That's a harder question than it sounds. Of course, the obvious answer - for its simple syntax - is BASIC in some form, and visual basic would give very immediate and easy results. But of course, VB is evil for the bad habits it teaches, and for the sheer stupidity of the limitations it puts on you.
Were it not for the lack of a GUI interface for it, I would recommend perl, since it has both very readable syntax and quite good structure.
C (or C++), of course, would be great, but kids are likely to get turned off quickly with the relatively arcane syntax and having to debug problems with pointers and missing semicolons...
But overall I'd have to say Java is your best bet. It's fairly quick and easy to whip up an applet (easier than C++ in many ways), and it's fairly easy to add little tweaks in, but it's also quite deep and can get them into OOP and efficient (size/speed) programming.
And what's more, you can write a pretty-looking applet in relatively few lines of code. And it's portable - unless it's MS J++:)
It strikes me that perhaps the part of the web most in need of intelligence is search engines. It would be extremely useful (not to mention entertaining) to, for example, give web crawlers a more human-like 'personality', giving it the capability to dislike a site becuase of apparent lack of content, number of hits on a hit counter, flashy graphics, etc. But of course, AI should be dynamic... perhaps in such a situation you could program the crawler to use click-through data from the parent search engine (with the users' permissions of course) to try and formulate an idea of what people like in a website, thus helping the page rankings.
On the other side of things it would be an interesting AI challenge to try to work out what kind of thing people actually want to find when they search for certain terms, in terms of the content and function of the site.
Of course, this may just be a silly idea, but I suppose it might help:)
The thing about this kind of idea that gives me a headache (apart from the sheer bizarreness of having a link between a quantum pair of particles over long distances. And getting one particle to the other end.) is how a line tap distortion can be distinguished from line noise....
Or maybe I'm geeting the wrong end of the stick (Or quark. Whatever.)
I remember when Athlons were new; I bought one. And a motherboard. And suffered the consequences.
I think I'll wait until this new 'duron' has been on the market a couple of months before checking it out. Just to give the motherboard manufacturers a chance to get things right.
GeForce drivers are already in XFree86 3.3.6 - I should know, I have a GeForce myself! So I think you can safely surmise that GeForce drivers are part of that DRI stuff in 4.0
(c) "DeCSS" means any computer program, file or device that may be used to decrypt or unscramble the contents of DVDs that are protected, or otherwise to circumvent the protection afforded, by CSS and that permits the copying of the contents or any portion thereof. I'm no lawyer, but...
I believe you are quite correct in saying that this statement would refer to all DVD players of any kind. Of course, you have to expect that since DeCSS is designed as a DVD player component, and basically this is just legal mumbo-jumbo to enable them to get you to remove whatever they want from your site, including, if they so desired, players cracked to be multi-region, or even entirely legitimate player software. Ironically enough, though, this would not include region-changer programs which are a much greater threat to copy protection:)
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That's a harder question than it sounds. Of course, the obvious answer - for its simple syntax - is BASIC in some form, and visual basic would give very immediate and easy results. But of course, VB is evil for the bad habits it teaches, and for the sheer stupidity of the limitations it puts on you.
:)
Were it not for the lack of a GUI interface for it, I would recommend perl, since it has both very readable syntax and quite good structure.
C (or C++), of course, would be great, but kids are likely to get turned off quickly with the relatively arcane syntax and having to debug problems with pointers and missing semicolons...
But overall I'd have to say Java is your best bet. It's fairly quick and easy to whip up an applet (easier than C++ in many ways), and it's fairly easy to add little tweaks in, but it's also quite deep and can get them into OOP and efficient (size/speed) programming.
And what's more, you can write a pretty-looking applet in relatively few lines of code. And it's portable - unless it's MS J++
It strikes me that perhaps the part of the web most in need of intelligence is search engines. It would be extremely useful (not to mention entertaining) to, for example, give web crawlers a more human-like 'personality', giving it the capability to dislike a site becuase of apparent lack of content, number of hits on a hit counter, flashy graphics, etc.
:)
But of course, AI should be dynamic... perhaps in such a situation you could program the crawler to use click-through data from the parent search engine (with the users' permissions of course) to try and formulate an idea of what people like in a website, thus helping the page rankings.
On the other side of things it would be an interesting AI challenge to try to work out what kind of thing people actually want to find when they search for certain terms, in terms of the content and function of the site.
Of course, this may just be a silly idea, but I suppose it might help
Mmmmmmm... microcomputers. How novel.
The thing about this kind of idea that gives me a headache (apart from the sheer bizarreness of having a link between a quantum pair of particles over long distances. And getting one particle to the other end.) is how a line tap distortion can be distinguished from line noise....
Or maybe I'm geeting the wrong end of the stick (Or quark. Whatever.)
I remember when Athlons were new; I bought one. And a motherboard. And suffered the consequences.
I think I'll wait until this new 'duron' has been on the market a couple of months before checking it out. Just to give the motherboard manufacturers a chance to get things right.
GeForce drivers are already in XFree86 3.3.6 - I should know, I have a GeForce myself! So I think you can safely surmise that GeForce drivers are part of that DRI stuff in 4.0
I believe you are quite correct in saying that this statement would refer to all DVD players of any kind. Of course, you have to expect that since DeCSS is designed as a DVD player component, and basically this is just legal mumbo-jumbo to enable them to get you to remove whatever they want from your site, including, if they so desired, players cracked to be multi-region, or even entirely legitimate player software. Ironically enough, though, this would not include region-changer programs which are a much greater threat to copy protection :)
Mmmmmmmmmm sabre-rattling!