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Comment Re:Bury (Score 1) 550

In addition to the crazy-short development deadline, my understanding is that the Pac-Man cart was released on a 4Kb capacity cart, whereas the later Ms. Pac-Man was on a 8Kb cart. You can do more cleaver things if your code can be bigger, so you can get a more accurate and detailed port.

Submission + - Localized (visual) programming language for kids?

jimshatt writes: I want my kids to play around with programming languages. To teach them basic concepts like loops and subroutines and the likes. My 8-year old daughter in particular. I've tried Scratch and some other visual languages, but I think she might be turned off by the English language. Having to learn English as well as a programming language at the same time might be just a little too much.
I'd really like to have a programming language that is easy to learn, and localized or localizable. Preferably cross-platform, or browser-based, so she can show her work at school (Windows) as well as work on in at home (Debian Linux).
By the way, she speaks Dutch and Danish, so preferably one of those languages (but if it's localizable I can translate it myself).

Any suggestions?

Comment Re:E-350's (Score 1) 285

"Man I thought I was a night owl."

Hairy, ya got me worried, man. I see way too many posts of yours made at times like 4AM. I hope you get enough sleep. If something bad happened to you, where'd I get my quotidian skewering of all that is lame, clueless, devious, egotistical, and/or self-serving?

Comment Re:It's about money, as usual (Score 1) 186

Yeah, there's about one hundred vehicles in Ann Arbor right now running a multi-manufacturer pilot test of the car-to-car communications. Many of the cars have warning systems that use the info passed between cars to alert driver of a danger. This is useful whether or not we end up with self-driving cars. So, yes, both manufacturers the DOTs around the world want to hang onto the spectrum. It could help save lives, improve traffic flow and road utilization, and give manufacturers a set of new features they can sell to improve their profits. How horrible!

We can debate if this is the best use of spectrum. I think it is a pretty good use, and it will need to be protected and used in a coordinated way to make these vehicle applications feasible and effective. Maybe you'd rather have faster Facebook updates or see better video on demand on your smartphone or something? Would you think that's a lot more important than avoiding a massive pile up in a white-out snowstorm or fog? Manufacturers won't announce dates or specific models yet, but it could be fairly close. But it won't happen if poor spectrum management makes it technically infeasible.

Comment This would be bad for connected vehicles. (Score 1) 40

The new spectrum allocation for unlicensed use around 5.9 GHz would conflict with previously-planned allocation for connected vehicle (aka "V2V") technology. The extent of potential interference between these differing uses is not yet understood. I hope this WiFi plan does not blow it for the auto and traffic safety industries.

See http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20130221/AUTO01/302210334/1148/auto01/Auto-industry-worried-FCC-decision-open-Wi-Fi-spectrum-could-hinder-technology for more.

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