[OT] Child development, was:Re: [plug] wow.. hell got a bit cooler today...

[Chris Caston]

On Fri, 2005-07-01 at 20:11, Gavin Chester wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-07-01 at 16:34 +0800, Adam Davin wrote:
> > On Fri, 1 Jul 2005 16:21:57 +0800 (WST)
> > Shayne O'Neill <shayne at guild.murdoch.edu.au> wrote:
> > 
> > > 
> > > Thats why they absolutely kill us with there learning curves. Total
> > > lack of fear, along with no wrong misconceptions to saddle them down.
> > > Even I still get nervous everytiime I have to reconfigure a package I
> > > havent dealt with before. I figure kids just do it.
> 
> -snip -
> 
> 	... on this recent swing in the topic to talk about educational games:
> 
> Is it a possible for someone to point to a list, or find a way to create
> a list, of games and educational apps divided into high resource users
> and low resource users?  I may not be looking hard enough, but it seems
> that few gpl apps state the minimum hardware requirements.  
>   
> I ask because in my small home Terminal Server (LTS) network my kids
> have fallen in love with supertux (I know, that's not very educational, hehe),
> but just one session uses up to 40% of my CPU and two sessions end up
> being "veryniced".  Other examples are tuxpaint and tuxtype that suck
> up heaps of CPU or network resources such that very few concurrent 
> sessions are possible.  Another educational app, Childsplay
> (python-based) is even greedier than supertux and I find that only gcompris is 
> well behaved, using only around 5-10% CPU - possibly because it's well
> written in C++.   
> 
> My trouble is that I have only a PII 450MHz as my LTS.  I'm not able or 
> wanting to upgrade yet because I believe in wringing all one can out of
> old hardware instead of dumping it.  My hardware is "antiquated" yet 
> happily runs a few concurrent sessions of OO.o and many productivity apps,
> while many of the educational and gaming apps make it struggle (I know, 
> that's explained by rate of screen refreshes and all that - but I want
> to know which would be good for my h/ware before the kids get hooked into it). 
> 
> (PS:  I posted this twice to the K12LTSP list, but both times it met with
> deafening silence.  Couldn't figure that 'cause if anyone would be interested
> those people should have :-/ )
> 
> Gavin
> 

Well you could always setup a OpenMosix cluster.
> _______________________________________________
> PLUG discussion list: plug at plug.org.au
> http://www.plug.org.au/mailman/listinfo/plug
> Committee e-mail: committee at plug.linux.org.au
>