Microsoft wants a piece of Facebook while trying to queer Google-Doubleclick deal while expecting a huge Halo sales payday. Google hints that it wants part of Facebook too. Why? Sun turning into the Sierra Club. Best Buy customers have no clue about HDTV or what it costs although they may want one. Computer Security Institute says the users are the problem. It looks as if we can forget about the Blu-ray/HD-DVD combo disk. Unworkable. Americans losing interest in electronics. Google getting phone patents secretly!
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When I was a kid, I had the tendency to disassemble my toys, the radios, the calculators, the blenders and basically anything that only needed a phillips or a flat screwdriver and wonder how each thing worked.
I still do that though with my cell phone and my computer out of boredom.
Bill Gates takes over the world
What next
Maybe he will have a stake in Apple computer as well ?
What next for the wealthiest little kid in America ?
Reminds me of those 150-project kit-boards that Radio Shack used to sell – and which I bought.
Use the supplied jumper-wires to interconnect the board-mounted components via the spring-terminals, and make working circuits.
All those Heathkit projects to make your own O-scope, shortwave radio, etc…
The kits to etch your own circuit-boards, from mask-patterns printed in electronics magazines…
Why would anyone bother learning any of that stuff, now?
All the components are on ICs, are commodities, and have been for years.
Unless you are in R&D- putting your name on a patent application and/or a paper to be published – you are probably just connecting modules in SPICE.
http://bwrc.eecs.berkeley.edu/Classes/IcBook/SPICE/
Easy… IF you know a kid who might be interested, get them a subscription to make magazine. Their open Arduino platform harkens to the Heath Kits of yesteryear, although I think it is a little hard for the young hacker. Plus the magazine is loaded with very basic tutorial and intro projects on activities like welding and soldering.
Also of course there is the Parallax Basic Stamp devices.
If the kids want to learn how to program, there is Blitz Basic and Dark Basic, although 3d programming is still really hard and requires a foundation in linear algebra. Blitz has the best and easiest support for 2d sprites IMO. Personally I would direct kids away from visual programming languages until they have a solid foundation, Visual studio and LabView come to mind.
The real culprit of all this is the Apple Macintosh computer which removed the very hacker friendly serial port many years ago. Also until OSX required highly propritary SDK for software development. All that after foisting their hardware on kids at school. At least Microsoft remains somewhat open to the entry level programmer with their free visual studio editions, but once again, VS is hard for the programming newbie. Linuxish operating systems are the absolute worst option for beginners.
Only in the last two years or so have the companies marketing hacker friendly devices and kits caught up with recent USB interfaces. There are a whole bunch of easy to use relay devices. But once again, these require a foundation in programming to be useful.
It seems like there would be a market for a simple circut simulator, to teach kids the basics. Instead we have garage band… letting the kids pretend to make their own music.
/end ramble for all the options available if kids were motivated to try
#5
Hush! Or the C++ groupies will act like monkeys and throw turds at you.
Heh, Apple is teaching kids that you only need to know how to blurr wrinkles and zits to make it in the computer market.
#6,
Oh you bring up an excellent option! Head on over to the Borland library museum and get Turbo C++ 3.0 for free! That would be an easy and very fast code and compile environment to learn programming basics. You might have to run it in vmware nowdays though. Oh the magic of just writing all your static structs to disk to save data. Parsers? We didn’t need parsers back in the day.