[SLL] Great day for linux OLPC

[Glenn Stone]

On Thu, Jan 04, 2007 at 08:15:44PM +0000, Wendell Cochran wrote:
>Each drill, he reported, began slowly as pupils punched out (say) '9
>x 12 =' . . .  & cried out the answer displayed.  But very soon they
>found wetware faster than fingers -- & each strove to be the first
>to shout '108!'.  One by one the calculators were abandoned,
>voluntarily, with no loss in learning.
>
>At that point the symposium died by consensus.

Hmph.  

Actually, what got drilled into us when we learned calculus was, we were
required to do the integration the "hard way" for the first week or two,
showing our work using limit theory, etc... and after that and forevermore
thereafter we were encouraged to do it the easy way.  

The point of spending that brief time doing it the hard way was to drill
into our brains the *theory* behind how you get from (massively complex
thingy here) to (the final answer).  

That was high school; ironically, when we got to college, we learned the
basics of programming first, and it was only as a junior, already committed
to the track, that we got our very first theory class.  What they did teach
us first before we really got our heads around sorts and queues and stacks
was the *psychology* of the whole thing... which is something I still use
today.  (The theory bits only get used in very high level, large scale
architecture kinds of things.)

ObLinux: Ironically, Linux was invented precisely because Linus didn't have
anything he could really *use* at home to do his programming labs... I'm
going to assume it would be relatively easy to add compilers and such to an
OLPC box if they aren't already there, so once the kids got beyond simple
tool use and started thinking, "Now, how does that work?"  they could
explore with the tool they already had...  

ObLinux the second:  Doesn't one of the boxes Fry's puts Linspire on have
something similar to the Geode processor used in these things? 

-- Glenn, remembering things from the distant past...