I don't mean to troll. I am not sure how well the device has aged with all the new netbooks that are available.
A few features that remain unmatched:
- screen that works in sunlight
- ebook mode (although I can read a PDF on my EEE and it looks great)
- more rugged than other computers
- battery life (?)
- hand crank (did they provide it this time?)
- wifi mesh
Also, is there a guarantee that the OLPC you donate will not be running XP? I would not be too happy about sponsoring Microsoft...
I am not shopping this year but I am afraid I would not choose the OLPC. Maybe I would get it for my kid though, I wonder.
Does it actually work? What's the frequency used for RFID chips? How thick a metal box do you need? What kind of joints does one need? Come on guys, don't tell me I'll have to Google it!
Additionally, if we follow your reasoning, many companies that have products that could be sold for Linux will think : Linux = 5% of Windows. They will conclude that they could increase their sales by 5% by supporting Linux.
That could sound like an interesting deal for many companies.
Wow! I did not realize that. I am glad my coworker is getting a Sansa and not just an ipod as I had suggested given the fact that mine worked fine with Rockbox... Well, of course it helps the Sansa is much cheaper...
Well, I guess I must make sure to tell my wife not to get me anything from Apple the next time around. Too bad, I liked the hardware.
You are talking about the other kind of datacenter. Regarding this issue you have 2 kinds of datacenters:
- the cluster/cloud type where servers are expandable. They might die but you don't care because you have loads and all your data is redundant (e.g. Google, most nodes of a cluster, web servers etc)
- the big iron kind where you buy high quality machines, support, redundant power supplies, redundant NICs, pay people with pagers to babysit them, lower the temperature to increase the MTBF etc.
All this research applies to the first case. You are right to pinpoint that in the second case you will still want to take all the precautions you can to avoid failures.
A friend just got a Wibrain b1 that came with Ubuntu. The drivers for all the VIA stuff are binary blobs which prevents him from upgrading the kernel. They also don't seem very reliable as he is seeing crashes.
Is there already Open Source drivers for that kind of hardware or is this part of your mission for VIA?
Maybe their lawyer told them they were in a bad situation and they should settle? Maybe the guy made the story up? Maybe they used the street price and not the OEM price because they don't want to reveal the OEM price? Who knows, that's the marvel of Microsoft's agreements. If there was an anti-trust trial, maybe it would shed some light on these shady practices. Oh wait! There was an anti-trust trial and we still don't know...
I am also looking at allmydata.org Tahoe. They also sell the service for 5$ a month. It's peer to peer though, so if you don't use their service you need to setup servers not just use existing FTP servers...
Re:Sometimes the correct answer is the simplest
on
Why Corporates Hate Perl
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
So true. I switched to Python because I could not market Perl to anybody including myself. I was using it from time to time and would try to convince coworkers to use it too. But the readability issues and the lack of keywords made it more difficult to look for documentation etc. As a result I could not market it to my coworkers and started having serious doubts myself. So I switched to Python. Suddenly, I could convince my coworkers easily as it looked good, readable, easy to learn by example etc. Also Perl and Python are very similar in what they offer (regexps, hashtables, string parsing, networking, modules). But Python usually offers a language construct to support important software engineering concepts (e.g. objects are native and not reimplemented every time as in Perl).
Just my 2 cents. I tried to love Perl and market it around me. But I couldn't. PHP, Python, Linux, Wikis are easy sells but Perl is not.
Well you still can. It's just that you have to wait a bit for people to chime in on a subject, then other people mod the posts and mod again etc. One thing I find a bit annoying is that the funny +5 articles are often drowning the insightful posts. But at the same time, funny is good and relatively easy to skip once I have had enough laughing and want more serious comments.
Slashdot still summons pretty insightful comments on a variety of topics. And very often I'll see a post and think: "I don't care about the article linked too, it's probably average but I am curious if there will be some really knowledgeable comment on Slashdot".
I personally have an EEEPC and Asus explicitly credited the OLPC for the idea to make it. This seems like a great success to me:
1) identify a need that the market is not addressing (cheap, simple, robust, networked machine)
2) make one in a non-profit for 3rd world children
3) convince all the industry that they need to emulate and best it
4) let everybody enjoy the resulting products
I really am thankful to the OLPC project for that.
I also read cool things about the OLPC's music and sound tools in Linux Journal. It will probably be part of Fedora or Ubuntu I install on my EEE when I hand it down to my son.
He will probably enjoy it a lot and that will be another OLPC success (albeit a modest one).
You won't see me count the OLPC project as a failure any time soon. They really helped change the world.
The GNAT is based on GCC. It's free and it is damn good. I was also using AONIX and they have a free (as in beer) version. I have always preferred GNAT though.
I am just a listener and I love my podcasts for my daily commute. The podcasts are great for me because:
- they rest my eyes (no need to read on screen)
- I don't need Internet access
- I don't need to wait for the show to be on or to be in the right country to listen to the radio show.
- they are enjoyable, entertaining and different from reading or watching TV
I tend to skip the ads, but I now who sponsors the shows I listen to so the ad/sponsoring is undoubtedly worth money.
A big thank you to all the podcasters! You made my life richer!
You are looking at it from a technical standpoint. There is also a human standpoint: people in China know that they are being watched, so they self censor the websites they go to in order to be sure that they stay out of trouble. It's a bit like when you are at work and you see some headline about the recent security problem at Facebook. You see Paris Hilton mentioned, so you stay clear from the link because you are not sure the article will be purely technical and not embarassing.
No need for a 100% efficient filtering system to frighten people and cause them to self-censor.
Actually, Tk is still cool. Python has Tkinter which is just plain natural, easy and pretty. I remember that Tk in Tcl was just what you describe but the Tkinter binding just gives a pythonic feel (i.e. clean syntax, readable etc.).
I used it the other day for the first time on my EEE PC and it was really easy to write. If I had tried it earlier I would probably have written more GUI code for my scripts in the past 10 years. Hindsight is a wonderful thing...
Tcl is a bit on an anti LISP. In Lisp everything is a function whereas in Tcl everything is a command. This creates an opportunity to increase aspirin sales;-)
Most of the head hunters that jump on you when you post your resume on Monster are pretty bad though. They do simple keyword matching, ask silly questions ("how many years C?") and seem to rely on their speed and the amount of people they reach to find a few matches that will bring big bucks.
I ran across a sharp head hunter and he really took time to:
- get me interested in the job
- make the conditions of recruitment easier (he made me skip the phone interview with the company)
- helped me prepare for the interview by telling me what kind of book I should use to revise
- found the matches between the job and me, despites the mismatches
So I am pretty impressed with good head hunters.
Re:RAM vs. battery life?
on
Hacking Asus EEE
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Actually, I have read some pretty interesting stuff on the eeeuser.com forums. They notably explained that when in sleep mode the RAM is refreshed normally (i.e. not with a special low power technique) and uses 2W.
This forces me to turn my EEE off to avoid running out of battery after a day or an night of sleep mode.
I did not see if the 2GB stick made things worse or not... Maybe there is more about this in the eeeuser.com forums.
You are correct. Hard disks have the same kind of feature I believe. The manpage for shred (*nix utility that erases files "securely" by writing random data several times) warns about this problem if I remember correctly. You may also find Truecrypt's documentation interesting, they list features (such as disk paging) that may cause data in RAM to be written to hard disks. They could then fall in the spare sectors and survive your efforts to shred the hard disk (computing the probability of such an event seems difficult though).
I am nevertheless using Truecrypt to avoid my data falling in the wrong hands but it looks like real experts would have a decent chance of getting everything I have on my disk. But I just want protection from casual thieves, not from the KGB or the Mafia...
Actually, it had been said that the hardware in the iPhone costs 200$ or so. If that's true then Apple is not losing money on those unlocked iPhones. The share they get from ATT is just more profit. Also, the iPhone is said to have cost 150 million $ in development. Not such a big deal when they sell millions of them with a decent margin.
There is a lot of speculation about this device, isn't there?
Slashdot Mirror
Hi,
I don't mean to troll.
I am not sure how well the device has aged with all the new netbooks that are available.
A few features that remain unmatched:
- screen that works in sunlight
- ebook mode (although I can read a PDF on my EEE and it looks great)
- more rugged than other computers
- battery life (?)
- hand crank (did they provide it this time?)
- wifi mesh
Also, is there a guarantee that the OLPC you donate will not be running XP? I would not be too happy about sponsoring Microsoft...
I am not shopping this year but I am afraid I would not choose the OLPC. Maybe I would get it for my kid though, I wonder.
Hey,
I can't believe nobody mentioned that noscript prompts you before showing a PDF file.
It can be tedious but it's useful apparently.
Does it actually work?
What's the frequency used for RFID chips? How thick a metal box do you need? What kind of joints does one need?
Come on guys, don't tell me I'll have to Google it!
25 Billion $ is a lot of money.
Additionally, if we follow your reasoning, many companies that have products that could be sold for Linux will think : Linux = 5% of Windows. They will conclude that they could increase their sales by 5% by supporting Linux.
That could sound like an interesting deal for many companies.
Wow! I did not realize that.
I am glad my coworker is getting a Sansa and not just an ipod as I had suggested given the fact that mine worked fine with Rockbox... Well, of course it helps the Sansa is much cheaper...
Well, I guess I must make sure to tell my wife not to get me anything from Apple the next time around. Too bad, I liked the hardware.
You are talking about the other kind of datacenter.
Regarding this issue you have 2 kinds of datacenters:
- the cluster/cloud type where servers are expandable. They might die but you don't care because you have loads and all your data is redundant (e.g. Google, most nodes of a cluster, web servers etc)
- the big iron kind where you buy high quality machines, support, redundant power supplies, redundant NICs, pay people with pagers to babysit them, lower the temperature to increase the MTBF etc.
All this research applies to the first case. You are right to pinpoint that in the second case you will still want to take all the precautions you can to avoid failures.
Hi,
Personally I write Python code in Vi or Emacs but I noticed Peppy.
Peppy uses Scintilla, is inspired by Emacs and is fully extensible in Python. This looks like fun!
See http://peppy.flipturn.org/
I have tried a Python IDE called Eric but it takes too much screen space on my EEE PC.
Finally, I will probably try the Netbeans editor when Netbeans 6.5 is out.
Hi,
A friend just got a Wibrain b1 that came with Ubuntu.
The drivers for all the VIA stuff are binary blobs which prevents him from upgrading the kernel. They also don't seem very reliable as he is seeing crashes.
Is there already Open Source drivers for that kind of hardware or is this part of your mission for VIA?
Thanks
Maybe their lawyer told them they were in a bad situation and they should settle?
Maybe the guy made the story up?
Maybe they used the street price and not the OEM price because they don't want to reveal the OEM price?
Who knows, that's the marvel of Microsoft's agreements. If there was an anti-trust trial, maybe it would shed some light on these shady practices. Oh wait! There was an anti-trust trial and we still don't know...
Hi,
I am also looking at allmydata.org Tahoe.
They also sell the service for 5$ a month.
It's peer to peer though, so if you don't use their service you need to setup servers not just use existing FTP servers...
So true.
I switched to Python because I could not market Perl to anybody including myself.
I was using it from time to time and would try to convince coworkers to use it too.
But the readability issues and the lack of keywords made it more difficult to look for documentation etc.
As a result I could not market it to my coworkers and started having serious doubts myself. So I switched to Python.
Suddenly, I could convince my coworkers easily as it looked good, readable, easy to learn by example etc.
Also Perl and Python are very similar in what they offer (regexps, hashtables, string parsing, networking, modules). But Python usually offers a language construct to support important software engineering concepts (e.g. objects are native and not reimplemented every time as in Perl).
Just my 2 cents. I tried to love Perl and market it around me. But I couldn't. PHP, Python, Linux, Wikis are easy sells but Perl is not.
You could also encrypt the data before sending it to the server.
That way any web server is just fine and trustworthy.
I downloaded it too.
Let's see if slashdot can handle the load of everybody reporting their successful download of Firefox!
Well you still can. It's just that you have to wait a bit for people to chime in on a subject, then other people mod the posts and mod again etc.
One thing I find a bit annoying is that the funny +5 articles are often drowning the insightful posts.
But at the same time, funny is good and relatively easy to skip once I have had enough laughing and want more serious comments.
Slashdot still summons pretty insightful comments on a variety of topics. And very often I'll see a post and think: "I don't care about the article linked too, it's probably average but I am curious if there will be some really knowledgeable comment on Slashdot".
I personally have an EEEPC and Asus explicitly credited the OLPC for the idea to make it.
This seems like a great success to me:
1) identify a need that the market is not addressing (cheap, simple, robust, networked machine)
2) make one in a non-profit for 3rd world children
3) convince all the industry that they need to emulate and best it
4) let everybody enjoy the resulting products
I really am thankful to the OLPC project for that.
I also read cool things about the OLPC's music and sound tools in Linux Journal. It will probably be part of Fedora or Ubuntu I install on my EEE when I hand it down to my son.
He will probably enjoy it a lot and that will be another OLPC success (albeit a modest one).
You won't see me count the OLPC project as a failure any time soon. They really helped change the world.
This is so funny. I can't believe I had moderation points just yesterday and I did not even use them.
And now I wish I could moderate this post funny.
Well, let's hope somebody will do it!
Hi,
The GNAT is based on GCC. It's free and it is damn good.
I was also using AONIX and they have a free (as in beer) version. I have always preferred GNAT though.
I am not sure about a website though...
I am just a listener and I love my podcasts for my daily commute.
The podcasts are great for me because:
- they rest my eyes (no need to read on screen)
- I don't need Internet access
- I don't need to wait for the show to be on or to be in the right country to listen to the radio show.
- they are enjoyable, entertaining and different from reading or watching TV
I tend to skip the ads, but I now who sponsors the shows I listen to so the ad/sponsoring is undoubtedly worth money.
A big thank you to all the podcasters! You made my life richer!
You are looking at it from a technical standpoint. There is also a human standpoint: people in China know that they are being watched, so they self censor the websites they go to in order to be sure that they stay out of trouble.
It's a bit like when you are at work and you see some headline about the recent security problem at Facebook. You see Paris Hilton mentioned, so you stay clear from the link because you are not sure the article will be purely technical and not embarassing.
No need for a 100% efficient filtering system to frighten people and cause them to self-censor.
by not buying the now overpriced gear...
Actually, Tk is still cool. Python has Tkinter which is just plain natural, easy and pretty. I remember that Tk in Tcl was just what you describe but the Tkinter binding just gives a pythonic feel (i.e. clean syntax, readable etc.).
;-)
I used it the other day for the first time on my EEE PC and it was really easy to write. If I had tried it earlier I would probably have written more GUI code for my scripts in the past 10 years. Hindsight is a wonderful thing...
Tcl is a bit on an anti LISP. In Lisp everything is a function whereas in Tcl everything is a command. This creates an opportunity to increase aspirin sales
I would second that for real head hunters.
Most of the head hunters that jump on you when you post your resume on Monster are pretty bad though. They do simple keyword matching, ask silly questions ("how many years C?") and seem to rely on their speed and the amount of people they reach to find a few matches that will bring big bucks.
I ran across a sharp head hunter and he really took time to:
- get me interested in the job
- make the conditions of recruitment easier (he made me skip the phone interview with the company)
- helped me prepare for the interview by telling me what kind of book I should use to revise
- found the matches between the job and me, despites the mismatches
So I am pretty impressed with good head hunters.
Actually, I have read some pretty interesting stuff on the eeeuser.com forums.
They notably explained that when in sleep mode the RAM is refreshed normally (i.e. not with a special low power technique) and uses 2W.
This forces me to turn my EEE off to avoid running out of battery after a day or an night of sleep mode.
I did not see if the 2GB stick made things worse or not... Maybe there is more about this in the eeeuser.com forums.
Hi,
You are correct. Hard disks have the same kind of feature I believe.
The manpage for shred (*nix utility that erases files "securely" by writing random data several times) warns about this problem if I remember correctly.
You may also find Truecrypt's documentation interesting, they list features (such as disk paging) that may cause data in RAM to be written to hard disks. They could then fall in the spare sectors and survive your efforts to shred the hard disk (computing the probability of such an event seems difficult though).
I am nevertheless using Truecrypt to avoid my data falling in the wrong hands but it looks like real experts would have a decent chance of getting everything I have on my disk. But I just want protection from casual thieves, not from the KGB or the Mafia...
Actually, it had been said that the hardware in the iPhone costs 200$ or so. If that's true then Apple is not losing money on those unlocked iPhones.
The share they get from ATT is just more profit.
Also, the iPhone is said to have cost 150 million $ in development. Not such a big deal when they sell millions of them with a decent margin.
There is a lot of speculation about this device, isn't there?