More importantly, OLPC should be putting software into the hands of these kids, not just a license to use a copy of some software owned by someone else.
-- Note: I am not a sock puppet, comments to that effect are not needed.
Never attribute to incompetence what can me more easily explained by malice.
As has been repeatedly pointed out, this is no small feat of incompetence. The idea that IT staff for the Office of the President of the United States could be unaware of existing retention solutions for MS Exchange, that they switchrf from a system that _had_ a retention solution for one that they knew _did not_ have one, and that nobody could come up with a better solution than having underlings manually sort emails containing _sensitive_ information, all because of incompetence is a pretty big stretch.
To make a point, if I hacked your Slashdot account to find your real identity, looked up your physical address, went to your house, rang the doorbell, and when you opened it punched you in the face, then claimed that it was just an accidental muscle spasm, would you believe it?
True, but the open source community can do something... try to create a perfect open-source clone of Windows. Wouldn't a clone of Windows be imperfect by it's very nature?
Sure, I'll replace the most important app for 1000 people with " couple of Linux projects which at least claim to support that." Those "couple of Linux projects" were for interfacing with Exchange. If you just want messaging and calendaring, not specifically Exchange integration, then there are plenty of very good Linux clients you can choose from. You can even get Lotus Notes as a native Linux app these days.
If applications like Open Office fail to open an Office document even 1% of the time then they're useless if that document is really something you need to open. Gimp still isn't a satisfactory replacement for Photoshop. Sound in flash still doesn't work correctly out of the box on Ubuntu systems, there's no mp3 support by default, nor does Quicktime really work. There's still not a decent movie player. Your OpenOffice point is valid, and a serious concern to most businesses. Your Gimp point is only valid to select groups that need Photoshop, who would ideally be using Macs by now anyway. But the rest of your points here are largely a non-issue from a business perspective. No sound on flash? Can't want movies at your desk? Unless you're in a specialized industry where those tasks are part of your job, you probably can't do that anyway.
If the Linux community wants to advance they're going to have to give up on some of their ideals and actually provide what people are looking for, which is a stable operating systems that run applications people actually want to use with a consistent look and feel everywhere. Unfortunately, beyond advocacy, there is little the Linux community can do to bring proprietary applications to Linux. As for consistent L&F, all GTK apps mostly look the same, and all QT apps mostly look the same. Compare that to Windows where the latest MS Office and IE don't look anything like the rest of XP, even coming form the same vendor. Obviously L&F fidelity isn't as big a requirement as you make it out to be.
Besides, Outlook is still the best email/productivity/calendaring application out there. Nothing I've seen on UNIX even comes close, especially when I need to share data with others. I've found Evolution to be on-par with Outlook in terms of features. The only think Outlook does better is Exchange integration. Evolution generally has better LDAP and CalDAV integration.
What Microsoft has done in the past is offer to pay for the cost of "upgrading" to Windows. This covered not only the license cost, but also the cost of manual labor, which was always billed at well above the going rate for the location. Basically they say: "If you want to switch your computers to Windows, we'll give you a free license plus give you $100 per PC to cover the cost of labor to install it.", when the labor costs about $1 per PC. Who can pass up such a deal?
n fluid dynamics, drag (sometimes called resistance) is the force that resists the movement of a solid object through a fluid (a liquid or gas). Drag is made up of friction forces, which act parallel to the object's surface plus pressure forces, which act in a direction perpendicular to the object's surface. It's the last part of that that applies to ram pressure. There is very little in the way of friction involved in heating the space shuttle, it's tiles are quire brittle and couldn't handle much in the way of friction.
I think the sub-notebook market is going to be an opening that can break the catch-22. Since they aren't meant to be full-featured laptop replacement, but more like internet appliances, nobody is expecting it to run Windows software or PC accessories. Once people overcome the "it should work like my Windows PC" mindset, a lot of the non-technical problems go away. After all, nobody expects shrink-wrapped PC games to run on their blackberry. But once you have many thousands of quite capable Linux laptops running around, accessory and software vendors will naturally want to tap that new market.
You will probably start seeing things marketed as "Asus Eee Compatible", if not necessarily "Linux compatible". You may even see some as "gOS Compatible". From there, it's just a matter of some extra packaging and testing to become "Ubuntu Compatible". Hardware will probably become "Linux Compatible" before software, since it only needs to have kernel support.
Hmm, that makes sense now, I hadn't thought about the differences in gravity and orbital velocity if the center of rotation wasn't also the center of gravity.
What if you had a closed sphere that was non-rotating, but rather inflated like a balloon, using the sun's energy to great a pressure inside the sphere to counter-act gravity? Doing it that way would mean that you don't worry about orbital velocities, and the closer a section is to the sun the more it is pushed out, so it would be self-correcting.
I'm not sure I understand, if you rotated the ring at it's orbital velocity around the sun, wouldn't any given portion of the ring be experiencing free-fall? Wouldn't that remove the stress on the structure?
As for keeping the sun in the middle of it, wouldn't gravity serve to keep any given portion of the ring at a set distance from the center of the sun? I mean, the sun stays in the middle of earth's orbit, why wouldn't it stay in the middle of a ring's orbit?
The ring could be stable if you didn't need to use it's rotation to produce artificial gravity. This would also remove the problem of material strength.
So what, pray tell, are you going to use to collect this material that is spewed out from the Sun at temperatures so high that it's in plasma form? A variation of a Bussard ramjet scoop would work, or any kind of electro-magnetic trap, really.
And I ask again: Are you sure you're in the right place? This is a news site, sci-fi is down the hall. This is Slashdot, which is somewhere between news and sci-fi, usually without quite being either.
Yeah, we can just store the energy in *batteries* during night time! Brilliant! I here by award you the Nobel prize for *genius*. Don't hold back, tell me how you really feel.
You can substitue "battery" with whatever means of energy storage you want, my point was that excess energy could be stored locally for later use (to contrast with my previous suggestion of transportable storage), not that it necessarily has to be stored in chemical cells.
Oh! I see! I thought you were an *idiot* a second ago, but you came up with this *brilliant* idea of turning electricity into *hydrogen* and just carrying it around in, you know, a fucking suitcase. What a brilliant and original idea that *president bush* the genius that *he* is wasn't talking up a few years ago before it turned out to be a totally bullshit idea. Seriously, if your argument has any validity, you don't need to resort to personal attacks when you make it. Yes, Hydrogen gas is a bitch to store, but who said it had to be stored as compressed H2 gas?
Why would you want to use earth material to build a Dyson sphere? The sun spews out massive amounts of material all the time, your Dyson sphere would be made from that. You could even use some advanced electromagnetic of gravitational technologies to coax extra material out if the current expulsion rate is too slow for your liking.
I seem to recall that the sun is only available during the daytime. The sun is available all the time, but sometimes you have issues like your planet getting in the way.
So you definitely need some means to switch the power, transferring from areas that have sunlight at any given moment to those that do not. You can always store the energy as something more transportable. For example, you can use the generated electricity to turn water into Hydrogen, and transport the Hydrogen. Of come up with some kind of artificial photosynthesis that uses solar energy to build hydrocarbons from water and atmospheric CO2.
Or, you can just store the energy in batteries, and use them at night.
Slashdot Mirror
More importantly, OLPC should be putting software into the hands of these kids, not just a license to use a copy of some software owned by someone else.
--
Note: I am not a sock puppet, comments to that effect are not needed.
My point wasn't they made mistakes, it's that there was an awful lot of planning required to make those mistakes.
Never attribute to incompetence what can me more easily explained by malice.
As has been repeatedly pointed out, this is no small feat of incompetence. The idea that IT staff for the Office of the President of the United States could be unaware of existing retention solutions for MS Exchange, that they switchrf from a system that _had_ a retention solution for one that they knew _did not_ have one, and that nobody could come up with a better solution than having underlings manually sort emails containing _sensitive_ information, all because of incompetence is a pretty big stretch.
To make a point, if I hacked your Slashdot account to find your real identity, looked up your physical address, went to your house, rang the doorbell, and when you opened it punched you in the face, then claimed that it was just an accidental muscle spasm, would you believe it?
Linux was not based on BSD nor SystemV. Unlike FreeBSD, it was not derived from any Unix code.
Obligatory link:
http://xkcd.com/327/
What Microsoft has done in the past is offer to pay for the cost of "upgrading" to Windows. This covered not only the license cost, but also the cost of manual labor, which was always billed at well above the going rate for the location. Basically they say: "If you want to switch your computers to Windows, we'll give you a free license plus give you $100 per PC to cover the cost of labor to install it.", when the labor costs about $1 per PC. Who can pass up such a deal?
Please explain what Java and Python have in common other than the fact that they are languages and one is also a platform?
The both run on the JVM.This is slashdot, so someone has to point it out. The shuttle experiences heating from ram pressure, not friction.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_shuttle_thermal_protection_system
I think the sub-notebook market is going to be an opening that can break the catch-22. Since they aren't meant to be full-featured laptop replacement, but more like internet appliances, nobody is expecting it to run Windows software or PC accessories. Once people overcome the "it should work like my Windows PC" mindset, a lot of the non-technical problems go away. After all, nobody expects shrink-wrapped PC games to run on their blackberry. But once you have many thousands of quite capable Linux laptops running around, accessory and software vendors will naturally want to tap that new market.
You will probably start seeing things marketed as "Asus Eee Compatible", if not necessarily "Linux compatible". You may even see some as "gOS Compatible". From there, it's just a matter of some extra packaging and testing to become "Ubuntu Compatible". Hardware will probably become "Linux Compatible" before software, since it only needs to have kernel support.
Hmm, that makes sense now, I hadn't thought about the differences in gravity and orbital velocity if the center of rotation wasn't also the center of gravity.
What if you had a closed sphere that was non-rotating, but rather inflated like a balloon, using the sun's energy to great a pressure inside the sphere to counter-act gravity? Doing it that way would mean that you don't worry about orbital velocities, and the closer a section is to the sun the more it is pushed out, so it would be self-correcting.
I'm not sure I understand, if you rotated the ring at it's orbital velocity around the sun, wouldn't any given portion of the ring be experiencing free-fall? Wouldn't that remove the stress on the structure?
As for keeping the sun in the middle of it, wouldn't gravity serve to keep any given portion of the ring at a set distance from the center of the sun? I mean, the sun stays in the middle of earth's orbit, why wouldn't it stay in the middle of a ring's orbit?
The ring could be stable if you didn't need to use it's rotation to produce artificial gravity. This would also remove the problem of material strength.
You can substitue "battery" with whatever means of energy storage you want, my point was that excess energy could be stored locally for later use (to contrast with my previous suggestion of transportable storage), not that it necessarily has to be stored in chemical cells. Oh! I see! I thought you were an *idiot* a second ago, but you came up with this *brilliant* idea of turning electricity into *hydrogen* and just carrying it around in, you know, a fucking suitcase. What a brilliant and original idea that *president bush* the genius that *he* is wasn't talking up a few years ago before it turned out to be a totally bullshit idea. Seriously, if your argument has any validity, you don't need to resort to personal attacks when you make it. Yes, Hydrogen gas is a bitch to store, but who said it had to be stored as compressed H2 gas?
I can't believe I made such a simple mistake.
Still, you could do 2 square mile plants, and you'd only need 2116 sites. Or 941 sites for a 3 square mile plant.
(Hopefully my math is better this time around).
You could always just build 92 different plants, at 1 square mile each, all over the country.
Why would you want to use earth material to build a Dyson sphere? The sun spews out massive amounts of material all the time, your Dyson sphere would be made from that. You could even use some advanced electromagnetic of gravitational technologies to coax extra material out if the current expulsion rate is too slow for your liking.
Or, you can just store the energy in batteries, and use them at night.
Or maybe Darkstar?