Linux for children 4.5 year old 453
You need to keep track of the various options for recording and make them compatible between arecord and lame, and what is coming out of your soundcard. Sometimes trial and error is the best approach...
Sounds almost like trolling to me :-)
Unfortunately I have no references, but I have read about research showing positive effects on coordination, concentration and other skills from computer gaming. In general, computer gaming is a lot better than TV because the computer games are interactive, always demanding responses from the player. I've heard people consume less energy sitting in the sofa in front of the TV than when lying down - that's certainly not true for computer games.
Games are different (and TV are different, too). Yes, I agree that games can be stupidifying people - one of the most common examples are the Windows' Solitaire - office workers all over the world are wasting hours on it every day, can it get more stupid than that? But just go up a minor level from that, to the minesweeper game, and that's already a skill-driven game; to succeed one need to think, fast and logically. Of course, overdoing is never a good thing, but I'm pretty sure that a regular doze of minesweeper a day is good for the mental health.
Hello, Strange things are going on... computers can browse linux shared files, through the local network...
Playing the good old games like "railroad tycoon" or "civilization", one learns (and are encouraged to learn more) about history, business, etc - and in addition, one has to plan and think about strategies. I think such games can help people to develope skills needed to succeed in life, as well.
The "games" quoted above - ubclogo and turtle.py - are actually not games, but programming languages! Real programming games exists too - like the good old crobots, where one actually should write a program for a robot (carrying a gun) using the C language, and then see him fight with other robots. There are several follow-ups to this old game, like erobot, c++robots, gnurobots ...
There are also border-lands between computer gaming and real-life, like the shoot'em'up laser-shooting games where people wear a laser gun and suits with detectors - and by now there are even games where the players are walking around on "quests" in urban landscapes, packed up with cellphones and GPS. Actually, I hope that such reality-based computer games never will outcompete the good old children games.
You do not know? Most home users have only one hard drive. In the old days, most had a floppy drive. Many have CD-ROM drives, usually just...
The crobots genre also have real-life equivalents i.e. in RoboCup football! This concept has been used as a teaching approach at several universities - simply let the students play with Lego (see
The biggest problem with computer games, as I see it, is that far too many of them are violent. I think facination about violence and weapons in an early age is a bad thing - but just as there exists non-violent TV, there for sure also are plenty of non-violent games to choose from.
Grant Edwards FWIW - concerning the newer AM2 platform (s940) CPUs from AMD; AMD64 X2 (Windsor) will use "Pacifica Virtualization" - due to be released around June 2006....the AM2 Single Core variant...
So, my conclution is that some computer games probably are stupidifying, that excessive gaming probably is not a good thing, and that children shouldn't learn to glorify violence - but except for that, I think computer games in general is a good thing, and that when done properly, educational games absolutely does have a place in the general education.
-- Tobias Brox, 68 plus 1¡42'N, 18¡57'E
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