Set up an old desktop (not too old) in the corner. Install Ubuntu and gCompris, and let her go at it. Desktops are metal boxes, so she isn't likely to break that. Use a CRT monitor so that touching the screen isn't a problem. Set it up on an end table so that it is all at her height. The only items that you need to worry about breaking are the mouse and keyboard since other than the power button, those are the only items she will use heavily. Keyboards and mice are cheap, so if they break, it isn't the end of the world. They are also really durable. Finally, when you get a mouse, 1) make sure it really works. I have seen parents give kids their old mice that stick. If a broken mouse is a source of frustration for you, it will likely be one for your child, and 2) Go get one of those small 'laptop' mice. They will fit your daughters hand WAY better than an adult sized mouse. I got my son one of those at 1, and it is still running fine at 4. I recently asked him if he wanted a full size mouse, and he was adamant that the smaller one was more comfortable than my large mouse.
A C64 takes WAY more knowledge to get started with than Linux or Windows. I gave my son his first computer soon after he turned 1, and he ran Ubuntu just fine. It took less than 10 minutes of instruction and a day of him fiddling for him to get comfortable with it. Install gCompris, which starts out with 'move the mouse over squares to display the picture' activities, and you are ready to go. My kid didn't get into C64s until he was late 3. Even now at 4 he is not ready to start programming, which is where the Apples and C64s will shine. If you go with Windows, I would also recommend GameTap. They have more than 75 educational titles in their catalog, and many of the purely entertainment titles are simple enough for a two year old. Things like Pac-man and Burger Time. After all, sometimes kids just need to play.
What deep seated childhood trauma lead you to believe that a child having access to a computer would lead to parent abandonment? Here is a rule of thumb. NO TOY IS A SUBSTITUTE FOR PARENTING. Giving your child access to the vast resource that our society offers IS parenting. Denying them access because of some subconscious fear of technology is also parenting, but it is bad parenting.
If you want to start complaining about people using something as a substitute for parenting, you need to look at daycare, preschools, and public schools. These are the top three tools that people shirk their parental duties. Heck, it is the norm for people feel good about the fact that they are shipping their 2 year olds off to be raised by strangers for 9 hours a day in an institution, and your complaining because a guy wants to give his kid access to a computer? At home? With his parents?
I am appalled by how many people right here on slashdot, hate computers and the people that have interst in them. The OP didn't ask what kind of computer would be good to babysit his kid, and could hold up to 24/7 use, or what laptop had good battery life for use in a locked closet. He asked what kind of computer would work good for his kid.
Parents buy sports equipment for thier kid all the time. Sometimes even before the kid is born. Why is it you think that for a jock to be a bad parent he has you force his kid into being hypercompetitive, yet the geek is a bad parent for even letting his kid have access to his interests? That is a pretty sick view of the world.
Why do you think that if a kid has a computer, he will have no other interests? Just so you know... They TV stereo type, and the jokes on slashdot about 'nerds' are not indicative of real people.
I certainly believe in teaching your family's values to kids, and to encourage children to try different activities, but shouldn't they be allowed to develop their own interests without all of that pressure to conform to their parents image?
Do you even realize what is wrong with that sentence?
I just signed up for GameTap. They are an on demand video game service. They have more than 75 kids education titles in their library, INCLUDING the highly regarded Putt-putt games. I was actually surprised how well Putt-putt held up over time.
You can sign up for free to try out the service, to see if you like it. Guest/Non-paying accounts have access to about 65 games. Pay users have access to close to 1000. It is $10 a month or $60 a year to be a paying customer. Not only will you get real retail educational titles for your kid, but you will get real retail games for yourself as well.
Don't listen to these nay sayers. Two is plenty old for a computer. Just don't get a laptop. Go get a full PC that is on sale. With a full PC you don't have to worry about the kid being rough. A keyboard is cheap and highly durable. If your kid can't keep their hands off the screen, and they are too rough for an LCD, get a CRT. There really isn't anything else for the kid to break. Oh, and get one of those tiny 'laptop' mice that they sell. It will fit his hand much better than a full size adult mouse.
I know that I set up my son's first computer for him shortly after he turned one. I installed Ubuntu Linux and loaded gCaprice for him to play the mouse games with. I gave him less than 5 minutes instruction on how the colored blocks will disappear and show a picture when you move the mouse pointer over them. I let him play with that for a few hours, and then I showed him how to turn the computer on and load gCaprise from the menu. This took less than another 5 minutes. By the next day, he not only could load gCaprice on his own, but he was playing other games that I had not showed him how to load.
About a week after his second birthday, I formatted his hard drive, gave him a fresh Ubuntu disk, and told him to install it himself. He did this with no help. (Linux is amazingly easy to install.)
You are 100% right that those cheap 'Toy' laptops are pointless. They are less interesting to kids with their gray character only LCD screen, and they don't do as much. Your kid can certainly use a full computer. A full computer is hard to break physically, and if he breaks the software, you can just do a reinstall of the OS. If you want something like a computer that is portable for car rides and whatnot, I would highly recommend a Leapster from Leap Frog. It is very durable, is colorful, and has lots of educational and FUN games. It is not a replacement for a computer, but it is a very good portable computing toy.
Since Hitler could not be worse than Hitler by definition, does that mean that you and Hitler agree on everything? That is one brave statement to make! Quick! Somebody burn him!!!
You did not really understand what the OP said. He never said that prison was about punishing people. He said it was about keeping the non-incarcerated under control through fear of rape. The fact that the most violent and brutal rapists are not suffering is irrelevant. They are locked up doing a 'service' for the establishment.
I suspect that like many other forms of art, there are entire groups of people with little to no talent who all band together as a mob to declare anyone who calls out their lack of talent unable to understand their genius. While in theory your explanation is how it is supposed to work. In practice, I would guess that many use it as an excuse for sucking.
Which is why if I ever have to serve on a jury, I will assume that anything presented by the police is invalid. I will assume that they have an agenda and that they are willing to bury evidence, fabricate evidence, and generally pervert the legal system to their own ends. Sad, yes, but unfortunately many cops agree with you.
But that is not what was said. Telling someone you are a doctor and giving them aspirin would be illegal too, but it is not illegal to give your pal a couple of aspirin if they have a headache. If giving legal advice was illegal for non-lawyers, we would have our MAFIAA problems solved. All we would have to do is wait for the next press conference where an RIAA executive tells people that copying CDs is illegal, and send it the cops.
This is one of those subjects that always irks me. Every time teacher pay comes up, and it is pointed out that they are part time employees, and make decent money on an hourly basis, we get people screeming about how teachers spend all summer with "continuing education". Besides that being total BS, if it were true, how is it that teachers are so uneducated that they cannot tell the difference between installing anti-virus software and surfing porn? And if they are educated enough to read, how is it that they cannot tell that a a Christina Aguilera fan site is not being used for the kids math assignment?
In 1985, I could understand teachers not understanding basic computer use. In 1990, I could understand it. In 2000, any teacher that didn't have basic computer knowledge was a poor teacher. It is now 2008. Any teacher that doesn't have basic computer knowledge should be treated exactly the same as a teacher that cannot read. The computer is the single most powerful educational device on the planet. It is not going anywhere, and any kid that is not comfortable with them is going to be as bad off as if they could not read.
A teacher claiming to not understand computers isn't an excuse, it is a declaration of incompetence.
There is no way you could fire the all of the people in the government in a four year period. In a best case scenario, you could fire a very small percentage of the people in the government. In practice, that means that MOST of your interaction with the government would not change. There are so many laws that say "You cannot do X without permission from Y", and Y is not an elected position, that in practice a very large portion of our laws are actually written and enforced by non elected officials.
Funny, I would think that you would explain to him that he is the first of his kind in his species rebirth. I would think a good name for him would be Phoenix.
Yep, but you can count on the "environmentalists" coming out in droves against this. It would get in the way of them using animal extinction as a tool to control how people behave.
That is why it is in quotes, but really, that is the environment that they are talking about when they said it. Most minors are rarely if ever exposed to what you or I would consider an actual 'conventional social situation'.
That line of thinking has annoyed me since I was a small child. When a kid doesn't spend a lot of time doing something, it is ADHD. When they do, it is obsession. Apparently the only thing that kids are allowed to spend overly large amounts of time at are sitting in classrooms and sports that get televised.
Of course, then we marvel at the few kids that don't get hampered by this. Here is an interesting exercise. Read about anyone who has ever received a gold medal in figure skating. I can guarantee you that you will not find one single example of a gold metal skater that says:
"Yeah, the first time I skated was at my friends 16th birthday. I really liked it, so I would go skating every few weeks on a Saturday. It ate up a good 6 or 7 hours a month, but it was worth it."
What you will find is many stories that say something like"
"I started skating when I was three. My parents saw that I had real aptitude for it, so we practiced and practiced. I really have to appreciate my parents, because they are the ones that would get up at 4:30 in the morning to drive me to the rink so that I could practice for 3 hours every day before school. Weekends would usually consist of 5 or 6 hours of practice each day."
Seriously, if your kid is in school, he is going to spend the better part of 8 hours each day in "conventional social situations". If they can not learn to interact with people in 40 hours a week, the few extra hours a night is not going to make a difference. Even if the schools stopped fighting it, it would still be virtually impossible for a kid to not be in "conventional social situations".
That can be solved pretty easily actually. All we need is someone with a little experience in writing RFCs for the IETF. Write an RFC that describes 'Traffic Limiting' with 'Traffic Limiting' actually in it's name. Then the next time that a carrier gets sued, the term "Traffic Limiting" can be used in a court of law. This would be particularly effective for use against ISPs that advertise "Unlimited" access.
I do the same. It is my understanding that the "correct" way of doing it is to always put the punctuation inside of the quotes, but to me the sentences:
Did I say "Read Slashdot now?"
Did I say "Read Slashdot now"?
Did I say "Read Slashdot now!"
are all unclear on what I want to say.
Did I say "Read Slashdot now!"?
Expresses exactly what I mean, and since the primary goal of writing is to have the reader understand what you wrote, I will, like you, continue to write what is clear and can care less about what is correct.
You are confused. Xerox lost the trademark lawsuit because trademark is specifically for the purpose of identifying a brand. You cannot have a trademark on terms already in use because it doesn't identify a brand. This is specific to Trademark.
The same does not apply to fraud. The argument that the fraud is so common that it is now legal is absurd.
Absolute BS. It is not a confusion by minimum wage Best Buy employees. The entire "IP" industry uses the term buy instead of license. It isn't the minimum wage employees that write the ads and approve the cash registers. Even that doesn't matter. If you you know that your minimum wage employees are selling a product that they only have the rights to sell a license to, then you are responsible.
Well now, that's kind of a problem. Every time someone goes into a store and buys software, they are given a sales recipt and told that they BOUGHT the software. I would be able to take the 'license' line a bit better if the software companies were ever successfully sued for the massive fraud that you claim they are committing.
Slashdot Mirror
Set up an old desktop (not too old) in the corner. Install Ubuntu and gCompris, and let her go at it. Desktops are metal boxes, so she isn't likely to break that. Use a CRT monitor so that touching the screen isn't a problem. Set it up on an end table so that it is all at her height. The only items that you need to worry about breaking are the mouse and keyboard since other than the power button, those are the only items she will use heavily. Keyboards and mice are cheap, so if they break, it isn't the end of the world. They are also really durable. Finally, when you get a mouse, 1) make sure it really works. I have seen parents give kids their old mice that stick. If a broken mouse is a source of frustration for you, it will likely be one for your child, and 2) Go get one of those small 'laptop' mice. They will fit your daughters hand WAY better than an adult sized mouse. I got my son one of those at 1, and it is still running fine at 4. I recently asked him if he wanted a full size mouse, and he was adamant that the smaller one was more comfortable than my large mouse.
A C64 takes WAY more knowledge to get started with than Linux or Windows. I gave my son his first computer soon after he turned 1, and he ran Ubuntu just fine. It took less than 10 minutes of instruction and a day of him fiddling for him to get comfortable with it. Install gCompris, which starts out with 'move the mouse over squares to display the picture' activities, and you are ready to go. My kid didn't get into C64s until he was late 3. Even now at 4 he is not ready to start programming, which is where the Apples and C64s will shine. If you go with Windows, I would also recommend GameTap. They have more than 75 educational titles in their catalog, and many of the purely entertainment titles are simple enough for a two year old. Things like Pac-man and Burger Time. After all, sometimes kids just need to play.
Computer is not a substitute for parenting.
What deep seated childhood trauma lead you to believe that a child having access to a computer would lead to parent abandonment? Here is a rule of thumb. NO TOY IS A SUBSTITUTE FOR PARENTING. Giving your child access to the vast resource that our society offers IS parenting. Denying them access because of some subconscious fear of technology is also parenting, but it is bad parenting.
If you want to start complaining about people using something as a substitute for parenting, you need to look at daycare, preschools, and public schools. These are the top three tools that people shirk their parental duties. Heck, it is the norm for people feel good about the fact that they are shipping their 2 year olds off to be raised by strangers for 9 hours a day in an institution, and your complaining because a guy wants to give his kid access to a computer? At home? With his parents?
Parents buy sports equipment for thier kid all the time. Sometimes even before the kid is born. Why is it you think that for a jock to be a bad parent he has you force his kid into being hypercompetitive, yet the geek is a bad parent for even letting his kid have access to his interests? That is a pretty sick view of the world.
Why do you think that if a kid has a computer, he will have no other interests? Just so you know... They TV stereo type, and the jokes on slashdot about 'nerds' are not indicative of real people.
I certainly believe in teaching your family's values to kids, and to encourage children to try different activities, but shouldn't they be allowed to develop their own interests without all of that pressure to conform to their parents image?
Do you even realize what is wrong with that sentence?
I just signed up for GameTap. They are an on demand video game service. They have more than 75 kids education titles in their library, INCLUDING the highly regarded Putt-putt games. I was actually surprised how well Putt-putt held up over time.
You can sign up for free to try out the service, to see if you like it. Guest/Non-paying accounts have access to about 65 games. Pay users have access to close to 1000. It is $10 a month or $60 a year to be a paying customer. Not only will you get real retail educational titles for your kid, but you will get real retail games for yourself as well.
Don't listen to these nay sayers. Two is plenty old for a computer. Just don't get a laptop. Go get a full PC that is on sale. With a full PC you don't have to worry about the kid being rough. A keyboard is cheap and highly durable. If your kid can't keep their hands off the screen, and they are too rough for an LCD, get a CRT. There really isn't anything else for the kid to break. Oh, and get one of those tiny 'laptop' mice that they sell. It will fit his hand much better than a full size adult mouse.
I know that I set up my son's first computer for him shortly after he turned one. I installed Ubuntu Linux and loaded gCaprice for him to play the mouse games with. I gave him less than 5 minutes instruction on how the colored blocks will disappear and show a picture when you move the mouse pointer over them. I let him play with that for a few hours, and then I showed him how to turn the computer on and load gCaprise from the menu. This took less than another 5 minutes. By the next day, he not only could load gCaprice on his own, but he was playing other games that I had not showed him how to load.
About a week after his second birthday, I formatted his hard drive, gave him a fresh Ubuntu disk, and told him to install it himself. He did this with no help. (Linux is amazingly easy to install.)
You are 100% right that those cheap 'Toy' laptops are pointless. They are less interesting to kids with their gray character only LCD screen, and they don't do as much. Your kid can certainly use a full computer. A full computer is hard to break physically, and if he breaks the software, you can just do a reinstall of the OS. If you want something like a computer that is portable for car rides and whatnot, I would highly recommend a Leapster from Leap Frog. It is very durable, is colorful, and has lots of educational and FUN games. It is not a replacement for a computer, but it is a very good portable computing toy.
When my aunt stops getting checks from the government to NOT grow food on her farm, then I will start to worry about food shortages.
How about autopot as in auto potentiometer? Since it is a potentiometer that gets set automatically instead of manually.
Since Hitler could not be worse than Hitler by definition, does that mean that you and Hitler agree on everything? That is one brave statement to make! Quick! Somebody burn him!!!
You did not really understand what the OP said. He never said that prison was about punishing people. He said it was about keeping the non-incarcerated under control through fear of rape. The fact that the most violent and brutal rapists are not suffering is irrelevant. They are locked up doing a 'service' for the establishment.
I suspect that like many other forms of art, there are entire groups of people with little to no talent who all band together as a mob to declare anyone who calls out their lack of talent unable to understand their genius. While in theory your explanation is how it is supposed to work. In practice, I would guess that many use it as an excuse for sucking.
Which is why if I ever have to serve on a jury, I will assume that anything presented by the police is invalid. I will assume that they have an agenda and that they are willing to bury evidence, fabricate evidence, and generally pervert the legal system to their own ends. Sad, yes, but unfortunately many cops agree with you.
But that is not what was said. Telling someone you are a doctor and giving them aspirin would be illegal too, but it is not illegal to give your pal a couple of aspirin if they have a headache. If giving legal advice was illegal for non-lawyers, we would have our MAFIAA problems solved. All we would have to do is wait for the next press conference where an RIAA executive tells people that copying CDs is illegal, and send it the cops.
This is one of those subjects that always irks me. Every time teacher pay comes up, and it is pointed out that they are part time employees, and make decent money on an hourly basis, we get people screeming about how teachers spend all summer with "continuing education". Besides that being total BS, if it were true, how is it that teachers are so uneducated that they cannot tell the difference between installing anti-virus software and surfing porn? And if they are educated enough to read, how is it that they cannot tell that a a Christina Aguilera fan site is not being used for the kids math assignment?
In 1985, I could understand teachers not understanding basic computer use. In 1990, I could understand it. In 2000, any teacher that didn't have basic computer knowledge was a poor teacher. It is now 2008. Any teacher that doesn't have basic computer knowledge should be treated exactly the same as a teacher that cannot read. The computer is the single most powerful educational device on the planet. It is not going anywhere, and any kid that is not comfortable with them is going to be as bad off as if they could not read.
A teacher claiming to not understand computers isn't an excuse, it is a declaration of incompetence.
There is no way you could fire the all of the people in the government in a four year period. In a best case scenario, you could fire a very small percentage of the people in the government. In practice, that means that MOST of your interaction with the government would not change. There are so many laws that say "You cannot do X without permission from Y", and Y is not an elected position, that in practice a very large portion of our laws are actually written and enforced by non elected officials.
Funny, I would think that you would explain to him that he is the first of his kind in his species rebirth. I would think a good name for him would be Phoenix.
Yep, but you can count on the "environmentalists" coming out in droves against this. It would get in the way of them using animal extinction as a tool to control how people behave.
Until I see an outcry against household pets, your comment holds no water.
That is why it is in quotes, but really, that is the environment that they are talking about when they said it. Most minors are rarely if ever exposed to what you or I would consider an actual 'conventional social situation'.
That line of thinking has annoyed me since I was a small child. When a kid doesn't spend a lot of time doing something, it is ADHD. When they do, it is obsession. Apparently the only thing that kids are allowed to spend overly large amounts of time at are sitting in classrooms and sports that get televised.
Of course, then we marvel at the few kids that don't get hampered by this. Here is an interesting exercise. Read about anyone who has ever received a gold medal in figure skating. I can guarantee you that you will not find one single example of a gold metal skater that says:
"Yeah, the first time I skated was at my friends 16th birthday. I really liked it, so I would go skating every few weeks on a Saturday. It ate up a good 6 or 7 hours a month, but it was worth it."
What you will find is many stories that say something like"
"I started skating when I was three. My parents saw that I had real aptitude for it, so we practiced and practiced. I really have to appreciate my parents, because they are the ones that would get up at 4:30 in the morning to drive me to the rink so that I could practice for 3 hours every day before school. Weekends would usually consist of 5 or 6 hours of practice each day."
Seriously, if your kid is in school, he is going to spend the better part of 8 hours each day in "conventional social situations". If they can not learn to interact with people in 40 hours a week, the few extra hours a night is not going to make a difference. Even if the schools stopped fighting it, it would still be virtually impossible for a kid to not be in "conventional social situations".
That can be solved pretty easily actually. All we need is someone with a little experience in writing RFCs for the IETF. Write an RFC that describes 'Traffic Limiting' with 'Traffic Limiting' actually in it's name. Then the next time that a carrier gets sued, the term "Traffic Limiting" can be used in a court of law. This would be particularly effective for use against ISPs that advertise "Unlimited" access.
I do the same. It is my understanding that the "correct" way of doing it is to always put the punctuation inside of the quotes, but to me the sentences:
Did I say "Read Slashdot now?"
Did I say "Read Slashdot now"?
Did I say "Read Slashdot now!"
are all unclear on what I want to say.
Did I say "Read Slashdot now!"?
Expresses exactly what I mean, and since the primary goal of writing is to have the reader understand what you wrote, I will, like you, continue to write what is clear and can care less about what is correct.
You are confused. Xerox lost the trademark lawsuit because trademark is specifically for the purpose of identifying a brand. You cannot have a trademark on terms already in use because it doesn't identify a brand. This is specific to Trademark.
The same does not apply to fraud. The argument that the fraud is so common that it is now legal is absurd.
Absolute BS. It is not a confusion by minimum wage Best Buy employees. The entire "IP" industry uses the term buy instead of license. It isn't the minimum wage employees that write the ads and approve the cash registers. Even that doesn't matter. If you you know that your minimum wage employees are selling a product that they only have the rights to sell a license to, then you are responsible.
Well now, that's kind of a problem. Every time someone goes into a store and buys software, they are given a sales recipt and told that they BOUGHT the software. I would be able to take the 'license' line a bit better if the software companies were ever successfully sued for the massive fraud that you claim they are committing.