Yes it does. The OLPC doesn't have a hard drive, and so, no swap partition to offload less recently used data, when you're getting low on RAM. Get a few apps running at once, especially with a memory-heavy, interpreted language like Python, and your 128MB of RAM will be full in no time, and applications will start crashing.
* Global Cooling is going to lead to another Ice Age! Wait...that was 30 years ago... Now it's GLOBAL WARMING IS GOING TO GET US!!!
30 years ago, scientists were concerned about "The Greenhouse Effect" which is now better known as Global Warming.
These days, well, it's quite obvious to anyone with a THERMOMETER that the earth is warming. How much, and why, may be debatable, but nobody with any sense suggests anything is cooling.
Electromagnetic Radiation Causes Cancer! Don't live near power lines!! Wait...that was 20 years ago... Now it's BUY THESE MAGNETIC BRACELETS AND MATRESS PADS! MAGNETISM LEADS TO HEALTH AND PROSPERITY!
There were nutjobs 20 years ago, and there are nutjobs now. They're just as wrong as they were back then. Excuse me while I go make some crop circles, and dress up in my gorilla costume and go for a walk in the woods.
they say their goal for system availability is 99.7% (they're currently at 99.2%)."
Reminds me of a PHB speech in a Dilbert book... Typed from fuzzy memory:
"This year our goal is 0 serious injuries! In hindsight, last year's goal of just 20 serious injuries was a mistake. We had to seriously injure 6 people to meet that goal."
according to the law, the teacher can have the student arrested for disorderly conduct?
No, not "according to the law" at all.
That would be "According to a one-sentence, off-the-cuff remark, trying to explain the law, by someone with no authority to interpret the law, that has been taken vastly out-of-context."
There, fixed that for you.
Now go read the full text of the law and come back, before bitching and complaining about it.
OK. It remind me of the hate law in the EU. People were screaming that such things would not happen in the US, censorship, calling blood on the EU.
That's ridiculous. The cases aren't even remotely close. In the US, you can write all the pro-racist/fascist/communist/totalitarian ideas you wish.
In this case, it sounds like it was a threat to commit violence, even if it wasn't really meant that way. That's completely different than censoring ideas and opinions.
I am, in fact, Catholic. You, apparently, are not.
You aren't forgiven of your sins until you confess them (admission and repentance). It is implicitly assumed in confession that you will try not to commit those past sins again (determination). Then (for lesser sins) you are usually directed to pray the rosary several times to receive forgiveness (acts of atonement).
For example, I can't type 100 WPM on the best keyboard ever made, let alone on one so small.
The point was simply that on a compact keyboard (if it has been well designed) you can type just as well as on a full-fledged desktop keyboard. If you can't type well to begin with, of course it's not going to make things better, but it won't make it worse.
I need something I can actually use, not an interface so small that it doesn't have any place to rest my hands.
Resting your hands on a notebook is pretty sub-par to begin with. Assuming it's thin enough, resting your hands on whatever the notebook is resting on, is much more comfortable.
And if you really don't like that, it would still be quite easy to have some kind of wrist rest that slides out when you open the lid.
I use a Dell 610 with a 8.5" H x 11.25" W screen at 1024 x 768.
That's not a very high DPI... That makes all the difference.
You can have a huge, 50" (low-def.) TV, and text will look horrible and completely unreadable on it. Meanwhile, a PC monitor 1/10th the size, with a much higher DPI, is easily readable. DPI is the difference. You simply haven't seen any 7" screens with a very high DPI.
I've tried using those keyboards, and it's nearly impossible for me to type with any accuracy
The keys are about 3/4ths the size that of a normal keyboard. So, at worst, you could expand that to about 9" wide, and accommodate everyone with fat fingers.
I don't care if the screen has a billion pixels per inch,
It's exceedingly clear you've simply never seen any screens with a very high DPI, and are just jumping to conclusions based on the low-res screens that you currently use.
if the screen is 5" wide I am going to have trouble reading it while it's sitting on my lap.
5" is ridiculous. Based on the keyboard, the minimum width would be 7" anyhow. That makes for about an 11" monitor.
It sounds like you simply use your laptop as a portable DVD burner.
That's complete nonsense. I mentioned CDs only because they are fairly large, and quite necessary on a portable computer. I never even suggested how or if I use it, so you're entirely inventing this in your own mind.
Most of us are Christians. We are forgiven our sins against our creator for no reason at all.
You're not a very good Christian.
Forgiveness requires admission, repentance, atonement, and determination to not repeat past sins.
You can't just absolve someone, for no reason.
Re:Now there's the Slashdot I know and love!
on
Jack Valenti, Dead at 85
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Just because you disagree with him about copyright law? Wow.
/.ers don't disagree with his personal views, we disagree with his actions... the things he did to corrupt copyright law in this country, ruining much of the entertainment industry as a whole.
Sure, it's not as bad as murder, rape, etc., but taking significant steps towards destroying the whole system of "art" of every kind is a pretty damed-able offense, which easily overrides all else. I mean, we're not talking about murdering someone, just glad to see one going away, who made his money in the most cynical and destructive way possible.
I wonder if we in the near future will see hybrid systems with flash-based drives for applications and swap space, and hard disk drives for data storage.
I sure as hell hope not.
Slow "Data" is just as bad as slow "Applications". The Applications have to be doing something, and it's likely they're accessing large volumes of user data, like images, videos, music, etc. Even if you only access a fraction of it at a time, the much slower speed is going to make your flash-based storage system seem quite pointless. I really don't care how fast a program starts up, when I sitting there for 10 minutes waiting for it to save a large file. That goes double for latency...
Isn't the keyboard the bottleneck in how small a laptop can be?
Nope. I have a full fledged keyboard on my Psion5. It measures about 3x7" and 100WPM+ typing on it is no problem.
Frankly, it looks like notebook manufacturers couldn't design a DECENT keyboard if they had several feet of space to work with... Things can get much smaller, and be EASIER to type on than current notebook keyboards.
The screen size may be a bit of a limit, but only because people have been convinced they need 17" screens by existing displays. Make a smaller screen, with a higher DPI, and widescreen aspect, and it would be just as easily usable.
The only notebook size limit I care about is the CD/DVD... So long as my notebook is large enough to fit a DVD burner, I'm happy with the size of it. How crappy the keyboard is, may be another matter.
1- Why only 23% faster? I thought mechanical HDD's were the bottleneck in modern computers
The main reason is probably just that Flash is slow. If you had sticks of DDR400 in there, instead of Flash, it would probably scream along.
The HDD is considered to be the bottleneck these days, but it's not significantly behind the CPU... If there was a sudden jump in HDD speed, the CPU would be the biggest concern once again. And, in fact, the bottleneck depends on your workload... When I want to encode a video, the CPU is the bottleneck. When I want to edit a video, the disk is definitely the bottleneck.
HDDs generally get a bad rap, through no fault of their own. They're actually pretty damn fast for their purpose, though capacity is growing faster than performance can, and causing issues that way. Their reliability is better than many solid-state components in my experience, but every time a motherboard dies, people brush it off, but when an HDD dies, their data is GONE, and they rant for the next 10 years about how moving parts in computers are horrible, even though it's just as likely that the on-board electronics failed, as anything mechanical.
On another note, what happened to dot matrix printers. I remember we had a dot matrix printer and the cartdges (ribbons?) were $5 each and laster for well over 1000 pages.
They're hiding, but still a couple models being made (mainly used for carbon-copy forms that need impact printing).
They might be okay on ink, but I sure as hell wouldn't recommend them. It's only been a couple years now since I last used them, and they are a nightmare.
They're painfully slow, crawling through plain-text printouts, and god help you if you need graphics. They're noisy as hell. Imagine a slower, high pitched jack hammer in the same room as you, going for hours a day... The quality is ridiculous by today's standards (60dpi). It's readable, in the same way that simulated alphabetical text on a 7 segment LCD (pager) screen is readable, but dot matrix makes a typewriter (or Daisy wheel printer) look like fine art by comparison. You can get cheap ink, but they don't take plain paper... You need old ratchet-drive paper, and perhaps with time you've forgotten the nightmare of accidentally ripping finished printouts while removing those perforated strips.
Dot matrix printers were killed by laser printers long ago, and for very good reason.
No it isn't. Need to "clean" the heads about every 3 pages, and the permanent heads mean its got a very short lifetime. Mine didn't out-last the included ink cartridges... It sat for 1 month before I could get new ink cartridges, and by that time, the ink had completely solidified... Just my luck, right outside the warranty period.
That's not to mention that it prints brutally slow, and selecting anything remotely "high quality" means a ton of ink is wasted, the images is incredibly dark and saturated, and simply doesn't look any better than "fast draft" settings.
Lying under oath about a completely irrelevant, private/personal issue is NOT a serious offense, by any stretch of the imagination. It's only if you lie about something SERIOUS that it even matters.
Cops aren't going to track you down and throw you in jail because when you had jury duty, and were being questioned by the judge, you lied about some small detail.
The American political system was not built for parties.
You're right... It was built for 13 states on the Atlantic cost of North America, with slavery in-mind, no nuclear weapons, no standing army, no electricity, etc.
We should go back to the good old days... right?
What it was built for has no relevance. It is what it is, as details of how things should work have been fleshed out over hundreds of years. Just because a few guys 240 years ago didn't know what would happen, doesn't mean what has happened is bad, at all.
Two, nuclear infrastructure is no threat to the USA. Even a working nuke isn't. You still need delivery vehicles. As for that, I think the ratio of USA to Iran is roughly 20,000:0
That's unbelievably blatant bullshit...
If nukes were something that could only be used when somebody waved a flag and said "Go", then yes, the US could annihilate Iran before they could blink. But that's not how it works.
You don't need ICBMs to deliver a nuclear bomb. Hell, commercial jets available from Boeing and Airbus are far faster and have larger capacity than the B-52 bombers that were the original nuclear bomb delivery system, and continued to be the only option for decades...
And furthermore, it's not an out-and-out war with Iran that anyone is concerned with. It's Iran's association with terrorist organizations, who are only too happy to put a bomb on a truck or a boat, and covertly travel, like any law-abiding individual, to their target. Yes, a truck is a more than adequate nuclear bomb delivery system, and Iran has access to plenty of them.
Then how does that explain the quotes from Clinton and Albright from before the Bush presidency started?
Those quotes dating from before 2000 referred to WMDs in past-tense, and were basically restating the US' commitment to continue enforcing the embargo, to prevent Hussein the resources needed to develop new WMDs... I wonder, when did Clinton and Albright claim Hussein was developing nuclear weapons, and had ties to Al Queda? I can give you plenty of quotes from the Bush administration, making exactly those claims...
Also, by 98, some of those stored (pre-Desert Storm) chemical weapons Iraq possessed may still have been lethal... They absolutely certainly weren't by 2003, though.
Not if the lighting in the room has a yellow tint to it.
I wonder how people would feel if they captured a picture by a campfire, only to have it turn out perfectly clear and white, looking like they are standing under massive lights...
Of course, I'm not being entirely honest, because HOW WHITE that ping pong ball should be is entirely debatable. In the N95 images, it certainly isn't pure white. Just open it up in your nearest image editor, and use the eraser tool on the ball...
What's more, anyone could easily increase the contrast of any picture to make it look even WHITER than white, and blacker than black. Cameras are supposed to capture a image as close to reality as possible... not blue-shift everything to play perceptual tricks on the viewer.
People want their memories, er, pictures to look like they were taken in full sun even if it was really lit by tungsten filament.
That's fine for this photo, but what happens when you take a photo out-doors, well-lit, with high contrast between colors, and simply quite saturated to begin with?
If it ends up like many amateur 35mm photos I've seen, that bright-red shirt will spill over, and give the rest of the photo a nasty red tint. Those kinds of photos, even just occasionally showing up, make a camera (or the film) worthless.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes it does. The OLPC doesn't have a hard drive, and so, no swap partition to offload less recently used data, when you're getting low on RAM. Get a few apps running at once, especially with a memory-heavy, interpreted language like Python, and your 128MB of RAM will be full in no time, and applications will start crashing.
30 years ago, scientists were concerned about "The Greenhouse Effect" which is now better known as Global Warming.
These days, well, it's quite obvious to anyone with a THERMOMETER that the earth is warming. How much, and why, may be debatable, but nobody with any sense suggests anything is cooling.
There were nutjobs 20 years ago, and there are nutjobs now. They're just as wrong as they were back then. Excuse me while I go make some crop circles, and dress up in my gorilla costume and go for a walk in the woods.
Reminds me of a PHB speech in a Dilbert book... Typed from fuzzy memory:
"This year our goal is 0 serious injuries! In hindsight, last year's goal of just 20 serious injuries was a mistake. We had to seriously injure 6 people to meet that goal."
No, not "according to the law" at all.
That would be "According to a one-sentence, off-the-cuff remark, trying to explain the law, by someone with no authority to interpret the law, that has been taken vastly out-of-context."
There, fixed that for you.
Now go read the full text of the law and come back, before bitching and complaining about it.
That's ridiculous. The cases aren't even remotely close. In the US, you can write all the pro-racist/fascist/communist/totalitarian ideas you wish.
In this case, it sounds like it was a threat to commit violence, even if it wasn't really meant that way. That's completely different than censoring ideas and opinions.
It was so unbelievable, we just had to put it on the front page of
I am, in fact, Catholic. You, apparently, are not.
You aren't forgiven of your sins until you confess them (admission and repentance). It is implicitly assumed in confession that you will try not to commit those past sins again (determination). Then (for lesser sins) you are usually directed to pray the rosary several times to receive forgiveness (acts of atonement).
The point was simply that on a compact keyboard (if it has been well designed) you can type just as well as on a full-fledged desktop keyboard. If you can't type well to begin with, of course it's not going to make things better, but it won't make it worse.
Resting your hands on a notebook is pretty sub-par to begin with. Assuming it's thin enough, resting your hands on whatever the notebook is resting on, is much more comfortable.
And if you really don't like that, it would still be quite easy to have some kind of wrist rest that slides out when you open the lid.
That's not a very high DPI... That makes all the difference.
You can have a huge, 50" (low-def.) TV, and text will look horrible and completely unreadable on it. Meanwhile, a PC monitor 1/10th the size, with a much higher DPI, is easily readable. DPI is the difference. You simply haven't seen any 7" screens with a very high DPI.
Yes it is.
Of course you can always lie to the clergy (which seems to be the issue you describe), but that's really besides the point.
The keys are about 3/4ths the size that of a normal keyboard. So, at worst, you could expand that to about 9" wide, and accommodate everyone with fat fingers.
It's exceedingly clear you've simply never seen any screens with a very high DPI, and are just jumping to conclusions based on the low-res screens that you currently use.
5" is ridiculous. Based on the keyboard, the minimum width would be 7" anyhow. That makes for about an 11" monitor.
That's complete nonsense. I mentioned CDs only because they are fairly large, and quite necessary on a portable computer. I never even suggested how or if I use it, so you're entirely inventing this in your own mind.
You're not a very good Christian.
Forgiveness requires admission, repentance, atonement, and determination to not repeat past sins.
You can't just absolve someone, for no reason.
Sure, it's not as bad as murder, rape, etc., but taking significant steps towards destroying the whole system of "art" of every kind is a pretty damed-able offense, which easily overrides all else. I mean, we're not talking about murdering someone, just glad to see one going away, who made his money in the most cynical and destructive way possible.
I'd say "murder" (mass or otherwise) is a pretty good line in the sand...
I sure as hell hope not.
Slow "Data" is just as bad as slow "Applications". The Applications have to be doing something, and it's likely they're accessing large volumes of user data, like images, videos, music, etc. Even if you only access a fraction of it at a time, the much slower speed is going to make your flash-based storage system seem quite pointless. I really don't care how fast a program starts up, when I sitting there for 10 minutes waiting for it to save a large file. That goes double for latency...
Nope. I have a full fledged keyboard on my Psion5. It measures about 3x7" and 100WPM+ typing on it is no problem.
Frankly, it looks like notebook manufacturers couldn't design a DECENT keyboard if they had several feet of space to work with... Things can get much smaller, and be EASIER to type on than current notebook keyboards.
The screen size may be a bit of a limit, but only because people have been convinced they need 17" screens by existing displays. Make a smaller screen, with a higher DPI, and widescreen aspect, and it would be just as easily usable.
The only notebook size limit I care about is the CD/DVD... So long as my notebook is large enough to fit a DVD burner, I'm happy with the size of it. How crappy the keyboard is, may be another matter.
The main reason is probably just that Flash is slow. If you had sticks of DDR400 in there, instead of Flash, it would probably scream along.
The HDD is considered to be the bottleneck these days, but it's not significantly behind the CPU... If there was a sudden jump in HDD speed, the CPU would be the biggest concern once again. And, in fact, the bottleneck depends on your workload... When I want to encode a video, the CPU is the bottleneck. When I want to edit a video, the disk is definitely the bottleneck.
HDDs generally get a bad rap, through no fault of their own. They're actually pretty damn fast for their purpose, though capacity is growing faster than performance can, and causing issues that way. Their reliability is better than many solid-state components in my experience, but every time a motherboard dies, people brush it off, but when an HDD dies, their data is GONE, and they rant for the next 10 years about how moving parts in computers are horrible, even though it's just as likely that the on-board electronics failed, as anything mechanical.
They're hiding, but still a couple models being made (mainly used for carbon-copy forms that need impact printing).
They might be okay on ink, but I sure as hell wouldn't recommend them. It's only been a couple years now since I last used them, and they are a nightmare.
They're painfully slow, crawling through plain-text printouts, and god help you if you need graphics.
They're noisy as hell. Imagine a slower, high pitched jack hammer in the same room as you, going for hours a day...
The quality is ridiculous by today's standards (60dpi). It's readable, in the same way that simulated alphabetical text on a 7 segment LCD (pager) screen is readable, but dot matrix makes a typewriter (or Daisy wheel printer) look like fine art by comparison.
You can get cheap ink, but they don't take plain paper... You need old ratchet-drive paper, and perhaps with time you've forgotten the nightmare of accidentally ripping finished printouts while removing those perforated strips.
Dot matrix printers were killed by laser printers long ago, and for very good reason.
No it isn't. Need to "clean" the heads about every 3 pages, and the permanent heads mean its got a very short lifetime. Mine didn't out-last the included ink cartridges... It sat for 1 month before I could get new ink cartridges, and by that time, the ink had completely solidified... Just my luck, right outside the warranty period.
That's not to mention that it prints brutally slow, and selecting anything remotely "high quality" means a ton of ink is wasted, the images is incredibly dark and saturated, and simply doesn't look any better than "fast draft" settings.
Lying under oath about a completely irrelevant, private/personal issue is NOT a serious offense, by any stretch of the imagination. It's only if you lie about something SERIOUS that it even matters.
Cops aren't going to track you down and throw you in jail because when you had jury duty, and were being questioned by the judge, you lied about some small detail.
You're right... It was built for 13 states on the Atlantic cost of North America, with slavery in-mind, no nuclear weapons, no standing army, no electricity, etc.
We should go back to the good old days... right?
What it was built for has no relevance. It is what it is, as details of how things should work have been fleshed out over hundreds of years. Just because a few guys 240 years ago didn't know what would happen, doesn't mean what has happened is bad, at all.
Hmm, swap "Dems" with "Republicans" and "Cheney" with "Clinton" and you might really have something there...
Of course that's not entirely true, because Clinton had a high approval rating, and was supported by his own party... completely unlike Cheney.
That's unbelievably blatant bullshit...
If nukes were something that could only be used when somebody waved a flag and said "Go", then yes, the US could annihilate Iran before they could blink. But that's not how it works.
You don't need ICBMs to deliver a nuclear bomb. Hell, commercial jets available from Boeing and Airbus are far faster and have larger capacity than the B-52 bombers that were the original nuclear bomb delivery system, and continued to be the only option for decades...
And furthermore, it's not an out-and-out war with Iran that anyone is concerned with. It's Iran's association with terrorist organizations, who are only too happy to put a bomb on a truck or a boat, and covertly travel, like any law-abiding individual, to their target. Yes, a truck is a more than adequate nuclear bomb delivery system, and Iran has access to plenty of them.
Those quotes dating from before 2000 referred to WMDs in past-tense, and were basically restating the US' commitment to continue enforcing the embargo, to prevent Hussein the resources needed to develop new WMDs... I wonder, when did Clinton and Albright claim Hussein was developing nuclear weapons, and had ties to Al Queda? I can give you plenty of quotes from the Bush administration, making exactly those claims...
Also, by 98, some of those stored (pre-Desert Storm) chemical weapons Iraq possessed may still have been lethal... They absolutely certainly weren't by 2003, though.
Not if the lighting in the room has a yellow tint to it.
I wonder how people would feel if they captured a picture by a campfire, only to have it turn out perfectly clear and white, looking like they are standing under massive lights...
Of course, I'm not being entirely honest, because HOW WHITE that ping pong ball should be is entirely debatable. In the N95 images, it certainly isn't pure white. Just open it up in your nearest image editor, and use the eraser tool on the ball...
What's more, anyone could easily increase the contrast of any picture to make it look even WHITER than white, and blacker than black. Cameras are supposed to capture a image as close to reality as possible... not blue-shift everything to play perceptual tricks on the viewer.
That's fine for this photo, but what happens when you take a photo out-doors, well-lit, with high contrast between colors, and simply quite saturated to begin with?
If it ends up like many amateur 35mm photos I've seen, that bright-red shirt will spill over, and give the rest of the photo a nasty red tint. Those kinds of photos, even just occasionally showing up, make a camera (or the film) worthless.