Perhaps that's understandable since many of those countries have enough non-tech issues to deal with already. But I think that if that's the case, they just shouldn't be allowed on the internet yet. There really needs to be a bar for entry.
And, just how do propose to do that?
The Internet is an agreement to exchange digital information with previously agreed-upon protocols. Nothing more, nothing less. ANY node on the Internet is abstractly equal to any other. It's the World of Ends that gives the Internet its value! As with most things, it's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness.
I'm surprised we haven't started seeing vigilantes tracking down hackers and spammers. When governments can't handle things, the mob takes over.
I'm surprised that you haven't recognized that the Realtime Blacklists are nothing but vigilante actions - whole swaths of the Internet blocked from communicating due to misbehavior...
Perhaps you are assuming that I meant my "painting light on walls" idea should replace all other childhood activities? I never said that.
There are 24 hours in a day. You are doing/SOMETHING/ during each of those hours, even if vegetating on a sofa.
So how do you propose introducing some "childhood activity" of limited value without displacing "other childhood activities" which have provable, demonstrable, lasting value? (EG: the sand pit, a box of blocks or Legos, tempera paints - good stuff happens there!)
I'm not suggesting that you proposed replacing all other activities - it's quite enough damage to reduce them.
Couldn't you combine this with a projector to make a wall you can "paint"? Could be great fun.
Great for kids too - finger painting on the wall without making a mess.
Except that you'd be missing a key element to childhood development - the mess!
People don't think in pure abstracts. Understanding concepts like mass, volume, friction, etc come from a "gut level" understanding that stems from our experiences with these things. The more firmly these ideas are grasped, (through childhood play) the easier these advanced concepts are later on in life.
By keeping kids in the relatively sterile and regimented classroom early, they miss the real learning they would get from play. Finland, for example, doesn't begin schooling of any kind until the kids are 7 years old, and quit when the child is just 16. So why do they have one of the top-rated education systems in the world? Somehow they manage to perform significantly better, even though we spend almost 50% more time at it.
Isn't it nice to know that you spent twice as much time as you could have, in order to achieve an inferior education?
As one more example - ever watch MythBusters? It's a great show, where they challenge myths with rudimentary science. Lots of fun, and lots of education about physics, mechanics, and so on.
Ever look at their shop? It's forever a MESS! Half-constructed doo-dads all over the place! Messes aren't just not bad, they are frequently a good indicator that something real is actually taking place!
Datacenters could possibly look as different as computers from the 1960s do, compared to today's PCs.
So then, the question crosses my mind - "How different do data centers from the 1960s look from those of today?"... I did a bit of googling, and even overshot the mark!
Here's a datacenter from 1949
and...
Here's a datacenter from today
Aside from being a little more "shiny" and now painted black, they look REMARKABLY SIMILAR... I'd almost wonder if the racks from 1949 are 19" racks, just like you might see today...
I think that as online TV becomes more popular, people will isolate themselves more and more from a shared experience. So people will end up having even more polarized views of things.
I've seen the reverse trend.
Videos online or on our DVR can be paused or rewinded - even when watching something that's not pre-recorded! So if somebody speaks up during the show, it's no big deal to pause it, talk about it, and then continue, or even rewind to pick up a detail that was missed.
This makes watching videos a la YouTube or DVR much more social than ever before.
It *can* be much less social, but that's been the case since VHS vs Betamax was a big deal, and people haven't become significantly less social that I can tell.
Uh, do you know how many people would need to be in on such a conspiracy? The folks who came up with the concept, the folks who developed some molecules that might work, tons of people involved in clinical trials, etc. It would probably be just as easy to fake the Apollo landings.
Uhm... hello????
Everybody knows that the Apollo missions were faked!
It's quite possible that there's so much program trading going on, that you may be able to predict the market (not prfectly, but at least profitably) by effectively predicting what the program traders en-masse are doing. Not that this is necessarily any easier than predicting the mass psychology behind the markets in general, but it does as least point to the fact that much of the market moves according to very deterministic forces.
And this fact is EXACTLY what stabilizes the market!
As soon as there's a discernable pattern, somebody's going to exploit that pattern in order to make more money, and as soon as that happens, the original pattern gets interrupted, thus stabilizing the marketplace. Perfect? No. But damned good. Some regulation is needed to keep these market forces from being overwhelmed - but the cost of this regulation is a pittance compared to the benefits gained!
Money is an awfully effective invention for distributing wealth, which is why the Star-Trek "utopia" where nobody needs money is not going to happen anytime soon. So long as there is differentiation between different people (and thus resource distribution potential) there will be money.
OpenSolaris is nearly as free (in every sense) these days as Linux, and it has some great technology in it, including a battle-hardened networking stack.
This statement implies that Linux's networking stack is not "battle-hardened" or at least not AS "battle-hardened". WTF? Linux is used on routers for a reason - and it's not because of the freecell game!
Trying to imply that Linux's networking stack is anything but quite mature is just idiocy.
There is nothing wrong with the FOSS community, however there are a small number of very vocal people who are total assholes towards people new to things such as Linux.
Ooops, I think you got that wrong.
There are a small number of very vocal people who are total assholes towards people.
It's wrong to mass-search drivers' license pictures. It's also wrong to mass-search pictures of anyone who has ever been convicted of a crime. Many, many people have a regrettable misdeed in their past. It's wrong to continue to punish people who have, as was once said, "paid their debt to society."
I truly understand what you mean. Although I have not been convicted of any crime (other than a few traffic issues and a failure to appear) my closest friend was so accused. What really sucks is that, in his case, he was very well justified in commiting the "crime".
However, there is a clear and definite truth: once people have manifest a particular type of behavior, they are more likely to do that again. Pedophiles have trouble stopping. Alcoholics tend to either become teetotallers or alcoholics. Shoplifters tend to steal.
So, where does the "debt to society gets paid" mentallity stop and the "society must protect itself" begin?
Being an ex-con is not a crime, and even this facial recognition system recognizes this. But having warrants out for your arrest is something that police might be very, very interested in - and matching such searches done against past conviction records is, IMHO, very justifiable.
Other than the obvious "high tech" aspect to these pissoirs [google.com] and having them only available at night which just doesn't make sense to me, since I occasionally have to urinate during daylight hours.
You have apparently not been through large cities very often. I'm staying in the Hilton hotel in San Mateo, CA on a weekend getaway with my lovely wife. (She's sleeping in upstairs) Going through San Fransisco, we hit several of the "economically disadvantaged" areas, and the smell of old urine was frequently strong and rank. Not just "oh, this is bad", but "I'm so glad I haven't eaten for several hours because if I'd eaten recently I'd hurl it all over the sidewalk" bad.
It's obvious that public urination isn't an issue for many of the street dwellers, but the foul odors are an issue for everybody else. The price is a bit high - why not just put the urinals on the side of the buildings and have doors that close? Spending that much money PER URINAL could get rather prohibitive...
PS: You don't want these open in the daytime - that would leave a strong implicit message that swinging out the member and taking a leak in broad daylight is perfectly OK...
Calculate what proportion of those deaths could have been prevented by mosquito treated nets.
You're probably not a parent, or you'd see the implicit point that I do. It was so obvious to me I forgot to state it! Given the information on what it takes to prevent your son or daughter from dying, you'd do just about anything you can to save your children's lives. It's part of being a parent. Once the laptops are out there, and people discover what they can accomplish if they know, they'll clambor for it. Knowledge is power, and once that genie is out, it's awful hard to put it back into the bottle.
Billions of years of selective evolution (or the consideration of an angry white guy) have made this urge to protect one's children run hard and deep through the soul of humanity. OLPC doesn't give parents nets, it provides them the means to find out about things like nets and pest control.
those economic resources could not have produced food, so they would otherwise be an untapped outlet. If all the money going into a project like that went into sending food over, you'd probably choke the food supply and incredibly diminish the value of the money you spent on it.
An interesting point - money is fluid, but resources are not. But there's something that the " Oooh Noes - they need clean water and underwear first!!!" crowd completely fails to miss...
As my father in law (and former businessman) says, "Sometimes you have to choose between making the house payment and the truck payment. And the house payment won't make the truck payment...". What he means by this is that when resources are tight, invest first in those things that improve your resource situation. The work-truck helps bring in money. The house does not. So, invest in that which will best improve your financial situation!
And that, to me, is much of what this $100 laptop is all about. True, not every impoverished soul will get one, and it's distinctly possible that only the "upper-poor" will actually benefit from this project. But the computer is the "work truck" of the present and future.
I type this while sitting in a Hilton hotel lobby in South San Fransisco. My wife and I are on a 2.5 day weekend getaway, with no specific plans for anything. (She's sleeping in) I have delicious coffee on the pottery table in front of me, beautiful plants all around me, and all of this is earned by what I type on this Dell Inspiron 600m laptop, armed with an Internet connection. (and yes, it runs Linux, Fedora Core)
A laptop with an Internet connection is an information feed of an invaluable nature. Can you imagine what a modem-speed Internet connection would do to expand the minds and viewpoints of the geographically challenged? What simple act of 'surfing the websites' can do to people whose hope is bleak, who lack the information necessary to solve their own problems? Information that can be used to learn how to purify their water, or fertilize their lands so that they provide more food. Or, for that matter, perhaps (as I do) use the laptop itself to directly provide income!
Sorry, but I'm with the OLPC project on this one - they'll either succeed in meeting their goals, or they won't succeed as much as they'd like. But I can't see how this project could truly fail.
The point is that electronics problems with HDs (but not mechanical problems) can be fixed by swapping circuit boards.
I've done data recovery a number of times like this.
It used to be that you could RMA a hard drive and have the replacement drive shipped immediately if you guaranteed the transfer with your credit card. You are probably still able to. So, if a warranted drive failed, I'd order the swap drive with my credit card, and when it came, swap out the controller board on the bottom of the drive. Get the data backed up to an external or 2nd HDD, then swap the controller boards back and send in the dead drive.
Yep, you read the subject right. It's the law of supply and demand at work.
See, people choose science careers because they *like* science. It's got a number of nonfinancial perks and rewards, such as being interesting, inciting passion, and satisfying a deep feeling of altruism.
Compare/contrast that with some business - say, importing iron. Not knocking the importance of the iron importers, as they serve a vital role in the economy, but it's not a particularly intellectually stimulating line of work.
Now, if you (like me) are of the scientific bend, are you going to actually want to get into the business of importing iron? Is it something that ignites your passion, that you were curious about as a kid?
Me neither. So to compensate, importing iron has a rather low requirement for entry, and a rather high payback on investment. (Can you read? Can you breathe? Feel like starting a business? You're probably qualified...)
And so people are willing to put up with reduced economics in order to benefit from the nonfinancial perks of science, to do science. Nothing strange or unusual - just the laws of a (relatively) free marketplace at work.
People have a reason to feel like they are unprotected on the internet.
It's because for a greater portion of incidents, they are.
To a certain extent, that's true for any kind of crime. Police do only the minimum amount of detective work to qualify for the term "investigation". They are inundated with things to investigate. If you want police to work for you, you have to dig for yourself, get all the evidence together, document, photograph, and substantiate everything, and hand over a case pre-cut and ready for trial. Otherwise you'll waste time and they'll use the phrase "civil matter" over and over.
But it's even worse online.
I was called in to help an ISP track down a hax0r who pwn3d a mail server. We spent a few days tracking things down - the regular admin/owner and I. Eventually, we tracked him down to a coffee shop in Romania. (I'm not kidding) We even chatted with the guy a la MSN video chat! He had a decent network of bots (about 200, as I recall, mostly on really big pipes, so it wasn't a bunch of 'doze boxen on 128k DSL)
We gathered all relevant evidence, including scripts to compromise, connection points, IP addresses, times dates, logfiles, the whole nine yards - probably 100 MB of data. We called the FBI. The lady on the phone sounded bored, and informed us to fill out a feedback form.
The feedback form was limited to 1,000 characters. We never got any response back.
Call me cynical, but I've been asked a number of times why I don't go work for the FBI - people have this romantic picture from TV shows - but the truth is, there's lots more money to be had doing it privately!
But when will it become truly affordable for the masses? That's what most of us want to know. Wake me when it's time to disconnect from the petroleum/nuclear fired grid.
It's already happening in California. This deal is huge. It's between 300 and 900 Megawatts. And what's even more remarkable is that there is no federal or state funding for this project - not even a subsidy or tax break!
The solar electricity is simply profitable. Watch this closely.
Another interesting run is the Solar Tower project in Australia. I'm really excited by this one! Once built, the operating costs drop to near ZERO.
What few people realize is how much the price of electricity varies. So go get your utility bill. Call the nearest solar energy installation guys. You may find that it's profitable RIGHT NOW to put solar cells on your roof!
So I was reading this magazine called "Optimize". It's one of those freebie trade rags where you simply have to sign up as a "CTO / CIO" to get, along with about 5 lbs of junk mail every day.
Anyway, I was reading about so-called "autonomic computing" with "dynamic resource allocation" and "self-healing capabilities". It was this fluffy, buzzword-laden stuff that just didn't quite dig with me.
Just when I thought that there might actually be something here for me to look into, I noticed an example and jumped on it.
The example was of an "enterprise" backup that had to be done nightly, and some tech weenie had to remote in at 1:00 AM every night to check disk space and kick off the backup. How did they do it the autonomic way? Well, they set up a background scheduler that would automatically check for disk space and start the process!
Yep, that's right. A cron job that did about 5 lines of shell scripting. WTF?
This sounds to be just as buzzword laden and content poor. I've come to conclude that the number of buzzwords used to describe a particular application are inversely proportional to the substance of said application.
You sir, have rediscovered the principle long known as the "blacklist", or "Realtime Black List" or RBL. There are quite a number of these: a quick google search turns up well over 4 MILLION PAGES devoted to the subject of "rbl".
Yes, us Mail Admins have been using these for years. And they work well, probably reducing load by some 70% or so. But they have their problems, and aren't 100% effective. If you block 70% of spam from a source of email that's 85% spam, you still have 50% of your inbox being spam. And that's about what I see...
PS: Your analogy is awful. Next time you aren't sure, there's this neat button called "Del" you might want to pay attention to...
Until employers get over the slave owner mentality and start paying people fairly for their work, they are going to have a hard time finding good people.
If you don't mind me asking, where do you shop for food? Where do you buy your tires? Clothes? Computers and related?
If you've ever gone to someplace that's a little further away but cheaper than the corner market, should get over your slave owner mentality and start paying local merchants fairly for their work.
Because it's the same exact thing.
"But.. but.... ! " you cry, as if that mattered. See, given the need for N, anybody and everybody is going to try to find the best combination of price and convenience to meet N. It doesn't matter if your a working stiff buying potatoes for your wife and kids, or a multi-millionaire CEO trying to find a good location for a manufacturing plant.
It's always the same. They're people, just like you. They do the same thing, just like you. Get over it. If you don't like it, become a boss! Start your own enterprise if you like! Hire and fire people, and see the look in their eyes as they realize that the reason you wanted to talk to them wasn't a good reason. (for them)
In my experience, the only difference between the idiots at the top and the idiots at the bottom of any organization is that the idiots at the top are in charge!
However, you have to make the choice between being a seller (which means lying to customers - no salesman ever tells the truth), and being a person who does something productive. The two things are not compatible; sales is a zero-sum activity.
Wow. With that kind of attitude, you'll never be a decent salesman! If you think that decent sales and representing the actual value of your product are mutually exclusive, you are dead wrong.
Sales can be a zero-sum (or even a negative sum) activity, just as coding can be. For examples of negative-value coding, see Developmestruction - a bit of searching here would do you good.
Sales is the process of overcoming communication friction. If you build a nifty widget that has some real value, its value is fully and completely unrealized until people know about it. It takes a sales and/or marketing department to overcome the intrinsic communication friction in order to let people know about your widget and what it's real value might be.
It's a process that's inherently neither good nor bad.
One of the most important skills you can learn is how to sell. It doesn't matter if you're operating as an independent consultant or as a wage slave in a rat cage, you have to sell the services you offer to another. Whether to your client or to your boss, the ability to sell yourself, your services, and communicate your value effectively is critical to getting paid what you're worth.
Yeah, it's important that you know your stuff, that you know how to write decent code, and that you continually strive to improve your skillz, but you'll get that advice from plenty of others.
But when you read the stories about how underpaid people are while their idiotic bosses get promoted, realize that what you're really reading is the story of somebody who doesn't know how to effectively market their real value to those around them!
You can start with the iPods to kids at Best Buy, but learn to sell items of value. Move into auto sales, and/or insurance sales. Or, run a computer store and man the floor for a while. Just a year or two of good sales experience will likely improve your income by 50% or more for the rest of your life.
Slashdot Mirror
What you are proposing is little more than Windows paint - only without even the positive feedback of a screen behind it.
So I ask you: What value can you concieve of that is in any way "educational"?
For that matter, how is this functionally different than, say, a Wacom board? They've been around for a long, long time...
Perhaps that's understandable since many of those countries have enough non-tech issues to deal with already. But I think that if that's the case, they just shouldn't be allowed on the internet yet. There really needs to be a bar for entry.
And, just how do propose to do that?
The Internet is an agreement to exchange digital information with previously agreed-upon protocols. Nothing more, nothing less. ANY node on the Internet is abstractly equal to any other. It's the World of Ends that gives the Internet its value! As with most things, it's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness.
I'm surprised we haven't started seeing vigilantes tracking down hackers and spammers. When governments can't handle things, the mob takes over.
I'm surprised that you haven't recognized that the Realtime Blacklists are nothing but vigilante actions - whole swaths of the Internet blocked from communicating due to misbehavior...
What else would you call that?
Perhaps you are assuming that I meant my "painting light on walls" idea should replace all other childhood activities? I never said that.
/SOMETHING/ during each of those hours, even if vegetating on a sofa.
There are 24 hours in a day. You are doing
So how do you propose introducing some "childhood activity" of limited value without displacing "other childhood activities" which have provable, demonstrable, lasting value? (EG: the sand pit, a box of blocks or Legos, tempera paints - good stuff happens there!)
I'm not suggesting that you proposed replacing all other activities - it's quite enough damage to reduce them.
Couldn't you combine this with a projector to make a wall you can "paint"? Could be great fun.
Great for kids too - finger painting on the wall without making a mess.
Except that you'd be missing a key element to childhood development - the mess!
People don't think in pure abstracts. Understanding concepts like mass, volume, friction, etc come from a "gut level" understanding that stems from our experiences with these things. The more firmly these ideas are grasped, (through childhood play) the easier these advanced concepts are later on in life.
Ironically, in our push to have more "highly educated" kids by starting earlier, we're actually making it more difficult to have "highly educated" adults! Research performed in Australia backs this up - starting formalized education later improves the kid's performance later in life.
By keeping kids in the relatively sterile and regimented classroom early, they miss the real learning they would get from play. Finland, for example, doesn't begin schooling of any kind until the kids are 7 years old, and quit when the child is just 16. So why do they have one of the top-rated education systems in the world? Somehow they manage to perform significantly better, even though we spend almost 50% more time at it.
Isn't it nice to know that you spent twice as much time as you could have, in order to achieve an inferior education?
As one more example - ever watch MythBusters? It's a great show, where they challenge myths with rudimentary science. Lots of fun, and lots of education about physics, mechanics, and so on.
Ever look at their shop? It's forever a MESS! Half-constructed doo-dads all over the place! Messes aren't just not bad, they are frequently a good indicator that something real is actually taking place!
Datacenters could possibly look as different as computers from the 1960s do, compared to today's PCs.
So then, the question crosses my mind - "How different do data centers from the 1960s look from those of today?"... I did a bit of googling, and even overshot the mark!
Here's a datacenter from 1949
and...
Here's a datacenter from today
Aside from being a little more "shiny" and now painted black, they look REMARKABLY SIMILAR... I'd almost wonder if the racks from 1949 are 19" racks, just like you might see today...
Remember when the deal between Microsoft and Novell was to "encourage interoperability"?
Here's that "interoperability" at work, folks...
I think that as online TV becomes more popular, people will isolate themselves more and more from a shared experience. So people will end up having even more polarized views of things.
I've seen the reverse trend.
Videos online or on our DVR can be paused or rewinded - even when watching something that's not pre-recorded! So if somebody speaks up during the show, it's no big deal to pause it, talk about it, and then continue, or even rewind to pick up a detail that was missed.
This makes watching videos a la YouTube or DVR much more social than ever before.
It *can* be much less social, but that's been the case since VHS vs Betamax was a big deal, and people haven't become significantly less social that I can tell.
Uh, do you know how many people would need to be in on such a conspiracy? The folks who came up with the concept, the folks who developed some molecules that might work, tons of people involved in clinical trials, etc. It would probably be just as easy to fake the Apollo landings.
Uhm... hello????
Everybody knows that the Apollo missions were faked!
It's quite possible that there's so much program trading going on, that you may be able to predict the market (not prfectly, but at least profitably) by effectively predicting what the program traders en-masse are doing. Not that this is necessarily any easier than predicting the mass psychology behind the markets in general, but it does as least point to the fact that much of the market moves according to very deterministic forces.
And this fact is EXACTLY what stabilizes the market!
As soon as there's a discernable pattern, somebody's going to exploit that pattern in order to make more money, and as soon as that happens, the original pattern gets interrupted, thus stabilizing the marketplace. Perfect? No. But damned good. Some regulation is needed to keep these market forces from being overwhelmed - but the cost of this regulation is a pittance compared to the benefits gained!
Money is an awfully effective invention for distributing wealth, which is why the Star-Trek "utopia" where nobody needs money is not going to happen anytime soon. So long as there is differentiation between different people (and thus resource distribution potential) there will be money.
OpenSolaris is nearly as free (in every sense) these days as Linux, and it has some great technology in it, including a battle-hardened networking stack.
This statement implies that Linux's networking stack is not "battle-hardened" or at least not AS "battle-hardened". WTF? Linux is used on routers for a reason - and it's not because of the freecell game!
Trying to imply that Linux's networking stack is anything but quite mature is just idiocy.
There is nothing wrong with the FOSS community, however there are a small number of very vocal people who are total assholes towards people new to things such as Linux.
Ooops, I think you got that wrong.
There are a small number of very vocal people who are total assholes towards people.
Does it matter what the subject is?
I guess you're not familiar with the law. Please don't pretend to be.
Look, if every slashdotter followed this advice, there'd be like, uhm, 70% fewer comments here, no?
It's wrong to mass-search drivers' license pictures. It's also wrong to mass-search pictures of anyone who has ever been convicted of a crime. Many, many people have a regrettable misdeed in their past. It's wrong to continue to punish people who have, as was once said, "paid their debt to society."
I truly understand what you mean. Although I have not been convicted of any crime (other than a few traffic issues and a failure to appear) my closest friend was so accused. What really sucks is that, in his case, he was very well justified in commiting the "crime".
However, there is a clear and definite truth: once people have manifest a particular type of behavior, they are more likely to do that again. Pedophiles have trouble stopping. Alcoholics tend to either become teetotallers or alcoholics. Shoplifters tend to steal.
So, where does the "debt to society gets paid" mentallity stop and the "society must protect itself" begin?
Being an ex-con is not a crime, and even this facial recognition system recognizes this. But having warrants out for your arrest is something that police might be very, very interested in - and matching such searches done against past conviction records is, IMHO, very justifiable.
Other than the obvious "high tech" aspect to these pissoirs [google.com] and having them only available at night which just doesn't make sense to me, since I occasionally have to urinate during daylight hours.
You have apparently not been through large cities very often. I'm staying in the Hilton hotel in San Mateo, CA on a weekend getaway with my lovely wife. (She's sleeping in upstairs) Going through San Fransisco, we hit several of the "economically disadvantaged" areas, and the smell of old urine was frequently strong and rank. Not just "oh, this is bad", but "I'm so glad I haven't eaten for several hours because if I'd eaten recently I'd hurl it all over the sidewalk" bad.
It's obvious that public urination isn't an issue for many of the street dwellers, but the foul odors are an issue for everybody else. The price is a bit high - why not just put the urinals on the side of the buildings and have doors that close? Spending that much money PER URINAL could get rather prohibitive...
PS: You don't want these open in the daytime - that would leave a strong implicit message that swinging out the member and taking a leak in broad daylight is perfectly OK...
Calculate what proportion of those deaths could have been prevented by mosquito treated nets.
You're probably not a parent, or you'd see the implicit point that I do. It was so obvious to me I forgot to state it! Given the information on what it takes to prevent your son or daughter from dying, you'd do just about anything you can to save your children's lives. It's part of being a parent. Once the laptops are out there, and people discover what they can accomplish if they know, they'll clambor for it. Knowledge is power, and once that genie is out, it's awful hard to put it back into the bottle.
Billions of years of selective evolution (or the consideration of an angry white guy) have made this urge to protect one's children run hard and deep through the soul of humanity. OLPC doesn't give parents nets, it provides them the means to find out about things like nets and pest control.
those economic resources could not have produced food, so they would otherwise be an untapped outlet. If all the money going into a project like that went into sending food over, you'd probably choke the food supply and incredibly diminish the value of the money you spent on it.
An interesting point - money is fluid, but resources are not. But there's something that the " Oooh Noes - they need clean water and underwear first!!!" crowd completely fails to miss...
As my father in law (and former businessman) says, "Sometimes you have to choose between making the house payment and the truck payment. And the house payment won't make the truck payment...". What he means by this is that when resources are tight, invest first in those things that improve your resource situation. The work-truck helps bring in money. The house does not. So, invest in that which will best improve your financial situation!
And that, to me, is much of what this $100 laptop is all about. True, not every impoverished soul will get one, and it's distinctly possible that only the "upper-poor" will actually benefit from this project. But the computer is the "work truck" of the present and future.
I type this while sitting in a Hilton hotel lobby in South San Fransisco. My wife and I are on a 2.5 day weekend getaway, with no specific plans for anything. (She's sleeping in) I have delicious coffee on the pottery table in front of me, beautiful plants all around me, and all of this is earned by what I type on this Dell Inspiron 600m laptop, armed with an Internet connection. (and yes, it runs Linux, Fedora Core)
A laptop with an Internet connection is an information feed of an invaluable nature. Can you imagine what a modem-speed Internet connection would do to expand the minds and viewpoints of the geographically challenged? What simple act of 'surfing the websites' can do to people whose hope is bleak, who lack the information necessary to solve their own problems? Information that can be used to learn how to purify their water, or fertilize their lands so that they provide more food. Or, for that matter, perhaps (as I do) use the laptop itself to directly provide income!
Sorry, but I'm with the OLPC project on this one - they'll either succeed in meeting their goals, or they won't succeed as much as they'd like. But I can't see how this project could truly fail.
The point is that electronics problems with HDs (but not mechanical problems) can be fixed by swapping circuit boards.
I've done data recovery a number of times like this.
It used to be that you could RMA a hard drive and have the replacement drive shipped immediately if you guaranteed the transfer with your credit card. You are probably still able to. So, if a warranted drive failed, I'd order the swap drive with my credit card, and when it came, swap out the controller board on the bottom of the drive. Get the data backed up to an external or 2nd HDD, then swap the controller boards back and send in the dead drive.
Worked a champ each of the 3 or 4 times I did it.
Yep, you read the subject right. It's the law of supply and demand at work.
See, people choose science careers because they *like* science. It's got a number of nonfinancial perks and rewards, such as being interesting, inciting passion, and satisfying a deep feeling of altruism.
Compare/contrast that with some business - say, importing iron. Not knocking the importance of the iron importers, as they serve a vital role in the economy, but it's not a particularly intellectually stimulating line of work.
Now, if you (like me) are of the scientific bend, are you going to actually want to get into the business of importing iron? Is it something that ignites your passion, that you were curious about as a kid?
Me neither. So to compensate, importing iron has a rather low requirement for entry, and a rather high payback on investment. (Can you read? Can you breathe? Feel like starting a business? You're probably qualified...)
And so people are willing to put up with reduced economics in order to benefit from the nonfinancial perks of science, to do science. Nothing strange or unusual - just the laws of a (relatively) free marketplace at work.
People have a reason to feel like they are unprotected on the internet.
It's because for a greater portion of incidents, they are.
To a certain extent, that's true for any kind of crime. Police do only the minimum amount of detective work to qualify for the term "investigation". They are inundated with things to investigate. If you want police to work for you, you have to dig for yourself, get all the evidence together, document, photograph, and substantiate everything, and hand over a case pre-cut and ready for trial. Otherwise you'll waste time and they'll use the phrase "civil matter" over and over.
But it's even worse online.
I was called in to help an ISP track down a hax0r who pwn3d a mail server. We spent a few days tracking things down - the regular admin/owner and I. Eventually, we tracked him down to a coffee shop in Romania. (I'm not kidding) We even chatted with the guy a la MSN video chat! He had a decent network of bots (about 200, as I recall, mostly on really big pipes, so it wasn't a bunch of 'doze boxen on 128k DSL)
We gathered all relevant evidence, including scripts to compromise, connection points, IP addresses, times dates, logfiles, the whole nine yards - probably 100 MB of data. We called the FBI. The lady on the phone sounded bored, and informed us to fill out a feedback form.
The feedback form was limited to 1,000 characters. We never got any response back.
Call me cynical, but I've been asked a number of times why I don't go work for the FBI - people have this romantic picture from TV shows - but the truth is, there's lots more money to be had doing it privately!
But when will it become truly affordable for the masses? That's what most of us want to know. Wake me when it's time to disconnect from the petroleum/nuclear fired grid.
It's already happening in California. This deal is huge. It's between 300 and 900 Megawatts. And what's even more remarkable is that there is no federal or state funding for this project - not even a subsidy or tax break!
The solar electricity is simply profitable. Watch this closely.
Another interesting run is the Solar Tower project in Australia. I'm really excited by this one! Once built, the operating costs drop to near ZERO.
What few people realize is how much the price of electricity varies. So go get your utility bill. Call the nearest solar energy installation guys. You may find that it's profitable RIGHT NOW to put solar cells on your roof!
So I was reading this magazine called "Optimize". It's one of those freebie trade rags where you simply have to sign up as a "CTO / CIO" to get, along with about 5 lbs of junk mail every day.
Anyway, I was reading about so-called "autonomic computing" with "dynamic resource allocation" and "self-healing capabilities". It was this fluffy, buzzword-laden stuff that just didn't quite dig with me.
Just when I thought that there might actually be something here for me to look into, I noticed an example and jumped on it.
The example was of an "enterprise" backup that had to be done nightly, and some tech weenie had to remote in at 1:00 AM every night to check disk space and kick off the backup. How did they do it the autonomic way? Well, they set up a background scheduler that would automatically check for disk space and start the process!
Yep, that's right. A cron job that did about 5 lines of shell scripting. WTF?
This sounds to be just as buzzword laden and content poor. I've come to conclude that the number of buzzwords used to describe a particular application are inversely proportional to the substance of said application.
You sir, have rediscovered the principle long known as the "blacklist", or "Realtime Black List" or RBL. There are quite a number of these: a quick google search turns up well over 4 MILLION PAGES devoted to the subject of "rbl".
Yes, us Mail Admins have been using these for years. And they work well, probably reducing load by some 70% or so. But they have their problems, and aren't 100% effective. If you block 70% of spam from a source of email that's 85% spam, you still have 50% of your inbox being spam. And that's about what I see...
PS: Your analogy is awful. Next time you aren't sure, there's this neat button called "Del" you might want to pay attention to...
Until employers get over the slave owner mentality and start paying people fairly for their work, they are going to have a hard time finding good people.
If you don't mind me asking, where do you shop for food? Where do you buy your tires? Clothes? Computers and related?
If you've ever gone to someplace that's a little further away but cheaper than the corner market, should get over your slave owner mentality and start paying local merchants fairly for their work.
Because it's the same exact thing.
"But.. but.... ! " you cry, as if that mattered. See, given the need for N, anybody and everybody is going to try to find the best combination of price and convenience to meet N. It doesn't matter if your a working stiff buying potatoes for your wife and kids, or a multi-millionaire CEO trying to find a good location for a manufacturing plant.
It's always the same. They're people, just like you. They do the same thing, just like you. Get over it. If you don't like it, become a boss! Start your own enterprise if you like! Hire and fire people, and see the look in their eyes as they realize that the reason you wanted to talk to them wasn't a good reason. (for them)
In my experience, the only difference between the idiots at the top and the idiots at the bottom of any organization is that the idiots at the top are in charge!
However, you have to make the choice between being a seller (which means lying to customers - no salesman ever tells the truth), and being a person who does something productive. The two things are not compatible; sales is a zero-sum activity.
Wow. With that kind of attitude, you'll never be a decent salesman! If you think that decent sales and representing the actual value of your product are mutually exclusive, you are dead wrong.
Sales can be a zero-sum (or even a negative sum) activity, just as coding can be. For examples of negative-value coding, see Developmestruction - a bit of searching here would do you good.
Sales is the process of overcoming communication friction. If you build a nifty widget that has some real value, its value is fully and completely unrealized until people know about it. It takes a sales and/or marketing department to overcome the intrinsic communication friction in order to let people know about your widget and what it's real value might be.
It's a process that's inherently neither good nor bad.
One of the most important skills you can learn is how to sell. It doesn't matter if you're operating as an independent consultant or as a wage slave in a rat cage, you have to sell the services you offer to another. Whether to your client or to your boss, the ability to sell yourself, your services, and communicate your value effectively is critical to getting paid what you're worth.
Yeah, it's important that you know your stuff, that you know how to write decent code, and that you continually strive to improve your skillz, but you'll get that advice from plenty of others.
But when you read the stories about how underpaid people are while their idiotic bosses get promoted, realize that what you're really reading is the story of somebody who doesn't know how to effectively market their real value to those around them!
You can start with the iPods to kids at Best Buy, but learn to sell items of value. Move into auto sales, and/or insurance sales. Or, run a computer store and man the floor for a while. Just a year or two of good sales experience will likely improve your income by 50% or more for the rest of your life.