The content-rich computers of today are completely different to what we had years ago. With the early PCs, anything interesting you could get it to do was something you made it do yourself. I used to write games to play on my programmable calculator (a TI SR-56, I was too poor to afford an HP). In today's world, there isn't a place for interpreted BASIC programming, let alone peek and poke assembly language.
(please, let's not make this a 'both ways up hill to school' joke)
But there are still probably bored kids with programmable calculators out there. Even geeky ones who write programs to factor numbers to their primes while sitting in a boring 'study hall.'
I attended an 'experimental school' from fourth to sixth grade, back in 1967-70 (aprox.). It was an 'unstructured' 'classroom without walls' approach. We were using all the latest techniques, and the SRA learning modules. There was a great science cart with all kinds of stuff to experiment with. I got into electronics about that time, though mostly from my own exposure and exploration at home.
What they found out over a few years time was that the average performance of the pupils was about the same. But, looking closer, they discovered that motivated kids were learning MORE and the average kid was learning LESS. I remember spending long classroom hours making clay log cabins and such. The experience set me back severely in some areas but raced me forward in others. Within a few years of the time I attended the school, walls and much more structure had been added. It was viewed a failure.
I wish, in a way, that I had been given a regular education, though it's always hard to say what difference it might have made.
There are certainly hard, well-documented instances of Steve Jobs sinning against his fellow man. Going way, back, i.e. to the instance where Wozniak helped him (performed the whole task, really) by optimizing some hardware for Atari. Jobs received a $5000 bonus from Atari for the task, but then told Woz that he got $700 and gave him a 'half' amount of $350.
No, you get the feeling from Microsoft that they just roll on like a column of amoral tanks over their opponents, whereas Jobs' actions make him seem like a targeted, deliberate agent for the secret police.
And in the 1980s, when Microsoft was beating their opponents in the marketplace with over- (and under-) handed business deals, Apple was running opponents out of business (i.e. the whole Apple II clone industry) in the courtroom.
Joe Sixpack's weird brother Nester still watches film classics on his old 19" RCA console set and enjoys them. He understands the concept of an aesthetic distance, and the dramatic quality of the film matters to him more than the quality of the reproduction.
Joe Sixpack's cousin Elmer, on the other hand is constantly obsessing over 'aliasing' and 'pixel size' and spends most of the run-time of any film he watches obsessing over pixels. He doesn't even know what the words 'aesthetic' and 'dramatic' mean and barely notices the story line in the films he watches. He replaces the battery in his remote control four or five times a year because he uses the backup and freeze-frame features extensively while watching films rich in 'special effects.'
.the iMac did more to jumpstart widespread adoption of USB than anything else
Windows 98 did more to jumpstart widespread adoption of USB than anything else. It was a 'niche' thing with miniscule sales of USB peripherals and a weird header on the motherboard until Windows 98 came out supporting it.
Oh, and Apple had it earlier. It was like ADB or anything else back then that most people ignored.
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The content-rich computers of today are completely different to what we had years ago. With the early PCs, anything interesting you could get it to do was something you made it do yourself. I used to write games to play on my programmable calculator (a TI SR-56, I was too poor to afford an HP). In today's world, there isn't a place for interpreted BASIC programming, let alone peek and poke assembly language.
(please, let's not make this a 'both ways up hill to school' joke)
But there are still probably bored kids with programmable calculators out there. Even geeky ones who write programs to factor numbers to their primes while sitting in a boring 'study hall.'
I attended an 'experimental school' from fourth to sixth grade, back in 1967-70 (aprox.). It was an 'unstructured' 'classroom without walls' approach. We were using all the latest techniques, and the SRA learning modules. There was a great science cart with all kinds of stuff to experiment with. I got into electronics about that time, though mostly from my own exposure and exploration at home.
What they found out over a few years time was that the average performance of the pupils was about the same. But, looking closer, they discovered that motivated kids were learning MORE and the average kid was learning LESS. I remember spending long classroom hours making clay log cabins and such. The experience set me back severely in some areas but raced me forward in others. Within a few years of the time I attended the school, walls and much more structure had been added. It was viewed a failure.
I wish, in a way, that I had been given a regular education, though it's always hard to say what difference it might have made.
Isn't Intuit the company caught modifying people's hard drive boot sectors recently, and introducing spyware?
There are certainly hard, well-documented instances of Steve Jobs sinning against his fellow man. Going way, back, i.e. to the instance where Wozniak helped him (performed the whole task, really) by optimizing some hardware for Atari. Jobs received a $5000 bonus from Atari for the task, but then told Woz that he got $700 and gave him a 'half' amount of $350.
No, you get the feeling from Microsoft that they just roll on like a column of amoral tanks over their opponents, whereas Jobs' actions make him seem like a targeted, deliberate agent for the secret police.
And in the 1980s, when Microsoft was beating their opponents in the marketplace with over- (and under-) handed business deals, Apple was running opponents out of business (i.e. the whole Apple II clone industry) in the courtroom.
Joe Sixpack's weird brother Nester still watches film classics on his old 19" RCA console set and enjoys them. He understands the concept of an aesthetic distance, and the dramatic quality of the film matters to him more than the quality of the reproduction.
Joe Sixpack's cousin Elmer, on the other hand is constantly obsessing over 'aliasing' and 'pixel size' and spends most of the run-time of any film he watches obsessing over pixels. He doesn't even know what the words 'aesthetic' and 'dramatic' mean and barely notices the story line in the films he watches. He replaces the battery in his remote control four or five times a year because he uses the backup and freeze-frame features extensively while watching films rich in 'special effects.'
.the iMac did more to jumpstart widespread adoption of USB than anything else Windows 98 did more to jumpstart widespread adoption of USB than anything else. It was a 'niche' thing with miniscule sales of USB peripherals and a weird header on the motherboard until Windows 98 came out supporting it. Oh, and Apple had it earlier. It was like ADB or anything else back then that most people ignored.