This. Mod parent up, a lot. Don't blame the technology if people don't teach interesting stuff with it.

Wow. The 1990 me could have made a lot more than silly BASIC dungeon crawlers and bloopy ProTracker mods with today's tech. If I had a time machine, I would send back a He-Man backpack filled with stuff like:

• An iPad, with lots of fun editors, music, art, other creative apps (and probably They Might Be Giant's Flood).
• A Raspberry Pi, battery pack, and I/O dongles.
• An Arduino or two, with some shields, sensors, motors, etc.
• A Dungeon Master's Guide, headphones, some Xanth and Discworld books, and other reasons to beat me up :-)

I use apps like Pythonista and Textastic on a regular basis. They work great. Pythonista even has built-in Python docs, tutorials, and their own Xcode SDK wrappers. I also cart around a Raspberry Pi with a WiFi dongle, New Trent rechargeable battery, and a nice little shell script to create a network on boot, sync my git repos, etc. If I can't do it on the iPad directly, I can bootup the Raspi and connect via SSH/SFTP/HTTP easily.

If schools are just doing the same old thing with iPads, or drinking the snake-oil-salesmen-turned-courseware-vendor Kool Aid, don't blame the tools.

For all of you who felt this news like a punch in the face, find solace in your fellow geeks; let's meet after work, wherever we are today, and raise a glass for 'taco and the /. gang.

I found slashdot on my first day of work, in my first real programming job back in college, and have been bathing in its pale green light ever since. This calls for beer!

osu-neko++

I recently attended a Jimbo lecture. During the Q&A bit, I asked him what challenges he thought Wikipedia might face into the future, as the number of articles approaches millions (I was asking from a data design, semantic web perspective - the number was hyperbolical). His response was something along the lines of "I hope it never reaches a million articles."

What. The. Frak.

I understand the desire to keep things reasonable, but new stuff happens/is created/is experienced every day. To me, this view is hopelessly short-sighted. What's the point of Wikipedia 100 years from now if we delete everything that any statistically insignificant portion of the population thinks is no longer notable, especially without a valid historical context? Shouldn't we instead focus on solving the inherent design problems that stem from using a 19th century taxonomic model in a paper paradigm? Seriously dude, it's a freaking database, not a book. Yes, MediaWiki+MySQL has limits, but nothing compared to a physical book.

In my view, this whole situation implies that Wikipedia is just operating at the fundamentally wrong level of abstraction.

Please mod parent up. A lot. For me, the whole point of /. is having one place to go for salient, well-curated geek news. The more more fluff, the less value - simple as that.

-foo