Probably nothing exciting is going to happen with these laptops. As the story suggests, the kids will mainly use the laptops to read textbooks. Then again, they'll have access to a lot of books they didn't previously have access to — which is probably exciting for them.
One thing folks miss when they criticize this probject: it will save the countries that buy them a lot of money. Buying and transporting books is expensive.
The projects that do the best for the developing world address mundane, unglamorous issues. And believe it or not, that's what the $100 laptop does: address mundane issues. Like lack of access to a library.
I might have been there only a few years, but I have certainly seen several good uses for 3D: Google Earth for planning a business trip...
It takes a pretty powerful graphics card to run Google Earth, or at least well enough to do anything useful. I don't see anybody spending a lot of money just to get "a few nice features".
Audio is even more important: if you try to use VoIP, you need low latency full duplex audio. I would not trust VMware with that.
In a serious business environment, you use your telephone to make telephone calls. This is true even at companies that have completely abandoned POTS in favor of VoIP. Employees just get phones that have RJ-14 connectors instead of RJ-11.
You can dream up any number of fancy applications that don't run well on a VM. But the fact is that the typical enterprise user doesn't need them. Don't make the standard Slashdot mistake of assuming that what you want or need is what everybody wants or needs.
Aah, but just try to take them away from primadonna developers and see how much they scream about their need to play mp3s and FPS games at work or how the company "owes" them some freedom, or how 3D is required for Java, or how the corporate VoIP initiative means they need to have the best possible sound on their desktop/laptop.
Try to stay ontopic, dude. We're talking enterprise environments, not development machines.
The 770 doesn't even pretend to be a PDA. It's for surfing the web, period. Yet twice this week we've seen PDAs that were supposed to be compared to the 770. Not just PDAs: PDAs with keyboards. Get real!
I'm guessing lots of clueless marketeers are picking the 770 as the product to position their product against. The Slashdot editors need to tune their filters against this sort of crap.
I should have said that 0.1 does not have a binary floating point representation — though I think that was implicit in the context. We're talking about decimal values as they appear in common programming languages.
There are any number of data formats that represent common decimals without rounding. But they aren't intrinsic in lot of common programming languages. That's particularly painful in Java, which doesn't have operator overloading. So you have to say stuff like BigDecimal fraction = new BigDecimal(1).divide(new BigDecimal(10)).
Back in the 70s, IBM's great invention was PL/1 (Programming Language 1: the first real programming language!). This had an intrinsic data type for everything. There was even a data type for pounds, schilling, pence, so you could write code that added 5 schillings sixpence to 15 schillings tupence and get 1 pound 8 pence. (Ironically, this was about the time the UK decimalized its currency.) Alas, there were some serious design flaws in PL/1 (parsing a language with no keywords is hard), and it never caught on.
I don't see that. You're assuming there are a lot of folks out there who would switch to MacOS if they could do so without buying a Mac. That doesn't make sense. Macs cost more, but not that much more. The only people who haven't already made the switch are people too poor to spend a few extra hundred on a Mac. Not a big (or profitable) user base.
their hardware userbase would probably stay very close in size
You've got to be kidding. Macs have two advantages over the competition: they're easy to use, and they're better engineered. If you can run MacOS on a white box that sells for half the price of any Mac, there goes the usability advantage. And in my opinion, the usability advantage is more important than the engineering factor. 'Cause the main effect of better engineering is to make the machine more powerful — and nowadays, even the dinkiest little POS white box provides more computing power than most users need.
Of course, there's also the coolness factor. Maybe that accounts for a lot of Mac sales. But all of them? Not even close.
Inasmuch as I can parse your argument at all, you seem to be saying "Most scripting languages compile to bytecodes that are executed by a VM; therefore any language that executes bytecodes on a VM is a scripting language." If you would learn to express yourself more concisely, you could avoid fallacies like this.
Perhaps it would help if you stopped taking the word "scripting" too literally. As you point out, languages like Perl no longer much resemble the scripting languages from whence they sprang. Nowadays, the more accurate term for languages like python and perl is "agile". But people continue to say "scripting" out of habit. Sloppy, but that's carbon-based units for you.
Your homework assignment is to google "agile programming languages" and explain why they describe Perl and Python, but not Java or C#.
Using a float to represent monetary amounts and expecting them to be free of rounding errors is as stupid as using integers to store zip codes and wondering where the leading zeros went...
It's not stupid, it's just ignorant.
Your comparison with integer zip codes is totally bogus: that's not an arithmetic error, it's just sloppy formatting. The variable contains a perfectly accurate value — you just have to remember to output it with a %05d format. (Of course, since you don't do arithmetic on zip codes, you might as will forget the whole problem and just store the thing as a string.) On the other hand, the rounding errors you get when you try to store decimal fractions as floating point stem from an extremely unobvious fact: many common values (such as 0.1) do not have a binary representation.
Meteors are bits of dust or rock that plunge into the Earth's atmosphere and burn up, making bright streaks in the sky.
Ah, the wikipedia mentality: lots of desire to "explain", no actual grasp of the facts. I'm not even going to touch the "dust or rock" description. But note that meteors come in all sizes. It's true that most burn up in the atmosphere. (I seem to recall reading that this happens thousands of times a day.) But some are big enough to leave their remains (meteorites) on the surface of the planet. These have been known to cause a little
(or a lot) of damage.
The ease with which I organize my tasks in Enlightenment 16 makes you wrong or me a genius. I'm not a genius.
Indeed, you're pretty ignorant. Intelligence is not this amorphous quantity that some geniuses have a lot of. It's a complicated collection of skills. People can be quite smart and not be able to juggle a lot of info in their heads. On the other hand, being able to remember a lot of shit is not necessarily a sign of intelligence, rainman.
It isn't a question of "casual" versus "non-casual". I've been a heavy computer user since before the PC was invented. But my ability to juggle a lot of facts in my head is limited. That's one reason I made the switch to GUIs early on, while my contemporaries were still dismissing it as a "point and grunt" interface that only idiots would ever bother with. ("Hey, if you need to multitask, use virtual consoles!") I like an interface that tells me the state of play, rather than making me keep it in my head.
I've tried virtual desktops many times, but always lose track of what's where. So instead, I make use of the fact that the task bar in Windows (and GNOME, and KDE) is resizeable. Make it four rows high, and you can have 20 windows open, and see all 20 window captions in a glance.
One reason I've never been able to adapt to Mac: there's no equivalent feature. Instead there's this weird, complicated icon thingee at the bottom that I can never quite figure out. Which, for all I know, is actually a better design. But switching to it would be as hard for me as giving up the QWERTY keyboard.
First, forget about spamming Slashdot with affiliate links. No money in it. I once managed to get my Amazon affiliate link into the main story — and made about $10 on the deal.
Second, Dreamhost is at the point that every small operation comes to where they discover that the business plan that worked fine when they had 10,000 customers doesn't scale up to 100,000 customers. Some companies can adapt to success, but Dreamhost ain't one of them. Slow servers, too much down time, no emergency plan. I'm bailing as soon as my current contract expires.
Third, the GNAA gag was never funny, and is now definitely old.
Well, I'm certainly disappointed. I value GTA mainly because it allows me to express my inner sociopath. (Oh, the look on pedestrian's faces when they hit your windshield!) I was looking forward to this game as a chance to reverse the role I played in grade school. Oh well!
I think you're right on all points, but I have to correct a possible misunderstanding. Freespire is not something a company would obtain in conjunction with a support agreement. It's the free-as-in-beer version of Linspire.
Why should I blame Wikipedia? You're the one who's lending authority to "facts" edited by anonymous bozos with no indication as to where they got their information.
Yes, I know how popular Delphi is in Argentina. And Poland. And the Czech Republic. And Russia. And Nigeria. And New Zealand. I sat through all the marketing spiels when I was at Borland. And, although its nice that folks like you can make money using Delphi to write software. But all the revenue from all those countries don't add up to enough to keep the product going.
Yes, the MFC documentation sucks. (Of course, MFC has been replaced by.NET, but that documentation sucks too.) So what? Microsoft manages to dominate the marketplace anyway. And Delphi has long since blown its last chance to provide an alternative.
Flow-Matic wasn't the first compiled language either. That honor belongs to Fortran, which was first developed in 1953. Every reference I've ever seen credits John Backus with inventing the compiler.
And distinguishing between Flow-Matic and COBOL is not useful, since both languages have the design flaw I'm criticizing.
You're getting your info from Wikipedia aren't you? Well, the entry on Flow-Matic is accurate enough, but is easy to misread. It says that Flow-Matic was the first "English-like compiled language". Which is perfectly true, but not the same thing as being "the first compiled language".
You're assuming that stock prices are based on asset valuation. That's nonsense. Asset valuation is just one tool for pricing a stock. Ultimately, the price of a stock represents investors beliefs about the company's ability to grow shareholder value. So a company can have negative assets and still have a good stock price, provided only that investors think that this situation is bound to change. That happened a lot during the dotcom bubble.
Contrariwise, a company can have a lot of valuable assets but a low stock price if investors think the company isn't using those assets effectively. That usually ends with the company being forced to sell off some (or, as in the case of Knight-Ridder, all) of its assets.
If you remember that stock prices are based on your ability to resell them, you realize that a negative price is an absurdity. That would mean that you'd be willing to pay somebody to take over your stock. Stock always has some value, if only as wallpaper.
COBOL was not the first high-level programming language, not by a long shot. There were already languages that knew how to interpret formulas (FORTRAN), process complex data structures (LISP) and even primitives forms of block structuring (Algol). The one big idea that COBOL added to the mix was that source code should resemble natural language (IF X EQUALS 3 OR 4 ADD 1 TO X). Hopper had to have been pretty ignorant about the sheer ambiguity of natural language to make this mistake.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably nothing exciting is going to happen with these laptops. As the story suggests, the kids will mainly use the laptops to read textbooks. Then again, they'll have access to a lot of books they didn't previously have access to — which is probably exciting for them.
One thing folks miss when they criticize this probject: it will save the countries that buy them a lot of money. Buying and transporting books is expensive.
The projects that do the best for the developing world address mundane, unglamorous issues. And believe it or not, that's what the $100 laptop does: address mundane issues. Like lack of access to a library.
Believe it or not, many people don't work in software development.
In a serious business environment, you use your telephone to make telephone calls. This is true even at companies that have completely abandoned POTS in favor of VoIP. Employees just get phones that have RJ-14 connectors instead of RJ-11.
You can dream up any number of fancy applications that don't run well on a VM. But the fact is that the typical enterprise user doesn't need them. Don't make the standard Slashdot mistake of assuming that what you want or need is what everybody wants or needs.
The 770 doesn't even pretend to be a PDA. It's for surfing the web, period. Yet twice this week we've seen PDAs that were supposed to be compared to the 770. Not just PDAs: PDAs with keyboards. Get real!
I'm guessing lots of clueless marketeers are picking the 770 as the product to position their product against. The Slashdot editors need to tune their filters against this sort of crap.
There are any number of data formats that represent common decimals without rounding. But they aren't intrinsic in lot of common programming languages. That's particularly painful in Java, which doesn't have operator overloading. So you have to say stuff like BigDecimal fraction = new BigDecimal(1).divide(new BigDecimal(10)).
Back in the 70s, IBM's great invention was PL/1 (Programming Language 1: the first real programming language!). This had an intrinsic data type for everything. There was even a data type for pounds, schilling, pence, so you could write code that added 5 schillings sixpence to 15 schillings tupence and get 1 pound 8 pence. (Ironically, this was about the time the UK decimalized its currency.) Alas, there were some serious design flaws in PL/1 (parsing a language with no keywords is hard), and it never caught on.
I don't see that. You're assuming there are a lot of folks out there who would switch to MacOS if they could do so without buying a Mac. That doesn't make sense. Macs cost more, but not that much more. The only people who haven't already made the switch are people too poor to spend a few extra hundred on a Mac. Not a big (or profitable) user base.
You've got to be kidding. Macs have two advantages over the competition: they're easy to use, and they're better engineered. If you can run MacOS on a white box that sells for half the price of any Mac, there goes the usability advantage. And in my opinion, the usability advantage is more important than the engineering factor. 'Cause the main effect of better engineering is to make the machine more powerful — and nowadays, even the dinkiest little POS white box provides more computing power than most users need.
Of course, there's also the coolness factor. Maybe that accounts for a lot of Mac sales. But all of them? Not even close.
This is getting repetitive. See Jack Get Outraged. See Jack File Silly Lawsuit. See Judge Throw Out Lawsuit Because of Bad Spelling. BOOORRRRIIING!!!!
Hey, that gives me an idea. We should invite Jack to a Slashdot Interview. That would be interesting.
As I type this, I see four Google ads, all by law firms that want to help me sue somebody....
Inasmuch as I can parse your argument at all, you seem to be saying "Most scripting languages compile to bytecodes that are executed by a VM; therefore any language that executes bytecodes on a VM is a scripting language." If you would learn to express yourself more concisely, you could avoid fallacies like this.
Perhaps it would help if you stopped taking the word "scripting" too literally. As you point out, languages like Perl no longer much resemble the scripting languages from whence they sprang. Nowadays, the more accurate term for languages like python and perl is "agile". But people continue to say "scripting" out of habit. Sloppy, but that's carbon-based units for you.
Your homework assignment is to google "agile programming languages" and explain why they describe Perl and Python, but not Java or C#.
Do your own homework!
...that nobody knows how to spell "beastiality"?
It's not stupid, it's just ignorant.
Your comparison with integer zip codes is totally bogus: that's not an arithmetic error, it's just sloppy formatting. The variable contains a perfectly accurate value — you just have to remember to output it with a %05d format. (Of course, since you don't do arithmetic on zip codes, you might as will forget the whole problem and just store the thing as a string.) On the other hand, the rounding errors you get when you try to store decimal fractions as floating point stem from an extremely unobvious fact: many common values (such as 0.1) do not have a binary representation.
Indeed, you're pretty ignorant. Intelligence is not this amorphous quantity that some geniuses have a lot of. It's a complicated collection of skills. People can be quite smart and not be able to juggle a lot of info in their heads. On the other hand, being able to remember a lot of shit is not necessarily a sign of intelligence, rainman.
I've tried virtual desktops many times, but always lose track of what's where. So instead, I make use of the fact that the task bar in Windows (and GNOME, and KDE) is resizeable. Make it four rows high, and you can have 20 windows open, and see all 20 window captions in a glance.
One reason I've never been able to adapt to Mac: there's no equivalent feature. Instead there's this weird, complicated icon thingee at the bottom that I can never quite figure out. Which, for all I know, is actually a better design. But switching to it would be as hard for me as giving up the QWERTY keyboard.
Second, Dreamhost is at the point that every small operation comes to where they discover that the business plan that worked fine when they had 10,000 customers doesn't scale up to 100,000 customers. Some companies can adapt to success, but Dreamhost ain't one of them. Slow servers, too much down time, no emergency plan. I'm bailing as soon as my current contract expires.
Third, the GNAA gag was never funny, and is now definitely old.
Well, I'm certainly disappointed. I value GTA mainly because it allows me to express my inner sociopath. (Oh, the look on pedestrian's faces when they hit your windshield!) I was looking forward to this game as a chance to reverse the role I played in grade school. Oh well!
I think you're right on all points, but I have to correct a possible misunderstanding. Freespire is not something a company would obtain in conjunction with a support agreement. It's the free-as-in-beer version of Linspire.
Why should I blame Wikipedia? You're the one who's lending authority to "facts" edited by anonymous bozos with no indication as to where they got their information.
Yes, the MFC documentation sucks. (Of course, MFC has been replaced by .NET, but that documentation sucks too.) So what? Microsoft manages to dominate the marketplace anyway. And Delphi has long since blown its last chance to provide an alternative.
Flow-Matic wasn't the first compiled language either. That honor belongs to Fortran, which was first developed in 1953. Every reference I've ever seen credits John Backus with inventing the compiler.
And distinguishing between Flow-Matic and COBOL is not useful, since both languages have the design flaw I'm criticizing.
You're getting your info from Wikipedia aren't you? Well, the entry on Flow-Matic is accurate enough, but is easy to misread. It says that Flow-Matic was the first "English-like compiled language". Which is perfectly true, but not the same thing as being "the first compiled language".
You're assuming that stock prices are based on asset valuation. That's nonsense. Asset valuation is just one tool for pricing a stock. Ultimately, the price of a stock represents investors beliefs about the company's ability to grow shareholder value. So a company can have negative assets and still have a good stock price, provided only that investors think that this situation is bound to change. That happened a lot during the dotcom bubble.
Contrariwise, a company can have a lot of valuable assets but a low stock price if investors think the company isn't using those assets effectively. That usually ends with the company being forced to sell off some (or, as in the case of Knight-Ridder, all) of its assets.
If you remember that stock prices are based on your ability to resell them, you realize that a negative price is an absurdity. That would mean that you'd be willing to pay somebody to take over your stock. Stock always has some value, if only as wallpaper.
Invented high-level languages? Compilers? Have your perchance heard of FORTRAN? Algol? Both are older than COBOL.
COBOL was not the first high-level programming language, not by a long shot. There were already languages that knew how to interpret formulas (FORTRAN), process complex data structures (LISP) and even primitives forms of block structuring (Algol). The one big idea that COBOL added to the mix was that source code should resemble natural language (IF X EQUALS 3 OR 4 ADD 1 TO X). Hopper had to have been pretty ignorant about the sheer ambiguity of natural language to make this mistake.