That's not too bad for the added $65. The mini keyboard looks nicer than the ~$20 FAVI ones[1] I usually use.
At first I thought they'd figured out a way to add a screen. That would be great. But it looks like you need to supply your own.
I work with students in Uganda and it's hard to beat what you get from a $200 netbook. Much faster processor than a pi, plus the screen is integrated. You can't do GPIO stuff like you can with a pi though, so there are trade-offs. Twice the price of this, too.
I work for an NGO that has IT programs in Rwanda. I would love to see some package similar to this that would somehow integrate a screen with Pi. I just love Pi as a concept and I really want to include it in our programs.
As it stands now, we're in the same boat as you. Second hand laptops / netbooks are a far cheaper and simpler solution for us than getting PIs and figuring out what to do with screens, keyboards, etc...
You (and parent commenter, and others) should get together and have a website for "This is the stuff we need, and why we need it".
You'd have a suggestion of a package of RPi, keyboard, screen, etc. You'd give suggestions for what would be good, and what to avoid. You give a total cost, and the amount you can provide to that. You then ask people to donate.
You maybe put the faces of children on your request.
I can't speak for him, but since he didn't answer, I'll tell you what we do in Rwanda.
We educate homeless illiterate kids. In Rwanda, getting your way around a computer is a respected skill and none of those kids have ever touched a computer before.
We are trying to give them basic computer skills such as: finding your way online, e-mail usage, searching, file management...there is a ton of simple things like that. We all take them for granted because we use computers every day of our lives.
Imagine that you're illiterate and you see this shiny thing that looks like a magic box filled with random symbols. You heard about it before, you heard older men say that it's really powerful and that everybody respects individuals who can operate The Computer. So now you're in front of it. You touched the keyboard for the first time. It's filled with weird symbols, and this shinny thing has weird unearthly colors and glyphs that you cannot make sense of. It's unknown and above all, really frightening.
After a couple of months, when their literacy becomes "good enough" and when they can figure out how to do basic computer tasks on their own (or figure out a solution from online sources) we seek funding to send them to boarding school so they get off the streets.
This is a difficult transition for those kids, they completely lack self-respect and will be surrounded with kids from rich families that have had a massive advantage over them. But now, they consider themselves a Computer User. A person that can figure out the powerful machine, so their feeling of self-worth rises dramatically and they fare much, much better in the new school environment.
And that's it. Nothing really innovative, just teaching homeless street kids some computer skills so they can feel better about themselves and find their way in school.
Play games, have fun, use them as aides in study, as a diary/calendars, some basic tinkering skills, with ad-hoc wifi even micro networks for voice and chat - that is off the top of my head. You will be surprised how little computing power and stable internet you need to be a full digital citizen of the world.
A phone line, 100mhz pentium and 8mb of RAM did it for me in 1998 :)
Which is also a bit closer to the nature of `>=>` chaining. I actually really like the _Just descent since it makes some of the failure modes for this lens very explicit.
And then it should always be said that the lens has setter properties that the `>=>` chain does not.
> First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two organized bodies of men; this is called politics.
> Instead we are mired in the innards of the machine micromanaging absolutely everything with incredible verbosity.
This is one area where Haskell really shines. If you want the machine to be able to do what you want without micromanaging how, than you need a way to formally specify what you mean in an unambiguous and verifiable way. Yet it also needs to be flexible enough to cross domain boundaries (pure code, IO, DSLs, etc).
Category theory has been doing exactly that in the math world for decades, and taking advantage of that in the programming world seems like a clear way forward.
The current state of the industry seems like team of medieval masons (programmers) struggling to build a cathedral with no knowledge of physics beyond anecdotes that have been passed down the generations (design patterns), while a crowd of peasants watch from all angles to see if the whole thing will fall down (unit tests).
Sure, you might be able to build something that way, but it's not exactly science, is it?
This is the kind of talk from Haskell folks that I find incredibly annoying. Where's Haskell's Squeak? Where's Haskell's Lisp Machine? It doesn't take much poking around to find out that non-trivial interactive programming like sophisticated games and user interfaces is still cutting very edge stuff.
I'm sorry, but you're upset because folks are passionate about a language that brings new perspective, and maybe is not exactly as useful in some areas as existing solutions? This is exactly the kind of attachment Bret warns about.
I don't think I expressed attachment to any particular solution or approach - I simply pointed out an extremely large aspect of modern software engineering where Haskell's supposed benefits aren't all that clear. So who's attached?
Are you trying to compare interactive software, one of the dominant forms of programs and widely used by billions of people every day, to formula 1 cars, an engineering niche created solely for a set of artificial racing criteria?
A better analogy would be being mad that the Tesla can't drive on the interstate.
"sophisticated games" pretty specifically implies contemporary 3d gaming, which is not a useful criteria for exploring a fundamental paradigm shift in programming.
The fact that you think a lisp machine is an "extremely large aspect of modern software engineering" certainly makes me feel that you are expressing an attachment to a particular approach.
We have many beautiful cathedrals don't we? So it is a bonafide fact that you can build something with the current state of industry. As far as the analogy goes I would alter it in that the peasants aren't simply watching, but poking the masonry with cudgels. Lastly, scientific methods of building aren't necessarily better, while they follow an order that is rooted in a doctrine, I can quickly think of all those scientifically built rockets that exploded on launch. To play devil's advocate, I'm not convinced that a scientific method is a better one than the current haphazard one we have in place for development.
> Do common people in the US really identify with being a patriot?
Patriotism originally meant you were willing to sacrifice something for your country. Presumably the smallest measure of that sacrifice would be spending your time developing well-founded opinions about how the country should operate. (Just take a look at the federalist papers: 85 long, dense articles arguing in favor of the minutest details of the constitution. And the expectation was that people would actually read them!)
Unfortunately patriotism doesn't mean sacrifice anymore. It means something akin to a fingers-in-the-ear, uncritical fanboyism. Just plaster everything with flags and soaring eagles and call it good. It's not sacrificing everything (like Snowden did), it's something you do instead of sacrificing _anything_, even the time it would take to educate yourself on what your country is doing. And as a bonus you get to flaunt that very ignorance as an additional point of pride.
And yeah, common people here in the US definitely do embrace it to a nauseating degree.
> Patriotism originally meant you were willing to sacrifice something for your country
Yes. That's why Snowden is a patriot, not fat bald men sitting around in a climate-controlled building in Utah, listening to mp3s of private conversations (and posting them to Youtube -- we're certainly not very far from this).
Those NSA characters don't sacrifice anything. They probably look like Newman of Seinfeld fame. Calling them "heroes" is hilarious (as well as Orwellian, but we're used to that).
We wrote our RF radio mesh coordinator software in Haskell, and it's been a great success. Working with binary data formats (various building control protocols) in Haskell is the kind of thing that spoils you forever.
The one issue I've run into is that ghc can't cross compile. If you want to run your code on ARM, you have to compile an ARM version of ghc (QEMU comes in handy here).
Every statement by Clapper has mentioned repeatedly how the program is lawful and falls under Section 702 of the FISA act approved by congress etc., etc.
But that assertion is meaningless because as a couple of brave senators have let us know (Wyden, Udall), the very court that's supposed to oversee activities under FISA, the FISC (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court) has found the NSAs activities to be unconstitutional[1]. The response to this finding wasn't reform, but to classify the findings themselves.
Small suggestion: In the case of selecting an item that's not the topmost, it would be nice if it was a one-step process rather than two (you need to first highlight with ctrl+letter, then activate with Enter).
Maybe a repeated press of ctrl+letter could actually activate the selection. Or maybe pressing and holding ctrl+letter for a short while.
The reason why I'm currently making users explicitly use Enter/Return to click is because this allows them to use modifiers while clicking, so Ctrl+Enter for right click, Cmd+Enter on a link to open it in a new tab, etc. However, I think Ctrl+letter might be interesting, but might be confusing on multi-letter shortcuts.
- a case w/integrated speaker
- a keyboard/trackpad combo
- a wifi dongle
- nice manual
That's not too bad for the added $65. The mini keyboard looks nicer than the ~$20 FAVI ones[1] I usually use.
At first I thought they'd figured out a way to add a screen. That would be great. But it looks like you need to supply your own.
I work with students in Uganda and it's hard to beat what you get from a $200 netbook. Much faster processor than a pi, plus the screen is integrated. You can't do GPIO stuff like you can with a pi though, so there are trade-offs. Twice the price of this, too.
Looks like a great project to me!
[1]: http://www.amazon.com/FE01-BL-Wireless-Keyboard-Mouse-Touchp...