23 Nov
2007
23 Nov
'07
1:04 p.m.
--- Stroller <classiccmp.org at stellar.eclipse.co.uk>
wrote:
I don't know what you interpret as "knowing
how a
disk drive works",
but it's useful to understand that a hard-drive is a
metal disk which
spins on an unlubricated bearing at 7000rpm. By
counting up the bits
in 100gig demonstrates how small the "ones and
zeros" are on a hard-
drive and how small the tolerances are - hopefully
this will
discourage children from dropping hard-drives by
careless handling!
That explanation is little more then would be found
in a "first look" approach book. Sure, everyone should
know those basics (I'm guessing they're difficult to
avoid). Tony was right. Many books are useless. I've
looked at those (and the diagrams and explanations
you'd see in PC Magazine over the years) and have been
frustrated also. I don't know, some of the earlyish
books on the peecee seemed to be what *I* was looking
for (or needed). It comes down to what an individual
has to know, wants to know, *can* know. It's different
for everybody at least a little. But there's no sense
getting too deep at the outset. But what do I know...
The availability of BASIC on olden personal
computers was undoubtedly
a boon for my generation - you could start out with
'10 print "i was
here" ; 20 goto 10' and work from there, actually
seeing the results
Up through the PS/2's, ~1990 I guess, BASIC was
burned into ROM. Even Win2K comes with QBasic.
And again I'm not making an exclusive case for
peecees here. An 8-bit machine could be a better
choice (could be, don't know for sure).
of your programming on the screen.
IMO the number of teenagers making significant
contributions to Open
Source Software is a testament to this
"availability" theory.
Well there's a huge amount of open source warez out
there. Question is how much of it is quality, and what
portion of that was contributed to by teenagers. And
remember a *teen* is anywhere from 13-19.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Be a better sports nut! Let your teams follow you
with Yahoo Mobile. Try it now.
http://mobile.yahoo.com/sports;_ylt=At9_qDKvtAbMuh1G1SQtBI7ntAcJ