Back when the Coke-Pepsi wars were red hot, there was a fierce bidding war over who would get the rights to engineer and provide the first cans of soda to be used in space. The resulting project was the center of quite a lot of advertising; maybe you saw some of it. And from what I read in the advertising trades, this project was looked upon by those in the field as a hell of a good investment and one that they would have been delighted to repeat.
You think that promotion "requires an exuberant economy"? You have GOT to be kidding me. Take a look at any history of advertising stunts during the Great Depression. Hell, just search for "depression glass". Not only that, such a plan would appeal to all sorts of motivations. As I said in the post I linked to, not only would this be something that the citizens of some places do if only to show how cool they are (anybody care to deny that Texas would jump at an excuse to have their own space program?) it would also give a structure in which high tech states like North Carolina could develop their own expertise and networks.
India got their moon program done for a hundred million dollars. Care to tell me that Texas A&M couldn't get a small payload to Mars orbit for less? Especially in partnership with a few dozen local businesses and schools?
I agree that food making technology is important, but first of all it takes time. The longer we wait to get that right the longer the delay before a Mars crew has what they need. Secondly, it's subject to breakdown. Do you really want to be that far from support when your algae tank shuts down? Third, have you ever tried to live on synthetic foods? I've got a jar of Marmite and some vegan "sheese" right here if you want to try it. Especially in a confined space with limited stimuli, good food, nice bedding and clothes, and so on, get very, very important. Ask anybody who has served on a submarine, especially a boomer crew, and they'll talk your ear off about it. To the extent that boomer crews talk about anything;->
Note, also that I'm not just talking about food. I'm talking about any resource that is low tech enough that supply can be decentralized. Not only does this include what I mentioned above, it even includes sheets of insulating material, robots for greenhouse work, and all sorts of useful things that NASA then doesn't need to pay to get out there. What you suggest and what I suggest do not have that high a substitution effect. They pull from different funding sources, use somewhat different pools of labor, are best suited to different time scales, and, to some extent, would provide different resources to Mars crews.
Looks to me like you're just a wee bit confused on this whole cost factor. How many kilos of mass do you think the first group will be bringing with them, anyway?
I agree with you about those places but I would say that if you're serious, go further up the chain. Call the white collar companies in your area, especially ones like ad agencies that replace their stuff frequently, and see if you can get equipment direct from them.
Here in Portland we have a group called Free Geek that has done a fantastic job of this kind of thing. You certainly should look at their site and might want to consider getting their video, though they're not specifically education-oriented.
Lastly, frankly, if your goal is to educate, instead of specifically to "put computers in schools", then consider getting active in your local infoshop, especially if you can get some friends to get active there as well. A good community computer center will reach more people per machine, people who *want* to be using those computers. They also have the freedom to do what works rather than what the schools will allow. Again here in Portland, we have an excellent example, a place called the IPRC, or Independent Publishing Resource Center. It, in turn, was originally modeled on a New York City place called ABC No Rio, though it has long since gone waaay past what No Rio offers. On top of everything else, an infoshop can then partner with a free school, or, as they're sometimes known, a "free skool". As an educational publisher and somebody who has been involved in every organization I mention above, who has also helped put computers in so many schools that I've lost count, there is little that would make me as happy as to see more active free schools in low income neighborhoods that provided classes in things like the biology of local species or sociology and psychology taught using local human behavior.
Afaic, we should be shipping dead bodies to Mars as fast as people will pay to do it. They're excellent biomatter, they provide useful colonies of microorganisms, and they give rich people a means to contribute to the settlement of other parts of the solar system. Same goes for shipping bodies to the Moon and, for that matter, the more stable Lagrange points.
Undoubtedly, the quantities of materiel for a Mars base would be huge. What I can't understand is why nobody is ramping up to spread that job around. Seems to me that there are plenty of companies, states, countries, and so on, who would be delighted to get the chance to spend millions of dollars to have their stuff being used by a Mars crew. And it seems to me that we now know both how to get missions to Mars and how to have them work together.
Why is nobody trying to convince Wisconsin to start their own Mars mission to send five kilos of cheese into Mars orbit along with some clothes from Lands' End and fifteen or twenty kilos of brats and cheese bread? We know that UW Madison has some kickass space scientists and plenty of engineers. Or what about having developing nations pay a fifty or sixty thousand dollars a kilo to get their signature products added to a vessel to then be built and launched by one of the umpty-dozen New Space companies? There are plenty of options.
The smart thing to do at this point is to start pushing non-federal entities to start their own launch programs to launch their own payloads to Mars orbit where they can either wait for landing instructions (safely a few hundred miles or more from the base) or to be ferried down by some purpose-built vehicle.
Not all supplies are high tech. There is no reason that we need to wait years and years before we'll be ready to send low-G cheese, for crying out loud. The vacuum sealers sold in every supermarket today are more high-tech than the gear used to prepare consumables for the Apollo missions. Thousands and thousands of kilos of supplies would fit into this category. Clothes. Food. Bedding. And on and on. And, frankly, there are plenty of ways to structure the contracts so that Mars crew aren't obligated to use what is sent. Something would have to be pretty damn bad to get left in the cold but there's no reason that option can't be included.
And think about it. This way the logistics work is spread around, too. And the cargos can launch at high-G, travel at near-ambient temperatures in low-atmosphere vessels, and in a dozens of different ways, be a hell of a lot cheaper to send then trying to get everydamnthing shipped in a human-capable vessel. Sending everything in one vessel is like shipping a package by buying an airline ticket for it. This would provide the option of "parcel post".
Speaking as a guy who spent a month in the hospital a few years back fighting one of the worst drug-resistant infections in the world (a nasty kind of c.dif) what you're talking about just doesn't happen that much to healthy people. Not only that, much of how medical technology fights infection (rehydration, boosted nutrients, etc) doesn't actually depend on knowing what the infectious agent is.
No doubt, there are exceptions, but among healthy adults the odds of the kind of thing that you mention are much lower than more simple things like losing oxygen.
Make no mistake, this is still a damned risky proposition. But so is bungie jumping. Hell, so is driving on New Year's Eve. Life involves risk. Pioneering even more so. The real question is not "is there risk?" but "does the likely gain outweigh that risk?"
We have plenty of ways to shield from radiation in transit.
1.) Send robots to the moon first to mine ore and make shielding. This shielding is then boosted up to space (using fuel also made from moon rock) and put it around the vessel.
2.) Crew travels in a meditative state most of the time (monks do it all the time and the training isn't that big a deal) and water tanks for the trip are shaped to surround the smaller area in which that great majority of the time is spent.
3.) Crew is composed of older people who accept that it's a one-way trip. This is being discussed more every year and personally, I think that it's the right way to go.
4.) Send a crew entirely of gamers, give them plenty of compressed munchies, use an even smaller enclosure than the one suggested above, and leave them to six months of uninterrupted gaming.
Hell, I'll leave in six months with whatever I can fit in a 3 meter cube if that's what I'm offered. Even if I knew that I would be dead six months after I get there, as long as I would know that I could do useful work making it easier for the next person to get there, I would go.
To some extent they were the same team. But that wasn't all. Firefly was where that team, at the specific request of Whedon and others, learned how to do a lot of the techniques that are why BSG has had such a compelling, gritty, feel. As I discussed here, they were encouraged to simulate lens flare and other artifacts of actual photography, they were encouraged to allow actors to move as they pleased rather than just standing on a choreographed sequence of marks, and the enemies were nowhere near as clearcut as they would be in a typical show.
This goes way beyond just dropping in refs to a previous project. Firefly pioneered a much looser approach. One that was, actually, a consequence of the Firefly team having a far better understanding than others of the things that newer tech like lighter cameras, smaller lights, better non-linear editing systems, and so on and how much more freedom they allowed.
Firefly changed the way that shows are done. Frankly, afaic, it should now be thought of as Miami Vice is, a show that raised the bar for everybody and whose impact will be felt in coming years all through motion media. Twenty years from now, when you're sitting and watching any kind of video, even an orange juice commercial, part of what will contribute to its possible high quality will be the results of one little show that never made it past fourteen episodes.
Around here we look at people who make lazy, emotional, self-centered comments and call them trolls. Especially when they try to change the subject away from that of the thread or actively try to insult that subject.
If you expect to be a part of THIS community then you will want to stop doing these things. Do enough trollish things and your comments will become automatically invisible to most users.
Ya know, I could argue point by point and try to explain about concepts like multipliers or make the usual "give a man a fish . .." comments. I could even explain the history of the OLPC project and how they started out by trying to find ways to do just the sorts of things you're talking about. But instead I'll leave it simple.
You want "justice"? Fine. More laptops means more people will be aware of and able to work with Gaviotas, and able to use their approaches.
Well, waddayaknow? A visitor from the past. 1973, perhaps.
Take off your beret, put down the joint, and join the twenty-first century. Those of us living in the real world have long since figured out that projects like OLPC are among the cheapest, fastest ways per child to, say, increase literacy.
You want clean water and reductions in child mortality? Then you need people who understand basic concepts of biology so that they understand *why* they need to track what is upstream versus down from a latrine.
You want feminism? Then reduce the labor needed to get chores done. Many superior approaches can be learned from the kind of information sharing that networked computers provide. AND they help users organize, which is about as "justice"-oriented a dynamic as anybody rational could ask for.
You want "justice" as such? I love vague terms like that. Is there somewhere I can, say, buy twelve pounds of "justice"? Or is it sold by the box? As *real* revolutionaries have long known (is Mao revolutionary enough for you?) an ignorant populace is an easily controlled populace. To free "the masses", you maximize the ease and speed and minimize the cost of spreading books, radio, and so on. Ideally, you should do this in a decentralized way where routing is damage-tolerant and reroutes around barriers. A way where readers control what content goes here and how. On the large scale, we call our system for that "the internet". On the small scale, the protocols and hardware of the XO replicate that with great effectiveness and flair.
Devices like these, for example, help spread up to date information on crop prices. This makes it harder for brokers to cheat farmers and helps farmers know what to plant, how to raise it, what blights are around and how to treat them, and when to bring what products to market.
This is what real world revolution looks like. This IS justice. Far more so than anything bullshit powermongers like FARC or Shining Path will ever accomplish. And these aren't "leftovers". These are special purpose machines designed and built (very well, as it happens) for doing exactly this.
You have something useful to contribute, then join right in. If you just want to spout meaningless slogans that insult those doing real work, then bugger off.
A.) This is TWO TOWNS. I'm finding all the teeth gnashing here a bit sad. The real deployments are already underway and most are using Linux.
If you RTFA you'll find that: . ..several towns in Colombia were in the process of buying or deploying its XO laptops, most of which use a Red Hat Fedora Linux OS... An initial 20,000 laptops will be handed out . . . in . . . Bogota. Another 90,000 laptops will be deployed in Cartagena.
Around 1,000 XO laptops have been earmarked for schools in regions where the Revolutionary Army of Colombia rebel group remains active. The XO is already used in Marina Orth, former home to drug lord Pablo Escobar.
B.) And what makes you so sure that in a few years they won't eventually switch the OS on the M$ boxes when the press and suits go away? Quite a few Latin American countries are framing the switch to Linux as a nationalistic thing, as a chance to use Spanish-language optimized versions from Mexico instead of the Norteamericano corporate beast.
I may yet keep my current cheesy phone and use the N810 *just* for stuff that I'll access over wifi. Or I may decide to dump the phone most times and use Skype and email software instead. That's exactly my point. If you think of this thread as being about the transfer of information instead of the semi-arbitrary categories of "phone", "smartphone", "pager", or "mobile net device" then things get quite nebulous. Look at the apps discussed here. Especially the Symbian ones. Who can use what for which tasks is a question with a non-obvious answer.
But an Eliza-style voicemail agent won't know about the printing company I'm expecting a quote from where the message may be "Bob who met you at the Doubletree", or the genuinely important and normally sane freelancer who nonetheless is freaking out this week and is probably just calling to get reassurance or anydamnbody who has a weird tone of voice that merits a non-obvious response.
I publish stuff about military history. And politics. I deal with artsy bookstore types, anarchists, writers, artists, and policy people, some in topical, contested fields. I have to deal with the very possibility of a prank by a friend. It may also be a senior exec in a large corporation or a city council member. AND some of what I do is topical. AND my schedule varies wildly between "hanging out thinking stuff through" and deadline times that I shouldn't be interrupted for anything short of a major crisis. Sometimes these deadline arise at very short notice.
If you think that any "intelligent software agent" is going to ever in our lifetimes be nuanced enough to handle all those judgement calls, then you've been watching too many episodes of BSG.
Truth is, I've been planning to get one of those Voyager-type phones with the less tiny QWERTY keyboard sometime in about a month. Or maybe a Nokia N810. Or iPhone. Last month I bought an HP 2133. Add to that my internet phone and I'm *hoping* that some time this spring I'll be able to build some interlocking system using all three that manages to do an almost passable job of providing the kind of gatekeeper and message pre-sorter functions that I took for granted long about '95.
One of my oldest friends and I periodically argue about this kind of thing and I've long been saying that we're going to see the return of the human secretary. My friend used to argue fiercely for technological fixes like agents and groupware but as the years pass he's coming around.
Personally I think that much of what we're talking about here is about judgement. And in a world of accelerating change, there will always be a lag for entrepreneurs in trying to make any expert system understand the nuances that a typical fifties secretary could handle just fine before her coffee with half of her attention. Some of this will probably be outsourced to people in places like India but I'm betting that groups like physically disabled workers or those looking for telecommuting options right here in the developed world will work out just fine for most of us who really need it.
Frankly, I don't know about y'all but I'm trying out a new assistant on Wednesday. I've been a geek for going on thirty years and afaic some jobs are just not best addressed with technology.
Slashdot Mirror
Back when the Coke-Pepsi wars were red hot, there was a fierce bidding war over who would get the rights to engineer and provide the first cans of soda to be used in space. The resulting project was the center of quite a lot of advertising; maybe you saw some of it. And from what I read in the advertising trades, this project was looked upon by those in the field as a hell of a good investment and one that they would have been delighted to repeat.
You think that promotion "requires an exuberant economy"? You have GOT to be kidding me. Take a look at any history of advertising stunts during the Great Depression. Hell, just search for "depression glass". Not only that, such a plan would appeal to all sorts of motivations. As I said in the post I linked to, not only would this be something that the citizens of some places do if only to show how cool they are (anybody care to deny that Texas would jump at an excuse to have their own space program?) it would also give a structure in which high tech states like North Carolina could develop their own expertise and networks.
India got their moon program done for a hundred million dollars. Care to tell me that Texas A&M couldn't get a small payload to Mars orbit for less? Especially in partnership with a few dozen local businesses and schools?
I agree that food making technology is important, but first of all it takes time. The longer we wait to get that right the longer the delay before a Mars crew has what they need. Secondly, it's subject to breakdown. Do you really want to be that far from support when your algae tank shuts down? Third, have you ever tried to live on synthetic foods? I've got a jar of Marmite and some vegan "sheese" right here if you want to try it. Especially in a confined space with limited stimuli, good food, nice bedding and clothes, and so on, get very, very important. Ask anybody who has served on a submarine, especially a boomer crew, and they'll talk your ear off about it. To the extent that boomer crews talk about anything ;->
Note, also that I'm not just talking about food. I'm talking about any resource that is low tech enough that supply can be decentralized. Not only does this include what I mentioned above, it even includes sheets of insulating material, robots for greenhouse work, and all sorts of useful things that NASA then doesn't need to pay to get out there. What you suggest and what I suggest do not have that high a substitution effect. They pull from different funding sources, use somewhat different pools of labor, are best suited to different time scales, and, to some extent, would provide different resources to Mars crews.
"We're monkeys! We'll go!"
You double dumb-ass!
*ducks*
Looks to me like you're just a wee bit confused on this whole cost factor. How many kilos of mass do you think the first group will be bringing with them, anyway?
I agree with you about those places but I would say that if you're serious, go further up the chain. Call the white collar companies in your area, especially ones like ad agencies that replace their stuff frequently, and see if you can get equipment direct from them.
Here in Portland we have a group called Free Geek that has done a fantastic job of this kind of thing. You certainly should look at their site and might want to consider getting their video, though they're not specifically education-oriented.
Lastly, frankly, if your goal is to educate, instead of specifically to "put computers in schools", then consider getting active in your local infoshop, especially if you can get some friends to get active there as well. A good community computer center will reach more people per machine, people who *want* to be using those computers. They also have the freedom to do what works rather than what the schools will allow. Again here in Portland, we have an excellent example, a place called the IPRC, or Independent Publishing Resource Center. It, in turn, was originally modeled on a New York City place called ABC No Rio, though it has long since gone waaay past what No Rio offers. On top of everything else, an infoshop can then partner with a free school, or, as they're sometimes known, a "free skool". As an educational publisher and somebody who has been involved in every organization I mention above, who has also helped put computers in so many schools that I've lost count, there is little that would make me as happy as to see more active free schools in low income neighborhoods that provided classes in things like the biology of local species or sociology and psychology taught using local human behavior.
It's not that complex. You just need to remember the implications of earlier experiments.
I keep looking at your post but for some reason I can't read it.
Must be a browser error or something . . .
Okayyyyyy.
Gotta say, at least you get points in my book for novelty.
But, ya know, I can't help but suspect that the cost-benefit ratio would be just a tad unpromising.
Afaic, we should be shipping dead bodies to Mars as fast as people will pay to do it. They're excellent biomatter, they provide useful colonies of microorganisms, and they give rich people a means to contribute to the settlement of other parts of the solar system. Same goes for shipping bodies to the Moon and, for that matter, the more stable Lagrange points.
Undoubtedly, the quantities of materiel for a Mars base would be huge. What I can't understand is why nobody is ramping up to spread that job around. Seems to me that there are plenty of companies, states, countries, and so on, who would be delighted to get the chance to spend millions of dollars to have their stuff being used by a Mars crew. And it seems to me that we now know both how to get missions to Mars and how to have them work together.
Why is nobody trying to convince Wisconsin to start their own Mars mission to send five kilos of cheese into Mars orbit along with some clothes from Lands' End and fifteen or twenty kilos of brats and cheese bread? We know that UW Madison has some kickass space scientists and plenty of engineers. Or what about having developing nations pay a fifty or sixty thousand dollars a kilo to get their signature products added to a vessel to then be built and launched by one of the umpty-dozen New Space companies? There are plenty of options.
The smart thing to do at this point is to start pushing non-federal entities to start their own launch programs to launch their own payloads to Mars orbit where they can either wait for landing instructions (safely a few hundred miles or more from the base) or to be ferried down by some purpose-built vehicle.
Not all supplies are high tech. There is no reason that we need to wait years and years before we'll be ready to send low-G cheese, for crying out loud. The vacuum sealers sold in every supermarket today are more high-tech than the gear used to prepare consumables for the Apollo missions. Thousands and thousands of kilos of supplies would fit into this category. Clothes. Food. Bedding. And on and on. And, frankly, there are plenty of ways to structure the contracts so that Mars crew aren't obligated to use what is sent. Something would have to be pretty damn bad to get left in the cold but there's no reason that option can't be included.
And think about it. This way the logistics work is spread around, too. And the cargos can launch at high-G, travel at near-ambient temperatures in low-atmosphere vessels, and in a dozens of different ways, be a hell of a lot cheaper to send then trying to get everydamnthing shipped in a human-capable vessel. Sending everything in one vessel is like shipping a package by buying an airline ticket for it. This would provide the option of "parcel post".
Speaking as a guy who spent a month in the hospital a few years back fighting one of the worst drug-resistant infections in the world (a nasty kind of c.dif) what you're talking about just doesn't happen that much to healthy people. Not only that, much of how medical technology fights infection (rehydration, boosted nutrients, etc) doesn't actually depend on knowing what the infectious agent is.
No doubt, there are exceptions, but among healthy adults the odds of the kind of thing that you mention are much lower than more simple things like losing oxygen.
Make no mistake, this is still a damned risky proposition. But so is bungie jumping. Hell, so is driving on New Year's Eve. Life involves risk. Pioneering even more so. The real question is not "is there risk?" but "does the likely gain outweigh that risk?"
We have plenty of ways to shield from radiation in transit.
1.) Send robots to the moon first to mine ore and make shielding. This shielding is then boosted up to space (using fuel also made from moon rock) and put it around the vessel.
2.) Crew travels in a meditative state most of the time (monks do it all the time and the training isn't that big a deal) and water tanks for the trip are shaped to surround the smaller area in which that great majority of the time is spent.
3.) Crew is composed of older people who accept that it's a one-way trip. This is being discussed more every year and personally, I think that it's the right way to go.
4.) Send a crew entirely of gamers, give them plenty of compressed munchies, use an even smaller enclosure than the one suggested above, and leave them to six months of uninterrupted gaming.
Sounds about right considering that the "volunteers" will most likely be prisoners that will be drugged into submissive conformity.
Citation needed.
Hell, I'll leave in six months with whatever I can fit in a 3 meter cube if that's what I'm offered. Even if I knew that I would be dead six months after I get there, as long as I would know that I could do useful work making it easier for the next person to get there, I would go.
If I had mod points right now I would mod this funny.
As it is, I'm saving it as a quote. Go, bugeaterr.
To some extent they were the same team. But that wasn't all. Firefly was where that team, at the specific request of Whedon and others, learned how to do a lot of the techniques that are why BSG has had such a compelling, gritty, feel. As I discussed here, they were encouraged to simulate lens flare and other artifacts of actual photography, they were encouraged to allow actors to move as they pleased rather than just standing on a choreographed sequence of marks, and the enemies were nowhere near as clearcut as they would be in a typical show.
This goes way beyond just dropping in refs to a previous project. Firefly pioneered a much looser approach. One that was, actually, a consequence of the Firefly team having a far better understanding than others of the things that newer tech like lighter cameras, smaller lights, better non-linear editing systems, and so on and how much more freedom they allowed.
Firefly changed the way that shows are done. Frankly, afaic, it should now be thought of as Miami Vice is, a show that raised the bar for everybody and whose impact will be felt in coming years all through motion media. Twenty years from now, when you're sitting and watching any kind of video, even an orange juice commercial, part of what will contribute to its possible high quality will be the results of one little show that never made it past fourteen episodes.
Around here we look at people who make lazy, emotional, self-centered comments and call them trolls. Especially when they try to change the subject away from that of the thread or actively try to insult that subject.
If you expect to be a part of THIS community then you will want to stop doing these things. Do enough trollish things and your comments will become automatically invisible to most users.
Just so's you know.
Wow. You really can't be bothered to use your brain for anything here, can you?
Here was the first of several links I found in Spanish. It took me all of about twenty seconds using Google.
Ya know, I could argue point by point and try to explain about concepts like multipliers or make the usual "give a man a fish . . ." comments. I could even explain the history of the OLPC project and how they started out by trying to find ways to do just the sorts of things you're talking about. But instead I'll leave it simple.
You want "justice"? Fine. More laptops means more people will be aware of and able to work with Gaviotas, and able to use their approaches.
That seems like a damn good idea to me.
Well, waddayaknow? A visitor from the past. 1973, perhaps.
Take off your beret, put down the joint, and join the twenty-first century. Those of us living in the real world have long since figured out that projects like OLPC are among the cheapest, fastest ways per child to, say, increase literacy.
You want clean water and reductions in child mortality? Then you need people who understand basic concepts of biology so that they understand *why* they need to track what is upstream versus down from a latrine.
You want feminism? Then reduce the labor needed to get chores done. Many superior approaches can be learned from the kind of information sharing that networked computers provide. AND they help users organize, which is about as "justice"-oriented a dynamic as anybody rational could ask for.
You want "justice" as such? I love vague terms like that. Is there somewhere I can, say, buy twelve pounds of "justice"? Or is it sold by the box? As *real* revolutionaries have long known (is Mao revolutionary enough for you?) an ignorant populace is an easily controlled populace.
To free "the masses", you maximize the ease and speed and minimize the cost of spreading books, radio, and so on. Ideally, you should do this in a decentralized way where routing is damage-tolerant and reroutes around barriers. A way where readers control what content goes here and how. On the large scale, we call our system for that "the internet". On the small scale, the protocols and hardware of the XO replicate that with great effectiveness and flair.
Devices like these, for example, help spread up to date information on crop prices. This makes it harder for brokers to cheat farmers and helps farmers know what to plant, how to raise it, what blights are around and how to treat them, and when to bring what products to market.
This is what real world revolution looks like. This IS justice. Far more so than anything bullshit powermongers like FARC or Shining Path will ever accomplish. And these aren't "leftovers". These are special purpose machines designed and built (very well, as it happens) for doing exactly this.
You have something useful to contribute, then join right in. If you just want to spout meaningless slogans that insult those doing real work, then bugger off.
A.) This is TWO TOWNS. I'm finding all the teeth gnashing here a bit sad. The real deployments are already underway and most are using Linux.
If you RTFA you'll find that: .several towns in Colombia were in the process of buying or deploying its XO laptops, most of which use a Red Hat Fedora Linux OS... An initial 20,000 laptops will be handed out . . . in . . . Bogota. Another 90,000 laptops will be deployed in Cartagena.
. .
Around 1,000 XO laptops have been earmarked for schools in regions where the Revolutionary Army of Colombia rebel group remains active. The XO is already used in Marina Orth, former home to drug lord Pablo Escobar.
B.) And what makes you so sure that in a few years they won't eventually switch the OS on the M$ boxes when the press and suits go away? Quite a few Latin American countries are framing the switch to Linux as a nationalistic thing, as a chance to use Spanish-language optimized versions from Mexico instead of the Norteamericano corporate beast.
In short, dudes, relax.
I may yet keep my current cheesy phone and use the N810 *just* for stuff that I'll access over wifi. Or I may decide to dump the phone most times and use Skype and email software instead. That's exactly my point. If you think of this thread as being about the transfer of information instead of the semi-arbitrary categories of "phone", "smartphone", "pager", or "mobile net device" then things get quite nebulous. Look at the apps discussed here. Especially the Symbian ones. Who can use what for which tasks is a question with a non-obvious answer.
But an Eliza-style voicemail agent won't know about the printing company I'm expecting a quote from where the message may be "Bob who met you at the Doubletree", or the genuinely important and normally sane freelancer who nonetheless is freaking out this week and is probably just calling to get reassurance or anydamnbody who has a weird tone of voice that merits a non-obvious response.
I publish stuff about military history. And politics. I deal with artsy bookstore types, anarchists, writers, artists, and policy people, some in topical, contested fields. I have to deal with the very possibility of a prank by a friend. It may also be a senior exec in a large corporation or a city council member. AND some of what I do is topical. AND my schedule varies wildly between "hanging out thinking stuff through" and deadline times that I shouldn't be interrupted for anything short of a major crisis. Sometimes these deadline arise at very short notice.
If you think that any "intelligent software agent" is going to ever in our lifetimes be nuanced enough to handle all those judgement calls, then you've been watching too many episodes of BSG.
Truth is, I've been planning to get one of those Voyager-type phones with the less tiny QWERTY keyboard sometime in about a month. Or maybe a Nokia N810. Or iPhone. Last month I bought an HP 2133. Add to that my internet phone and I'm *hoping* that some time this spring I'll be able to build some interlocking system using all three that manages to do an almost passable job of providing the kind of gatekeeper and message pre-sorter functions that I took for granted long about '95.
One of my oldest friends and I periodically argue about this kind of thing and I've long been saying that we're going to see the return of the human secretary. My friend used to argue fiercely for technological fixes like agents and groupware but as the years pass he's coming around.
Personally I think that much of what we're talking about here is about judgement. And in a world of accelerating change, there will always be a lag for entrepreneurs in trying to make any expert system understand the nuances that a typical fifties secretary could handle just fine before her coffee with half of her attention. Some of this will probably be outsourced to people in places like India but I'm betting that groups like physically disabled workers or those looking for telecommuting options right here in the developed world will work out just fine for most of us who really need it.
Frankly, I don't know about y'all but I'm trying out a new assistant on Wednesday. I've been a geek for going on thirty years and afaic some jobs are just not best addressed with technology.