Move your datacenter to Canada. You would not have to pay so much for AC. Quebec has the cheapest electricity in North America, and there is no serious tectonic fault line.
"I did have working sanitation, an electrical grid, viable farming and transportation infrastructures"... do you notice that any of the elements you are listing cost more than $100 to provide to a child?
Of course you are right, but the point is that we hope to get a lot of bang for the buck with the OLPC project. The laptop could be a great educational tool. Also, books could be provided electronicaly, thus saving on the costs of books and paper, which after a few years of schooling, is not negligeable.
I never heard about water vapor being a problem for the atmosphere. I bet that if we send more water in the atmosphere, nature will self correct quickly. The water will not persist in the atmosphere since it will cool off and rain down. You might just increase the amount of rain. Also, clouds do reflect sun light...
Nature has a problem of disposing of CO2; takes time for the vegetation to bring the levels down. However, excess water vapor would quickly rain down... its not like its going to stick in the atmosphere for decades or centuries like CO2.
I am no expert about this, and I am just guessing here. But I am reasoning with the little knowledge I have about physics.
What if you use a strong VPN between your wireless computer and your access-point? Granted, there is no proof that encryption cannot be cracked, but up to this day, strong encryption is considered pretty secured.
The reason I mainly uses Google is Google groups; whenever I have a computer related problem, the Usenet archive is often helpful. I do not think that there is any other archive of Usenet like this out there (available for free). If there are, please share the links.
And how many slashdotters find Google Groups useful?
Distributions should start recommending hardware
on
Lenovo To Shun Linux
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I think it would be good for distributions to start recommending hardware manufacturers. Imagine Red Hat and Novell recommending HP over Dell, Nvidia over ATI for example. That might give a push to hardware manufacturers to better support Linux.
You are talking about the poorest among the poorest. You are right about that. But the $100 laptop project is not aimed at the poorest of the poorest. It is aimed at those for whom such a tool would be of great help. Take the cell phone experience in India:
Sure the money spent for building a cell phone infrastructure could go for buying drugs, but when you only give food and medecine, people cannot help themselves to get out of poverty. Give the tools to get themselves out. That is the aim of such projects. Empower the people. And once they have an economy going, you can tax them to pay for food and medecine for the poorest.
That said, you still need to provide food and medecine when crisis hit. There I agree with you. But rich countries cannot limit their help to food and medecine. We must help 3rd world countries to get out of their misery by themselves.
I often use Google groups to find solution to technical problems. Are there many other search engine for Usenet groups? Are they as good as Google groups?
If Ballmer's kids cannot use Google, they might be deprived of a tool which no other serious alternative exist.
IBM never created their own distribution. They resell RHEL or SLES (mostly). Every move IBM makes regarding open source is a business move. They want to ensure that they recoup their investements, directly or indirectly. But obviously, they concluded that creating their own distro would be too costly for the benefits they would gain.
One nice eye-candy and which would be usefull too, would be to be able to have different backgrounds for each of my workspaces. Why has this never been implemented? CDE has this! I read about all these efforts to implement complex eye-candy, but simply having different backgrounds for each workspace would, I believe, relatively easy to implement. I am using Gnome here.
It begs the question, how much more SHOULD they do? Should we, western society, have to do propaganda to win the hearts of Muslims? Or should we simply rely on saying the truth, including the ugly side?
I would like to see a 24/7 channel established which would be objective. Propaganda channels can only go so far, because people eventually realise that the picture shown by them is too rosy, and when this happens, the channels loose all credibility. I do understand the need to have a western channel in Iraq, because I suspect that Iraqi channels might not be objective either. I know that in Canada our national television channels are not always objectives. So if I cannot trust my own country channels, I guess I cannot trust those of Iraq.
But for a 24/7 channel to be objective, it should be established by an international organisation and have muslisms on its board and production staff. Editorials from both camps should be allowed. Of course, who is to say that it will be totally objective? But it would be a start.
Still can't sell Thunderbird to friends if I cannot install a french dictionary. The problem has been reported over a year ago. With such a feature missing, I cannot convince friends to jump the band wagon.
P.S. I must admit, I have not tried to install the dictionary manually. Maybe this can be done. Still, I feel that the software should be able to do it by itself.
If part of the settlement requires the Fedora Foundation to remove the technology in the next FC release, the user looses functionnality. Apps that existed and worked for him are suddenly not available anymore, at least in an easy packaged form.
Because of patent litigation, users of the Blackberry in the US could potentially loose their service. Users do suffer from patent issues.
The algae would need sunlight to grow. You must provide a system where sunlight is well distributed. There is a formula that relates the two, i.e. X algae require Y sunlight.
Since you require sunlight to grow algae, then you would generate shadow on the ground at some point. Where the shadow hits, not much will grow. So if Y has to be big, you still someway will either have to build horizontal tanks or have sunlight collectors on the ground, taking up a lot of surface. In either case, you loose.
A bit off topic but regarding projectors, I always wondered why the lamps are so expensive (>$200). Are the filaments made of gold?? (joking). Seriously, I would like to know why manufacturing could not yield much cheaper lamps. Anybody got a clue?
Actually, how can you secure such an application if you are expected to run it on strangers computers (coffee shops, schools, libraris, hotels, etc...)? Anybody can put a key logger on a keyboard and there is no software that could secure this.
Thus, you can only be secure if you use your own computer. And if you bring your own computer anywhere, why not install the software locally? As for your documents, you can encrypt them and transmit them to a secure location.
But X11 should not crash/lock up if an application miss behaves in the first place. The whole idea of a stable OS is for the OS (and its interface) to remain up no matter what applications do.
As far as I know, if you eat a balance diet, any balance diet, you get all the vitamin D you need. They dope milk with Vitamin D, so I wonder why I would have to go under the sun to get more vitamin D than the share I need...
Yep, that is why I still will not trust this strategy for very important data such as financial data. However, I wonder how many keyloggers are sophisticated enough to sort key pressed per windows.
I startup some text editor, then i type random characters in it. Then I move to the password field and type 1 char. Then back to the text editor typing random chars again. Then I type the 2nd char of my password after switching windows. I go on like that.
Of course, for financial stuff, I do not trust this. But for login into an email account, I believe that this is secure enough. They won't bother trying to figure out what the password is with the keylogger.
But by collecting the water instead of letting it rain down, you can redirect more water directly where it is needed, i.e. the roots of the plants, instead of letting some of the rain fall on roads, houses, mountains of rocks, non cultivated land, etc...
Slashdot Mirror
Since Firefox 2.0, you can reorder your tabs.
Move your datacenter to Canada. You would not have to pay so much for AC. Quebec has the cheapest electricity in North America, and there is no serious tectonic fault line.
"I did have working sanitation, an electrical grid, viable farming and transportation infrastructures"... do you notice that any of the elements you are listing cost more than $100 to provide to a child?
Of course you are right, but the point is that we hope to get a lot of bang for the buck with the OLPC project. The laptop could be a great educational tool. Also, books could be provided electronicaly, thus saving on the costs of books and paper, which after a few years of schooling, is not negligeable.
I never heard about water vapor being a problem for the atmosphere. I bet that if we send more water in the atmosphere, nature will self correct quickly. The water will not persist in the atmosphere since it will cool off and rain down. You might just increase the amount of rain. Also, clouds do reflect sun light...
Nature has a problem of disposing of CO2; takes time for the vegetation to bring the levels down. However, excess water vapor would quickly rain down... its not like its going to stick in the atmosphere for decades or centuries like CO2.
I am no expert about this, and I am just guessing here. But I am reasoning with the little knowledge I have about physics.
What if you use a strong VPN between your wireless computer and your access-point? Granted, there is no proof that encryption cannot be cracked, but up to this day, strong encryption is considered pretty secured.
The reason I mainly uses Google is Google groups; whenever I have a computer related problem, the Usenet archive is often helpful. I do not think that there is any other archive of Usenet like this out there (available for free). If there are, please share the links.
And how many slashdotters find Google Groups useful?
I think it would be good for distributions to start recommending hardware manufacturers. Imagine Red Hat and Novell recommending HP over Dell, Nvidia over ATI for example. That might give a push to hardware manufacturers to better support Linux.
You are talking about the poorest among the poorest. You are right about that. But the $100 laptop project is not aimed at the poorest of the poorest. It is aimed at those for whom such a tool would be of great help. Take the cell phone experience in India:
t m
http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_18/b3627035.h
Sure the money spent for building a cell phone infrastructure could go for buying drugs, but when you only give food and medecine, people cannot help themselves to get out of poverty. Give the tools to get themselves out. That is the aim of such projects. Empower the people. And once they have an economy going, you can tax them to pay for food and medecine for the poorest.
That said, you still need to provide food and medecine when crisis hit. There I agree with you. But rich countries cannot limit their help to food and medecine. We must help 3rd world countries to get out of their misery by themselves.
I often use Google groups to find solution to technical problems. Are there many other search engine for Usenet groups? Are they as good as Google groups?
If Ballmer's kids cannot use Google, they might be deprived of a tool which no other serious alternative exist.
IBM never created their own distribution. They resell RHEL or SLES (mostly). Every move IBM makes regarding open source is a business move. They want to ensure that they recoup their investements, directly or indirectly. But obviously, they concluded that creating their own distro would be too costly for the benefits they would gain.
Mmm... maybe because there is no business case for this? They would not recover their investement?
One nice eye-candy and which would be usefull too, would be to be able to have different backgrounds for each of my workspaces. Why has this never been implemented? CDE has this! I read about all these efforts to implement complex eye-candy, but simply having different backgrounds for each workspace would, I believe, relatively easy to implement. I am using Gnome here.
It begs the question, how much more SHOULD they do? Should we, western society, have to do propaganda to win the hearts of Muslims? Or should we simply rely on saying the truth, including the ugly side?
I would like to see a 24/7 channel established which would be objective. Propaganda channels can only go so far, because people eventually realise that the picture shown by them is too rosy, and when this happens, the channels loose all credibility. I do understand the need to have a western channel in Iraq, because I suspect that Iraqi channels might not be objective either. I know that in Canada our national television channels are not always objectives. So if I cannot trust my own country channels, I guess I cannot trust those of Iraq.
But for a 24/7 channel to be objective, it should be established by an international organisation and have muslisms on its board and production staff. Editorials from both camps should be allowed. Of course, who is to say that it will be totally objective? But it would be a start.
Still can't sell Thunderbird to friends if I cannot install a french dictionary. The problem has been reported over a year ago. With such a feature missing, I cannot convince friends to jump the band wagon.
9 0
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2673
P.S. I must admit, I have not tried to install the dictionary manually. Maybe this can be done. Still, I feel that the software should be able to do it by itself.
If part of the settlement requires the Fedora Foundation to remove the technology in the next FC release, the user looses functionnality. Apps that existed and worked for him are suddenly not available anymore, at least in an easy packaged form.
Because of patent litigation, users of the Blackberry in the US could potentially loose their service. Users do suffer from patent issues.
The algae would need sunlight to grow. You must provide a system where sunlight is well distributed. There is a formula that relates the two, i.e. X algae require Y sunlight.
Since you require sunlight to grow algae, then you would generate shadow on the ground at some point. Where the shadow hits, not much will grow. So if Y has to be big, you still someway will either have to build horizontal tanks or have sunlight collectors on the ground, taking up a lot of surface. In either case, you loose.
A bit off topic but regarding projectors, I always wondered why the lamps are so expensive (>$200). Are the filaments made of gold?? (joking). Seriously, I would like to know why manufacturing could not yield much cheaper lamps. Anybody got a clue?
That just penalize shareholders and employees who had nothing to do with the decision to proceed to such action.
They should instead go after the administrators who made the decision to proceed.
Actually, how can you secure such an application if you are expected to run it on strangers computers (coffee shops, schools, libraris, hotels, etc...)? Anybody can put a key logger on a keyboard and there is no software that could secure this.
Thus, you can only be secure if you use your own computer. And if you bring your own computer anywhere, why not install the software locally? As for your documents, you can encrypt them and transmit them to a secure location.
But X11 should not crash/lock up if an application miss behaves in the first place. The whole idea of a stable OS is for the OS (and its interface) to remain up no matter what applications do.
About coal being worse than nuclear, I have not the best references, but here are a few:
/ FS-163-97.html / colmain.html
http://geology.cr.usgs.gov/energy/factshts/163-97
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text
http://yarchive.net/nuke/coal_radiation.html
As far as I know, if you eat a balance diet, any balance diet, you get all the vitamin D you need. They dope milk with Vitamin D, so I wonder why I would have to go under the sun to get more vitamin D than the share I need...
Yep, that is why I still will not trust this strategy for very important data such as financial data. However, I wonder how many keyloggers are sophisticated enough to sort key pressed per windows.
I have a variation of this.
I startup some text editor, then i type random characters in it. Then I move to the password field and type 1 char. Then back to the text editor typing random chars again. Then I type the 2nd char of my password after switching windows. I go on like that.
Of course, for financial stuff, I do not trust this. But for login into an email account, I believe that this is secure enough. They won't bother trying to figure out what the password is with the keylogger.
But by collecting the water instead of letting it rain down, you can redirect more water directly where it is needed, i.e. the roots of the plants, instead of letting some of the rain fall on roads, houses, mountains of rocks, non cultivated land, etc...