Yes, developing countries should be lining up to take out loans to pay for a totally new piece of hardare with a new software interface as well in hopes that without any pilot projects or proven track records.
There are lots of programs aimed at expanding access in the US also, and Quanta, the OLPC manufacturer, is planning to sell OLPC-like computers for $200 next year
How much volume do they need? Intel's ClassMate and AMD's PIC are approaching the $200 mark, and you don't have to buy a minimum order of one million to get to that price
Am I missing something here? The patent was filed on March 25, 1987. The motion was filed April 18th, 2007. Patents last 20 years. These asshats lost their case by a few weeks. (OK, sure, Apple's OS was probably infringing before the patent expired, too bad they didn't file then)
Also, remember that M$ has a few test units of the OLPC, and the OLPC design itself was altered to include a PCMCIA slot at M$'s request. Could be they're just getting ready to replace the SugarUI on all of the OLPC units (given/donated freely... by governments) to schools. Boy, would/that/ suck, just when I thought we might break the M$ monopoly - at least for the next generation?
At least this is better than the SchoolNet Namibia story a few years back, when M$ donated Office, but not the OS, leading the project to investigate the cost of buying OS licenses so they could use MSOFfice... and went with Linux.
I'm sorry, are people still buying media from RIAA/MAFIAA companies? I stopped buying their crap when they started acting like it was the eighties and VCRs were about to destroy their business. I still buy music, but only when it comes DRM-free and RIAA-free (thanks, RIAA Radar!).
It makes me sad that anyone who'd read slashdot are (a) surprised and (b) are still buying crap from Sony. Stop supporting dead business models, and they'll go away.
This reminds me of the advantages of living in an ass-old house; not necessarily from the re-wiring side, but from the forethought in building side. Built-in restrooms? There's a closet on the other side of the wetwall with open access to the plumbing, which means that every time you need to do something to the tub, it doesn't involve busting out the tile and then re-tiling at the end.
What happened to building that is intentionally easy to maintain, as opposed to intentionally hard? (My parents had to replace their tub at their house - not only was the piping not in a sane location, it was embedded 6' into the house slab (which had, unsurprisingly, cracked, taking the pipe with it).
I think requiring credentials for wikipedia is anti-wikipedia, for many of the reasons/.ers have pointed out. Frankly, I don't even want someone with a Ph.D. in comparative media studies, dissertation on Happy Days and The American Dream talking about shark-jumping (in fact, when that happens, wikipedia itself will have jumped the shark in a frenzy of circular referencing).
What is relevant is some feature that only lets users present credentials if those are independently verified. If you can't/won't get your employer/credentialing agency to back you up, then you can explain that, but you don't get to put the "I'm a Ph.D in ____" tag on your user page.
Tied in with this could be some user-reputation system as well, but I fear that'd just open the door to massive gaming of the system and/or reputation-flaming-wars; I've seen enough deletion discussion logs to not get too serious about recommending this.
Hell, I've been intentionally boycotting the RIAA since they took AudioGalaxy down, and by accident even before then (their affiliated labels so rarely have any good music on them). I'm sad it's taken this long for the loathing to spread outside of the geek circles.
Actually, a huge component of the Moon mission is learning and planning for a Mars mission:
Mike Griffin, NASA Administrator: "NASA is moving forward with a new focus for the manned space program: to go out beyond Earth orbit for purposes of human exploration and scientific discovery." Administrator Griffin makes the case for completing the International Space Station, "the most complex construction feat ever undertaken," as a stepping stone to future exploration.
"Using the space station and building an outpost on the moon to prepare for the trip to Mars are critical milestones in America's quest to become a truly spacefaring nation," Griffin writes. "I think that we should want that. I want that. I want it for the American people, for my grandchildren, for my great-grandchildren."
I think this is mostly true; I'd rather do most of the install myself anyhow. That being said, I'd love it if I could recommend a Linux Dell to a friend (instead of Macs as I do currently) that'd come pre-installed and/working/. I don't mind (much) opening up my xorg.conf and mucking with wifi settings, but my parents would have heart attacks trying to unscrew-up an X misconfiguration problem. I, nor Dell, really has the support capability to deal with end users screaming "OMFG my screen is blinking in weird ways at me!!!"
So a few vanilla installs of the major players would work, just an extra selection button on the OS screen (there's enough Windows ones with Vista's 31-flavors approach as is, I will ignore complaints about how the consumer knows what to choose; a one-sentence intro for each OS/Distro should suffice for newbies)
What this really means, and what will cause a lot of hiccups, is hardware support. What, no more winmodems? NDIS wrappers causing problems? At the end of the day, as a Linux user, I don't care what flavor Dell installs, what I really care about is that by their installation of any flavor, their hardware suddenly needs to be supported. when I install whatever flavor I specifically want to muck with, I don't have to worry about hardware issues.
People have believed that the end is near (in an xtian sense) for over 2000 years now, and in other mythologies for even longer. It's when people change their day-to-day behavior towards that belief that it gets... dangerous.
Exactly. Sure, Google is the poster child for Linux stability, raw power, and flexibility, but Google Earth (admittedly, bought with Keystone) ain't exactly open source, nor are they opening up their actual code for their web services.
Remember, Hotmail ran on FreeBSD for years even under Microsoft's ownership.
Microsoft didn't "wake up" to the right set of ideas - it's not google's services that are beating Microsoft into the ground, it's their general openness and interoperability. Microsoft can put Office online and create a search technology that can find a needle in a haystack not even linked by RFID tags to the tubes, but if they continue to play their embrace/extend/extinguish games instead of opening up, as an internal cultural change, what they produce will continue to be hindered by this proprietary mindset.
(It's not even like they have to jump ship into OSS - Google's technology by and large is closed source, they just play ball better)
Ah, you gotta love the/. moderation system, where my little piece of flamebait gets up to 5, whereas your actual thought-out exploration of the problem stops at 2.
MS needs to do what Apple did when they jumped from 9 to 10; which is (a) change everything and (b) make a virtual machine to keep legacy apps that didn't convert over working.
As you touched on and the other responder mentioned, Windows has a nascent and under-used "package" system with cab/infs and MSI, it's just not centralized or tied in with the DLL-hell problems.
DLLs I think are both less and more of a problem than people talk about - it shouldn't be that hard to create a local listing of all DLLs and their versions, and then have programs check to see if they need to add their own or not. I avoid dealing with this area, anyhow, so maybe that's too elementary.
I mean, that's a possibility, I'm not about to load a walmart page in IE, thankyouverymuch. The page it displayed to me was just HTML (I read through the source) and I was trying masking myself with an IE useragent string.
I get (after a few refreshes) (rendered as text from the server) an HTML page that reads: "The Wal-Mart Video Downloads store is currently unavailable due to temporary site maintenance. We apologize for any inconvenience."
Either they're fixing it or are slashdotted?
As much as I hate Walmart, they did sell the Linspire systems; I think this is laziness more than intention.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, developing countries should be lining up to take out loans to pay for a totally new piece of hardare with a new software interface as well in hopes that without any pilot projects or proven track records.
There are lots of programs aimed at expanding access in the US also, and Quanta, the OLPC manufacturer, is planning to sell OLPC-like computers for $200 next year
How much volume do they need? Intel's ClassMate and AMD's PIC are approaching the $200 mark, and you don't have to buy a minimum order of one million to get to that price
Hear hear.
Am I missing something here? The patent was filed on March 25, 1987. The motion was filed April 18th, 2007. Patents last 20 years. These asshats lost their case by a few weeks. (OK, sure, Apple's OS was probably infringing before the patent expired, too bad they didn't file then)
Also, remember that M$ has a few test units of the OLPC, and the OLPC design itself was altered to include a PCMCIA slot at M$'s request. Could be they're just getting ready to replace the SugarUI on all of the OLPC units (given/donated freely ... by governments) to schools. Boy, would /that/ suck, just when I thought we might break the M$ monopoly - at least for the next generation?
At least this is better than the SchoolNet Namibia story a few years back, when M$ donated Office, but not the OS, leading the project to investigate the cost of buying OS licenses so they could use MSOFfice... and went with Linux.
Once we clear the issue of broadband providers up, can we move on to cell phones? The US market is even further behind the rest of the world there.
I'm sorry, are people still buying media from RIAA/MAFIAA companies? I stopped buying their crap when they started acting like it was the eighties and VCRs were about to destroy their business. I still buy music, but only when it comes DRM-free and RIAA-free (thanks, RIAA Radar!).
It makes me sad that anyone who'd read slashdot are (a) surprised and (b) are still buying crap from Sony. Stop supporting dead business models, and they'll go away.
If they simply make the content unplayable
Hell, most of it's unwatchable already, this is simply the next logical step...
This reminds me of the advantages of living in an ass-old house; not necessarily from the re-wiring side, but from the forethought in building side. Built-in restrooms? There's a closet on the other side of the wetwall with open access to the plumbing, which means that every time you need to do something to the tub, it doesn't involve busting out the tile and then re-tiling at the end.
What happened to building that is intentionally easy to maintain, as opposed to intentionally hard? (My parents had to replace their tub at their house - not only was the piping not in a sane location, it was embedded 6' into the house slab (which had, unsurprisingly, cracked, taking the pipe with it).
I think requiring credentials for wikipedia is anti-wikipedia, for many of the reasons /.ers have pointed out. Frankly, I don't even want someone with a Ph.D. in comparative media studies, dissertation on Happy Days and The American Dream talking about shark-jumping (in fact, when that happens, wikipedia itself will have jumped the shark in a frenzy of circular referencing).
What is relevant is some feature that only lets users present credentials if those are independently verified. If you can't/won't get your employer/credentialing agency to back you up, then you can explain that, but you don't get to put the "I'm a Ph.D in ____" tag on your user page.
Tied in with this could be some user-reputation system as well, but I fear that'd just open the door to massive gaming of the system and/or reputation-flaming-wars; I've seen enough deletion discussion logs to not get too serious about recommending this.
Hell, I've been intentionally boycotting the RIAA since they took AudioGalaxy down, and by accident even before then (their affiliated labels so rarely have any good music on them). I'm sad it's taken this long for the loathing to spread outside of the geek circles.
Actually, a huge component of the Moon mission is learning and planning for a Mars mission:
/ why_moon.html
Mike Griffin, NASA Administrator: "NASA is moving forward with a new focus for the manned space program: to go out beyond Earth orbit for purposes of human exploration and scientific discovery." Administrator Griffin makes the case for completing the International Space Station, "the most complex construction feat ever undertaken," as a stepping stone to future exploration.
"Using the space station and building an outpost on the moon to prepare for the trip to Mars are critical milestones in America's quest to become a truly spacefaring nation," Griffin writes. "I think that we should want that. I want that. I want it for the American people, for my grandchildren, for my great-grandchildren."
RThisFM for more detail: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/exploration/mmb
Only when I'm hiding them from wlassistant ;) log files are /etc, libraries in home directories.
I think this is mostly true; I'd rather do most of the install myself anyhow. That being said, I'd love it if I could recommend a Linux Dell to a friend (instead of Macs as I do currently) that'd come pre-installed and /working/. I don't mind (much) opening up my xorg.conf and mucking with wifi settings, but my parents would have heart attacks trying to unscrew-up an X misconfiguration problem. I, nor Dell, really has the support capability to deal with end users screaming "OMFG my screen is blinking in weird ways at me!!!"
So a few vanilla installs of the major players would work, just an extra selection button on the OS screen (there's enough Windows ones with Vista's 31-flavors approach as is, I will ignore complaints about how the consumer knows what to choose; a one-sentence intro for each OS/Distro should suffice for newbies)
What this really means, and what will cause a lot of hiccups, is hardware support. What, no more winmodems? NDIS wrappers causing problems? At the end of the day, as a Linux user, I don't care what flavor Dell installs, what I really care about is that by their installation of any flavor, their hardware suddenly needs to be supported. when I install whatever flavor I specifically want to muck with, I don't have to worry about hardware issues.
People have believed that the end is near (in an xtian sense) for over 2000 years now, and in other mythologies for even longer. It's when people change their day-to-day behavior towards that belief that it gets ... dangerous.
...they let people using Windows edit it? ... uh... yeah, it's open.
I think on Slashdot we've reached a general consensus
And if that by itself is not a landmark event heralding the dawn of a new age, I don't know what is.
Exactly. Sure, Google is the poster child for Linux stability, raw power, and flexibility, but Google Earth (admittedly, bought with Keystone) ain't exactly open source, nor are they opening up their actual code for their web services.
Remember, Hotmail ran on FreeBSD for years even under Microsoft's ownership.
Microsoft didn't "wake up" to the right set of ideas - it's not google's services that are beating Microsoft into the ground, it's their general openness and interoperability. Microsoft can put Office online and create a search technology that can find a needle in a haystack not even linked by RFID tags to the tubes, but if they continue to play their embrace/extend/extinguish games instead of opening up, as an internal cultural change, what they produce will continue to be hindered by this proprietary mindset.
(It's not even like they have to jump ship into OSS - Google's technology by and large is closed source, they just play ball better)
Ah, you gotta love the /. moderation system, where my little piece of flamebait gets up to 5, whereas your actual thought-out exploration of the problem stops at 2.
MS needs to do what Apple did when they jumped from 9 to 10; which is (a) change everything and (b) make a virtual machine to keep legacy apps that didn't convert over working.
As you touched on and the other responder mentioned, Windows has a nascent and under-used "package" system with cab/infs and MSI, it's just not centralized or tied in with the DLL-hell problems.
DLLs I think are both less and more of a problem than people talk about - it shouldn't be that hard to create a local listing of all DLLs and their versions, and then have programs check to see if they need to add their own or not. I avoid dealing with this area, anyhow, so maybe that's too elementary.
Windows Vista: stealing the pretty GUI crap from Gnome, KDE, and OSX, but leaving out useful shit like apt and yum
I mean, that's a possibility, I'm not about to load a walmart page in IE, thankyouverymuch. The page it displayed to me was just HTML (I read through the source) and I was trying masking myself with an IE useragent string.
I get (after a few refreshes) (rendered as text from the server) an HTML page that reads: "The Wal-Mart Video Downloads store is currently unavailable due to temporary site maintenance. We apologize for any inconvenience."
Either they're fixing it or are slashdotted?
As much as I hate Walmart, they did sell the Linspire systems; I think this is laziness more than intention.
My only question is, OK, so the license forbids it - does the technology also?