[ale] On the Hardware Note... (was: Bringing HW to Joe's tomorrow)

[Wandered Inn]

You've got the right idea.  You've got to teach them early. :)

My machine is a dual boot Linux/win95.  It spends 95% of the time in
Linux. My daughter (7, (that's her age, not her name..) likes playing
solitaire, xmahjongg and backgammon, under Linux.  She's been playing a
bit of chess on a regular chess board, but she's not quite got the hang
of it.  Looks like that's next for the old Linux box.

She has her own login and knows how to use lilo, login and fire up X. 
She's already recognized that we don't have near the problems with Linux
that we do with Windows.

She knows daddy's a programmer and understands that a computer runs on
'programs.'  She told me the other day that 'That Mr. Gates (she's got
her manners) should take lessons from the guy who wrote Linux.  She then
asked me who wrote Linux.  I gave her a short answer that Linus started
it, but that just about the rest of the world has been helping.  She
said: "Cool, maybe I can write a program for Linux."  I've created a
monster...

"Amy J. Ayers" wrote:
> 
> Eric and I will be having a little girl in May and she will be
> a linux user from an early age, no doubt. I'm sure her first
> experiences with linux will be of the GUI variety, as a user
> of the open-source educational software I'll no doubt write in
> my copious free time.
> 
> I'm predicting that by the time she begins to write she will also
> start learning basic unix commands for file manipulation, perhaps.
> I don't know much about child development yet, so pardon me if I'm
> a bit off in my predictions.
> 
> At some turning point, maybe 9 or 10 (Eric, how old were you when
> you were your own bbs sysop?), she'll be given sudo access, at
> which point we'll show her basic system administration and begin
> educating her about security as well ("If Mommy cracks your password
> one more time, you're grounded").
> 
> I'm thinking that by age 12 or 13 she'll want to learn to compile
> her own development kernel, with custom hacks Daddy made to make
> her new Pentium 68 clone use its virtual reality instruction set
> properly.
> 
> Dan, is this about the timeline you were thinking of for you
> daughter?
> 
> -Amy
> 
> <Dave Brooks wrote:
> < My sisters use it to browse the web and play games and what ever else
> <> little girls like to do.
> <
> <They might surprise you.
> <
> <> The thing is, the harddrive is kind of lacking, obviously, and with
> <> Windows98 (No!  I refuse to teach 12-year-olds UNIX <G>)
> <
> <My fourteen-year-old daughter has taught herself to access and get
> <around in my linux box. Even managed to shoulder surf my root password
> <and figured out how to restart ipmasquerading when I have left it down
> <after using ax-25. Of course, she was 13 at the time :-) Now if she
> <would only figure out how to rewrite the ipfwadm script so I can have
> <the ipmasq out the modem and ether, plus the ax25 for me.
> <
> <--
> <Chris Ness
> <mailto:cness at gloster.vivid.net               All jobs are equally easy to
> <http://www.vivid.net/~gloster               the person not doing the
> <work.
> <                                                           Holt's Law

--
Until later: Geoffrey		esoteric at denali.atlnet.com

You mean you paid MONEY for Service Pack '98????