This has Ig Noble prize written all over it.

Wow, the formatting really got away from me on that, didn't it? I even previewed it. No idea what happened there.

Ditto! This was the answer I gave 16 years ago and it's the same now: https://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=58612&cid=5607536

"When romance fades, something else takes it's place." .. "Senility?" .. "Trust!"

Classic underrated movie!https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/19/08/23/205249/slashdot-asks-whats-your-favorite-underappreciated-movie?utm_source=feedly1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed#

I didn't get in on the game until the C=128 came out. Had the 5-1/4" drive... what was it the 5128? No, that was the power supply... the 1541 was the disk drive.

But my favorite add-on was the Covox Voicemaster -- it did speech synthesis and voice recognition. Horribly. But it was awesome.

So... if someone just spilled a diet sweet tea in a pool, how much would that skew these results? Because I genuinely bet that happens a lot too.

Isn't "rental" literally what they are? I mean, with a service, but still... a short-term on-demand paid-for one. i.e. "rental".

And anyway, I'm not going to feel bad for technology replacing Uber drivers when Uber itself was a "disruptive" technology to replace taxi cabs. I'm glad for innovation that creates real improvements, and I empathize with people who may lose jobs over it... but this seems a bit of a hypocritical sort of wine from a "high-tech" business model which _very recently_ did exactly the same displacement of an older less-techy business model.

Robots still suck at some things -- sewing complex shapes (like teddy bears and backpacks) for example. The cost comparison has to take into account the type of work performed, but as the robotics improve in capability and drop in price more and more things will pass the lowest labor thresholds; it seems hard to believe there's any way around that.

The single most motivating thing for me, personally, was to find real problems to solve and real examples and help on how to solve them. Bonus points for variety and competition and even prizes.

Enter Kaggle -- data mining competitions with an absurd amount of examples, datasets, community posts, forums, curated examples. I really cannot emphasize how much I've learned in this community. Join and try one of the example competitions -- the Titanic one is popular, follow the getting started guides and go from there.

I'm sure there are many other ways, and it may not be for everyone, but this has really been a great resource for me.

I didn't think there was much of a question; the lord of the rings simply had a huge amount more material that was fully assembled by the original author than the Hobbit did. It was one book, with a scattering of notes and addendums, that got stitched and stretched into three epic movies.

It's interesting that they're admitting directorial mayhem at this point, but the direction taken from the outset was overkill and greedy. I'm sure it could have been better, but still, it took a lot to make this mess.

Of course, I'm still going to watch them again. Someday.

I use JuiceSSH on my phone, which is amazingly useful more often than it should be necessary. It falls fairly low on that link, for some reason, so maybe I should check the others out.

puTTY on Windows.

Otherwise I'm connected directly to a linux box and just SSH out from a native command line. I don't tend to boot into X unless really necessary, and then I'm normally just stuck with xterm until I can get out of it.

And I don't know when the last time I had to terminal from an apple product is, so I don't even know any more for that one.

When a building gets built, or a dam, or a pipeline, there's engineers, architects, brick layers, welders, and all sorts of other people involved.

When you do software, "programmers" is just a catch name all that could fit several of those archetypes -- the only thing you have to do to be a programmer is to actually code. But there certainly ARE software "Engineers" -- people whose job it is to make sure that everything the designers and programmers are individually putting together should _work_, and not fall apart, and survive in the actual ecosystem the code is released in.

Just like a good mechanical engineer shouldn't be above picking up a shovel or an acetylene torch now and again, if needed, even if it isn't still their forté, a good software engineer should probably be able to code, but that's not really their core purpose.

And as for "Engineering claims an explicit responsibility to public safety and reliability, even if it doesn’t always deliver"... next time someone fails to steal your identity on the internet, thank a programmer, a software engineer, and probably a computer scientist among others. Next time I don't die driving over a bridge I'll thank a few mechanical and civil engineers, as well as the workers that did their job putting it together.

The best thing out there, designed specifically to address your concern, is the XO laptop by the laptop.org people for their "One Laptop Per Child" campaign: http://laptop.org/en/

Their price is $35 per unit, and they take significant cuts (and some creative solutions to be sure) to get there. They're not exactly readily available, particularly for US schools, but it may be worth talking to them. It's possible these would be enough for you, if you could get hold of them, but I'd consider them pretty under-powered for an applicable middle-school or higher education where there are other options.

The XO is a good data point for what you sacrifice going below the entry Chromebook or hp-11 style laptop, or even an android tablet with a keyboard. Also, it sets the bar at $35 so your hopeful target of $20 seems unlikely; the XO has been around for years and they probably can't go much lower, and you're not likely to get many people competing for this space, at least not for profit. The DIY kits (i.e. raspberry pi) you've already addressed and those are even more expensive. The idea of hooking to an existing TV (with an Android Stick) may have merit, but there's still the price of a mouse, keyboard, and a capable TV in the first place, so the real price is higher.

Anyway, I think you're going to be hard pressed to find better solutions. It's a noble goal, but the industry just isn't there yet, despite good examples of people trying. Hope this helps.

Thus the use of "not obscure" in the quoted description. Thank you for your support.

Eep, I have offended someone with actual skills! The horror.

Putting it on your resume is one thing... heck, I'd hire someone who had legitimate INTERCAL experience on principle.

Still, I ran a few job searches and couldn't find a match... not a single job looking for INTERCAL experience. What has the world come to? You may get more luck on masochism personals (Ashley Madison anyone?): "gwc, into whips, chains, and being forced to code complex algorithms in INTERCAL". Hmmm.

Off to google LIRL now!

R is also only one of several even more obscure languages in that domain, including Julia and Stan... is MAPLE still a thing? Less obscure is MATLAB, and Mathematica... (all platforms as well as languages) they've all got their special strengths as usual.

Swift is more popular than R, yet still obscure compared to the top 10 or so. I don't know how ABAP is still alive.

Prolog, Scheme, Groovy, SCALA... there are lots. Even LISP shows up below R in some lists.

SQL is similarly not obscure in its area, but worth learning and you rarely see it in a list of general programming languages (because it isn't). But the commercial vendors all ship their SQL with strong variants that extend the language and do more common language functions like looping. I speak of PL/SQL, TSQL, and their ilk, which all have a touch of obscurity in the same way R does.

I might recommend targeting obscure libraries or platforms also. CUDA isn't a language so much as an architecture; OpenCV is interesting.

If you're looking for jobs, take those, plug them into a job search engine and see what interests you. Languages tend to correlate with industries fairly well. If you want to work on Genomics, you'll see different languages at the top than if you want to work on Wall Street.

Avoid INTERCAL job postings at all costs.