuff deep in the file trees. I try to keep boxes running for family and friends, and mostly succeed, but I reinstall often. That, and the security vulnerability, is shite.
As much as I'm an oceanographer and find whales beautiful and interesting creatures, I still need to take exception to the above.
Some species of whales (Fin and Sei, IIRC) are approaching or exceeding historcal population levels, though data on their historical population numbers are scarce.
Cetacean whales are large, grazing planktivores... i.e. analogous to cows. There is almost no scientific data to support (or oppose) any intelligence claims for large cetaceans (as opposed to the smaller odontocetes, dolphins and their ilk, which have been shown to have excellent problem solving and communication abilities).
Agreed, some species of whales are endangered, and Japanese hunting practices have been shown to be indiscriminate (genetic testing of market whale meat), but unconditionally opposing the hunting of whales while eating steak has an odor of hypocrisy.
A more reasoned approach would address issues such as acoustic pollution (cutting off large cetacean communication), shipping deaths (Northern Right Whale), and bioaccumulation in the food chain (several of the top predators, including killer whales, belugas, and polar bears). To do this, though, we have to change our way of life, consuming less and more locally produced stuff and reducing chemical use.
Save the Whales! Looks great on a poster, but IMHO it's horribly simplistic and ignores much more serious systemic problems.
No, actually 1937 called (the year my mother was born).
It could easily be argued that a lot of people shouldn't be using computers, or cars, or walking with scissors. But in this world, they are, and some of them are friends or relatives. Just because we live in a caves and only meet people at LAN parties doesn't mean the rest of the world should have to know how to recompile a kernel just to get a computer working. Computers are becoming autility, not a luxury, and stupid inconsistencies like this should be ironed out.
Let's see. Maybe because some of us aren't corporate drones who spend all of every day in robotic positions in front of our desks!
My wireless keyboard wanders all over my office without disturbing the coffee cup and piles of papers on my desk. When someone I'm talking to needs to type something, I hand them the keyboard.
Batteries: there's a recharger on the wall above my computer. When one set goes down, I swap in the other set. Nuff said.
Media center... Imagine you're cuddling on the couch with your girlfriend (right, I know this is slashdot, but I did say "imagine"), and you want to see a scene again. Standing up, disturbing a girlfriend, two cranky cats, two glasses of wine and a bowl of popcorns just won't do.
KVM: Oh, great, instead of N sets of wires and N keyboards and N mice, you now have N+1 sets of wires, but one keyboard and mouse, and only you can use the N computers. KVM's are nice on the cluster, but lousy for personal use.
Price: Yep, they cost more. And a Ferrari costs more than a Focus. Get over it. Some of us are tired of beige boxes and spaghetti; we like our computers friendly and easy to use, and are willing to pay for it.
"why the hell would you want a kb that can't be used in certain positions?"
This is too funny... Why the hell would I want a keyboard that is literally tied to a humming beige box and can't go more than a few inches without knocking everything over?!!
Repeat seven times, which seems to be some sort of DOD magic number.
You can play around with block size "bs=" and number of blocks "count=", but my experience was that just choosing something big but smaller than the cache size of the disk is good. Checking "man dd" might be a good.
It takes a while. An old Dell laptop with a 40GB drive took several days./dev/random is slow, use/dev/urandom, unless the drive contains the secrets of the Illuminati and you're afraid the NSA is after you. In which case speed might be of the essence.
The hell with the mobile internet, how about just the plain old internet? Proprietary file formats, splashy unreadable graphics, text as graphics, lousy design, etc. You know who you are!
If the regular internet paid more attention to bandwidth and standards, the mobile web would probably work just fine.
If a single page requires several hundred K and several plugins only available for a Commodore 64, you know who you are!
Can someone review one of these? After all the hype, they've sort-of disappeared now that they're out there. Is it world-shaking and under produced (Apple), or kludged, unreliable and annoying?
Slashdot Mirror
And the earth will be an expanding cloud of gas and dust in a few billion years... so why get up this morning?
Your infatuation with modern languages is great and all, but every time I look, there's another "latest, greatest" that everyone HAS to learn. Science departments rarely have time to keep porting code. And I've never seen a modern language that is any more or less intuitive than vanilla PERL; they just have a different programmer's concept of what constitutes "intuitive" built into them!
Yeah, the laptops for kids guys had principles... the sort of principles that make people wear hair shirts and give up bacon. They shot their intended users in the arm just so they can play with themselves in a dark room and produce something that is a half-a***d replica of Windows and OS-X and less reliable than either one.
My experience:
And don't get me started on what happened to any of these when you tried to do complicated things on the USB chain!!!!!
This is F***ed!!! This is not a user ready OS. The closest thing I've seen to a user-ready Linux Distro is KNOPPIX, which worked on all of the above except the last one, for which I suspect wireless drivers are just not available (Broadcom G series PCI).
Yeah, I could do something arcane to insert the windows drivers. THIS IS NOT A SOLUTION!!! THIS IS A F^&*ing HACK!
OS X just works for me. It allows me to do work, rather than debug arcane hardware conflicts.
I'd really like to get my hands on one of those now. I sort of miss slapping it upside the carriage every time you were finishing a line. And a typo at the end of a page REALLY hurt.
Then I bought an iPod mini... two days before they announced the Nano. And it was good!? I carry little scraps of paper until I get back to my laptop, then I update iCal and Address Book. Then I sync my iPod. And it works. Ok, I'm not a road warrior, but it works, and it charges easily, and it plays for a long (>1 day) time. And it is good enough.
And, while RTFM (Questions 12-16) is funny and all, have any of you ever SEEN a manual worth its weight in pennies recently. Most manuals I've gotten with computers extend as far as "put the thing with the three metal prongs on the end into the wall." That's not much help when the hard drive crashes or the BIOS battery dies. I usually recycle them the first time my electronic device boots into a functional OS.
Some do... I've worked in a few. More should have them.
No argument that Christian Europe (and its American black sheep cousin) eventually became a technological and philosophical master of the world, but lets not glorify early Christianity as anything more, in the main, than nasty, brutish, and cruel.
By that standard, there is no such thing as free. You pay in advertising budgets, inflation, environmental damage, time invested, or some other currency for every "free" item out there.
Lie: "We have evidence proving that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction."
Not-Lie: "We have evidence suggesting (or strongly suggesting, or indicating) that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction."
And yes, I would say the statement, "Susie is going to McDonalds for lunch," is a lie. You state with certainty something for which you have no proof. The statement has no conditionals. That Susie might someday go to McDonald's someday for lunch is unverifiable and therefor also untrue. A vareity of plausible, if extremely unlikely, conditions exist which would prevent Susie from ever again going to McDonalds, or having lunch.
"I think Susie is going to McDonalds for lunch" is perfectly reasonable. "Susie said she is going to McDonalds for lunch" is also a lie; she merely implied it in stating she was hungry for a big Mac. Your intuition is not fact!!!
Oh, and if you feel like wasting mod points calling me off-topic, go ahead.
Limping back into my cave, cane in hand... where DID I put my teeth... now.
I am talking about a slightly wierd language... Fortran 90. I've tried both g95 projects with no luck, and really haven't had the time to dig into the details. Yep, not everyone uses C*!
When they reach the age to have a good computer, they're probably old enough to work for it. Then pay them to them work outside (lawns, gardens, etc.). Or pay them to "volunteer" with a local parks program with you.
They will need a computer for schoolwork; but they don't need a good one to websurf and write papers. This culture seems to think that kids absolutely require all the latest in technology, clothes, cars and toys to turn out OK.
THEY DON'T!!! Give them a crap computer, some good books, and lots of your time. When they're old enough to escape your clutches and buy their own computers, let them. But don't enable them with the latest in games and toys. If YOU have them around the house, then remember, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree!.
Mac OSX 10.3 is WAYYYY ahead of any linux distro I've played with. IT JUST WORKS! No kernel recompiles, no digging through esoteric web pages in Hungarian, etc. Unless I really want something odd, then it's there! The robust hardware and kernel combined with the comparitive ease in accepting open source is a godsend.
Do I still use Linux? Yes, for work, where certain esoteric pieces of software haven't been successfully ported, and my boss won't get me a compiler for the Mac. But I greatly enjoy the fact that I can actually get 90% of my work done on my laptop while downloading my podcasts and not having to reboot because my USB connections are FUBARed, again.
I can't say much about Windows. Its administrative interface seems to be some really odd mix of GUIs, command line and random stuff deep in the file trees. I try to keep boxes running for family and friends, and mostly succeed, but I reinstall often. That, and the security vulnerability, is shite.
- Some species of whales (Fin and Sei, IIRC) are approaching or exceeding historcal population levels, though data on their historical population numbers are scarce.
- Cetacean whales are large, grazing planktivores... i.e. analogous to cows. There is almost no scientific data to support (or oppose) any intelligence claims for large cetaceans (as opposed to the smaller odontocetes, dolphins and their ilk, which have been shown to have excellent problem solving and communication abilities).
Agreed, some species of whales are endangered, and Japanese hunting practices have been shown to be indiscriminate (genetic testing of market whale meat), but unconditionally opposing the hunting of whales while eating steak has an odor of hypocrisy.A more reasoned approach would address issues such as acoustic pollution (cutting off large cetacean communication), shipping deaths (Northern Right Whale), and bioaccumulation in the food chain (several of the top predators, including killer whales, belugas, and polar bears). To do this, though, we have to change our way of life, consuming less and more locally produced stuff and reducing chemical use.
Save the Whales! Looks great on a poster, but IMHO it's horribly simplistic and ignores much more serious systemic problems.
It could easily be argued that a lot of people shouldn't be using computers, or cars, or walking with scissors. But in this world, they are, and some of them are friends or relatives. Just because we live in a caves and only meet people at LAN parties doesn't mean the rest of the world should have to know how to recompile a kernel just to get a computer working. Computers are becoming autility, not a luxury, and stupid inconsistencies like this should be ironed out.
That ASOT is a witch!!
My wireless keyboard wanders all over my office without disturbing the coffee cup and piles of papers on my desk. When someone I'm talking to needs to type something, I hand them the keyboard.
Batteries: there's a recharger on the wall above my computer. When one set goes down, I swap in the other set. Nuff said.
Media center... Imagine you're cuddling on the couch with your girlfriend (right, I know this is slashdot, but I did say "imagine"), and you want to see a scene again. Standing up, disturbing a girlfriend, two cranky cats, two glasses of wine and a bowl of popcorns just won't do.
KVM: Oh, great, instead of N sets of wires and N keyboards and N mice, you now have N+1 sets of wires, but one keyboard and mouse, and only you can use the N computers. KVM's are nice on the cluster, but lousy for personal use.
Price: Yep, they cost more. And a Ferrari costs more than a Focus. Get over it. Some of us are tired of beige boxes and spaghetti; we like our computers friendly and easy to use, and are willing to pay for it.
"why the hell would you want a kb that can't be used in certain positions?" This is too funny... Why the hell would I want a keyboard that is literally tied to a humming beige box and can't go more than a few inches without knocking everything over?!!
You can play around with block size "bs=" and number of blocks "count=", but my experience was that just choosing something big but smaller than the cache size of the disk is good. Checking "man dd" might be a good.
It takes a while. An old Dell laptop with a 40GB drive took several days. /dev/random is slow, use /dev/urandom, unless the drive contains the secrets of the Illuminati and you're afraid the NSA is after you. In which case speed might be of the essence.
So... anyone want to comment on why the web (caltechvsmit.com)page is down? You REALLY ought to secure your server when you're bragging.
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?desc ription=55-125-003&depa=0
If the regular internet paid more attention to bandwidth and standards, the mobile web would probably work just fine.
If a single page requires several hundred K and several plugins only available for a Commodore 64, you know who you are!
Real geeks (and their laptops), metrosexuals and artists are likely to be found at the funky coffee shop with the free wireless.
Extra points if you post from the OQO.