I have a small nitpick with the video you shared: unfortunately that one and most others on YouTube are “talkie” CD versions which replaced the amazing MIDI music with rather uninspired symphonized CD tracks. Here’s a different longplay with the MIDI soundtrack:
I worked tech support for gateway way back in the day.
The reset programming for the AnyKey was a very common call, many people didn’t even know they had an AnyKey keyboard and would accidentally remap keys.
The one with Bob's computer is a bit less clear. It seems the orange Martian falls in love with an Apple II(e?) and beams back in to bring it a rose.
> For young children, what's the developmental impact?
Kids get to practice talking about and describing what's silly about the behavior they see in the vignette. In the process, children usually end up properly categorizing various Earth objects, gaining valuable experience points which they will later exchange for increased attack and magic-conjuring abilities.
Additionally, the kids learn coping strategies to deal with the idea that creatures can teleport without warning to any location in the show and are never, ever noticed by any of the characters on the show. IIRC these characters scared the ever-living bejeezus out of a lot of kids.
Most important HN edit I've ever made: correct "everlasting bejeezus" to "ever-living bejeezus"
It's a harmless bit. The joke (if I remember correctly) is that these two creatures are aliens that pop up and don't know what the thing in front of them is. For children (and adults) it is silly because, of course, we know what a computer is – we've seen one dozens of hundreds of times! Compound that confusion with a silly way of speaking to reaffirm that they're not from earth and it makes you giggle.
As for the developmental impact, I think it's quite positive. Sesame Street has been and continues to be a great source of knowledge and useful lessons & morals for children. Adding in some silly situations like this helps keep them engaged and develop their sense of humor.
It doesn't show the year; but assuming this was about 1980, home computers were only just starting to appear - many kids wouldn't have seen them; and you've just told taught them computers do what you tell them to do, and not by themselves and also told them what the flashing thing is.
For Sesame street that's more than enough for a little sketch.
(And that the computer guy fixes everything....)
The machine depicted in the clip is an Apple IIe, which first came out in 1983. But this might not be a 1983 model, because the monitor depicted with the machine is the ColorMonitor IIe, which came out in 1985. Because it's a computer used on a set for a TV show, it's possibly a loan machine, perhaps from Apple themselves, so it was likely supplied as a new computer + new monitor combination. So I'd hazard a guess and say this setup is from 1985 or later.
If we take my previous assumption further, the Platinum IIe was released in 1987, which came with a numerical keypad built in, and looks distinctly different from the IIe. Even though this Youtube clip is 240p, you can distinctly see that there is no "divide" in the keyboard, so this is definitely not a Platinum IIe.
I would say this machine was manufactured between 1985 and 1987.
watched these as a kid, and was highly impacted for some reason by the "yep" aliens over much other sesame street content I believe because they were sort of dropped into a random situation and had to suss out how everything worked.
It doesn’t seem to exactly fit your description but Python Challenge (http://www.pythonchallenge.com/) has been incredibly fun and rewarding for me back in the day.
It’s a series of riddles that are meant to be solved using the python language. It’s really old now but I’m hoping that some library specific riddles are still relevant. Apart from those few, most of them should be language agnostic as well.
I’ve always wanted to create a similar thing to replicate the experience in JS but never gotten around to it.
Edit: oh also completely agree with most of the recommendations here. Particularly with TIS-100, Factorio and Human Resource Machine.
I can second the Synacor challenge. After writing the VM and completing the challenge, I ended up writing my own assembler and small compiler for it. Very fun.
React-Redux complements React in some great ways. It has been my state storage of choice from the beginning. IMO, it would be better to start react with it rather than changing habits later. The go-to tutorial series is here: https://egghead.io/courses/getting-started-with-redux
And definitely use typescript if you value good code quality (and your sanity). The advanced type system and compile time type checking is really a boon to the JS ecosystem. https://www.typescriptlang.org
Most popular libraries these days either include their own typescript definitions, or the definitions are available vie @types (it is as easy as npm install --save-dev @types/library-name)
If on the off chance that no typings are available, you just write a simple namespace declaration (usually a one liner) and start using the library right away, albeit without smart code sensing / completion. See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22842389/how-to-import-a...
It may be obvious for electric and electronics engineers, but thank you for introducing me to this concept. Through Wikipedia, I found some very interesting applications. 1-bit camera ( http://dsp.rice.edu/cscamera ) particularly.
It is not at all obvious how compressive sensing works! Even if you have a background in signal processing or linear algebra. Most people approach linear algebra to solve over-determined systems of equations, not under-determined systems. But it turns out you can validly pose the problem if you have some a priori knowledge of the structure of your signal.
Actually, the camera uses a single pixel, not a single bit. The measurements from pixel are from a 16-bit ADC so we get pretty good grayscale information. There are some single bit compressive sensing implementations, often used for radar where the SNR is low.
There's even a startup that is building commercial implementations of single pixel cameras. We work with the Rice researchers you linked to. http://www.inviewcorp.com/
Whitespace can matter, but ; counts as a newline and you can have any whitespace inside an expression that you want. Typically you'll write something like:
some_function( with, lots,
of args )
but you can also use that flexibility to make your source code look like a badass fucking fractal too.
