Not rendering bitty little colour screens or scanning for viruses. Plus the code was written to extract every last drop of power out of the architecture. So when you compare the amount of WORK a machine from the 70s or 80s did (my university's mainframe had a FORTRAN complier that needed less that 131kWord of memory - today the GRUB bootloader is bigger than that) with a more modern box, with all its overheads and inefficiencies, the balance isn't as great as the scoffers might think.
Does that make it any less impressive that a cell phone is putting up these kinds of numbers? Does it make it less impressive that you can code up an Linpack in Java, throw it at a JVM and rely on JIT compiler to optimize the DAXPY for the hardware on the fly? I think it both of those things are pretty damn impressive.
In the not so distant past, things like Algebra and Geometry were considered "premium" learning. Now, anyone who has been through high school has been exposed to those concepts and, even if they can't use that math, they have been exposed to it. The internet has become such a pervasive part of our culture that an understanding of how it works and even ethics classes on how to use it should be taught at an early age.
That doesn't preclude idiot bureaucrats without that education from thinking that sending information via tor and expecting the exit node to be secure but, it does put society in a place where basic knowledge about the fundamental structure of the internet is almost common sense.
Of course it is possible that it already has gone supernova, and that the light and hard gamma front will reach us tomorrow morning.
This is one of the things I love about astronomy. It's entirely possible that it went supernova before we even had telescopes powerful enough to look at it and say, "Huh. That star is not like the others".
Why should Adobe care? As far as their history goes, I think Adobe would love it if they didn't need to support a flash plug-in.
If that were true, they would open source their plugin and let the community improve it.
They certainly don't seem to want to invest a lot of time/money into keeping it up-to-date.
Because they don't need to. They've already "won". With a huge installed base and no real competing technology, there is little motivation to improve the product. Only in version 10.1 have they gotten around to even adding video hardware acceleration while flash as a video delivery device has been a staple of the internet since youtube came on the scene. My guess is they are adding it because 1) It will make flash usable on phones. 2) There is some fear that HTML could become a viable alternative.
If it failed the first few times, just keep trying. Surely we can either slip it by the public or keep trying until they lose steam or we've distracted them with something else. Do whatever it takes to keep the media industry funding our political campaigns.
Interestingly enough, my knowledge of Dengue only comes from living in Argentina for the last 10 years and remembering it being big in the papers a year or two ago before I left. The reason that millions of dollars can be appropriated to treat something like Influenza A is that a vaccine exists. And it exists because it also affects rich countries that can shell out enough money to make the R&D worth the investment.
I think it depends on several factors. 22 year old kids with a bachelors in CS from a state school are usually bright eyed and eager to learn. If they come from "prestigious" tech schools and "settle" on a company that isn't a household name, they are usually aghast that they aren't everyones manager a year into the job as they've over-engineered every piece of software they've been tasked to write and treat even seasoned veterans as if they don't know what they are talking about.
Also be wary of anyone with a Masters in Computer Science getting their first industry job. Be sure to grill them about why they aren't getting their Ph.D. Often it's because they were good enough to get to the Masters level but couldn't get into a Ph.D. program. Those kinds of people often end up being overly expensive dead weight as they try to turn their job into their own personal Ph.D. program.
(perhaps they just don't think they'll ever profit from malaria drugs, etc)
And there you have it. Most of the countries where Malaria is prevalent are not rich countries. However, most people have heard the word Malaria and, even if they don't know what it is or how you get it, this announcement sounds impressive to them. Dengue Fever is also common in many of the areas of the world where Malaria is but they aren't releasing that research. Why? Because no one has heard of it so it's not an effective PR stunt.
Phoronix is great for information and their benchmark suite is excellent but, I agree that their benchmark results have to be taken with a grain of salt. I actually have a feeling that the reason their benchmark results are so dubious is actually *because* they have such an easy, automated benchmark suite. They just run the benchmarks, it generates a webpage and they annotate it. Some of my specific gripes with their benchmark results are:
1) Declaring a winner on very small margins. Unless you are actively optimizing software on a completely quiescent box, a 1% difference in average performance doesn't make something faster. You chalk that up to noise and just call it a draw. 2) Declaring a winner on baffling results. When you see a number that you don't expect, you don't just say, "Odd. That's really slow." You investigate and find the cause of the odd results and fix it if possible. Then you post the baffling results if still applicable and the better results like Toms did. 3) Declaring a winner for a limited or useless test. If A is faster than B using a filesize of C, that's interesting if I work with files of size C. If I don't, then that number is meaningless to me. If you are benchmarking for user-grade machines, you have to find the subset of the dataset that is relevant and test it's min/max/average/medium.
I probably have more gripes but, that's the gist of it. I read phoronix daily but, I always feel like their benchmarks and comments on the benchmarks do an injustice to whatever things they are trying to compare. The Toms benchmark was a bit better but, rarely have I seen online benchmarks not do #1.
Actually, you don't. You just need to "sudo apt-get install google-chrome-stable". They setup their packages in a sane way so that it removes the beta for you (and presumably would do the same if you downloaded it from the website and did a "sudo dpkg -i").
It's interesting but not surprising. As an engineer at a major financial data provider, we generally *try* to appropriate hardware to handle a 2x average market open load. That works because it's a known large spike in data and, so much data is being produced that a slight degradation in service over that brief interval isn't noticed because SO much data is coming through. When this kind of thing happens in the middle of the day for a prolonged period of time, shit starts crashing. And, it happens in a cascading fashion that probably only exacerbates the problem.
Protip: There was a time when Christians acted like this. It’s called THE DARK AGES! It was a desperate time. With crusades, inquisitions, but most of all, power-greedy dicks controlling people. This is the exact same thing now. Only in the Muslim world.
It's not only in the Muslim world that we still have these things. We just have better PR Guys than the Muslims and so we lump all these activities into something we call "The War on Terror".
You're doing this in a laboratory situation, not in the realworld. Your approach will not work when you're talking about running a hundred, or a thousand, concurrent VMs on commodity hardware. Remote or local access is hardly the problem... it's all those concurrent threads gulping down bandwidth that could be used to do actual processing, instead of memory copies.
I don't think the OP was talking about "hundreds or thousands of VMs on commodity hardware". He was talking about making 20+ workstations be able to run both linux and Windows in a sane way. In that case, if you have to do it, make Ubuntu the host and Windows the guest using VirtualBox. Performance is much, much better that way.
Just on the interactivity alone, it's slow response, you spend extra seconds loading windows, menus, and after awhile those extra seconds add up to real productivity loss. Virtualization belongs on servers and in labs, where interactivity is less important than raw horsepower. For a workstation, don't virtualize. It's painful.
This is a surprising response. The rare times I've needed to work on Windows GUI projects, I've always virtualized with VirtualBox from an Ubuntu host and have never had any performance complaints at all. In fact, it was much faster than most Windows machines I've used because once I got the guest to a good state, I snapshotted it and rolled it back every time I shut the guest off. I would almost go so far as to say that the preferred way to run Windows is as a guest OS from linux where you roll back the guest every time. It's fast, stable and borders on pleasant to use.
Now, going the other way is not the same. In a corporate environment where your Windows workstation is likely straining to even keep up with the virus checker, trying to run an Ubuntu VM under that can be slightly painful. It's not unbearable but, it's certainly not as pleasant as the Ubuntu host and Windows guest situation.
Most wireless cards that you find in a laptop do absolutely nothing on the 5Ghz channels unless they first hear a beacon on one of those channels. They specifically do this so that they can conform to world regulations on what channels can be used. So the Israeli claim is completely bogus unless Apple went out of their way to hardcode the wifi region directly into the firmware instead of the normal "world roaming" region that most cards have (which is possible, I suppose). Having said that, for some cards it's not a hardware or firmware restriction that prevents the transmission on whatever channel you want but instead a software one. For example, you can use an atheros wireless card that normally has the 5Ghz channels closed as a full on access point by simply hacking the driver to remove the restriction.
In some countries the light sequence is green, yellow, red, yellow, green. The second yellow occurs after the opposing traffic turns red (with maybe a slight delay) to indicate that you can start driving but, to be cautious. This is similar to your idea but prevents a longer delay at lights when it's obvious there is no opposing traffic and (hopefully) serves as a warning as you are entering an intersection after a red light. Though, it may be that this system only works in places where most of the driving rules are enforced by custom and not by law. If people are accustomed to driving where most intersections do not having stoplights/stop signs and there is more of a social pact of giving right of way, they are probably more likely to actually look before entering an intersection even after a red light has changed.
I don't even think it's possible to do something like this in an informed way. Even if you can visually see the exact data that they put into their database and think to yourself, "Ok, that's fine. That data is pretty anonymous", doesn't mean that in 2 years time (or even now), the information in that database can't be cross-referenced against other databases to help identify you. I dearly hope privacy isn't dead but, the more places you make yourself known (even anonymously), the more likely that in the future, that data can be mined to build a complete picture of you. Just because data seems innocuous doesn't mean it is.
Linux users complains boils down to "It's not fair that Windows is successful."
Again, boo-fuckin'-hoo. Make something useful and maybe people will use it.
I don't think Linux users complain that Windows is successful. I think they complain that Windows is artificially successful. At certain points in Microsofts history they have had arguably the best home/office operating system available. However, as the competition has caught up or exceeded their offerings, they continue to maintain a monopoly by doing things like strong-arming hardware vendors, document lock-in, spreading FUD about patents, etc.
Regardless of how you feel about Google, they don't maintain their market share via underhanded tactics. The fact that they maintain a dominant market share, even when they may not be the default search engine on most computers, means that people choose to use their search engine because they find value in it. The barrier to entry in the search market may be high in that you have to provide a better service than Google but, if you do such a thing, adoption rates can skyrocket overnight because it's simply a matter of a user typing in a different URL for searching. So, while Google may be or may be becoming a monopoly, they can be overthrown at the whim of their users. That is not the case with Microsoft because of the above mentioned tactics in which they maintain their monopoly.
I find it disturbing that you have to sit through a 2:30 minute powerpoint presentation accompanied by 1980s porn music in order to see the 1 second boot time. For those looking for just the boot time, it occurs between 1:05 and 1:06 seconds in the video.
I think your definition of "fake" and mine differ. The video is certainly not fake. It's a Lego machine that can solve a Rubics Cube that is being blogged about by some random overzealous blogger. The 2 and 4 second solves were probably the engineer running test cases where he took a solved cube and rotated it a certain number of times to see if the machine would then solve it in the same number of rotations. It's fairly obvious that the machine isn't capable of solving a random cube in 2-4 seconds because it doesn't move fast enough.
Oh, for fucks sake, IT'S A LEGO ROBOT SOLVING A RUBICS CUBE!
The problem is that the word of the law has become more important than the spirit of the law in many countries. Beyond outright felonies that essentially everyone would agree are anti-social behavior, there is no good reason to enforce the word of the law when no harm has been done to any other party. I lived in Argentina for much of the last 10 years and, there, the spirit of the law seems to be what is enforced. Smoking pot is illegal but, if you are peacefully sitting outside and smoking it, no one cares. Smoking in the bars is now illegal but, it's a stupid law so everyone still smokes in the bars. Speed limits, stop signs and even the lines on the road are just suggestions.
Having said that, a society like that comes at a certain price. A police officer can enforce all the normal bullshit laws that are universally shared by almost all countries (by treaty or bank pressure, I'm sure) and, when they do, it's not usually because they feel honor bound to uphold their higher moral position and police the populace. It's because you look like a sucker and will give him 50 bucks to look the other way.
So, amazingly, a society founded on irrationally accepting global "standards", ignoring them, and then having a certain amount of corruption to enforce them for personal gains, is actually a MUCH more pleasant place to live than, say, the U.S. or U.K (I've lived in both for many years as well). I suppose that's possibly because it's a relatively new democracy and people still remember life before that. But, in Buenos Aires you can get something on the scale of The Million Man March on any given weekend just because the government did something stupid like raise the export tax on cheese by 0.05%. They take that shit seriously.
Really, the true protection the laptop gets is that every student receives one for free, but a replacement laptop has to be paid for out of their parent's pockets. Students will learn to be careful with them or face punishment from their parents.
Disregarding all the other horrors of this, what happens when the parents don't have enough money to buy a new one? Is the kid expelled? Is he left behind?
Laptops die. Not always because their owners mistreat them. The "break it and your parents pay" policy is only inviting a divide between the rich and the poor.
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Once the Stargate was found and the Asgard gave us all their tech, these sorts of events are no longer impressive.
Not rendering bitty little colour screens or scanning for viruses. Plus the code was written to extract every last drop of power out of the architecture. So when you compare the amount of WORK a machine from the 70s or 80s did (my university's mainframe had a FORTRAN complier that needed less that 131kWord of memory - today the GRUB bootloader is bigger than that) with a more modern box, with all its overheads and inefficiencies, the balance isn't as great as the scoffers might think.
Does that make it any less impressive that a cell phone is putting up these kinds of numbers? Does it make it less impressive that you can code up an Linpack in Java, throw it at a JVM and rely on JIT compiler to optimize the DAXPY for the hardware on the fly? I think it both of those things are pretty damn impressive.
In the not so distant past, things like Algebra and Geometry were considered "premium" learning. Now, anyone who has been through high school has been exposed to those concepts and, even if they can't use that math, they have been exposed to it. The internet has become such a pervasive part of our culture that an understanding of how it works and even ethics classes on how to use it should be taught at an early age.
That doesn't preclude idiot bureaucrats without that education from thinking that sending information via tor and expecting the exit node to be secure but, it does put society in a place where basic knowledge about the fundamental structure of the internet is almost common sense.
Of course it is possible that it already has gone supernova, and that the light and hard gamma front will reach us tomorrow morning.
This is one of the things I love about astronomy. It's entirely possible that it went supernova before we even had telescopes powerful enough to look at it and say, "Huh. That star is not like the others".
Why should Adobe care? As far as their history goes, I think Adobe would love it if they didn't need to support a flash plug-in.
If that were true, they would open source their plugin and let the community improve it.
They certainly don't seem to want to invest a lot of time/money into keeping it up-to-date.
Because they don't need to. They've already "won". With a huge installed base and no real competing technology, there is little motivation to improve the product. Only in version 10.1 have they gotten around to even adding video hardware acceleration while flash as a video delivery device has been a staple of the internet since youtube came on the scene. My guess is they are adding it because 1) It will make flash usable on phones. 2) There is some fear that HTML could become a viable alternative.
If it failed the first few times, just keep trying. Surely we can either slip it by the public or keep trying until they lose steam or we've distracted them with something else. Do whatever it takes to keep the media industry funding our political campaigns.
Stories like this almost make me physically ill.
All of these ones: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010150636%201749646482&name=SLC
Interestingly enough, my knowledge of Dengue only comes from living in Argentina for the last 10 years and remembering it being big in the papers a year or two ago before I left. The reason that millions of dollars can be appropriated to treat something like Influenza A is that a vaccine exists. And it exists because it also affects rich countries that can shell out enough money to make the R&D worth the investment.
I think it depends on several factors. 22 year old kids with a bachelors in CS from a state school are usually bright eyed and eager to learn. If they come from "prestigious" tech schools and "settle" on a company that isn't a household name, they are usually aghast that they aren't everyones manager a year into the job as they've over-engineered every piece of software they've been tasked to write and treat even seasoned veterans as if they don't know what they are talking about.
Also be wary of anyone with a Masters in Computer Science getting their first industry job. Be sure to grill them about why they aren't getting their Ph.D. Often it's because they were good enough to get to the Masters level but couldn't get into a Ph.D. program. Those kinds of people often end up being overly expensive dead weight as they try to turn their job into their own personal Ph.D. program.
(perhaps they just don't think they'll ever profit from malaria drugs, etc)
And there you have it. Most of the countries where Malaria is prevalent are not rich countries. However, most people have heard the word Malaria and, even if they don't know what it is or how you get it, this announcement sounds impressive to them. Dengue Fever is also common in many of the areas of the world where Malaria is but they aren't releasing that research. Why? Because no one has heard of it so it's not an effective PR stunt.
Phoronix is great for information and their benchmark suite is excellent but, I agree that their benchmark results have to be taken with a grain of salt. I actually have a feeling that the reason their benchmark results are so dubious is actually *because* they have such an easy, automated benchmark suite. They just run the benchmarks, it generates a webpage and they annotate it. Some of my specific gripes with their benchmark results are:
1) Declaring a winner on very small margins. Unless you are actively optimizing software on a completely quiescent box, a 1% difference in average performance doesn't make something faster. You chalk that up to noise and just call it a draw.
2) Declaring a winner on baffling results. When you see a number that you don't expect, you don't just say, "Odd. That's really slow." You investigate and find the cause of the odd results and fix it if possible. Then you post the baffling results if still applicable and the better results like Toms did.
3) Declaring a winner for a limited or useless test. If A is faster than B using a filesize of C, that's interesting if I work with files of size C. If I don't, then that number is meaningless to me. If you are benchmarking for user-grade machines, you have to find the subset of the dataset that is relevant and test it's min/max/average/medium.
I probably have more gripes but, that's the gist of it. I read phoronix daily but, I always feel like their benchmarks and comments on the benchmarks do an injustice to whatever things they are trying to compare. The Toms benchmark was a bit better but, rarely have I seen online benchmarks not do #1.
Actually, you don't. You just need to "sudo apt-get install google-chrome-stable". They setup their packages in a sane way so that it removes the beta for you (and presumably would do the same if you downloaded it from the website and did a "sudo dpkg -i").
It's interesting but not surprising. As an engineer at a major financial data provider, we generally *try* to appropriate hardware to handle a 2x average market open load. That works because it's a known large spike in data and, so much data is being produced that a slight degradation in service over that brief interval isn't noticed because SO much data is coming through. When this kind of thing happens in the middle of the day for a prolonged period of time, shit starts crashing. And, it happens in a cascading fashion that probably only exacerbates the problem.
Protip: There was a time when Christians acted like this. It’s called THE DARK AGES!
It was a desperate time. With crusades, inquisitions, but most of all, power-greedy dicks controlling people.
This is the exact same thing now. Only in the Muslim world.
It's not only in the Muslim world that we still have these things. We just have better PR Guys than the Muslims and so we lump all these activities into something we call "The War on Terror".
You're doing this in a laboratory situation, not in the realworld. Your approach will not work when you're talking about running a hundred, or a thousand, concurrent VMs on commodity hardware. Remote or local access is hardly the problem... it's all those concurrent threads gulping down bandwidth that could be used to do actual processing, instead of memory copies.
I don't think the OP was talking about "hundreds or thousands of VMs on commodity hardware". He was talking about making 20+ workstations be able to run both linux and Windows in a sane way. In that case, if you have to do it, make Ubuntu the host and Windows the guest using VirtualBox. Performance is much, much better that way.
I do. The short answer: Don't.
Just on the interactivity alone, it's slow response, you spend extra seconds loading windows, menus, and after awhile those extra seconds add up to real productivity loss. Virtualization belongs on servers and in labs, where interactivity is less important than raw horsepower. For a workstation, don't virtualize. It's painful.
This is a surprising response. The rare times I've needed to work on Windows GUI projects, I've always virtualized with VirtualBox from an Ubuntu host and have never had any performance complaints at all. In fact, it was much faster than most Windows machines I've used because once I got the guest to a good state, I snapshotted it and rolled it back every time I shut the guest off. I would almost go so far as to say that the preferred way to run Windows is as a guest OS from linux where you roll back the guest every time. It's fast, stable and borders on pleasant to use.
Now, going the other way is not the same. In a corporate environment where your Windows workstation is likely straining to even keep up with the virus checker, trying to run an Ubuntu VM under that can be slightly painful. It's not unbearable but, it's certainly not as pleasant as the Ubuntu host and Windows guest situation.
Most wireless cards that you find in a laptop do absolutely nothing on the 5Ghz channels unless they first hear a beacon on one of those channels. They specifically do this so that they can conform to world regulations on what channels can be used. So the Israeli claim is completely bogus unless Apple went out of their way to hardcode the wifi region directly into the firmware instead of the normal "world roaming" region that most cards have (which is possible, I suppose). Having said that, for some cards it's not a hardware or firmware restriction that prevents the transmission on whatever channel you want but instead a software one. For example, you can use an atheros wireless card that normally has the 5Ghz channels closed as a full on access point by simply hacking the driver to remove the restriction.
$ ls -l /etc/udev/rules.d/99-mail-on-usb.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/99-mail-on-usb.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/99-mail-on-usb.rules
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 159 2010-04-13 21:23
$ cat
ACTION=="add",SUBSYSTEMS=="usb",RUN+="/bin/sh -c 'who | mail root -s Insert'"
ACTION=="remove",SUBSYSTEMS=="usb",RUN+="/bin/sh -c 'who | mail root -s Remove'"
That's my version 1.0 and took almost 30 seconds to create. I don't live in my moms basement though. :(
In some countries the light sequence is green, yellow, red, yellow, green. The second yellow occurs after the opposing traffic turns red (with maybe a slight delay) to indicate that you can start driving but, to be cautious. This is similar to your idea but prevents a longer delay at lights when it's obvious there is no opposing traffic and (hopefully) serves as a warning as you are entering an intersection after a red light. Though, it may be that this system only works in places where most of the driving rules are enforced by custom and not by law. If people are accustomed to driving where most intersections do not having stoplights/stop signs and there is more of a social pact of giving right of way, they are probably more likely to actually look before entering an intersection even after a red light has changed.
I don't even think it's possible to do something like this in an informed way. Even if you can visually see the exact data that they put into their database and think to yourself, "Ok, that's fine. That data is pretty anonymous", doesn't mean that in 2 years time (or even now), the information in that database can't be cross-referenced against other databases to help identify you. I dearly hope privacy isn't dead but, the more places you make yourself known (even anonymously), the more likely that in the future, that data can be mined to build a complete picture of you. Just because data seems innocuous doesn't mean it is.
Boo-fuckin'-hoo.
Linux users complains boils down to "It's not fair that Windows is successful."
Again, boo-fuckin'-hoo. Make something useful and maybe people will use it.
I don't think Linux users complain that Windows is successful. I think they complain that Windows is artificially successful. At certain points in Microsofts history they have had arguably the best home/office operating system available. However, as the competition has caught up or exceeded their offerings, they continue to maintain a monopoly by doing things like strong-arming hardware vendors, document lock-in, spreading FUD about patents, etc.
Regardless of how you feel about Google, they don't maintain their market share via underhanded tactics. The fact that they maintain a dominant market share, even when they may not be the default search engine on most computers, means that people choose to use their search engine because they find value in it. The barrier to entry in the search market may be high in that you have to provide a better service than Google but, if you do such a thing, adoption rates can skyrocket overnight because it's simply a matter of a user typing in a different URL for searching. So, while Google may be or may be becoming a monopoly, they can be overthrown at the whim of their users. That is not the case with Microsoft because of the above mentioned tactics in which they maintain their monopoly.
*That* is what Linux users complain about.
I find it disturbing that you have to sit through a 2:30 minute powerpoint presentation accompanied by 1980s porn music in order to see the 1 second boot time. For those looking for just the boot time, it occurs between 1:05 and 1:06 seconds in the video.
I think your definition of "fake" and mine differ. The video is certainly not fake. It's a Lego machine that can solve a Rubics Cube that is being blogged about by some random overzealous blogger. The 2 and 4 second solves were probably the engineer running test cases where he took a solved cube and rotated it a certain number of times to see if the machine would then solve it in the same number of rotations. It's fairly obvious that the machine isn't capable of solving a random cube in 2-4 seconds because it doesn't move fast enough.
Oh, for fucks sake, IT'S A LEGO ROBOT SOLVING A RUBICS CUBE!
The problem is that the word of the law has become more important than the spirit of the law in many countries. Beyond outright felonies that essentially everyone would agree are anti-social behavior, there is no good reason to enforce the word of the law when no harm has been done to any other party. I lived in Argentina for much of the last 10 years and, there, the spirit of the law seems to be what is enforced. Smoking pot is illegal but, if you are peacefully sitting outside and smoking it, no one cares. Smoking in the bars is now illegal but, it's a stupid law so everyone still smokes in the bars. Speed limits, stop signs and even the lines on the road are just suggestions.
Having said that, a society like that comes at a certain price. A police officer can enforce all the normal bullshit laws that are universally shared by almost all countries (by treaty or bank pressure, I'm sure) and, when they do, it's not usually because they feel honor bound to uphold their higher moral position and police the populace. It's because you look like a sucker and will give him 50 bucks to look the other way.
So, amazingly, a society founded on irrationally accepting global "standards", ignoring them, and then having a certain amount of corruption to enforce them for personal gains, is actually a MUCH more pleasant place to live than, say, the U.S. or U.K (I've lived in both for many years as well). I suppose that's possibly because it's a relatively new democracy and people still remember life before that. But, in Buenos Aires you can get something on the scale of The Million Man March on any given weekend just because the government did something stupid like raise the export tax on cheese by 0.05%. They take that shit seriously.
Really, the true protection the laptop gets is that every student receives one for free, but a replacement laptop has to be paid for out of their parent's pockets. Students will learn to be careful with them or face punishment from their parents.
Disregarding all the other horrors of this, what happens when the parents don't have enough money to buy a new one? Is the kid expelled? Is he left behind?
Laptops die. Not always because their owners mistreat them. The "break it and your parents pay" policy is only inviting a divide between the rich and the poor.