Have a look at the Parallax Propeller for video output, apperently they're great for it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJcbxrdErkY

Hi Adam,

"I think it's hard to compare countries like South Africa and Holland."

I agree, what comes to mind is the old saying: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. The text book system is working well enough as far as I can see.

X.

I just took my 7 year old out of a school that made a similar 'enormously bold move', yeah, and I'm an old time Slashdot nerd.

In the case of my son's school the idea was to replace all the practice material for all the important subjects by similar material on a (custom made) tablet. No writing skills were necessary anymore. Making math exercises is now a matter of guessing, the tablet will immediately respond with correct or false and the kid can go back and fix things.

I love technology and all but I'm seriously worried about what such a 'bold move' will do to my kid's future cognitive abilities. The long term effects of this are unknown. So we took him to another school where they teach according to the (properly debugged) Montessori model.

The kicker is that pilots for this system are going on on 10% of Dutch schools and none of the other parents of the 200 or so affected children seemed to be bothered by this.We'll probably know the results of this experiment in another 5 years.

You got the time frame wrong.
When OS/2 appeared Windows was already in use.
So OS/2 was competing with Windows from the start.

http://www.audioholics.com/news/industry-news/kids-prefer-poor-quality-mp3

(and remember, kids are able to hear frequencies that you can't!)

But surely the biggest use of this technology is not for drinking water but for irrigation? Turning the desert into arable land...

They probably realized they're doing it in the wrong order.

You have to establish a police-state first and *then* you ban porn.

Symantec has probably been hacked by the Chinese too...

"I think this is in error. Perl is less maintainable than other languages, due to the myriad of "correct" was to implement solutions to various problems"

I know myriads of correct wa[y]s to implement solutions in any of the dozen languages I know. Are you saying you know only one?

(this complaint about Perl has never failed to puzzle me)

Ultimately what killed it, and what launched PHP's rocket, was the ease with which the latter could be embedded in HTML code.

It was possible to do that with Perl (Apache::Sandwich), but a bit of a hassle. PHP came standard enabled on most Linux distributions. All you had to do was create a .php file in the right place and you were in business.

If the Perl guys had made that as effortless as with PHP, then Perl would've been the winner right now.

Is your data encrypted or do you trust your friends with everything?

"I am speaking from an American born Chinese working in London"

Let me guess, you're a tapeworm? A brain parasite? A cybernetic implant?

I have nothing against Apple perse, but I have serious issues with the closed nature of their iOS devices and especially how I don't have the ability to control what gets transfered on or off the device. Everything has to go through iTunes or some cloud solution.

Android has no such restricting policies, that's why I'd like to see it 'win'.

I like to try drum kit apps ( I have kids ). But on my Android phone there's a perceivable (and intolerable) lag when you tap the drums with all the apps I tried. On iOS (1st gen iPad) they're all nearly instantaneous.

Ever try anything like that?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not an Apple fan, I'd like Android to win, but not by closing my eyes for its faults.

Possibly. I never had a 'nexus', just the basic Samsung stuff. One problem that I noticed is when running 'drum kit' apps. I have tried some on my Android phone and several on my iPad (1st generation). On the iPad the drums react almost instantaneously. On the androids there's a noticable (and fatal) delay.

Did you ever try anything like that on you nexuses?