Sugar is god-awful slow. It's not even a real program; it's just a Python script.
So you're saying they should have programmed it in Lisp or Scheme?
I recall Sawmill/Sawfish; one of the best window managers at the time, highly configurable, blazingly fast, written in Scheme.
As for "a real program"... sorry, but AFAICT even a VB program is a real program. If Sugar were written in Logo, it would still be a real program.
I mean, what other kind of program is there? Unreal programs? Fake programs?
You could say it weren't a real program if it never worked at all.
XP on the XO is M$ attempt simply to pull some popularity out of the XO and from their point of view trying to force up the cost of hardware to prevent the software appearing as such an expensive waste of money in comparison, hence the resource hog vista. They really have become a myopically greedy company with a complete disregard for the harm their actions cause.
OLPC is an educational project.
Microsoft wants, more than anything, to keep infecting younger generations.
If kids learn to live without Microsoft's software, if they learn to program and hack on a massive scale, there is no force in the world that will make them endorse Microsoft's expensive solutions unless they are significantly better than the competition, i.e. really worth their price.
This is something that needs to be stopped, as it cuts in their future userbase; it is as if the sheep suddenly started developing civilization: not very good news for shepherds at all.
LOL, are you serious? That renames instead of opening in OSX? Jesus.
Sounds counter-intuitive to anyone coming from another environment, but it is actually absolutely consistent to other practices in OS X.
Cmd-O Opens a file from Finder just as it opens a file in any other program. Using Enter to rename, while non-obvious, has proven to be very convenient.
It did take me a while to get used to it, but I've grown to love that consistency. Any program I use, I know Cmd-O will Open something, Cmd-W will close the Window, Cmd-Q will Quit the application, and Cmd-, will bring up Preferences (to name just a few shortcuts).
I know I risk getting modded as troll again for suggesting it, but Linux does not suit everybody's needs.
BTW I'm a Gentoo and OS X user. And I've converted half my family to Linux. But still, my friends have different needs and Linux does not suit them.
Get games on Linux some more, and it will happen, too.
The key is — and I've let all my friends know it — to buy a Linux-based laptop, then install Windows yourself and just snag the drivers from the HP website.
Cheaper, better, and only takes a little while.
Sounds like not so much an issue of "kids of today", but rather one of "I am not a strategy gamer". You'd likely have had your ass handed to you by a kid of 30 years ago too. Kids today haven't evolved some magic "strategy gene".
Of course they haven't.
But their immersion in those games makes them better strategists than me.
A large part of it is nurture, though I do hear from some psychologists that the average IQ is rising, so they have to recalibrate their tests every once in a while.
The child's brain is designed to absorb and process vast quantities of information. Some of it, like morality, cannot be processed at a very young age because of underdeveloped cognitive facilities in certain areas. In others, though, they are extremely malleable.
None of that is surprising. You were not pushed as quickly. 5 years old is about where kids learn to read. That can be pushed back up to about a year for most kids, but no amount of anything is going to result in a 2 year old that can read. Kids aren't changing.
I was a two-year-old who could read.
I got my first library card at three and a half, and I still remember the first books I borrowed.
And BTW, I wasn't pushed at all. It's just that whenever I pointed at a letter or a digit, my parents would tell me what exactly it was.
Granted, Croatian is a language with pretty much phonological spelling, so it was rather easy to jump from letters to words, but still.
Kids already learn algebra in private primary schools. Again, you can shift the age a little with aggressive teaching regimens, but we'll never see 7 year olds learning advanced combat tactics.
I would not dare play strategy games against the kids of today.
I was never much of a gamer, so it would kind of suck to get my ass handed to me by a primary school kid.
Though I would argue that dark isn't bad.
Kids thrive on dark; fairytales, ghost stories... though maybe I wouldn't give them Martin. Especially if they tend to bond with characters they grow to like.
I'd rather have my body rejuvenated and enhanced than replace it with the shoddy technology of the 20th century.
Worry not! You will not have our body replaced with the shoddy technology of the 20th century.
However, the shoddy technology of the 21st century is a wholly different matter.
How would it feel to have a body with "Made in China" engraved on most of its parts?
No, I do not want to test it on my biological body, thank you very much.
It would be untrue, for one.
Someone send me a Chinese girl!
SO in summer time you will pay more in cooling costs than you gain in electricity. Either that or be warmer. Logically you want the drapes outside where they would be amiently cooled.
Now if you draw the blinds and thus it gets darker and you need to turn on a light well. So much for any gains.
You discount for the fact that not all people are at home at all times.
If I'm not at home, I want my house to remain cool with as little energy spent as possible. That means that if those curtains are put outside windows (or maybe fashioned into blinds of some sort), they both prevent heat entering and produce electricity.
Also, if you put them on windows, it does not mean that windows have become your primary energy source, so it's either electricity or light. It's more like "create power in your spare time" — when you don't need the light, you get some power.
I love getting pre-paid business return envelopes in my mail. That way I can just send all the stuff that they send me right back to them. They pay to send it to me, and they pay to get it all back from me.
I think it was on bash.org... anyway, some guy sent back a credit card company's spam back to them, along with a bunch of pennies, so they had to pay postage as it surpassed the weight limit.
When they called him back, he demanded the money back, and finally got a cheque for 30-something pennies.
I find it a recommendable method. Annoy them, make them spend both time and money on a clearly unprofitable venture -- and they may stop.
I really really want a "Forward all spam messages to spam@uce.gov and delete them afterwards" button in my Gmail interface.
Especially since I tend not to wipe them until there are more than 2k of them.
Funny as that may be, Bliss -- AFAIK the most famous Linux virus -- has an uninstall routine invoked by passing the infected program the argument --bliss-disinfect-files-please.
Because I'm pretty sure that's the only thing that could make a model M stop working.
Nuclear war?
Only if he intends to use them as shielding.
I'd bet on some MacGyverish Situation where a Model M or three will provide a ratchet, caltrops, a shield, and maybe even rollerskates and some offensive weaponry.
Maybe they can even be used in constructing a trebuchet.
Yes, I have one too. I bought it after I ruined my original Model M by spilling tea on it,
What kind of tea did you spill on it that actually ruined it?
Once one of my teachers spilled coffee or coke (it was caffeinated and sticky, that's all I remember) on her Model M.
I told her to wash it, turn it upside down and leave it to dry for a day or two.
Worked like a charm.
That's ridiculous- WINE aims to emulate win32 perfectly, including reproducing bugs, so all windows programs run as expected.
Actually, I recall a test referenced a year or two ago on/., where DOS and Windows viruses were shown to be incompatible with WINE, but worked just fine under Windows.
So no, not all programs run as expected.
I wonder, though, whether a process of coding to suit viruses would also do away with other incompatibilities...
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Sugar is god-awful slow. It's not even a real program; it's just a Python script.
So you're saying they should have programmed it in Lisp or Scheme?
I recall Sawmill/Sawfish; one of the best window managers at the time, highly configurable, blazingly fast, written in Scheme.
As for "a real program"... sorry, but AFAICT even a VB program is a real program. If Sugar were written in Logo, it would still be a real program.
I mean, what other kind of program is there? Unreal programs? Fake programs?
You could say it weren't a real program if it never worked at all.
XP on the XO is M$ attempt simply to pull some popularity out of the XO and from their point of view trying to force up the cost of hardware to prevent the software appearing as such an expensive waste of money in comparison, hence the resource hog vista. They really have become a myopically greedy company with a complete disregard for the harm their actions cause.
OLPC is an educational project.
Microsoft wants, more than anything, to keep infecting younger generations.
If kids learn to live without Microsoft's software, if they learn to program and hack on a massive scale, there is no force in the world that will make them endorse Microsoft's expensive solutions unless they are significantly better than the competition, i.e. really worth their price.
This is something that needs to be stopped, as it cuts in their future userbase; it is as if the sheep suddenly started developing civilization: not very good news for shepherds at all.
If you were to combine the patent on dirt and the tree view, you would effectively kill the keeping of potted plants in cubicles. :-P
So whom would companies employ then?
Also, Dolphin has an optional two-pane view not unlike {n, m}c.
Very useful for copying and the like.
LOL, are you serious? That renames instead of opening in OSX? Jesus.
Sounds counter-intuitive to anyone coming from another environment, but it is actually absolutely consistent to other practices in OS X.
Cmd-O Opens a file from Finder just as it opens a file in any other program. Using Enter to rename, while non-obvious, has proven to be very convenient.
It did take me a while to get used to it, but I've grown to love that consistency. Any program I use, I know Cmd-O will Open something, Cmd-W will close the Window, Cmd-Q will Quit the application, and Cmd-, will bring up Preferences (to name just a few shortcuts).
Yeah, yeah.
But it's not an option for some.
I know I risk getting modded as troll again for suggesting it, but Linux does not suit everybody's needs.
BTW I'm a Gentoo and OS X user. And I've converted half my family to Linux. But still, my friends have different needs and Linux does not suit them.
Get games on Linux some more, and it will happen, too.
Geeks using Windows... that's inhuman sacrifice.
A year down the line and it does what she wants it to do
But surely, not having to spend a year getting it right would be better? I'd much prefer to just load windows and get on with it.
He's recounting a year's worth of user experience, not telling it took a year to get to work.
at that point, stick to linux...
Sure, if you want to be an asshole, please do.
Not everyone needs Linux. Not everybody would be happy with it.
Forcing Linux on them could only have an opposite effect.
HP makes decent laptops.
The key is — and I've let all my friends know it — to buy a Linux-based laptop, then install Windows yourself and just snag the drivers from the HP website.
Cheaper, better, and only takes a little while.
Sounds like not so much an issue of "kids of today", but rather one of "I am not a strategy gamer". You'd likely have had your ass handed to you by a kid of 30 years ago too. Kids today haven't evolved some magic "strategy gene".
Of course they haven't.
But their immersion in those games makes them better strategists than me.
A large part of it is nurture, though I do hear from some psychologists that the average IQ is rising, so they have to recalibrate their tests every once in a while.
The child's brain is designed to absorb and process vast quantities of information. Some of it, like morality, cannot be processed at a very young age because of underdeveloped cognitive facilities in certain areas. In others, though, they are extremely malleable.
Add a firm dash of irreverence and the importance of questioning authority, and they'll be good to go.
Puberty'll handle that all on its own.
No parental effort required.
None of that is surprising. You were not pushed as quickly. 5 years old is about where kids learn to read. That can be pushed back up to about a year for most kids, but no amount of anything is going to result in a 2 year old that can read. Kids aren't changing.
I was a two-year-old who could read.
I got my first library card at three and a half, and I still remember the first books I borrowed.
And BTW, I wasn't pushed at all. It's just that whenever I pointed at a letter or a digit, my parents would tell me what exactly it was.
Granted, Croatian is a language with pretty much phonological spelling, so it was rather easy to jump from letters to words, but still.
Kids already learn algebra in private primary schools. Again, you can shift the age a little with aggressive teaching regimens, but we'll never see 7 year olds learning advanced combat tactics.
I would not dare play strategy games against the kids of today.
I was never much of a gamer, so it would kind of suck to get my ass handed to me by a primary school kid.
Though I would argue that dark isn't bad.
Kids thrive on dark; fairytales, ghost stories... though maybe I wouldn't give them Martin. Especially if they tend to bond with characters they grow to like.
I would add something Bujold herself recommended in one convention: Cordwainer Smith.
Pretty hard-core SF, with lots of elements of Chinese storytelling that makes it that little bit more magical. Especially if your kids like cats.
I know I would have devoured his stories had I encountered when I was 10. As it happened, I devoured them at 20.
I'd rather have my body rejuvenated and enhanced than replace it with the shoddy technology of the 20th century.
Worry not! You will not have our body replaced with the shoddy technology of the 20th century.
However, the shoddy technology of the 21st century is a wholly different matter.
How would it feel to have a body with "Made in China" engraved on most of its parts?
No, I do not want to test it on my biological body, thank you very much.
It would be untrue, for one.
Someone send me a Chinese girl!
SO in summer time you will pay more in cooling costs than you gain in electricity. Either that or be warmer. Logically you want the drapes outside where they would be amiently cooled.
Now if you draw the blinds and thus it gets darker and you need to turn on a light well. So much for any gains.
You discount for the fact that not all people are at home at all times.
If I'm not at home, I want my house to remain cool with as little energy spent as possible. That means that if those curtains are put outside windows (or maybe fashioned into blinds of some sort), they both prevent heat entering and produce electricity.
Also, if you put them on windows, it does not mean that windows have become your primary energy source, so it's either electricity or light. It's more like "create power in your spare time" — when you don't need the light, you get some power.
As opposed to what, being a good "con" and doing what?
Conning people?
I love getting pre-paid business return envelopes in my mail. That way I can just send all the stuff that they send me right back to them. They pay to send it to me, and they pay to get it all back from me.
I think it was on bash.org... anyway, some guy sent back a credit card company's spam back to them, along with a bunch of pennies, so they had to pay postage as it surpassed the weight limit.
When they called him back, he demanded the money back, and finally got a cheque for 30-something pennies.
I find it a recommendable method. Annoy them, make them spend both time and money on a clearly unprofitable venture -- and they may stop.
Pity it doesn't work for e-mail spam.
Is there an easy way to do that from Gmail?
I really really want a "Forward all spam messages to spam@uce.gov and delete them afterwards" button in my Gmail interface.
Especially since I tend not to wipe them until there are more than 2k of them.
Funny as that may be, Bliss -- AFAIK the most famous Linux virus -- has an uninstall routine invoked by passing the infected program the argument --bliss-disinfect-files-please.
Not very user-friendly, but look at the features!
In case of what? Nuclear war?
Because I'm pretty sure that's the only thing that could make a model M stop working.
Nuclear war?
Only if he intends to use them as shielding.
I'd bet on some MacGyverish Situation where a Model M or three will provide a ratchet, caltrops, a shield, and maybe even rollerskates and some offensive weaponry.
Maybe they can even be used in constructing a trebuchet.
Yes, I have one too. I bought it after I ruined my original Model M by spilling tea on it,
What kind of tea did you spill on it that actually ruined it?
Once one of my teachers spilled coffee or coke (it was caffeinated and sticky, that's all I remember) on her Model M.
I told her to wash it, turn it upside down and leave it to dry for a day or two.
Worked like a charm.
Model Ms are nearly indestructible.
I have a Unicomp SpaceSaver (they didn't have a 105-key Customizer at the time).
Blank.
They couldn't make me one with a Croatian layout, so I asked them to send me a blank one.
No extra cost, either.
The best keyboard I've ever owned, though still I type this on my MacBook Pro.
That's ridiculous- WINE aims to emulate win32 perfectly, including reproducing bugs, so all windows programs run as expected.
Actually, I recall a test referenced a year or two ago on /., where DOS and Windows viruses were shown to be incompatible with WINE, but worked just fine under Windows.
So no, not all programs run as expected.
I wonder, though, whether a process of coding to suit viruses would also do away with other incompatibilities...