I recently purchased a Nokia 6680... ordered straight from Hong Kong through ebay. Not really available in the US. One of the main reasons I got it was that there is an active developer community around the Series 60 based phones. I hadn't really seen open source projects for a cell phone before and the thought intrigued me. Also, looking at the code (esp. Python...my language of choice)...it looked pretty easy to program for.
Plus... no one I know has that phone...which makes me way cooler than all of my friends.
What would I have wanted when I was a kid ? Hmmm... probably more games.
But that wasn't what was best for me and would have taught me less than
what I did get.
When I was 7, my Dad brought home a new Commodore VIC-20. At the time,
the VIC was the first color computer under $200. It came with 5k
(yeah kilobytes) of RAM, and a tape drive that loaded and stored programs
on audio casettes. (Note: turn down the volume on the dual-casette boom
box if you attempt to listen to the computer tapes!)
The VIC was neat. It loaded Commodore Basic and I could write programs
for it. The instruction manual had some programs to print "HELLO" over
and over on the screen, some random POKE 16384,128 type stuff to change
the screen colors, and some flying bird animations using the commodore
special characters (remember the front of the keys?).
Here's the thing. My parents didn't buy me games for the VIC (except
Sargon II chess). But what they did do was buy me a subscription to
Compute, and Compute's Gazette magazines. These magazines were a goldmine.
They contained program listings that I would type into the VIC and store
on casettes. That was how I got games. And that is also how I learned
about simple debugging. Half the time (well most of the time) there was
something wrong with the programs as listed and they just didn't work.
I would have to tediously go back through the listing and figure out the
problem. Debugging with print statements at age 7 ! I also had a copy
of "Compute's first book of VIC" (11.99 at KMart), and I learned how to
create sprite graphics by writing over memory with bit fields and printing
them to the screen like characters. I doubt I would have the patience
for that nowadays.
In high school, I graduated to an Apple 2c. This was the one with a handle
on the back, and was "portable". I programmed in BASIC on the Apple also
and by then I actually had a couple of games. Remember HACKER with the
network of robot tunnels and trading items for spy clues ?:) And there
were always the Zorks (and "Nord and Bert" if anyone remembers). As for
the programming, it continued with magazine listings. But what really
kept me going was Scientific American articles. Each month I couldn't
wait for the Mathematical Recreations sections to come out so I could try
my hand at writing programs to go along with the articles, which often
had cool algorithms in pseudocode. The AK Dewdney book "The Armchair
Universe" was also very interesting to me and I tried to reproduce many
of the programs in there also. I stayed in on many a Friday night playing
around with the 2c while my friends were out doing whatever because I
found the programming much more interesting (I'm a geek I know). I was
heavily into fractals at the time and remember running my mandelbrot generator
and waiting a week for it to render on the 2c (I wasn't aware of "optimization"
or "assembly language"). When the picture finally finished I was pretty
proud of what I'd done.
In high school I also attended a summer computer camp at Ohio State run
by the SuperComputer center. That was the first time I ever saw a UNIX
machine. If I recall it was some sort of SUN machine - I remember pressing the wrong button, escaping from the graphical environment
and watching a lady there annoyingly type some commands to get it back
into graphics mode. (Now I know I probably killed X or something). At the camp,
groups wrote simulations on Macintoshes in PASCAL that eventually ran on
a Cray X-MP and were rendered to video tape. My group did a simulation
of a disease spreading through a population (of pixels). The other summer
computer program I did was working in the computer lab at Univ of Toledo. I was supposed to be working on debugging Fortran programs
to convert molecular modeling files from one format to another but... well
the prof wasn't there much so I ended up creating multi-page printouts
of fractals using the wide line printer there and ascii characters...just
can't trust high school kids w
download the tweakui powertools from microsoft
there's an "always on top" option that gets added
to every window when you rt-click the titlebar.
gimp toolwindow on top problem solved.
Shrink software will go by the wayside. And it should. It's 2004. Do something better. If you can't make money doing what you're doing then don't depend on the government to allow you to. You're in a dreamworld if you think the supply of software is really limited. It's "artificial scarcity". You cannot stop software piracy with software -- it has _never_ been done and cannot be done. It is only a stall tactic.
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i purchased a nintendo ds _specifically_ because there was a linux porting project for it. i certainly don't think its a waste of time.
I recently purchased a Nokia 6680... ordered straight from Hong Kong through ebay. Not really available in the US. One of the main reasons I got it was that there is an active developer community around the Series 60 based phones. I hadn't really seen open source projects for a cell phone before and the thought intrigued me. Also, looking at the code (esp. Python...my language of choice)...it looked pretty easy to program for. Plus... no one I know has that phone...which makes me way cooler than all of my friends.
When I was 7, my Dad brought home a new Commodore VIC-20. At the time, the VIC was the first color computer under $200. It came with 5k (yeah kilobytes) of RAM, and a tape drive that loaded and stored programs on audio casettes. (Note: turn down the volume on the dual-casette boom box if you attempt to listen to the computer tapes!) The VIC was neat. It loaded Commodore Basic and I could write programs for it. The instruction manual had some programs to print "HELLO" over and over on the screen, some random POKE 16384,128 type stuff to change the screen colors, and some flying bird animations using the commodore special characters (remember the front of the keys?).
Here's the thing. My parents didn't buy me games for the VIC (except Sargon II chess). But what they did do was buy me a subscription to Compute, and Compute's Gazette magazines. These magazines were a goldmine. They contained program listings that I would type into the VIC and store on casettes. That was how I got games. And that is also how I learned about simple debugging. Half the time (well most of the time) there was something wrong with the programs as listed and they just didn't work. I would have to tediously go back through the listing and figure out the problem. Debugging with print statements at age 7 ! I also had a copy of "Compute's first book of VIC" (11.99 at KMart), and I learned how to create sprite graphics by writing over memory with bit fields and printing them to the screen like characters. I doubt I would have the patience for that nowadays.
In high school, I graduated to an Apple 2c. This was the one with a handle on the back, and was "portable". I programmed in BASIC on the Apple also and by then I actually had a couple of games. Remember HACKER with the network of robot tunnels and trading items for spy clues ? :) And there
were always the Zorks (and "Nord and Bert" if anyone remembers). As for
the programming, it continued with magazine listings. But what really
kept me going was Scientific American articles. Each month I couldn't
wait for the Mathematical Recreations sections to come out so I could try
my hand at writing programs to go along with the articles, which often
had cool algorithms in pseudocode. The AK Dewdney book "The Armchair
Universe" was also very interesting to me and I tried to reproduce many
of the programs in there also. I stayed in on many a Friday night playing
around with the 2c while my friends were out doing whatever because I
found the programming much more interesting (I'm a geek I know). I was
heavily into fractals at the time and remember running my mandelbrot generator
and waiting a week for it to render on the 2c (I wasn't aware of "optimization"
or "assembly language"). When the picture finally finished I was pretty
proud of what I'd done.
In high school I also attended a summer computer camp at Ohio State run by the SuperComputer center. That was the first time I ever saw a UNIX machine. If I recall it was some sort of SUN machine - I remember pressing the wrong button, escaping from the graphical environment and watching a lady there annoyingly type some commands to get it back into graphics mode. (Now I know I probably killed X or something). At the camp, groups wrote simulations on Macintoshes in PASCAL that eventually ran on a Cray X-MP and were rendered to video tape. My group did a simulation of a disease spreading through a population (of pixels). The other summer computer program I did was working in the computer lab at Univ of Toledo. I was supposed to be working on debugging Fortran programs to convert molecular modeling files from one format to another but ... well
the prof wasn't there much so I ended up creating multi-page printouts
of fractals using the wide line printer there and ascii characters...just
can't trust high school kids w
download the tweakui powertools from microsoft there's an "always on top" option that gets added to every window when you rt-click the titlebar. gimp toolwindow on top problem solved.
As if we had a low enough budget already...now i'm going to get a paycut because it will "make us more secure".. i hope my phbs don't read this tripe.
Shrink software will go by the wayside.
And it should. It's 2004. Do something better.
If you can't make money doing what you're doing
then don't depend on the government to allow you
to. You're in a dreamworld if you think the
supply of software is really limited. It's "artificial scarcity". You cannot stop
software piracy with software -- it has
_never_ been done and cannot be done. It
is only a stall tactic.
Free the information and free the market.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/spotlight.html
Doesn't this look similar to what Gates is saying?
This is about the technology:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/spotlighttech.ht ml
If anyone's seen the GNU software radio to do HDTV it's neat http://comsec.com/wiki?HowtoHdTv. Only $1000 worth of hardware though :(