The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Watch David Pogue's video. It's pretty amazing. Screw Radiohead, we'll be ordering one (well, 2 for one)

I just read "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson. This laptop could be the real life version of that book's "Young Lady's Primer". I'm tempted to order one, too...

That's great. I hope it catches on. What a cool machine for kids!

That book was excellent. The software and hardware in the Primer was a *bit* more advanced than what we have...
-bill

How about for poor kids in this country once in a while. Nice program though, buy one and send one to a child that could never afford a computer. Plus the technology for it's operation is awesome! They really took all of the issues of third world countries in to account.
Also, my un-trusting side worries about "if" the free computers actually gets in to the hands of a needy child. There are so many greedy piles of shit in this world.
Other than that, cool little computer and a great gesture.

Other cool stuff not mentioned in the video or article is that it ships with music-making software and 20MB of creative commons or similar free compressed music built in. With a whole bunch more on the server.

check it out

$400 is £200. I would definitely buy one of these if they'd sell them in the UK. Sadly, the nearest I can get is an eeePC, which is runs hot, has a rubbish battery life, and seems pretty fragile too.

I think the 'show source code' is one of the best features. I started out being interested in computers writing basic programs on dos, BBC micro and commodore 64 machines, mainly by copying them from books or examples from BBSes. This gives people the ability to grow their own code, rather than just wait for binary handouts.

I actually agree with BLT. I hope OLPC gets distributed to kids here. I'm very concerned about the growing divide in the USA, and a system which is designed from the ground up to teach kids how to actually modify the system is a very good thing.

The reason I'm a software engineer today was that I had ready access to a Commodore 64 growing up. The C64 boots up into a programming environment. Today's kids never really encounter anything like that unless they happen to take a class in college, and by then it's often too late for them to really understand what's going on. Even for those who don't intend to become software engineers when they grow up, having at least basic programming and logical reasoning skills will be very necessary to remain competitive in the global economy.

I'm pretty sure that any system that runs on Linux has the ability to be altered by the user. Not that I'm an expert on that kind of thing - my computer teacher told me that.

You might want to mention a sometimes overlooked technology known as ROM to your computer teacher.

obscurity wrote:You might want to mention a sometimes overlooked technology known as ROM to your computer teacher.

And compilers.

fluffy wrote:The reason I'm a software engineer today was that I had ready access to a Commodore 64 growing up.

Yeah, I'm with you. I sometimes reflect how different my life would be if I hadn't had a sinclair spectrum as a kid. I think that the biggest disservice MS has done to the IT industry (and god knows they've done plenty) is the lack of a built-in, easily accessed and fully documented programing environment in windows (and no, qbasic doesn't quite cut it :) ).

roymond wrote:

obscurity wrote:You might want to mention a sometimes overlooked technology known as ROM to your computer teacher.

And compilers.

Compilers are for wusses! :)

Yeah, man, REAL MEN write raw machine code in hex editors.

Well, they do.

jolly roger wrote:I'm pretty sure that any system that runs on Linux has the ability to be altered by the user.

Yes, Linux-based systems come with everything kids need to learn how to program, what with C/C++ being such an easy language to learn and Emacs being such an intuitive environment and so on.

It's a good thing so many computers ship with Linux on them! And that for those that don't, Linux is so easy to get up and running!

Also, having a Python-based environment which puts all the Python stuff RIGHT THERE is a lot easier for kids to pick up than, say, GTK. or whatever.

fluffy wrote: Also, having a Python-based environment which puts all the Python stuff RIGHT THERE is a lot easier for kids to pick up than, say, GTK. or whatever.

This is spot on. Learn by doing. Doing requires access. And RTFM for ctrl-X ctrl-C isn't access.

I started on the Apple II+ and learned "machine language" because Applesoft Basic was too slow for hi res graphics. I used the 3 pages at the end of the Reference Manual to learn the (IIRC) 16 commands for moving bytes around. Compilers seemed silly: why would you learn something called "C" and then buy a program that could turn "C" into machine language? Why not just learn the machine language?

Now that I'm older, of course, getting things done so I can go home to my family feels more important than poking through details so I know how things actually work. But the former is called "phoning it in" and the latter is called "learning." And all the adults around me feel like computers "useful" only if they facilitate the former.

Mostess wrote:Compilers seemed silly: why would you learn something called "C" and then buy a program that could turn "C" into machine language? Why not just learn the machine language?

So, maintaining the machine language equivalent of a half million lines of source code is something you do on a regular basis? (bug fixes, new releases, added or enhanced functionality, etc.)

Not to mention collaborating with off-shore developers, vendors and client resources...

I think Mostess was referring to his point of view when he was a kid and not, say, doing professional software development. I have to admit that when I was a fledgling programmer I had silly notions like that too.

fluffy wrote:I think Mostess was referring to his point of view when he was a kid and not, say, doing professional software development. I have to admit that when I was a fledgling programmer I had silly notions like that too.

I didn't mean to be, well, mean. It had as much tongue in cheek as my initial response (though it's still an issue). But I didn't use the tongue-in-cheek emoticon -)

roymond wrote:

Mostess wrote:Compilers seemed silly: why would you learn something called "C" and then buy a program that could turn "C" into machine language? Why not just learn the machine language?

So, maintaining the machine language equivalent of a half million lines of source code is something you do on a regular basis? (bug fixes, new releases, added or enhanced functionality, etc.)

Not to mention collaborating with off-shore developers, vendors and client resources...

Actually, I have no idea how a person keeps track of so much C, really. I dropped the whole hobby soon after learning about compiled languages and didn't have to program a lick of code until after college. And I soon discovered that I can keep about a small utility's worth of code straight before I start to go crazy. The hardest was the C++ library I built to run experiments for my dissertation. I commented those files and named everything so meticulously just so I wouldn't lose track. Last I heard they were still using them.

People who do this stuff for a living, and make all this stuff work, amaze me. Like romantic era composers, really.

You learn to navigate a codebase like you learn to navigate a city. If you come in fresh you're usually lost and take a lot of wrong turns and go down one-way streets the wrong way, but after a while you start to get familiar with things, and a few months later people start asking you for directions and you can't remember <em>not</em> being familiar with everything.

fluffy wrote:You learn to navigate a codebase like you learn to navigate a city. If you come in fresh you're usually lost and take a lot of wrong turns and go down one-way streets the wrong way, but after a while you start to get familiar with things, and a few months later people start asking you for directions and you can't remember <em>not</em> being familiar with everything.

I like boobies! And cake. Cake is good too. Mmmmm, chocolate cake. But mostly boobies.

fluffy wrote:You learn to navigate a codebase like you learn to navigate a city. If you come in fresh you're usually lost and take a lot of wrong turns and go down one-way streets the wrong way, but after a while you start to get familiar with things, and a few months later people start asking you for directions and you can't remember <em>not</em> being familiar with everything.

That's awesome insight. But don't forget that this city exists in a highly non-Euclidean, multidimensional space. And that it can only be indirectly experienced using a symbolic description that is unidimensional and linear. To me it's more like being a blind man at the art gallery.

And to bring this all back to the topic at hand, a light portable laptop that easily toggles between showing you the appilcation UI and the application code is like a computer Rosetta stone for kids. Our own public schools should be buying these things left and right. Because the only way you're going to learn to navigate those big cities (or in my case, small towns) is by spending a few thousand hours practicing for fun.