We seem to get some of these "kids and computers" questions every few months. We just had this one and there was this one.
Now, stop and think about the logic of this. First, you're asking a bunch of geeks for parenting advice. Only a few of us have kids. Next, you're asking the kind of question which doesn't provoke the kind of thought that would lend a helpful answer; doubtless you'll toddle off and go do whatever you felt like doing anyway, as you should do anyway. Finally, you're asking what you can do for someone so that by 16+ years from now, they'll be prepared.
Now, if you were 18 today, what kind of insight would you have gained from your explorations of technology in 1990? Let's see, here: Cell phones would be lost on you. You'd probably have learned to type on an IBM Selectric. You'd have discovered Windows 3.0 running on a 386 PC or a Mac box. With the Windows box, you'd get as far as DOS and the QBasic language and hit the wall after that, and with the Mac you'd be drawing nifty black-and-white bitmaps and learning Hypercard. If you got to tour a workplace of the time on a school field trip, you'd get to learn about how computers are huge blue cabinets in special cold rooms with Halon dumps and running things like VMS. You'd get real handy at copying songs from the radio onto tape cassettes, or at least scoring on CDs if you were pink. Ipod's would never have entered your sphere...
You see where it's going, now? There's almost nothing you can show your kids today that won't be landfill fodder by the time they're getting a job. As a last ditch effort to say I recommended something, I'd say give them Linux to play with, so at least they'd get to see a system that's geared to enable learning from the guts outward. As opposed to proprietary systems which are designed to keep you in the dark and hence dependent on "The Man" like a junkie scoring their fix, endlessly chasing the delusion that you can pay somebody else to do your learning for you. But by now, I suppose you're just sneering in contempt at the audacity to suggest such a thing, even though my kids have had no problem doing everything they want to do on a Linux box, and I'm OK with that, and I'll be OK with your kids working for my kids, too!
At least some good has come of this exchange, this time. I've set the point in concrete once and for all so I can copy and save this reply in a file, the quicker to post the *NEXT* time we get this question.
The kernel and a few utilities are BSD-liscenced; the majority of the programs on the distribution are GNU software just like in Linux. To put a fine point on it, some BSD programs are included in Linux distros, like my Slakware has BSD games, fork system calls, and nail, for instance.
OpenSolaris is distributed under CDDL
The kernel and some of *their* utilities is, the rest of the software on the system is GNU GPL again! (I grinned to see the SDL game Supertux on the Belenix distro!)
And Linux isn't? What you mean is that we have a GNU based kernel.
Since the GPL went version three, Linus has expressed some doubts about continuing under that license. If he balks out and drafts his own, we'll have another Solaris/BSD situation: Another differently licensed kernel running GNU software. So I point out even if Linus breaks from past practice, we still have HURD...which, I predict, would suddenly see more interest if this happened.
PS It's not like a BSD or CDDL license is the kiss of death or anything. At this point, I think one could well paper the walls of one's home with the existing FOSS licenses; and if that isn't enough, you can always drop by opensource.org and draft your own with them.
So if suddenly all the brain surgeons of the world disappear I can pick up where they left off if only I have the scalpel and other tools?
Ummm, as I was saying about users of Gentoo, LFS, etc: Yes, we have not just tools, but people experienced with code, people who program, people who know what to do with the tools. What the heck *is* it about programming that everybody thinks it's impossible for mere mortals to do? Where did the first programmers come from? They learned. They were the first, so nobody taught them; they taught themselves...in just one lifetime! I guess I'm perpetually at odds with most of Slashdot on this issue; I have confidence in learning. Everybody else talks about programs and programmers like they were dinosaurs: lose 'em once - gone forever!
some of the best and brightest minds on the project might end up on Oracle's payroll.
Not all of the brilliant people are famous. Since I mentioned Gentoo: it managed to lose it's lead developer suddenly to the exact same "real paycheck" scenario you quote. So somebody else stepped forward and Gentoo's still kicking. It *can* happen. But if you feel better worrying, then worry away.
The most retarded tech magazine's least gifted writer opines that illiteracy is caused by chat rooms and comic books. This is like Marilyn Manson leading the protest that the rock music culture makes kids depraved.
I know I'm getting modded down about it. And to that person clicking the downvote button right now, I say: you have the soul of an ant.
Someone should make a list of current popular OSS programs, what their licensing is, and what we can do if that project is bought out.
Good thinking, but I'm still not too concerned. Last week, I downloaded/burned/and ran live CDs of a FreeBSD distro, GNU/HURD, an OpenSolaris distro, and Plan Nine from Bell Labs, just to see where my "emergency exits in case of Linux failure" are (which saga is covered here). With the exception of Plan 9 (Lucent tech's weird license for it's weird OS), the vast, sweeping majority of it's all GPL licensed, which belongs to you and I as well as anybody who bought it. We're on more solid ground than you can imagine!
By the way, the HURD booted and performed nicely on both my machines (God knows why it isn't being developed faster or promoted better, it's nearly as stable as Linux 1.0 was!), so we even have a GPL'd kernel to turn to.
True, but how many are prepared to actually do it?
News flash: FOSS distros come with FOSS programming tools: compilers, interpreters, scripting engines, libraries, documentation, et all. Not much point *to* open source code, if all you can do with it is read it, eh? True, many distros are poorly prepared for programming needs, and I shun them and shame them, but even the most threadbare distro has a scripting tool or compiler or two or five.
I've made periodic policies to obtain the full sources for major installed distros I've run, such as Red Hat and Slackware. Despite the wonders of package management, many times those of us with finickier tastes have to resort to compiling a tarball to get the program we want. And then there's distros like Linux From Scratch, Gentoo, and Sourcemage, where the whole idea is to build it from source code, piece by piece.
So rest assured, if you *nuked* 90% of the open-source organizations, the rest of us could replenish the well in, oohhh, given sufficient cooperation and bittorrent seeding, about a week.
Most people don't quite seem to appreciate the crisis that the UK is going through in maths, science and engineering. I'm guessing the situation is similar abroad?
Find ten Americans who can SPELL "maths, science and engineering". Go on, I dare ya!
And you hear the howls of outrage as you step foreward to defend this? Listen, civilization and it's law enforcement has had to deal with ALL types of assholes for centuries, without going to this measure. I'd become a NEW kind of asshole that you've never seen before, if this measure were enforced everywhere. There comes a time when we must learn to examine the phrase "The lesser of two evils." I'd definitely support your continuing to deal with the DV household 5 times per week, as opposed to the same burden plus me taking a baseball bat to the camera in my house 5 minutes after your install tech is out the door. Now you have manufactored another law breaker! Worse or better?
Countless times, when coding time overlaps into bed time, I've had an elusive bug or a problem I can't figure out. The more I try to fix it, the more I muck it up. Finally, I would give up and collapse to sleep - only in the morning to awake with the whole fix written in my head and ready to go! I'd sit down to the keyboard, type out my dreamed code, and it would compile and run right the first time without fail. Problem solving skills of my subconscious mind even seem to outperform my conscious mind. Since then, I've heard similar stories from other programmers.
Over the years, my wife has learned to recognise the symptoms. If she hears me cursing the machine in frustration, she gently prods me that it's time to rest my brain. She's always right, even though at the time, I'm so absorbed in the problem that I can't pull back and see what's wrong.
I started becoming self-taught on a TRS-80 Model I. The code I wrote was a joke...*high five* Me too!
And you know, looking back on it all, I would rather have it this way (TRS-80/Commodore/Apple2 BASIC, MS QBasic, MS Visual C++, LINUX gcc, Lisp, Bash, sed/awk, Python, Tcl/tk, GTK/ncurses/SDL, HTML, CSS/XML, Java/Javascript, POVray, rc... who knows, I've probably forgotten five or so!), than to have gone 90 miles deep in just one language and be married to it for life. The way it is, you learn one new language a year or sink into the Turing tar pit!
PS You know what's funny? I *STILL* haven't gotten around to Perl and Ruby! Oh, I'm pitiful!
This is only good for home/local use:
I have a special subirectory called "code" within which I have folders for each language I've worked in for whenever I've had something I want to save. These will either be the first few tutorial-level programs I've written in that language, or complete programs where I saw some reuse in the future. I can quickly search ("grep") within the files for functions, keywords, and such, either as a memory refresher for writing a different program, or to cut and paste and modify. It works for me because with programming, I tend to go wide but shallow! That is, I have five usable programs each in about 15 languages I've done by now...and I'm still falling behind, I need to learn 20 more!!!
Folks, don't go thinking this means I hate America. But I'm sick of seeing all the technology innovations in energy production and ecology come out of other countries. I'm sick of seeing the US get it's ass kicked in school grades. I'm fed up reading about how the US is deficient in graduating engineers. I grew up hearing about how we were the country that landed on the moon and was taught at an early age to idolize those scientists in white lab coats.
Whatever happened to watching science fiction movies and thinking "We'll be that advanced in just a few more years."? Now we favor creation myths over accepted theory, stifle NASA scientists who try to warn us about the environment, campaign against stem cell research like we were having the Salem witch trials all over again, and the brainy of our culture get hung with derisive nicknames. I guess science is only important if you're going to bomb somebody or invade their privacy...we still lead the world in those two departments.
By all means, burn the oil as fast as possible and leave the US high and dry! Maybe then these fatheads I have to share a country with will learn a thing or two...possibly even the word "learn" will cease to be dirty again.
Something you have to remind people is just how fast OSS software grows up. I can remember when KDE was klunky and not very usable, Red Hat had trouble detecting hardware, nvu was barely able to handle a simple layout, and Gimp had only about ten filters. Time and again, I've been able to point somebody who was complaining of missing features and bugs at the new version of the same program, where the issues were addressed.
Filing bug reports or even offering simple feedback helps the development along. But at any rate, I see OSS develop at a faster time scale. Three years ago, how many of you heard of Firefox?
New conservation methods will come on line as prices rise, consumption will fall, and lifestyles will change, further slowing the process. And we can always fall back on nuclear energy.
Everywhere BUT the US, that is! You heard some of the posters in this topic? They'll go out and buy TWO Hummers and drive to the mall with one foot on the gas pedal of each car, just to compensate. And all forms of alternative energy are abominations to God; haven't you heard Focus on the Family? Science is evil. We initiate Inquisitions on our own NASA members, even.
So when you're skimming through the air in air-conditioned comfort in your Jetson's solar-powered hovercraft, be sure to wave down at the cavemen in tattered suits clutching their useless cell phones as they search frantically for one last gallon to steal/tree to chop down/body to incinerate to power their land tanks.
OK, fine, I don't own a car at all! Our whole family only uses public transportation! And we consume about 1/2 what the average household does. (Yes, we garden, too). Now what? Does that entitle you to go out and buy a Lear jet to fly to the mall to compensate? Just how much harder DO you expect the world to sacrifice so you can have your luxuries?
Slashdot Mirror
Now, stop and think about the logic of this. First, you're asking a bunch of geeks for parenting advice. Only a few of us have kids. Next, you're asking the kind of question which doesn't provoke the kind of thought that would lend a helpful answer; doubtless you'll toddle off and go do whatever you felt like doing anyway, as you should do anyway. Finally, you're asking what you can do for someone so that by 16+ years from now, they'll be prepared.
Now, if you were 18 today, what kind of insight would you have gained from your explorations of technology in 1990? Let's see, here: Cell phones would be lost on you. You'd probably have learned to type on an IBM Selectric. You'd have discovered Windows 3.0 running on a 386 PC or a Mac box. With the Windows box, you'd get as far as DOS and the QBasic language and hit the wall after that, and with the Mac you'd be drawing nifty black-and-white bitmaps and learning Hypercard. If you got to tour a workplace of the time on a school field trip, you'd get to learn about how computers are huge blue cabinets in special cold rooms with Halon dumps and running things like VMS. You'd get real handy at copying songs from the radio onto tape cassettes, or at least scoring on CDs if you were pink. Ipod's would never have entered your sphere...
You see where it's going, now? There's almost nothing you can show your kids today that won't be landfill fodder by the time they're getting a job. As a last ditch effort to say I recommended something, I'd say give them Linux to play with, so at least they'd get to see a system that's geared to enable learning from the guts outward. As opposed to proprietary systems which are designed to keep you in the dark and hence dependent on "The Man" like a junkie scoring their fix, endlessly chasing the delusion that you can pay somebody else to do your learning for you. But by now, I suppose you're just sneering in contempt at the audacity to suggest such a thing, even though my kids have had no problem doing everything they want to do on a Linux box, and I'm OK with that, and I'll be OK with your kids working for my kids, too!
At least some good has come of this exchange, this time. I've set the point in concrete once and for all so I can copy and save this reply in a file, the quicker to post the *NEXT* time we get this question.
The kernel and a few utilities are BSD-liscenced; the majority of the programs on the distribution are GNU software just like in Linux. To put a fine point on it, some BSD programs are included in Linux distros, like my Slakware has BSD games, fork system calls, and nail, for instance.
OpenSolaris is distributed under CDDL
The kernel and some of *their* utilities is, the rest of the software on the system is GNU GPL again! (I grinned to see the SDL game Supertux on the Belenix distro!)
And Linux isn't? What you mean is that we have a GNU based kernel.
Since the GPL went version three, Linus has expressed some doubts about continuing under that license. If he balks out and drafts his own, we'll have another Solaris/BSD situation: Another differently licensed kernel running GNU software. So I point out even if Linus breaks from past practice, we still have HURD...which, I predict, would suddenly see more interest if this happened.
PS It's not like a BSD or CDDL license is the kiss of death or anything. At this point, I think one could well paper the walls of one's home with the existing FOSS licenses; and if that isn't enough, you can always drop by opensource.org and draft your own with them.
Ummm, as I was saying about users of Gentoo, LFS, etc: Yes, we have not just tools, but people experienced with code, people who program, people who know what to do with the tools. What the heck *is* it about programming that everybody thinks it's impossible for mere mortals to do? Where did the first programmers come from? They learned. They were the first, so nobody taught them; they taught themselves...in just one lifetime! I guess I'm perpetually at odds with most of Slashdot on this issue; I have confidence in learning. Everybody else talks about programs and programmers like they were dinosaurs: lose 'em once - gone forever!
some of the best and brightest minds on the project might end up on Oracle's payroll.
Not all of the brilliant people are famous. Since I mentioned Gentoo: it managed to lose it's lead developer suddenly to the exact same "real paycheck" scenario you quote. So somebody else stepped forward and Gentoo's still kicking. It *can* happen. But if you feel better worrying, then worry away.
I know I'm getting modded down about it. And to that person clicking the downvote button right now, I say: you have the soul of an ant.
You didn't find out what he had for breakfast this morning?
...by BUILDING them! But it would save time if the site had templates based on famous models...
Good thinking, but I'm still not too concerned. Last week, I downloaded/burned/and ran live CDs of a FreeBSD distro, GNU/HURD, an OpenSolaris distro, and Plan Nine from Bell Labs, just to see where my "emergency exits in case of Linux failure" are (which saga is covered here). With the exception of Plan 9 (Lucent tech's weird license for it's weird OS), the vast, sweeping majority of it's all GPL licensed, which belongs to you and I as well as anybody who bought it. We're on more solid ground than you can imagine!
By the way, the HURD booted and performed nicely on both my machines (God knows why it isn't being developed faster or promoted better, it's nearly as stable as Linux 1.0 was!), so we even have a GPL'd kernel to turn to.
News flash: FOSS distros come with FOSS programming tools: compilers, interpreters, scripting engines, libraries, documentation, et all. Not much point *to* open source code, if all you can do with it is read it, eh? True, many distros are poorly prepared for programming needs, and I shun them and shame them, but even the most threadbare distro has a scripting tool or compiler or two or five.
I've made periodic policies to obtain the full sources for major installed distros I've run, such as Red Hat and Slackware. Despite the wonders of package management, many times those of us with finickier tastes have to resort to compiling a tarball to get the program we want. And then there's distros like Linux From Scratch, Gentoo, and Sourcemage, where the whole idea is to build it from source code, piece by piece.
So rest assured, if you *nuked* 90% of the open-source organizations, the rest of us could replenish the well in, oohhh, given sufficient cooperation and bittorrent seeding, about a week.
I can't wait to get out from under this government. I want to believe that "morally wrong" and "criminal" have something to do with each other again!
Find ten Americans who can SPELL "maths, science and engineering". Go on, I dare ya!
Ob SONY joke:
SONY="Soon Only Not Yet"
they're getting bulldozed soon. I've never seen the government employee yet who would abandon a target for bullying. They just come back with tanks.
Is if my house has empty frames in the walls.
And you hear the howls of outrage as you step foreward to defend this? Listen, civilization and it's law enforcement has had to deal with ALL types of assholes for centuries, without going to this measure. I'd become a NEW kind of asshole that you've never seen before, if this measure were enforced everywhere. There comes a time when we must learn to examine the phrase "The lesser of two evils." I'd definitely support your continuing to deal with the DV household 5 times per week, as opposed to the same burden plus me taking a baseball bat to the camera in my house 5 minutes after your install tech is out the door. Now you have manufactored another law breaker! Worse or better?
But go and try to tell them that, and they'll say something like "You talk too complicated."
Over the years, my wife has learned to recognise the symptoms. If she hears me cursing the machine in frustration, she gently prods me that it's time to rest my brain. She's always right, even though at the time, I'm so absorbed in the problem that I can't pull back and see what's wrong.
And you know, looking back on it all, I would rather have it this way (TRS-80/Commodore/Apple2 BASIC, MS QBasic, MS Visual C++, LINUX gcc, Lisp, Bash, sed/awk, Python, Tcl/tk, GTK/ncurses/SDL, HTML, CSS/XML, Java/Javascript, POVray, rc... who knows, I've probably forgotten five or so!), than to have gone 90 miles deep in just one language and be married to it for life. The way it is, you learn one new language a year or sink into the Turing tar pit!
PS You know what's funny? I *STILL* haven't gotten around to Perl and Ruby! Oh, I'm pitiful!
This is only good for home/local use:
I have a special subirectory called "code" within which I have folders for each language I've worked in for whenever I've had something I want to save. These will either be the first few tutorial-level programs I've written in that language, or complete programs where I saw some reuse in the future. I can quickly search ("grep") within the files for functions, keywords, and such, either as a memory refresher for writing a different program, or to cut and paste and modify. It works for me because with programming, I tend to go wide but shallow! That is, I have five usable programs each in about 15 languages I've done by now...and I'm still falling behind, I need to learn 20 more!!!
Whatever happened to watching science fiction movies and thinking "We'll be that advanced in just a few more years."? Now we favor creation myths over accepted theory, stifle NASA scientists who try to warn us about the environment, campaign against stem cell research like we were having the Salem witch trials all over again, and the brainy of our culture get hung with derisive nicknames. I guess science is only important if you're going to bomb somebody or invade their privacy...we still lead the world in those two departments.
By all means, burn the oil as fast as possible and leave the US high and dry! Maybe then these fatheads I have to share a country with will learn a thing or two...possibly even the word "learn" will cease to be dirty again.
Filing bug reports or even offering simple feedback helps the development along. But at any rate, I see OSS develop at a faster time scale. Three years ago, how many of you heard of Firefox?
Everywhere BUT the US, that is! You heard some of the posters in this topic? They'll go out and buy TWO Hummers and drive to the mall with one foot on the gas pedal of each car, just to compensate. And all forms of alternative energy are abominations to God; haven't you heard Focus on the Family? Science is evil. We initiate Inquisitions on our own NASA members, even.
So when you're skimming through the air in air-conditioned comfort in your Jetson's solar-powered hovercraft, be sure to wave down at the cavemen in tattered suits clutching their useless cell phones as they search frantically for one last gallon to steal/tree to chop down/body to incinerate to power their land tanks.
Because the US is the most-lit country on this map:http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http:// planetforlife.com/images/zearthlites.jpg&imgrefurl =http://planetforlife.com/where/&h=397&w=787&sz=51 &tbnid=LEK0DVp-7_4uzM:&tbnh=71&tbnw=141&hl=en&star t=1&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dglobal%2Benergy%2Bnight%26s vnum%3D10%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26safe%3Doff%26client% 3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26s a%3DN
and the most ignorant. The rest of the world will be living in a solar-powered, clean-aired, efficient, comfortable Jetson's space-age world while the Neanderthals will still be dragging their clubs in the dirt as they shuffle around looking for the very last thing to burn. It is already too late to change this course, but be damn sure *I* won't stick around to suffer with all the fools who wouldn't listen to people like me for 35 years.
OK, fine, I don't own a car at all! Our whole family only uses public transportation! And we consume about 1/2 what the average household does. (Yes, we garden, too). Now what? Does that entitle you to go out and buy a Lear jet to fly to the mall to compensate? Just how much harder DO you expect the world to sacrifice so you can have your luxuries?
It enhances the single-volley rant effect, as if the entire paragraph were barked in a single breath. Hence the panting afterwards.
Can you end our corrupt war and kick the thieves out of our government too, while you're at it?