The Parallax Propeller is an 8-core microcontroller (with each core named a "cog") with very small amounts of memory on each core. The Propeller can fairly easily interface with PS/2 keyboards and mice, VGA monitors, and RCA Composite screens. You can code on it with ASM, a language with an onboard-interpreter called SPIN, some free but proprietary-and-slightly-limited C compilers, a tiny implementation of Basic that works, or a very robust Forth.
Give it to the kids in your life, and they too will be able to write "Ian Rules!" :)
Why stop at the American Midwest? I'm fairly certain that there's no "inherent virtue" in Africa. Oh, and let's add China too. India maybe. Everyone should just come to America. Yes, you Canadians playing peekaboo in the corner too.
The Midwest and its way of life depended on a technology and an industry that is not anymore experiencing growth. This could happen in coastal cities tomorrow too. Trying to adapt your town to meet the needs of a modern economy is, I think, a much nobler cause than letting it wither and die because it lacks some sort of abstract "inherent virtue" thing.
I'm pretty sure there's no "inherent virtue" in having kids anymore either. I mean think about it, kids increase net environmental impact by humans. :|
> Why stop at the American Midwest? I'm fairly certain that there's no "inherent virtue" in Africa. Oh, and let's add China too. India maybe. Everyone should just come to America. Yes, you Canadians playing peekaboo in the corner too.
D'oh, I upvoted your comment before I read the whole thing. After spending time in provincial China, yes, I agree that the people living with miserable quality of life on subsistence farming should move to Chengdu, Shanghai, Beijing, Taipei, Hong Kong, or one of the developed places in the rest of Asia or the West. Haven't been to Africa but I imagine it's similar.
Most of the valuable and useful things happening in the world right now depend more on working with other people than natural resources or lots of space. If you like it as a preference, go right ahead for it. But speaking in terms of individual success and progress, or as advancement as humanity/society-at-large, yes, generally speaking we ought to migrate to where there's other smart people we can work with. So I agree with the first part of your semi-sarcastic comment because I missed the sarcasm, though I disagree a bit with the rest of it.
You could have saved keystrokes by saying "I totally believe in the Capitalist version of Marx's Socialism-Wins theory. All socialist things will fall! MUAHAHAHA"
Please, approach the debate with some sensibility or an eye to analysis. This isn't a debate of ideologies, this isn't Marx vs. Smith, this is real people trying to get real health care, and not being able to.
When I was laid off a few months ago, I was told to call a Plan Administrator if I wanted to continue my health insurance plan out of my own pocket. Of course I wanted to - I've a family with 3 kids. When I called the woman she said she would send me the forms. The cost, she said, was around $600 per month for my Family Plan. "And let me give you some advice", she added. "If you are even one day late with a payment, your insurance will be canceled." "Don't be late with a payment."
That $600 is right around my total Unemployment Compensation. So yeah, I've little interest in debates on ideologies. I doubt any of the windbags above would be interested either if they had to decide between providing healthcare insurance for their family or paying their mortgage.
Well don't lose hope. Look into a high deductible catastrophic policy that will cover you for the god forbid large events. That deduction requires you pay out of pocket for wellness care, visits for shots, strep throat, etc., but if you can buy one for a year out of savings it may be a cheaper option.
Never underestimate the kindness of strangers and don't be ashamed to let your doctors know your situation. Offer to trade services, presumably your reading HN so you can work with computers. I know a good number of doctors who get a lot of severely discounted home maintenance services from folks who got free or reduced payments for care.
But above all don't ever hesitate to sacrifice the mortgage payment for the sake of your children. They come first. You can swallow your pride and keep the mortgage and bank wolves away from the door for a good period of months by knowing a bit about the law.
I agree with you about ideology. This "healthcare" debate is really about a lot of issues boiling over in our society and it's not really a debate or discussion. There seems to be no common sense left.
Thanks man. Things are looking up considerably now. I was quite hesitant to comment on what had become a rather emotional issue for me. At any rate, I really appreciated your thoughtful response.
Our intro to computing class involves learning about gates, an academic architecture (LC-3), programming in bytecode, programming in assembler, learning how we assemble the bytecode into assembler, then learning C. Our final project is a basic compiler from C to ASM given an AST.
I think it's a great way to learn about the way a machine works in one semester :)
This sounds great, you learn how a machine could be programmable, and how existing programmable machines operate; but the question mostly under dispute here is whether C brings out the nature of 'programmability' -- i.e. whether it brings out very clearly the purpose that all these strata serve, namely general programmability. --And thus whether a C-only environment is missing something essential. Myself I would think it does, and that for example Lisp and Haskell and ML help bring this out more clearly, and so, in another way, do the happening scripting languages. Your experience with with assembler seems to me more important than experience with C -- though of course everyone has to learn C. In my own case, for what it's worth -- I wouldn't think everyone else would need this -- it's only when I saw that a properly assemble machine could compile Haskell that I really grew to respect the machine...
Now I'm no expert on this but, wouldn't it be a security risk if any old citizen could inquire about the credentials of another person? Recent homegrown terrorists come to mind.
That said, he could just be a phony who invented degrees. The White House really should say something about this.
Perhaps what most interests me about the article is not the dichotomy of the two cultures, but in the area between them.
I'm a college sophomore studying EE in a notable university, but I spent most of my free time (and much of my homework time!) coding in high school. I had been using Linux from middle school, so my way of learning coding was picking up K&R's C book, learning the ropes, and starting to code on Linux. Linux really was an incredible atmosphere to learn to code in, and I learned more than just C. The ability to look at the source of other applications, to submit bugfixes for projects, and the incredible POSIX standard that makes C and other languages just ... whistle ... was great.
That said, I later abandoned Linux (several reasons: time, laptop incompatibility, much more time spent fiddling with radios, I "sold out", whatever) for day-to-day use. I still code and do it on Windows, but it's not the same. Now there are a lot of things of the "Windows culture" that I really like -- a shiny GUI for everyone, a huge smattering of applications which means that if I don't want to write it I don't have to, not having to deal with finding obscure driver patches so that my out-of-date hardware can stay supported, package management clashes, etc. But when I want to code, and I do so intermittently, I feel the intellectual gap.
I want that great POSIX interface, but more importantly I want an atmosphere that works around the code that I write. And here's where I feel the gap the most -- what about those of us who really enjoy a satisfying, intellectual coding experience, the "Unix culture" (and I don't code often enough to want to want to grind out consumer software), but still want the benefits felt for other users of the OS somewhat appreciably, and still want this end-user directed drag-and-drop "Windows culture".
I've heard that the Mac bridges the gap, but I'm an impoverished student, and spending $1000 on a Mac laptop is something in my semi-distant future.
If you want a {star}nix, try FreeBSD if you've got a day or two to set it up. If not, maybe PC-BSD. PC-BSD is based on FreeBSD but integrates KDE. The reason I like FreeBSD is that it just seems to have more tools available, like sysctl to view/set various options like computer temperature, turning the reading light on/off (on my used Thinkpad T43). Compared to Linux, I like the core OS more, but there are more programs available for Linux. FreeBSD can run Linux programs through a compatibility layer. Actually, thats how I'm running the Adobe Flash plugin, but it is a little slow.
A second point: if you think there aren't many games on Linux, wait until you try FreeBSD - there are even less. There's minesweeper and a few similar, but thats about it.
FreeBSD users seem to think that Slackware is the most similar Linux distro. Anyway, FreeBSD might be worth a try for you!
Hardware also seems to have excellent support built in.
Maybe I'll try it; Slackware was my first and still favorite distro. The big problem is I'm on dial-up and can't download much - and too many linux resellers are apparently rip-off artists, since at least half the CDs I've bought by mail won't work. That's one reason I bought the new Ubuntu 8.10 DVD; unfortunately I don't like it much more than Vista, which isn't much. I haven't got a Slackware distro that will work on my current computer, the 10.1 setup apparently can't handle SATA disks.
The Apple student discount isn't "hefty." They are a little less than 10%. Typically $100 off laptops less than $1500, $150 off $1500-$2000 and $200 off $2000. Late summer they usually throw in an iPod for free. It's not a bad deal overall, but refurbs are the way to go if you need a real discount.
http://www.parallax.com/tabid/407/Default.aspx
The Parallax Propeller is an 8-core microcontroller (with each core named a "cog") with very small amounts of memory on each core. The Propeller can fairly easily interface with PS/2 keyboards and mice, VGA monitors, and RCA Composite screens. You can code on it with ASM, a language with an onboard-interpreter called SPIN, some free but proprietary-and-slightly-limited C compilers, a tiny implementation of Basic that works, or a very robust Forth.
Give it to the kids in your life, and they too will be able to write "Ian Rules!" :)