A person claiming responsibility for some of the XO's innovations has left the OLPC in order to be compensated for her inventions. The main problem that I see: she has benefited from another purse while developing this technology, then kept the patents for her self to benefit on. It may be acceptable in a human-eat-human world, but it is far from charitable.
Maybe it would have been better for her to move on and develop better technology, then patent and profit from that. For example, that XO display has a number of benefits over the competition but still has deficiencies. With her knowledge of the original, perhaps she could have gone on to develop one with a higher contrast reflective mode. (As an example.) That way at least she is doing something outside of the context of the OLPC project to add value, without straight off stealing the goods.
Welcome to the world of modern research ...
on
Open Source Math
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· Score: 4, Interesting
This problem goes beyond mathematics, and reaches into many of the sciences. Mathematicians and scientists often place undue trust in complex software systems, simply as a matter of getting the work done faster rather than producing higher quality research. Sometimes it is a case of handling large volumes of data, in which case human intelligence and discretion is a bottleneck. Sometimes it is a matter of finding numerical solutions where analytic ones are difficult (if not impossible) to find at present. And, in the case of mathematics, I'm guessing that they are using it as a shortcut for those difficult analytic solutions.
Then again, I must really ask if the mathematician in question understands what they are doing if they are using software as a shortcut for difficult analytic solutions. After all, if they don't understand the algorithms well enough to do the work themselves, who is going to say that they understand the limitations of the rules that they are asking the computer to apply.
I would think if they picked one Costal City for the initial recipients, it would be cheap to ship the laptops via ship and have a local volunteer or two distribute them to the children. I went to a local talk on the OLPC a while back, and yes they have considered the shipping aspects. While they didn't mention cost, perhaps because its almost secondary when you're dealing with palettes of computers and corruption, but they were definitely concerned about the security angle.
I work in a university environment, and we handle a lot of information that has been defined as private. In the process, I have noticed that the definition of privacy usually covers things that don't really matter and outright ignores things that do matter. As a result, the degree of bureaucracy is increasing, the quality of education is decreasing, and nobody is really being protected.
Now if we were granted real privacy protections, I would happily live with a few inconveniences. But the sad fact of the matter is that we aren't granted real privacy protections. After all, through lobbying and legal loopholes, our corporate "partners" can pretty much do with our privacy what they please.
If you're leaving these days it's not uncommon to get escorted to the door... and it's not uncommon to be a perp walk Thanks for the warning. Now that I know, I'll wear a big smile and an "I'm going somewhere better" t-shirt for the occasion. After all, why let them get you down if you're doing things the proper way.
I agree, there are better things to spend that money on. Alas, as earlier posts indicated, there are many issues here. Employee retention being one of them. Like it or not, industry will offer perks like this and that is what the government has to compete with if they want to keep the brightest and hardest working. And sometimes cash in hand doesn't help the employees either. If you have a driven employee, chances are that cash in hand will just go into the bank. When in the bank, the money won't contribute to the social welfare of the employee or anyone else.
There was an easy way that they could have avoided this problem: have the translator check its own translation by feeding in the translation and having it translated back into the original language. It would have become immediately obvious that the automatic translator doesn't work and that they should hire a real person to do it.
Incidentally, a radio show used to run a music contest where they translated English lyrics to some other language and then back into English. The goal was to figure out what the original song was. And it could be quite hard unless you know the song by heart.
A direct search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a crap-shoot. We don't know how probably the formation of life is, we don't know where to look for it, and we don't know how to look for it.
Very basic answers have yet to be answered. How many planets are out there, and what are their properties? We have only been discovering extra-solar planets over the past decade (or so), the planets that we have been discovering have been very exotic (because of our detection methods), and we can only find them around relatively nearby stars (the stars tend to be smaller, thus dimmer, thus only easily detected if they are nearby). Once we have a decent sampling of planets and their bulk properties, we can start considering chemistry.
Yeah, that's tedious and expensive research. But it is necessary. Imagine how hard it would have been to develop the theory of special relativity if we didn't develop the Newtonian model first (giving us the rough outline that Einstein would perfect). Maybe some brilliant mathematician would have eventually stumbled upon the mathematical models of general relativity, but it is highly unlikely or would have taken much longer.
It isn't necessarily about laptops and digicams, though it may be used there.
The exciting stuff involve the ability to charge and discharge fast, and hopefully they are chemically stable so that they last a long time. Something like that could be used to harness the energy of a stopping train, the take that energy and put it right back into starting that train into motion again. Imagine using that for subways or light rail. I could also see it being used to lighten power distribution problems for such systems.
[quote]How exactly would you measure fractions of a bit? A bit is the smallest unit you can measure. Either you have the bit, or you don't. You can't have half a bit. It would be like saying you have half an atom of hydrogren.[/quote]
200 millibits per second * 5 seconds = 1000 millibits = 1 bit.
What's really changed with Vista is that people are not willing to be shepherded along from release to release by Microsoft. Has anything really changed? I seem to recall plenty of people saying that they would never touch ME (and they didn't), and I seem to recall a lot of people saying that they would never switch to XP (but they did).
Besides, making the transition is more than hardware and software. It is skills. There are plenty of people who went from Windows to Mac OS X who are having trouble with Mac OS X. Often it is because Mac OS X does things in different ways. Other times it is because there are certain quirks in Mac OS X that Apple simply isn't fixing.
I rarely played games for 15 years because of PCs, even though there are a few games that I love. Then I bought a console. The console solve the problem of hardware and software compatibility. I can buy used console games and not have to worry about dysfunctional copy protection mechanisms injecting themselves into my system. (Whatever they do with consoles just works.) The console keep my entertainment separate from the work I do.
Damn kids, can't even whistle a carrier anymore, how are they going to check their email on the road ? Alas, the last time I tried whistling at 2.4 GHz, the FCC came knocking on my door and told me to stop.
I don't know how planning is done where you live, but HOV lanes in these parts are on bus route and are intended to improve transit ridership by speeding up transit service. Just as they are intended to encourage car-pooling by allowing those people to use the priority lane.
Unfortunately, improving transit service is fraught by similar problems as these HOV lanes: many of the people who drive alone are so self-centred that they won't even consider sharing a car or taking public transit. These people who use dummies are simply the worse of the bunch because they don't see the roads as shared resources with shared rules that are meant to serve the needs of all people.
HOV lanes are usually created in order to reduce traffic congestion problems, by encouraging people to car-pool, use public transit, cycle, or walk. The alternatives are less desirable: paying even more money to expand and maintain road networks with higher capacity, or to deal with health problems created by the dumping of combustion by products (particulate matter, nitrous oxides, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, etc.). The latter is a non-trivial problem.
This is not about cheating the system, though some may think of it as such. It is about using municipal resources efficiently and saving lives.
... on a social level. For helping his employees, people who were selected because they face similar challenges that he faced, build a new life.
I think it's why he deserves a running chance against the person saving mountain gorillas. Helping people may not seem as serious as saving a species, but it's very important. At any rate, more important than giving people Linux.
Don't forget that those guys in the dorms playing Halo pay lots of money to the university, which pays for the network.
Students are paying for an education, and maybe room and board. It is absurd to think that universities should be giving students free reign to academic resources for gaming. Particularly if their use is degrading the availability of those resources for their intended purposes.
If you want a low latency connection for gaming, then buy your own and don't force others to subsidise your entertainment. Thing is, very few gamers will do that because they know that the minute they use a real ISP is the minute that they have to pay for how they use it. And most students would rather just bitch and freeload.
It is time to patent a brilliant new system that will help e-commerce vendors rake in billions of dollars: half-click shopping.
Rather than waiting for the MOUSE_UP event after a MOUSE_DOWN event, we will use the MOUSE_DOWN event itself to close the transaction. This will ensure that all of those customers who initiate a click in a moment of shopping excitement will not be able to prematurely terminate a transaction by dragging their mouse pointer off of the link element before releasing the mouse button. Just imagine all of the extra transactions that will initiate!
Next up, Zero-click shopping by using MOUSE_OVERs.
I don't know why but this shit seems really hard to get right. Electronic stock trading, bank transactions, military systems etc - no problem. Electronic voting - disaster every time.
Because people are willing to accept a certain degree of corruption in financial transactions that they are unwilling to accept in the democratic process? Because military systems are diverse, in function and manufacturer, and are rarely designed for a specific military conflict (i.e. it is difficult corrupt the system to serve a particular side in a conflict)?
Why should you consider an OLPC over an Eee PC? Because the OLPC program is about giving kids an education and technology that will enable them to build a 1st world future for their 3rd world country. The machine itself has a very accessible user interface: it is highly simplified, and not does not expect the newcomer to be literate in any particular language. (The latter is important because there are many dialects out there, and because children may not be literate when they are initially given these machines.) It also makes learning IT accessible, since it involves two excellent programming tools for the learner: Squeak (via eToys, a.k.a. Squeak), and Python. In many ways, it is about teaching them "how to fish" rather than giving them the fish. If you think about this in dollars and cents, you are missing out on something great.
If you think that they should be given food or the ability to grow it, you're missing out on something too. Not everyone is able to contribute to the welfare of others in the same way. Negroponte and his band of loyal academics, geeks, and so forth decided that their ability to contribute is through IT. After all, that's where their skills and aspirations lay. The food first angle also misses the point that the peoples of many nations don't want to be stuck in a subsistence or donor recipient situation. The want an education so that they can grow beyond the handouts of the 1st world. (Of course other peoples and other nations have other aspirations.) To some, the OLPC may step beyond the bounds.
The OLPC is not perfect, and it isn't only about price. It's initial introductory mantra of the "$100 laptop" was mostly about making it accessible by making it inexpensive. And even though it is $400, I hope to snag one through this deal. I have seen the computer, and it is rugged and useful. As an educator, I also see that it may have more utility than the standard "made for the office" desktop/laptop PC. Perhaps I would also use it to contribute back to the project if I did get one.
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This problem goes beyond mathematics, and reaches into many of the sciences. Mathematicians and scientists often place undue trust in complex software systems, simply as a matter of getting the work done faster rather than producing higher quality research. Sometimes it is a case of handling large volumes of data, in which case human intelligence and discretion is a bottleneck. Sometimes it is a matter of finding numerical solutions where analytic ones are difficult (if not impossible) to find at present. And, in the case of mathematics, I'm guessing that they are using it as a shortcut for those difficult analytic solutions.
Then again, I must really ask if the mathematician in question understands what they are doing if they are using software as a shortcut for difficult analytic solutions. After all, if they don't understand the algorithms well enough to do the work themselves, who is going to say that they understand the limitations of the rules that they are asking the computer to apply.
I work in a university environment, and we handle a lot of information that has been defined as private. In the process, I have noticed that the definition of privacy usually covers things that don't really matter and outright ignores things that do matter. As a result, the degree of bureaucracy is increasing, the quality of education is decreasing, and nobody is really being protected. Now if we were granted real privacy protections, I would happily live with a few inconveniences. But the sad fact of the matter is that we aren't granted real privacy protections. After all, through lobbying and legal loopholes, our corporate "partners" can pretty much do with our privacy what they please.
I agree, there are better things to spend that money on. Alas, as earlier posts indicated, there are many issues here. Employee retention being one of them. Like it or not, industry will offer perks like this and that is what the government has to compete with if they want to keep the brightest and hardest working. And sometimes cash in hand doesn't help the employees either. If you have a driven employee, chances are that cash in hand will just go into the bank. When in the bank, the money won't contribute to the social welfare of the employee or anyone else.
There was an easy way that they could have avoided this problem: have the translator check its own translation by feeding in the translation and having it translated back into the original language. It would have become immediately obvious that the automatic translator doesn't work and that they should hire a real person to do it. Incidentally, a radio show used to run a music contest where they translated English lyrics to some other language and then back into English. The goal was to figure out what the original song was. And it could be quite hard unless you know the song by heart.
A direct search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a crap-shoot. We don't know how probably the formation of life is, we don't know where to look for it, and we don't know how to look for it. Very basic answers have yet to be answered. How many planets are out there, and what are their properties? We have only been discovering extra-solar planets over the past decade (or so), the planets that we have been discovering have been very exotic (because of our detection methods), and we can only find them around relatively nearby stars (the stars tend to be smaller, thus dimmer, thus only easily detected if they are nearby). Once we have a decent sampling of planets and their bulk properties, we can start considering chemistry. Yeah, that's tedious and expensive research. But it is necessary. Imagine how hard it would have been to develop the theory of special relativity if we didn't develop the Newtonian model first (giving us the rough outline that Einstein would perfect). Maybe some brilliant mathematician would have eventually stumbled upon the mathematical models of general relativity, but it is highly unlikely or would have taken much longer.
It isn't necessarily about laptops and digicams, though it may be used there. The exciting stuff involve the ability to charge and discharge fast, and hopefully they are chemically stable so that they last a long time. Something like that could be used to harness the energy of a stopping train, the take that energy and put it right back into starting that train into motion again. Imagine using that for subways or light rail. I could also see it being used to lighten power distribution problems for such systems.
[quote]How exactly would you measure fractions of a bit? A bit is the smallest unit you can measure. Either you have the bit, or you don't. You can't have half a bit. It would be like saying you have half an atom of hydrogren.[/quote] 200 millibits per second * 5 seconds = 1000 millibits = 1 bit.
200 millibits per second. Wow, that's slower than the 300 bits per second modem that I had on my Apple II!
Besides, making the transition is more than hardware and software. It is skills. There are plenty of people who went from Windows to Mac OS X who are having trouble with Mac OS X. Often it is because Mac OS X does things in different ways. Other times it is because there are certain quirks in Mac OS X that Apple simply isn't fixing.
I rarely played games for 15 years because of PCs, even though there are a few games that I love. Then I bought a console. The console solve the problem of hardware and software compatibility. I can buy used console games and not have to worry about dysfunctional copy protection mechanisms injecting themselves into my system. (Whatever they do with consoles just works.) The console keep my entertainment separate from the work I do.
I don't know how planning is done where you live, but HOV lanes in these parts are on bus route and are intended to improve transit ridership by speeding up transit service. Just as they are intended to encourage car-pooling by allowing those people to use the priority lane.
Unfortunately, improving transit service is fraught by similar problems as these HOV lanes: many of the people who drive alone are so self-centred that they won't even consider sharing a car or taking public transit. These people who use dummies are simply the worse of the bunch because they don't see the roads as shared resources with shared rules that are meant to serve the needs of all people.
Actually, this is a serious problem.
HOV lanes are usually created in order to reduce traffic congestion problems, by encouraging people to car-pool, use public transit, cycle, or walk. The alternatives are less desirable: paying even more money to expand and maintain road networks with higher capacity, or to deal with health problems created by the dumping of combustion by products (particulate matter, nitrous oxides, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, etc.). The latter is a non-trivial problem.
This is not about cheating the system, though some may think of it as such. It is about using municipal resources efficiently and saving lives.
I think it's why he deserves a running chance against the person saving mountain gorillas. Helping people may not seem as serious as saving a species, but it's very important. At any rate, more important than giving people Linux.
Don't forget that those guys in the dorms playing Halo pay lots of money to the university, which pays for the network. Students are paying for an education, and maybe room and board. It is absurd to think that universities should be giving students free reign to academic resources for gaming. Particularly if their use is degrading the availability of those resources for their intended purposes. If you want a low latency connection for gaming, then buy your own and don't force others to subsidise your entertainment. Thing is, very few gamers will do that because they know that the minute they use a real ISP is the minute that they have to pay for how they use it. And most students would rather just bitch and freeload.
It is time to patent a brilliant new system that will help e-commerce vendors rake in billions of dollars: half-click shopping. Rather than waiting for the MOUSE_UP event after a MOUSE_DOWN event, we will use the MOUSE_DOWN event itself to close the transaction. This will ensure that all of those customers who initiate a click in a moment of shopping excitement will not be able to prematurely terminate a transaction by dragging their mouse pointer off of the link element before releasing the mouse button. Just imagine all of the extra transactions that will initiate! Next up, Zero-click shopping by using MOUSE_OVERs.
I don't know why but this shit seems really hard to get right. Electronic stock trading, bank transactions, military systems etc - no problem. Electronic voting - disaster every time. Because people are willing to accept a certain degree of corruption in financial transactions that they are unwilling to accept in the democratic process? Because military systems are diverse, in function and manufacturer, and are rarely designed for a specific military conflict (i.e. it is difficult corrupt the system to serve a particular side in a conflict)?
Why should you consider an OLPC over an Eee PC? Because the OLPC program is about giving kids an education and technology that will enable them to build a 1st world future for their 3rd world country. The machine itself has a very accessible user interface: it is highly simplified, and not does not expect the newcomer to be literate in any particular language. (The latter is important because there are many dialects out there, and because children may not be literate when they are initially given these machines.) It also makes learning IT accessible, since it involves two excellent programming tools for the learner: Squeak (via eToys, a.k.a. Squeak), and Python. In many ways, it is about teaching them "how to fish" rather than giving them the fish. If you think about this in dollars and cents, you are missing out on something great. If you think that they should be given food or the ability to grow it, you're missing out on something too. Not everyone is able to contribute to the welfare of others in the same way. Negroponte and his band of loyal academics, geeks, and so forth decided that their ability to contribute is through IT. After all, that's where their skills and aspirations lay. The food first angle also misses the point that the peoples of many nations don't want to be stuck in a subsistence or donor recipient situation. The want an education so that they can grow beyond the handouts of the 1st world. (Of course other peoples and other nations have other aspirations.) To some, the OLPC may step beyond the bounds. The OLPC is not perfect, and it isn't only about price. It's initial introductory mantra of the "$100 laptop" was mostly about making it accessible by making it inexpensive. And even though it is $400, I hope to snag one through this deal. I have seen the computer, and it is rugged and useful. As an educator, I also see that it may have more utility than the standard "made for the office" desktop/laptop PC. Perhaps I would also use it to contribute back to the project if I did get one.