And these are also the reasons my small business uses (and hates) Windows. And I'm thinking about switching people to iMacs, which is anathama to me, but probably an OK business decision.
I do not want to patch things. I do not want to train people (including me). I do not want to sudo get anything. I want a f'ing dumb terminal to talk to our online resources and maybe edit some documents. Put Android on a desktop, port a text editor, and I'll run it.
"Apple and Google just kicked off the first round of their battle for the Internet speedlane subscription bundles. Based on what we've seen so far, Apple is in the lead. It's still early, and this could change, but it looks like Apple is making an all-around smarter bet than Google." I haven't tried out the Google Internet bundle yet. The Apple 'net is decent, but it's so focused on TV rental that it makes it difficult to work with... well, it's a good thing it's only $99/month. It's dang cheap...
That's a fabulous pile of should. Sadly, producing kid-ready products takes a little more work than that.
Only one quibble from you list is that few of the target markets for OLPC had a computer in 1998, and thus it's not a good use case target. The hardware is new, but cheap.
I'm going to guess you don't have kids. Children start chewing on everything in reach at six months, and continue for about a year. It's actually a development milestone, related to learning how to chew and manage solid foods. Which is why having lead in kids products is a terrible engineering decision, one that Slashdot appears to applaud: Lead just wants to be free!
If premium-brand toy manufacturers like Fischer-Price aren't smart enough to not make children's products with LEAD FUCKING PAINT, when can we really expect them to learn? This isn't about user error, this is about toxic, inappropriate materials put in kids toys to save money.
This crackdown is in response to very specific instances of high-end, name brand toy companies coating children's toys with fucking lead fucking paint in 2008. Brand equity, according to perfect market camp, is supposed to prevent this sort of thing. But brand managers care more about quarterly returns than they do about not wrecking the company. Also, it's really hard to tell if a paperclip contains lead. So now we have a government mandate that retailers prove they do not contain lead.
Eventually, kids products will have a better, more secure supply chain as manufacturers of paperclips respond to the new market conditions. Smart paperclip makers will thrive, slow ones will die, and the lead paint people will sell somewhere else. Last time I checked, kids toys were available everywhere and ridiculously cheap. The market will survive this no-more-lead disruption, continue to be compete, and I won't have to worry about this shit.
I think that's right: orgs like the perceived (and maybe real, TBD) low support costs relative to all the other platforms available. The novel form factor is just candy. It suggests that a netbook-format ipad/netbook mashup running iOS might be pretty f'ing popular too.
The sad thing is, with the money they raised, I could have RFPed the job and gotten it built by now. And I'm not a programmer, just a jackass who can write an RFP.
They asked for 10k for an amateur project. Instead they got a big pile of bad-business-plan from the community of people who sent them $180,000.
Judges are human, and Righthaven is a bag of dicks. Righthaven sues their own sources for posting stories that the sources gave to the paper for free. It's entirely likely the judge stayed up late looking for ways to get these people off the hook. Law is not code. It is a human institution subject to human anti-dickhead prejudices.
This usually works in the other direction: Internet freedoms are frequently tested in the court on behalf of creepy child abusers. Maybe we should try to avoid that?
Actually, it's not. The site K8 is co-owned by xnxx, a porn forum. xnxx links traffic from their porn forum to the K8 kids site. All things considered, I'd rather not send my kids to a site pre-populated with people who spend a lot of time chatting about porn. More to the point of the story, these aren't people who care about education, kids, etc. It's all business. Which is fine, but I think I'll stick to pbs.org, thanks.
They know who the kids are because they watch who hangs out at kid sites. And once you leave the kid site and drag that tracking cookie around the web for a while, you can create profiles of the headlines, keywords etc that they gravitate to. Link up with a social network, and you can pin down age, gender, etc. All of this serves to amplify and specialize the pitches that then show up on, say, advertising on the side of school buses. It's a highly weaponized version of a long running battle to fill your kid's brains up with attention grabbing crap. Teachers and parents don't stand a chance.
Time to make Ghostery a required plug in for schools and houses with kids.
Censorship in the West is almost always private-vs-private.
Often, the courts serve as weapon to enforce private interests (see: libel tourism, CDMA takedowns, Wikileaks vs Bank Julius Baer, etc). This is sometimes called Accidental Censorship, but at the end of the day someone always wants this to happen, and the threat to democratic discourse and political minorities is just as real.
TFA suggests that the Mach 10 will be to get some scramjets online, which will then boost to high atmosphere, and then pop out a small second (third?) stage rocket.
Twitter, long described as a "semi-open" platform, whatever that means, will now proceed to become a case study in the difference between actually open (user-owned, peer-to-peer) and not at all open (corporate owned, centralized) in modes of communication.
Slashdot Mirror
And these are also the reasons my small business uses (and hates) Windows. And I'm thinking about switching people to iMacs, which is anathama to me, but probably an OK business decision.
I do not want to patch things. I do not want to train people (including me). I do not want to sudo get anything. I want a f'ing dumb terminal to talk to our online resources and maybe edit some documents. Put Android on a desktop, port a text editor, and I'll run it.
I always assumed those SSIDs were people phishing. I guess I'm reassured to learn that the world is not that uniformly malicious.
They have backorders for 500,000 units and have shipped 1,000,000. If that ain't mass production, what is?
"Apple and Google just kicked off the first round of their battle for the Internet speedlane subscription bundles. Based on what we've seen so far, Apple is in the lead. It's still early, and this could change, but it looks like Apple is making an all-around smarter bet than Google." I haven't tried out the Google Internet bundle yet. The Apple 'net is decent, but it's so focused on TV rental that it makes it difficult to work with... well, it's a good thing it's only $99/month. It's dang cheap...
Yeah, but you get the speakers for free, and the ads are targeted to your demographic, so it's pretty much like it's a feature, right? Riiiight?
best post ever.
I haven't found that my inability to use a slide rule has negatively impacted my career.
That's a fabulous pile of should. Sadly, producing kid-ready products takes a little more work than that.
Only one quibble from you list is that few of the target markets for OLPC had a computer in 1998, and thus it's not a good use case target. The hardware is new, but cheap.
I'm going to guess you don't have kids. Children start chewing on everything in reach at six months, and continue for about a year. It's actually a development milestone, related to learning how to chew and manage solid foods. Which is why having lead in kids products is a terrible engineering decision, one that Slashdot appears to applaud: Lead just wants to be free!
Troll mod? Nice work, Slashdot.
Yeah, lead fucking paint on children's toys. Remember that? Before you call me an idiot, what's you plan?
If premium-brand toy manufacturers like Fischer-Price aren't smart enough to not make children's products with LEAD FUCKING PAINT, when can we really expect them to learn? This isn't about user error, this is about toxic, inappropriate materials put in kids toys to save money.
This crackdown is in response to very specific instances of high-end, name brand toy companies coating children's toys with fucking lead fucking paint in 2008. Brand equity, according to perfect market camp, is supposed to prevent this sort of thing. But brand managers care more about quarterly returns than they do about not wrecking the company. Also, it's really hard to tell if a paperclip contains lead. So now we have a government mandate that retailers prove they do not contain lead.
Eventually, kids products will have a better, more secure supply chain as manufacturers of paperclips respond to the new market conditions. Smart paperclip makers will thrive, slow ones will die, and the lead paint people will sell somewhere else. Last time I checked, kids toys were available everywhere and ridiculously cheap. The market will survive this no-more-lead disruption, continue to be compete, and I won't have to worry about this shit.
"My strike teams ready, but I need a command crew for my shuttle..."
This is why I only pack whiskey for microgravity trips.
I use EtherPad quite a bit, and it's not the feature list. It's good design. More isn't better. Sadly, OO had neither last time I tried to love it.
That must be why Flickr is so unpopular. Wait... no...
Diaspora is a pretty good name. It's easily understood, unambiguous in spelling, but uncommonly used -- perfect.
LibreOffice not so much. I think they should call it Zebra Office.
I think that's right: orgs like the perceived (and maybe real, TBD) low support costs relative to all the other platforms available. The novel form factor is just candy. It suggests that a netbook-format ipad/netbook mashup running iOS might be pretty f'ing popular too.
The sad thing is, with the money they raised, I could have RFPed the job and gotten it built by now. And I'm not a programmer, just a jackass who can write an RFP.
They asked for 10k for an amateur project. Instead they got a big pile of bad-business-plan from the community of people who sent them $180,000.
Judges are human, and Righthaven is a bag of dicks. Righthaven sues their own sources for posting stories that the sources gave to the paper for free. It's entirely likely the judge stayed up late looking for ways to get these people off the hook. Law is not code. It is a human institution subject to human anti-dickhead prejudices.
This usually works in the other direction: Internet freedoms are frequently tested in the court on behalf of creepy child abusers. Maybe we should try to avoid that?
Actually, it's not. The site K8 is co-owned by xnxx, a porn forum. xnxx links traffic from their porn forum to the K8 kids site. All things considered, I'd rather not send my kids to a site pre-populated with people who spend a lot of time chatting about porn. More to the point of the story, these aren't people who care about education, kids, etc. It's all business. Which is fine, but I think I'll stick to pbs.org, thanks.
They know who the kids are because they watch who hangs out at kid sites. And once you leave the kid site and drag that tracking cookie around the web for a while, you can create profiles of the headlines, keywords etc that they gravitate to. Link up with a social network, and you can pin down age, gender, etc. All of this serves to amplify and specialize the pitches that then show up on, say, advertising on the side of school buses. It's a highly weaponized version of a long running battle to fill your kid's brains up with attention grabbing crap. Teachers and parents don't stand a chance.
Time to make Ghostery a required plug in for schools and houses with kids.
Censorship in the West is almost always private-vs-private.
Often, the courts serve as weapon to enforce private interests (see: libel tourism, CDMA takedowns, Wikileaks vs Bank Julius Baer, etc). This is sometimes called Accidental Censorship, but at the end of the day someone always wants this to happen, and the threat to democratic discourse and political minorities is just as real.
Here's a discussion of the concept:
http://commons.globalintegrity.org/2009/11/accidental-censorship-how-policy.html
TFA claims the Tab runs Android 2.2 / Froyo.
TFA suggests that the Mach 10 will be to get some scramjets online, which will then boost to high atmosphere, and then pop out a small second (third?) stage rocket.
Twitter, long described as a "semi-open" platform, whatever that means, will now proceed to become a case study in the difference between actually open (user-owned, peer-to-peer) and not at all open (corporate owned, centralized) in modes of communication.