I personally see characters in games as no more than game pieces, not dissimilar to chess pieces and attach to them roughly the same level of emotion; but to the uninitiated they see games apparently simulating slaughter and torture, turning their children into a murdering wave of emotionless sociopaths.
Bottom line: Stupid people are stupid. That has nothing to do with the airport scene. Those people do not react to "amoral" things, they create amorality so they can bitch about how it ruins the world. Leave out the airport scene and you still have all those morons demanding the banishment of any kind of violent video game, along with anything that depicts or refers to sexuality, mocks religions, is anti-patriotic...
See above. Here in Germany the right-wing pseudo-christian conservative bloc has been waging a war on anything remotely offensive to their voters - and anything that can be publicly propped up as a scapegoat for social problems and political failure. This has nothing to do with how violent games actually are. The debate goes back all the way to the first GTA installment. After every school shooting a well-known choir of politicians, "experts" and self-proclaimed moral authorities (we use the term "Berufsentrüstete") sings the good old let's-ban-x song. When the first Tamagotchis came out some morons wanted to have them banned because they might have miseducated children about how to treat a pet. The very same people now rail against video games and pornography. They live in a blissful state of complete cognitive dissonance, and that is not going to change anytime soon. You cannot reason with these people, because they do not want to apply reason. Their stupidity serves them as a powerful tool. Ergo you cannot get them to compromise. We already have one of the strictest age-based rating systems in the world. German releases of violent games are usually massively crippled - no blood, people replaced by robots, enemies surrender instead of dying etc. And those punks still want to ban violence completely. We very nearly had paint-ball and similar games banned for adults. At the same time there is very little in restrictions for competitive shooters even though virtually every kid involved in such school killings was trained in such clubs and in most cases received access to weapons through this sport.
[...] events like the airport shooting scene ultimately give the morality crusaders ammunition and news headline real estate to put ever increasing pressure on politicians and take away that freedom.
So what is your plan? Defending freedom of speech by restricting speech? I do not see this working out.
What is the alternative? Not to shock people? Hell, literature would be a rather poor subject if authors had followed that reasoning. Yes, the airport scene is crass. Yes, I can understand that it is controversial to many people. Still it is a work of fiction. Nothing more. Fiction serves to entertain, and there was a time it also was intended to educate. And I do see MW2 in this tradition. It has the player face probably the biggest dilemma of them all: Does the end justify the means?
We see exactly this question asked right now across European media - though admittedly in a much less dire context, thank goodness - with the investigation into British PC Mark Kennedy's conduct. How far may the "good" go to fight the "bad"? May they break laws? If yes, which ones? May they violate ethical or moral conventions? MW2 may have chosen the most drastic scenario imaginable - killing those that you are supposed to protect - but the underlying issue is the same. Here in Germany just a while ago a law was snubbed by the supreme court that would have permitted the armed forces to shoot down hijacked passenger planes if they were being used as weapons akin to 9/11. So I really do not see why the game causes such a shit storm. Reality is far, far more grim.
I seriously doubt that. There are tv's with built-in W-LAN and H.264 acceleration for moderate prices today. Adding one more chip, especially when there are no licensing costs, is not an issue - if there is a market for it. And there will be one within short time.
Re. the Apple/MS episode: I am aware of it. The major difference is that Apple would have to wage war against the content provider on the Internet. If YouTube switched to WebM tomorrow, Apple would implement it today.
Both Firefox and Safari have taken a huge chunk of the market. [...] Safari takes up 5% [...].
For a very kind definition of "huge". With Apple's market share in the desktop and laptop world somewhere between 4 and 10%, depending on who you ask, those 5% look rather bleak to me. Either they barely manage to keep their few hardware customers from jumping ship or they lose about half of the many Mac users to competing browsers. Neither option sounds much like a success.
Absolutely. Which is why no DVD player can handle DivX, and why MP3 never made the jump to mobile phones and even dedicated devices. And, regarding your choice of time span, which is why we all still use VHS. Right. You do not honestly believe H.264 in its current form will be around in 10 years in any other use than to convert legacy media to its successor's successor?
Such breaches are the reason why I will never have a credit card. There ought to be a way to create some kind of simple ACL on payment methods: Similar to how I use a different e-mail alias for every (important) website I sign up for which I can simply change or delete if the database is breached or I receive spam, I should be able to give each company an individual authorisation code for withdrawals from my account that can only be used by that company, maybe through digital signatures, and may be subject to further limitations (no withdrawal above x, not more than a total of x withdrawn per month, each requested withdrawal must be manually authorised by me...). So even if one such code was compromised evil haxor X could do nothing with it unless they also steal the same company's payment certificate, which in an ideal world should not be stored on the same machine as their customer DB.
I can fine-tune who can do what on my media server down to ridiculous levels, but I have virtually no control over my bank account. Something is horribly wrong in this world.
Great. And what phones do they have? I doubt that among those 80% the iPhone owners are in the majority. 10% of the Indonesians have Internet access. Most of those are located in the major cities. Indonesia's slums have been struggling for decades to fight rampant diseases and starving. It is a very poor country with much of the population receiving at best a mediocre basic education. Aside from those 10% with Internet I doubt that many others own a computer, though I could not find any numbers to substantiate this. Can you provide anything to the contrary to enlighten me?
A TV-Out. Right. I am at a loss what to say. Read the website, please, before you continue to participate in this discussion. There you will find statements like this one:
In one Cambodian village where we have been working, there is no electricity, thus the laptop is, among other things, the brightest light source in the home.
Pardon my french, but which fucking TV do you want to connect the XO to in the middle of fucking nowhere in Africa?! Such a connector would be useless to the vast majority of the user base, it would add to hardware cost, maintenance, it would open another hole through which sand and liquids could enter the casing and it has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with the purpose of the OLPC project.
Regarding your first question: I do not know. I did not bring up this utterly retarded argument that somehow an extremely expensive ruggedised smartphone has anything to do with the OLPC.
When your protests fail and your political system is rigged in such a way that democratic change is made impossible, you can either pull a Ghandi and wait for a miracle or torch a few cars and break some windows. Not saying violence is the better option, but what good is protest when it is not heard?
The Linux4Afrika project outfits schools with computer rooms. Different focus, different goal, different requirements.
South Africa has a high tech industry in rapid growth. At the same time more than 70% of the population live in dire poverty and receive little to no education. Similarly Indonesia is not a uniformly industrialised country. The OLPC is aimed at those at the fringe of technological progress. In rural areas in third world countries you cannot simply put a handful of computers in a room and hook them up the the great wide internet. You said it yourself. In essence we two agree.
I can get a €15 machine from the local garage sale if need be. That still has nothing to do with the OLPC. The majority of people in Africa make a few dollars a month which they spend on food, medication and other essential items. They cannot afford a computer, no matter how cheap it is by our standards. And dumping them in front of a "common" laptop would do them no good, either. The XO is not simply about getting online. Please read the mission statement and the docs on the project's website.
Your question, though, is quite impossible to answer. Consumption depends to a large degree on how you use your machine, so every user will get different results. Independent tests and reviews are the only way aside from personal measurings I could think of to get any realistic figure.
Oh dear. How many African villages have a DSLAM in front of their medicine man's hut? And how many primary schools in the Indonesian countryside offer higher level web app development classes? This is not a general-purpose laptop to be issued to first world students, it is a machine purpose-built for a very narrow set of requirements. Remember: You deal with people to whom a cell phone is the pinnacle of civilisation.
Besides, Java is available for ARM. And massively overrated as a "standard in learning programming".
Most $600 laptops have more functionality and more power than this thing. That matters exactly fuck-all to people who cannot even afford a $165 laptop on their own. Besides, how would you like doing your homework or reading long texts and watching films on a cell phone? Did you even look up what the OLPC project is about? The kids in the third world do not need an app store, they need a platform that enables them to get used to a machine that magically emits light, shows pretty pictures that can move and make noise, and that allows them to talk to someone outside their range of sight. Ideally one that survives in the desert and uses little power. Which is precisely what the XO was designed from the ground up to be.
[...] they would have to modify it in some way (for example package it into a new zip file) which is a lot more work than just uploading it unchanged.
Yeah, which is so much more work that, um, every half-way sane upload application automates this process. Rapidshare and other hosters already do compare hashes. You are not the first bright fellow to realise that filtering file names is retarded.
I remember reading about an analysis of Facebook comments and "like's" a while ago which concluded that negative posts receive the most attention. Apparently it is easier to respond to a negative attitude - either by arguing against it or expressing solidarity - than a positive one.
The same effect is visible in politics: It is the angry voters who rush to the polling stations, the content stay at home, even though the outcome of the election is equally important to both. There surely is a psychological explanation for this behaviour.
There is a slight difference between a sovereign nation deciding who to trade with and that same sovereign nation manipulating another sovereign nation's internal politics through propaganda (the latter being used in its descriptive meaning, not as judgement).
The problem is Mugabe, not WikiLeaks. If the cables had not been leaked Mugabe would find another way to get rid of his "competition". Therefore the solution is not to condemn WikiLeaks but to pressure our governments into taking action against Mugabe.
To put this into simpler terms: If someone attacked you with a knife it is that person who should go to prison, not the producer of the knife.
People affiliated with the german Pirate Party have created and published a song book (sorry, no english translation available) with several popular Christmas songs. They created the sheet music themselves and used only lyrics whose copyright protection has expired, so the song book can be freely used and distributed.
Yes, we just accidentally blundered our way into being the world's premier superpower.
[citation needed]
Your premier superpower is broke. The Chinese hold your currency and thereby your economy by the balls to squeeze or crush as they see fit. Your premier superpower is currently going through its second Vietnam, with the Russians shouting "told you so" over their laughter every other week. Your premier superpower has been turned into a poor man's rip-off of the German Democratic Republic, spying on its populace, interning and murdering foreign and domestic "enemies" in violation of international law.
Nope. Those people already jumped ship to *buntu. And rightly so, since this distro better fits their specific needs. Debian being completely free is A Good Thing for those who care what is running on their machines.
I have used a similar system and I found it indeed quite straining to drag stuff over longer distances for prolonged periods of time. The major issue, though, was not moving stuff within one surface but dragging items up from the horizontal to the vertical surface. It requires a very uncomfortable turning of the hand along the way to get over the curve. So it is not really suited for dragging objects around en masse.
I have recently used a similar, but subtly different prototype at Munich's Ludwig Maximilian University, which essentially links the images of two Full-HD beamers. So yes, documents are perfectly legible even on these surfaces.
At least in the Munich project the touch functionality is offered in addition to mouse and keyboard. It is also possible to use a translucent silicone "keyboard" on the horizontal surface and have the machine project the actual keys onto (or rather, below) it and have the touch surface register the "key" presses on the silicone in the same way as with a truly virtual keyboard. Other input devices can be similarly simulated by putting objects onto the surface.
Slashdot Mirror
I personally see characters in games as no more than game pieces, not dissimilar to chess pieces and attach to them roughly the same level of emotion; but to the uninitiated they see games apparently simulating slaughter and torture, turning their children into a murdering wave of emotionless sociopaths.
Bottom line: Stupid people are stupid. That has nothing to do with the airport scene. Those people do not react to "amoral" things, they create amorality so they can bitch about how it ruins the world. Leave out the airport scene and you still have all those morons demanding the banishment of any kind of violent video game, along with anything that depicts or refers to sexuality, mocks religions, is anti-patriotic...
The problem is that if they push the boundaries too hard and too fast you get a backlash causing things like:- http://www.gamestooge.com/2009/06/05/germany-bans-violent-games-completely/
See above. Here in Germany the right-wing pseudo-christian conservative bloc has been waging a war on anything remotely offensive to their voters - and anything that can be publicly propped up as a scapegoat for social problems and political failure. This has nothing to do with how violent games actually are. The debate goes back all the way to the first GTA installment. After every school shooting a well-known choir of politicians, "experts" and self-proclaimed moral authorities (we use the term "Berufsentrüstete") sings the good old let's-ban-x song. When the first Tamagotchis came out some morons wanted to have them banned because they might have miseducated children about how to treat a pet. The very same people now rail against video games and pornography. They live in a blissful state of complete cognitive dissonance, and that is not going to change anytime soon. You cannot reason with these people, because they do not want to apply reason. Their stupidity serves them as a powerful tool. Ergo you cannot get them to compromise. We already have one of the strictest age-based rating systems in the world. German releases of violent games are usually massively crippled - no blood, people replaced by robots, enemies surrender instead of dying etc. And those punks still want to ban violence completely. We very nearly had paint-ball and similar games banned for adults. At the same time there is very little in restrictions for competitive shooters even though virtually every kid involved in such school killings was trained in such clubs and in most cases received access to weapons through this sport.
[...] events like the airport shooting scene ultimately give the morality crusaders ammunition and news headline real estate to put ever increasing pressure on politicians and take away that freedom.
So what is your plan? Defending freedom of speech by restricting speech? I do not see this working out.
What is the alternative? Not to shock people? Hell, literature would be a rather poor subject if authors had followed that reasoning. Yes, the airport scene is crass. Yes, I can understand that it is controversial to many people. Still it is a work of fiction. Nothing more. Fiction serves to entertain, and there was a time it also was intended to educate. And I do see MW2 in this tradition. It has the player face probably the biggest dilemma of them all: Does the end justify the means?
We see exactly this question asked right now across European media - though admittedly in a much less dire context, thank goodness - with the investigation into British PC Mark Kennedy's conduct. How far may the "good" go to fight the "bad"? May they break laws? If yes, which ones? May they violate ethical or moral conventions? MW2 may have chosen the most drastic scenario imaginable - killing those that you are supposed to protect - but the underlying issue is the same. Here in Germany just a while ago a law was snubbed by the supreme court that would have permitted the armed forces to shoot down hijacked passenger planes if they were being used as weapons akin to 9/11. So I really do not see why the game causes such a shit storm. Reality is far, far more grim.
I seriously doubt that. There are tv's with built-in W-LAN and H.264 acceleration for moderate prices today. Adding one more chip, especially when there are no licensing costs, is not an issue - if there is a market for it. And there will be one within short time.
Re. the Apple/MS episode: I am aware of it. The major difference is that Apple would have to wage war against the content provider on the Internet. If YouTube switched to WebM tomorrow, Apple would implement it today.
That, and most the i* owners I know run Opera on their devices because they dislike Safari.
Both Firefox and Safari have taken a huge chunk of the market. [...] Safari takes up 5% [...].
For a very kind definition of "huge". With Apple's market share in the desktop and laptop world somewhere between 4 and 10%, depending on who you ask, those 5% look rather bleak to me. Either they barely manage to keep their few hardware customers from jumping ship or they lose about half of the many Mac users to competing browsers. Neither option sounds much like a success.
Absolutely. Which is why no DVD player can handle DivX, and why MP3 never made the jump to mobile phones and even dedicated devices. And, regarding your choice of time span, which is why we all still use VHS. Right. You do not honestly believe H.264 in its current form will be around in 10 years in any other use than to convert legacy media to its successor's successor?
Such breaches are the reason why I will never have a credit card. There ought to be a way to create some kind of simple ACL on payment methods: Similar to how I use a different e-mail alias for every (important) website I sign up for which I can simply change or delete if the database is breached or I receive spam, I should be able to give each company an individual authorisation code for withdrawals from my account that can only be used by that company, maybe through digital signatures, and may be subject to further limitations (no withdrawal above x, not more than a total of x withdrawn per month, each requested withdrawal must be manually authorised by me...). So even if one such code was compromised evil haxor X could do nothing with it unless they also steal the same company's payment certificate, which in an ideal world should not be stored on the same machine as their customer DB.
I can fine-tune who can do what on my media server down to ridiculous levels, but I have virtually no control over my bank account. Something is horribly wrong in this world.
Great. And what phones do they have? I doubt that among those 80% the iPhone owners are in the majority. 10% of the Indonesians have Internet access. Most of those are located in the major cities. Indonesia's slums have been struggling for decades to fight rampant diseases and starving. It is a very poor country with much of the population receiving at best a mediocre basic education. Aside from those 10% with Internet I doubt that many others own a computer, though I could not find any numbers to substantiate this. Can you provide anything to the contrary to enlighten me?
A TV-Out. Right. I am at a loss what to say. Read the website, please, before you continue to participate in this discussion. There you will find statements like this one:
In one Cambodian village where we have been working, there is no electricity, thus the laptop is, among other things, the brightest light source in the home.
Pardon my french, but which fucking TV do you want to connect the XO to in the middle of fucking nowhere in Africa?! Such a connector would be useless to the vast majority of the user base, it would add to hardware cost, maintenance, it would open another hole through which sand and liquids could enter the casing and it has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with the purpose of the OLPC project.
Regarding your first question: I do not know. I did not bring up this utterly retarded argument that somehow an extremely expensive ruggedised smartphone has anything to do with the OLPC.
When your protests fail and your political system is rigged in such a way that democratic change is made impossible, you can either pull a Ghandi and wait for a miracle or torch a few cars and break some windows. Not saying violence is the better option, but what good is protest when it is not heard?
The Linux4Afrika project outfits schools with computer rooms. Different focus, different goal, different requirements.
South Africa has a high tech industry in rapid growth. At the same time more than 70% of the population live in dire poverty and receive little to no education. Similarly Indonesia is not a uniformly industrialised country. The OLPC is aimed at those at the fringe of technological progress. In rural areas in third world countries you cannot simply put a handful of computers in a room and hook them up the the great wide internet. You said it yourself. In essence we two agree.
I can get a €15 machine from the local garage sale if need be. That still has nothing to do with the OLPC. The majority of people in Africa make a few dollars a month which they spend on food, medication and other essential items. They cannot afford a computer, no matter how cheap it is by our standards. And dumping them in front of a "common" laptop would do them no good, either. The XO is not simply about getting online. Please read the mission statement and the docs on the project's website.
Your question, though, is quite impossible to answer. Consumption depends to a large degree on how you use your machine, so every user will get different results. Independent tests and reviews are the only way aside from personal measurings I could think of to get any realistic figure.
Not that I like Apple, but a small market share does not make them unsuccessful. By your reasoning BMW is a failed business.
Oh dear. How many African villages have a DSLAM in front of their medicine man's hut? And how many primary schools in the Indonesian countryside offer higher level web app development classes? This is not a general-purpose laptop to be issued to first world students, it is a machine purpose-built for a very narrow set of requirements. Remember: You deal with people to whom a cell phone is the pinnacle of civilisation.
Besides, Java is available for ARM. And massively overrated as a "standard in learning programming".
Most $600 cellphones [...]
Most $600 laptops have more functionality and more power than this thing. That matters exactly fuck-all to people who cannot even afford a $165 laptop on their own. Besides, how would you like doing your homework or reading long texts and watching films on a cell phone? Did you even look up what the OLPC project is about? The kids in the third world do not need an app store, they need a platform that enables them to get used to a machine that magically emits light, shows pretty pictures that can move and make noise, and that allows them to talk to someone outside their range of sight. Ideally one that survives in the desert and uses little power. Which is precisely what the XO was designed from the ground up to be.
[...] they would have to modify it in some way (for example package it into a new zip file) which is a lot more work than just uploading it unchanged.
Yeah, which is so much more work that, um, every half-way sane upload application automates this process. Rapidshare and other hosters already do compare hashes. You are not the first bright fellow to realise that filtering file names is retarded.
I remember reading about an analysis of Facebook comments and "like's" a while ago which concluded that negative posts receive the most attention. Apparently it is easier to respond to a negative attitude - either by arguing against it or expressing solidarity - than a positive one.
The same effect is visible in politics: It is the angry voters who rush to the polling stations, the content stay at home, even though the outcome of the election is equally important to both. There surely is a psychological explanation for this behaviour.
There is a slight difference between a sovereign nation deciding who to trade with and that same sovereign nation manipulating another sovereign nation's internal politics through propaganda (the latter being used in its descriptive meaning, not as judgement).
The problem is Mugabe, not WikiLeaks. If the cables had not been leaked Mugabe would find another way to get rid of his "competition". Therefore the solution is not to condemn WikiLeaks but to pressure our governments into taking action against Mugabe.
To put this into simpler terms: If someone attacked you with a knife it is that person who should go to prison, not the producer of the knife.
People affiliated with the german Pirate Party have created and published a song book (sorry, no english translation available) with several popular Christmas songs. They created the sheet music themselves and used only lyrics whose copyright protection has expired, so the song book can be freely used and distributed.
Yes, we just accidentally blundered our way into being the world's premier superpower.
[citation needed]
Your premier superpower is broke. The Chinese hold your currency and thereby your economy by the balls to squeeze or crush as they see fit. Your premier superpower is currently going through its second Vietnam, with the Russians shouting "told you so" over their laughter every other week. Your premier superpower has been turned into a poor man's rip-off of the German Democratic Republic, spying on its populace, interning and murdering foreign and domestic "enemies" in violation of international law.
Nope. Those people already jumped ship to *buntu. And rightly so, since this distro better fits their specific needs. Debian being completely free is A Good Thing for those who care what is running on their machines.
Do not get me started on DeCSS. It took a long time for distros to muster the balls to ship this library, and even today its legality is disputed.
I have used a similar system and I found it indeed quite straining to drag stuff over longer distances for prolonged periods of time. The major issue, though, was not moving stuff within one surface but dragging items up from the horizontal to the vertical surface. It requires a very uncomfortable turning of the hand along the way to get over the curve. So it is not really suited for dragging objects around en masse.
I have recently used a similar, but subtly different prototype at Munich's Ludwig Maximilian University, which essentially links the images of two Full-HD beamers. So yes, documents are perfectly legible even on these surfaces.
At least in the Munich project the touch functionality is offered in addition to mouse and keyboard. It is also possible to use a translucent silicone "keyboard" on the horizontal surface and have the machine project the actual keys onto (or rather, below) it and have the touch surface register the "key" presses on the silicone in the same way as with a truly virtual keyboard. Other input devices can be similarly simulated by putting objects onto the surface.