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“This is not the computer for you”

samhenri.gold

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Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#361

Post by carlosjobim »

orbital-decay wrote: post #354
carlosjobim wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows have also always required a lot of tinkering and trouble shooting to make things work in a pleasant way. But for Linux, the creative software simply isn't there in many cases for a kid to start learning. Unless it's programming, which is not everybody's talent. A kid tinkering with any kind of creative software learns and absorbs important skills which they can build on later if they want to. These things are…

Perhaps I wasn't clear, I'm not saying kids rush to install Linux to run creative software, they're perfectly fine with Windows. I'm saying that nowadays Linux is another cool thing to try, as a father of one of those tinkerers. There's no way in hell he wants a Mac because it's so limited. Same thing about my niece, she's into electronic music since 14, and the only way she got into music making was pirating a ton o…

> I genuinely mean no offence, but you sound as an old serious man when talking about useful skills. Kids and teens are not doing this for their careers, they're doing this for fun.

Yes, but depending on what you put in front of your kids, they're going to get different experiences when doing things for fun and curiosity. So why not help them a little on the way with the right tools and right toys? They'll find a way to get into the weeds and explore their curiosity one way or the other - isn't it much better that they learn about music or audio producing, or photo editing, digital art, or 3D modeling, instead of learning about how to fix the Windows registry or change a configuration file?

A kid will make a spreadsheet about dinosaurs if they only get to play with an office computer. Parents can help them by giving them something better to play with.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#362

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

bigyabai wrote: post #81
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprisingly enough you don’t need Linux to learn about computers. You know that Macs have terminal?

The default Mac terminal environment is the Weetabix of UNIX-likes. You need GNU coreutils to do pretty much anything.

Wow so you mean you need to actually run brew to install core-utils!!! The inhumanity!!!

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#363

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

bigyabai wrote: post #86
hollerith wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name one thing lacking in the utilities included with MacOS (which come from BSD).

The overwhelming majority of UNIX-like software isn't designed for BSD runtimes, to name one.

And guess how many people care?

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#364

Post by opan »

Ancapistani wrote: post #344
mr_briggs wrote: post #151

> A Chromebook’s ceiling is made of web browser, and the things you run into are not the edges of computing but the edges of a product category designed to save you from yourself. I'm in the same boat as the author; I cut my teeth on a hand-me-down 2005 eMac, then a hand-me-down 2008 Macbook, before finally getting my own 2011 iMac. I think this is overly harsh on Chromebooks given they belong to the cheaper end of t…

I went through a two-year period where I didn't have a decent job and couldn't afford a computer of any kind for myself. I ended up spending some time volunteering for a local non-profit, and they gave me an "old laptop" they had in storage. This was in ~2005. It was a Sony Vaio, and the only thing I really remember about the hardware/specs is that it had a physical scroll widget under the touchpad on the edge of the…

> realized that it had been broken for almost two weeks. I'd used that computer every day and hadn't needed to use a mouse even once.

I had a similar experience on a smaller scale a few weeks ago. I keep an extra keyboard of my preferred model (Pinky4) in a backpack to take on the go with me, but I only have one pointing device I really like (Ploopy Classic Trackball), so I pack up my one and only as needed. I'd gotten home, started using my computer, and an hour or two passed before I reached for the trackball and noticed it wasn't there. It was still in my backpack. I've got Sway keybinds to jump between my most-used programs instantly, and use a lot of terminal stuff as well. I can definitely imagine if I were on a low-end machine I'd go even longer without noticing.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#366

Post by kristianp »

This is a great reaction to those people who said things like: "If the phrase "Java app" is in your vocabulary this laptop probably isn't for you." [1], in response to someone who said "Large Java apps like Android Studio are not good at managing 8gb of RAM". Kids and poor students are totally gonna run Android Studio slowly on these. A year ago 8GB was the min requirement [2].

As others say, most disadvantaged kids won't be buying one of these, it will be a 2nd hand windows machine. Probably with 8GB of RAM and they'll be hounded by popups telling them that their machine is no longer supported by windows 10, or trying to run windows 11 on them. Bring on a new generation of linux users. Many lucky or industrious ones will get a Neo though.

Maybe the sales of the Neos will turn back the clock on minimum system requirements. I can see dev shops having a couple of them around for user testing. Maybe the Adobe resident Creative Cloud app will start to suck less (probably not). I'm interested to see how Mac OS market share will track with the release of the Neo. I've even bought some Apple shares for the first time.

My experience with running some things I "shouldn't have", was running software like Povray on my 486sx (which has no working FPU). Being able to pirate software by copying a floppy was a good way to learn professional tools back in the days before everyone had a modem. For me that included Word Perfect 5.1 and Turbo C 2.0 that I didn't upgrade for a long time. Then again I regret not upgrading the 486sx a lot sooner. There's still a window to pirate software, but many non-cloud versions are getting too old to run on current OSs now. Lots of open source dev tools now of course.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346858

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20250311194741/https://developer...

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#367

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

gjm11 wrote: post #278
PaulRobinson wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned to code on my school's BBC Micro. [0] 8-bit. 16KiB of RAM. BASIC as the programming language. 640x256 resolution in 8 colours. I could make that thing sing in an hour. It was hard to get it to do much, but then the difficulty was the fun thing. By the time we got to the early 2000s and I could buy something with more RAM, CPU and storage than I could ever reasonably max out for the problems I was interested…

It was worse than you remember. You could have 640x256 in monochrome , or 320x256 with 4 colours, or 160x256 with 16 colours (which IIRC was actually 8 distinct colours plus 8 flashing versions of them). The game Elite did something extremely evil and clever: it was actually able to switch between modes partway through each frame, so that it could display higher-resolution wireframe graphics in the upper part of the…

Switching modes like that was common practice on the Amstrad CPC (which used the same 6845 video chip), but as time went on, people also learned how to change the base address of screen RAM part way through each frame. This gave you super-smooth hardware scrolling for the main game area while still retaining a static score display. Unfortunately it came too late in the machine's history to be used for more than a handful of games, but demo coders used it extensively (and still do).

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#368

Post by autoexec »

nine_k wrote: post #340
mr_briggs wrote: post #151

> A Chromebook’s ceiling is made of web browser, and the things you run into are not the edges of computing but the edges of a product category designed to save you from yourself. I'm in the same boat as the author; I cut my teeth on a hand-me-down 2005 eMac, then a hand-me-down 2008 Macbook, before finally getting my own 2011 iMac. I think this is overly harsh on Chromebooks given they belong to the cheaper end of t…

A kid looking for the best bang for the carefully saved buck would buy a used machine off eBay, for less than $599, and more capable. An M1 MBP 2021 with 16GB would cost about this much; an M1 Macbook Air, or an M1 Mac Mini with 16 GB would cost half as much. A ton of beefy, perfectly Linux-ready used laptops can be had for under $350. So this is only for the kids who are obsessed not just with computers, but brand-n…

It's for kids and parents who bought into marketing and thinks that they need a apple product to be an artist or to be cool and not nerdy but can't afford an apple computer with decent specs.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#369

Post by genthree »

randallsquared wrote: post #334
genthree wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a computer nerd who started on DOS on IIRC a 286, all the Windowses (OK not quite all, though my first job did expose me to a couple NT versions and 2K in addition to nearly-all the home versions I upgraded through on my own) and various Linuces (Gentoo as my primary OS, even, for like... five years, LOL) These days there are two things I use my "real" non-server computers for in my personal life: 1) Media piracy…

You can't even see this whole comment on an iPhone, let alone the immediate contextual thread that is necessary for framing it. That sounds flippant, but it's the visceral reaction I have to trying to do everything on iOS (iPads are a little better than iPhone in this regard, but still have the "everything through a keyhole" feeling). That said, tiny viewports are not really the main problem, since obviously a modern…

[dead]

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#370

Post by pentagrama »

mr_briggs wrote: post #151

> A Chromebook’s ceiling is made of web browser, and the things you run into are not the edges of computing but the edges of a product category designed to save you from yourself. I'm in the same boat as the author; I cut my teeth on a hand-me-down 2005 eMac, then a hand-me-down 2008 Macbook, before finally getting my own 2011 iMac. I think this is overly harsh on Chromebooks given they belong to the cheaper end of t…

And Chromebooks aren't only a web browser, are only an Android web browser.

I used one and it has the android play store to install apps, thank god FF at least supports extensions, but many apps lack features of the desktop counterparts, the layouts are designed only for mobile and on desktop looks terrible (including FF android).

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