An excellent method if you don't mind damaging the books. Not so good if you are borrowing books (which is technically piracy anyway) or if you just want to keep the original books in good condition, perhaps for resale in later years.

Which is why those of us outside the US grind our teeth when we have to use the 'wrong' spelling for functions like SetColor() .

Using / for options pre-dates CP/M . DEC used it on many of their operating systems to signify options. I used it this way in RSTS/E on a PDP-11 in high school, on TOPS-10 on a DEC-10 at uni and on VMS on a VAX-750.

Imagine the fun of supporting scripts (well, batch files) when SWITCHCHAR was in the other position. IBM was wise to discourage it.

If MS wanted to make an ARM Win7 they would do what Apple did when they shifted from the 68k to the PowerPC. The new Mac OS was compiled for the PPC but old 68k applications ran in a 68k emulator. Likewise, MS would compile Windows itself as ARM code (they already have hardware abstraction layers designed for MIPS, PPC, etc back in the 1990's). Old applications would run in an x86 emulator. Most application spend a lot of time waiting for events or inside system calls (which is in native ARM code), so performance would still be okay (except maybe for video apps).

Even better, I read an article about 8 years ago where DEC Alpha code was being run on an x86 system. Each small piece of Alpha code currently being run was compiled JIT and then saved back into the binary file. Over time the entire application was converted piecemeal into an x86 binary. The final binary ran almost as fast as a natively compiled application.

Both linked articles talk of exponential growth. Any statistician knows that nothing we can measure is exponential except as an approximation in the early stages. Sooner or later limiting factors will turn it into an S curve. A classic example is rabbit populations. When first introduced they have little or no limits and breed 'like rabbits'. Then as the population builds up the number of predators also builds up (more rabbits means more food for foxes which means more baby foxes) and the food supply is no longer enough. More predators and not enough food limits the number of rabbits.

Same with Wikipedia. In the beginning there was nothing and a lot of people with only 2 facts to their credit. They added those facts and were left with nothing more to contribute. Late comers have found their own 2 facts have already been added by someone else. Hence the S curve shown in the pretty graph in the second link.

In the early days WP was criticised for being amateurish. So they tried to clean up their act by requiring verifiability from a respected source instead of a truth that can't be verified by anyone else. Sadly this gives the cold shoulder to true experts unless they happen to have something in a respected publication.

Also, they now try to be more professional in the style used. In the early days it was an uncritical rush to add information without worrying about grammar, consistency, neatness, etc. Now they try to organise things better. It takes time to learn this style. You may have contributed articles to a school newspaper but it takes a lot more professionalism to submit something to a prestigious science magazine (which may reject articles based on spelling mistakes). I personally see many edits on WP that look like they were written by a second grader - spelling mistakes, awful grammar, basic facts wrong. Some I patch up with better grammar and some I revert if they are beyond help. It takes time to learn how to write at a semi-professional level - time that many people are not prepared to spend. Of course, WP still needs to clean up a lot articles written during the land grab of the early years.

Any club has people who want to dominate and have the time to make it their life crusade. A single dominator easily swamps the effects of 10 or more reasonable contributors because they don't want to make it their own life crusade to topple that dominator. We also get people who insist on doing things their way - like leaving out the 'u' in 'colour' or using model year for cars (which is the only way to talk about cars for Americans but confuses everybody else). This is human nature. I've seen it in every club and church I've been in. It's a way of feeling important without all the hard work of being a real expert. But it's only bad if it's used to exclude others. For myself, my passion is old Toyota cars. I fell important when I can confidently answer questions to help someone fix their 30/40/50 year old car. But as soon as I deny someone else the opportunity to provide that help then I have abused my knowledge. Sadly, that too is human nature.

Don't forget the IBM 5100 portable computer in 1975. Or the Apollo guidance computer - surely a contender for the most travelled computer of the 1960's. Or the Voyager computer - surely the most travelled computer ever.

Donna Shirley was the manager for the first Rover project and then later became manager for most of the other Mars projects. Since women were very rare in NASA at the time, she initiated a competition among high schools to name it after a female explorer. She details all this in her book "Managing Martians".

Depends on the course. If they are doing a computing course then, as you said, they should be learning general techniques, not a specific language.

But if they are doing astronomy then you teach them how to use the tools relevant to astronomy (Forth in this example). An astronomer doesn't necessarily have to be a stellar programmer.

Back in mid 1998 I was tossing up between the IBM Thinkpad 110 and the Libretto 100CT. The Thinkpad 110 was released in 1995, so it was a bit old but they were cheap in 1998. 486SX-33, internal harddisk, PCMCIA ports and an inbuilt modem caused journalists to love it. Similar size to a large pack of cigarettes. http://www.basterfield.com/pc110/brochures.htm But I went for the newer Libretto and used it for many years on overseas trips. Pentium 133, internal hard disk, SVGA, sound. Similar size to a paperback book. The only downside was the collection of accessories I had to take with me - external CD reader, charger, mouse, modem card, ethernet card, CF adapter, etc. Both could take Windows 95. I've also used 286 class DOS based portables similar in size to the current netbooks. I used it on overseas trips with both a development environment (vi, Borland C and a cross compiler) for EFT terminals and also various bank environment simulators so I could demonstrate EFT terminals to our prospective clients completely in a self contained environment. In a single briefcase I had a complete travelling kit for going to any client, demonstrating and even customising our products.

Simulating button pushing by lifting/dropping the entire screen is a neat trick - kudos. Pity it can't work for multi-touch. I'd imagine it would also have trouble trying to show fine lines (like roads on maps) because our fingers can tell the difference between pressure on the whole finger tip and pressure on a small part. Still a good technique though.

The Apple patent says that the area under the touch screen could be filled by air but has no mention of the HW explicitly changing the shape. Instead it relies on gliding motions putting only slight pressure on the screen (and hence deforming the screen only slightly). But the user would push much harder for typing and pointing operations and would therefore feel the slight ridges between each air cell. The ridges are always in the same place but rely on how hard the user pushes for whether they are felt or not. Whereas this topic is talking about the HW actively changing the surface of the display but inflating the air cells.