We could annihilate 5 billion people on the planet, but the average person (at least in North America) would little more than flinch, so long as their own city or state is not affected
No, we couldn't, because the US has moved most manufacturing overseas and is completely dependent on Europe and China economically.
I'm sorry, but who are you to make that decision for your management and your customers? Did you pay for the creation of the database? Do you pay for the machines?
Your job is to tell people how much it would cost (time, extra load) to support this, nothing more. And you should be honest about it, not make up some silly numbers. The decision on whether to grant the access is between your management and the customer.
There is no technical or educational reason to put Windows on the OLPC. Since this isn't full desktop Windows, Windows doesn't work any better on these machines than Linux, it doesn't enable any educationally relevant software to be run, and it doesn't enable any relevant drivers to be installed.
It's odd that Negroponte accuses open source developers of being blinded by ideology; the only person I see being blinded by ideology is him, and he is really screwing the OLPC project because of it.
First of all, I wasn't specifically referring to AIDS. The Catholic stance on procreation is a much greater crime against humanity and nature than that.
Second, the Vatican isn't promoting abstinence for health reasons but for reasons of doctrine and social control, therefore they can't take credit for beneficial health consequences. Organizations that are concerned with health benefits promote abstinence and still make condoms widely available.
But as your comment illustrates, Catholics have no problem lying about their intentions, just another example of Catholic moral relativism.
At the risk of feeding the trolls, in what way is C# + Gtk# + MonoDevelop less of a bloated pig than Java?
Swing attempts to reimplement everything in Java; what it can't reimplement in Java, it reimplements in C. Gtk# is a thin binding of Gtk+ to C#.
Java is actually a very fast,
Actually, it is not. Java lacks some fundamentally important constructs (e.g., multidimensional arrays) that mean that a lot of code simply cannot be written efficiently in Java no matter how you try. If you haven't run into that, it's simply because your needs are modest.
extremely productive platform to develop on.
I can put together a high quality Linux desktop application in Monodevelop in minutes. In Java and Swing, it's impossible to put together a high quality desktop app at all.
with a top-shelf toolchain (in fact several)
If you think that crap like Eclipse or NetBeans is "top-shelf", you really haven't used a good IDE in your life.
Rather than worrying about alien life, the pope should worry about the millions whose deaths he has been responsible for by interfering with the distribution of contraceptives. And I don't just mean Catholics, I mean people who don't follow his cult.
It is interesting that now that Mono is getting to a more complete (and possibly usable state), most developers have moved beyond the.NET hype and onto more elegant development platforms...
Please stop conflating Mono and.NET. Mono supports.NET, but that's not its primary API.
In fact, the primary API is the same API lots of open source software uses: Gnome, Gtk+, and many standard open source libraries. All Gnome apps using Mono use the Gtk+ APIs.
I wish there were better alternatives, but C# + Gtk# + MonoDevelop is probably the most elegant development platform right now. Nothing else really comes close. Python is a more elegant language but doesn't have a comparable IDE. Objective-C and Cocoa are messily intertwined with C and C APIs. And Java is a bloated pig.
I already have a version of Ubuntu with Xfce that has default configuration designed to be usable on those laptops
I don't think XFCE window management is any better for these kinds of screens than Gnome, and I think the XFCE dock and toolbars are considerably worse.
2. Make configuration suitable for a person who is accustomed to "traditional" windowing systems.
But that's not the goal of OLPC. The goal of OLPC is to make a system usable for kids and non-experts. Kids and non-experts have real trouble with Windows/Mac/XFCE/Gnome-style window management. Sugar may not be the right answer to this problem, but none of the traditional desktop environments are suitable.
I think plopping a full-blown Gnome or KDE desktop on the OLPC would be a mistake: those desktops work poorly on small screens, and they are incredibly obscure for new users (although no more obscure than Windows and Macintosh).
I think there's a middle ground, though: reuse the Gnome desktop infrastructure but replace the window manager with something simpler that prevents the usual beginner mistakes (losing windows behind each other, moving windows off-screen, etc.).
As for Windows on OLPC, I don't get it. Even if you run Windows+Sugar on the OLPC, you won't be able to install commercial software or commercial drivers with it, Windows books won't apply, and realistically you won't be able to run Microsoft's development tools on the OLPC either. But you will alienate lots of OLPC contributors, and you'll saddle yourself with an OS over which OLPC has no control, and Microsoft secretly probably just wants to kill the whole project anyway.
I've thought about this for a while and just can't figure out what the need to search for life on Mars is all about. Except for 3rd rate B-movies featuring little green men, life on Mars isn't really interesting at all.
It is enormously interesting for biology.
Why? Because no matter what is there when we finally get around to building our Mars base will be destroyed in order to develop a useful environment and atmosphere for humans. Mars life be damned.
We'll get the DNA we need before then. And, frankly, I doubt we're going to have a Mars base this century, or do any terraforming for many centuries to come; it's just too expensive.
That's irrelevant. For terms, it's not the person who "invents" the term that gets to define it, it's the person who manages to convince others to use it in a particular sense. OSI was clearly the first organization to establish a widely adopted meaning for the term "open source" with respect to software (it also has an intelligence meaning).
Short form: The OSI should not be allowed to define what "Open Source" means any more than McDonalds should be allowed to define what "Hamburger" means.
That's because the term "hamburger" was in widespread usage before McDonald's started to use it. But McDonald's probably owns the trademark "big mac", even though that term was used occasionally before for various things. That's because McDonald's put that term in widespread commercial usage.
They may be able to get UMTS/HSDPA (high speed wireless through the cell phone).
You can bond multiple telephone lines; 112kbps is a bit better than 56kbps.
No matter what you do, you should probably set up servers, since modern interactive applications try to do too many things in real time: E-mail servers that retrieve and send stuff in the background, aggressive web caching, and RSS readers plus downloaders for the web.
If you are going to take competency of the admin into account when analyzing how secure a system can be, then you are pretty much already screwed.
No, you are screwed if you don't take the competency of the admin into account.
Besides, it's not just a question of competency, it's also a question of time. I'm not going to waste my time on a system designed by people who treat my time as being worthless.
Thinking like yours is the reason why security sucks so badly.
It's not "built into" the Mac, it's a $99/year subscription.
You've been able to get similar subscriptions for Windows for far longer than for OS X. And Linux has had this functionality built in for about a decade. I don't think that this is even the first case of recovering a laptop by using its webcam.
There is not a shred of evidence that SELinux is any more secure than other approaches to Linux security. In fact, in practice, it may well be less secure since it is so complex and hard to deploy: either people disable it entirely, or they configure it wrong and have a false sense of security.
To me, SELinux represents a lot of what is wrong with security today: people think that they can achieve security by just tacking a bunch of complicated software on top of existing systems, and people think they can get away with ignoring usability and users.
I can't imagine having one centralized person manually inspecting everyone's junk-mail header is the optimal solution
Actually, that strikes me as a good solution; it's certainly better than having other employees dealing with spam as part of their daily routine and losing 30 minutes/day for everybody in the company. And by centralizing it, you have the ability to pick the tools to make your work more efficient, as opposed to having 50 employees each fiddle with their own spam filters.
Wow, "built-in technology on the Mac" makes it sound so important. I guess those brilliant inventors at Apple must have labored very hard to copy the idea of building in a camera above a laptop screen from Sony.
likely to expose a person... to hatred or contempt because of race, religion, age, disability, sex, marital status or sexual orientation
Ah, so religions have carved out this nice little niche, where they can pass judgment on everybody else, but if anybody dares criticize them, they hide behind anti-discrimination laws.
I find Catholic and Muslim doctrines immoral and contemptible. Not only do I think I have a right to criticize them, I think I have a moral duty.
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We could annihilate 5 billion people on the planet, but the average person (at least in North America) would little more than flinch, so long as their own city or state is not affected
No, we couldn't, because the US has moved most manufacturing overseas and is completely dependent on Europe and China economically.
Those statistics are useless; nobody has any idea how these measures translate into correctness, robustness, or performance.
I'm sorry, but who are you to make that decision for your management and your customers? Did you pay for the creation of the database? Do you pay for the machines?
Your job is to tell people how much it would cost (time, extra load) to support this, nothing more. And you should be honest about it, not make up some silly numbers. The decision on whether to grant the access is between your management and the customer.
There is no technical or educational reason to put Windows on the OLPC. Since this isn't full desktop Windows, Windows doesn't work any better on these machines than Linux, it doesn't enable any educationally relevant software to be run, and it doesn't enable any relevant drivers to be installed.
It's odd that Negroponte accuses open source developers of being blinded by ideology; the only person I see being blinded by ideology is him, and he is really screwing the OLPC project because of it.
truth never wins -- its opponents just go extinct
Yes, and the people who promote Ada as a secure and productive programming language have almost died out.
Ada is neither, and fortunately, the market has realized that.
First of all, I wasn't specifically referring to AIDS. The Catholic stance on procreation is a much greater crime against humanity and nature than that.
Second, the Vatican isn't promoting abstinence for health reasons but for reasons of doctrine and social control, therefore they can't take credit for beneficial health consequences. Organizations that are concerned with health benefits promote abstinence and still make condoms widely available.
But as your comment illustrates, Catholics have no problem lying about their intentions, just another example of Catholic moral relativism.
At the risk of feeding the trolls, in what way is C# + Gtk# + MonoDevelop less of a bloated pig than Java?
Swing attempts to reimplement everything in Java; what it can't reimplement in Java, it reimplements in C. Gtk# is a thin binding of Gtk+ to C#.
Java is actually a very fast,
Actually, it is not. Java lacks some fundamentally important constructs (e.g., multidimensional arrays) that mean that a lot of code simply cannot be written efficiently in Java no matter how you try. If you haven't run into that, it's simply because your needs are modest.
extremely productive platform to develop on.
I can put together a high quality Linux desktop application in Monodevelop in minutes. In Java and Swing, it's impossible to put together a high quality desktop app at all.
with a top-shelf toolchain (in fact several)
If you think that crap like Eclipse or NetBeans is "top-shelf", you really haven't used a good IDE in your life.
Rather than worrying about alien life, the pope should worry about the millions whose deaths he has been responsible for by interfering with the distribution of contraceptives. And I don't just mean Catholics, I mean people who don't follow his cult.
It is interesting that now that Mono is getting to a more complete (and possibly usable state), most developers have moved beyond the .NET hype and onto more elegant development platforms...
.NET. Mono supports .NET, but that's not its primary API.
Please stop conflating Mono and
In fact, the primary API is the same API lots of open source software uses: Gnome, Gtk+, and many standard open source libraries. All Gnome apps using Mono use the Gtk+ APIs.
I wish there were better alternatives, but C# + Gtk# + MonoDevelop is probably the most elegant development platform right now. Nothing else really comes close. Python is a more elegant language but doesn't have a comparable IDE. Objective-C and Cocoa are messily intertwined with C and C APIs. And Java is a bloated pig.
I already have a version of Ubuntu with Xfce that has default configuration designed to be usable on those laptops
I don't think XFCE window management is any better for these kinds of screens than Gnome, and I think the XFCE dock and toolbars are considerably worse.
2. Make configuration suitable for a person who is accustomed to "traditional" windowing systems.
But that's not the goal of OLPC. The goal of OLPC is to make a system usable for kids and non-experts. Kids and non-experts have real trouble with Windows/Mac/XFCE/Gnome-style window management. Sugar may not be the right answer to this problem, but none of the traditional desktop environments are suitable.
I think plopping a full-blown Gnome or KDE desktop on the OLPC would be a mistake: those desktops work poorly on small screens, and they are incredibly obscure for new users (although no more obscure than Windows and Macintosh).
I think there's a middle ground, though: reuse the Gnome desktop infrastructure but replace the window manager with something simpler that prevents the usual beginner mistakes (losing windows behind each other, moving windows off-screen, etc.).
As for Windows on OLPC, I don't get it. Even if you run Windows+Sugar on the OLPC, you won't be able to install commercial software or commercial drivers with it, Windows books won't apply, and realistically you won't be able to run Microsoft's development tools on the OLPC either. But you will alienate lots of OLPC contributors, and you'll saddle yourself with an OS over which OLPC has no control, and Microsoft secretly probably just wants to kill the whole project anyway.
Powerset is not an instant solution, it's a step in the right direction. Early Google wasn't perfect,
No, it wasn't. But it was sufficiently better/easier to use than the alternatives to make using it worthwhile.
I don't see that yet with Powerset.
I've thought about this for a while and just can't figure out what the need to search for life on Mars is all about. Except for 3rd rate B-movies featuring little green men, life on Mars isn't really interesting at all.
It is enormously interesting for biology.
Why? Because no matter what is there when we finally get around to building our Mars base will be destroyed in order to develop a useful environment and atmosphere for humans. Mars life be damned.
We'll get the DNA we need before then. And, frankly, I doubt we're going to have a Mars base this century, or do any terraforming for many centuries to come; it's just too expensive.
The OSI did not invent the term "Open Source".
That's irrelevant. For terms, it's not the person who "invents" the term that gets to define it, it's the person who manages to convince others to use it in a particular sense. OSI was clearly the first organization to establish a widely adopted meaning for the term "open source" with respect to software (it also has an intelligence meaning).
Short form: The OSI should not be allowed to define what "Open Source" means any more than McDonalds should be allowed to define what "Hamburger" means.
That's because the term "hamburger" was in widespread usage before McDonald's started to use it. But McDonald's probably owns the trademark "big mac", even though that term was used occasionally before for various things. That's because McDonald's put that term in widespread commercial usage.
Americans and Europeans pay blank CD fees as well and that didn't protect them from DMCA-style legislation.
The ability to contract for Internet access is not a "privilege", it's a right.
They may be able to get UMTS/HSDPA (high speed wireless through the cell phone).
You can bond multiple telephone lines; 112kbps is a bit better than 56kbps.
No matter what you do, you should probably set up servers, since modern interactive applications try to do too many things in real time: E-mail servers that retrieve and send stuff in the background, aggressive web caching, and RSS readers plus downloaders for the web.
If you are going to take competency of the admin into account when analyzing how secure a system can be, then you are pretty much already screwed.
No, you are screwed if you don't take the competency of the admin into account.
Besides, it's not just a question of competency, it's also a question of time. I'm not going to waste my time on a system designed by people who treat my time as being worthless.
Thinking like yours is the reason why security sucks so badly.
People claims SELinux is difficult, but they often don't understand how insanely powerful it is....
No, it isn't powerful. "Powerful" doesn't just mean being able to get a lot done, it means getting a lot done with little time or effort.
It's not "built into" the Mac, it's a $99/year subscription.
You've been able to get similar subscriptions for Windows for far longer than for OS X. And Linux has had this functionality built in for about a decade. I don't think that this is even the first case of recovering a laptop by using its webcam.
There is not a shred of evidence that SELinux is any more secure than other approaches to Linux security. In fact, in practice, it may well be less secure since it is so complex and hard to deploy: either people disable it entirely, or they configure it wrong and have a false sense of security.
To me, SELinux represents a lot of what is wrong with security today: people think that they can achieve security by just tacking a bunch of complicated software on top of existing systems, and people think they can get away with ignoring usability and users.
Why not reject all messages containing images? Images in E-mail are almost always either for tracking, for spam, or for viruses.
I can't imagine having one centralized person manually inspecting everyone's junk-mail header is the optimal solution
Actually, that strikes me as a good solution; it's certainly better than having other employees dealing with spam as part of their daily routine and losing 30 minutes/day for everybody in the company. And by centralizing it, you have the ability to pick the tools to make your work more efficient, as opposed to having 50 employees each fiddle with their own spam filters.
Wow, "built-in technology on the Mac" makes it sound so important. I guess those brilliant inventors at Apple must have labored very hard to copy the idea of building in a camera above a laptop screen from Sony.
likely to expose a person... to hatred or contempt because of race, religion, age, disability, sex, marital status or sexual orientation
Ah, so religions have carved out this nice little niche, where they can pass judgment on everybody else, but if anybody dares criticize them, they hide behind anti-discrimination laws.
I find Catholic and Muslim doctrines immoral and contemptible. Not only do I think I have a right to criticize them, I think I have a moral duty.