Thread: Gone quiet here
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Old July 3rd 17, 07:15 PM posted to sci.space.station
Jeff Findley[_6_]
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Posts: 2,307
Default Gone quiet here

In article ,
says...

The thing is you tell young uns about radio stations being received from
across the planet and they wave their I phones at you and sneer.


Exactly. The complexity and cost has been moved away from the user's
radio and moved to cell towers, fiber, and communications satellites.
Consequently, the cost of entry into the global telecommunications
"system" has gone *way* down.

To me there is still something magical to know that the same photons that
left the aerial in New Zealand have reached a bit of wire in your garden and
you can hear the results. I guess I'm just being too romantic.


Perhaps, but there is still a need to maintain these systems. They're
often the only means of communication during major disasters (e.g.
earthquake, hurricane, and etc.) which quite often takes down the
communications systems needed for cell phones.

With regard to computers, well when I could see I buit the zX81 kit and it
worked. That is a pretty amazing thing as is learning to actually write
software on it. Next came the Spectrum, and a Memotech, a sam and an Atari 8
bit etc. but really the poor folk these days do not get so excited about
computers as they never get their hands dirty unless they learn it at
school. there is something good about learing it at your own speed.


This is somewhat true. But there are things happening like FIRST
robotics competitions and cool cheap computers (with actual GPIO
interfaces!). I've got a Raspberry Pi, a Pi 2, two Pi 3, and a Pi Zero.
All of them cost $25 to $30 except for the Zero which sells for a mere
$5. This credit card sized single board computer is aimed squarely at
education, but it's also a hardware hacker's dream because of its
computing power, wealth of hardware interfaces, and its low cost.

The best part is that it's a non-profit so any money they make goes
towards building Raspberry Pi computers to send overseas to areas of the
world where computers are too expensive for schools to buy.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/

it all went weird when C came along with its abstract concepts. I didmanage
to get a compiler for many older languages running on the old Spectrum.
C Modulo 2 Forth, Fortran, and many others. Python seems to be the thing
for the home right now, but I seem to have a hard time with syntax now I
cannot see as the indenting and all the extra quotes, and other symbols are
hard to rember.


I went from Basic to Fortran 77 to C to C++ with a bit of Java at one
point.

C++ is still a huge industry standard (that's what I use every day at
work). Python is a great "scripting" language and is supposed to be
easy for new users to learn. But in general I understand jumping from
language to language can be a pain due to different required syntax.

Jeff
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