I find back-ports of game titles from more to less powerful hardware to be fascinating -- paring down a complex premise into something more simple really exposes a programmer's cleverness, and it really does give credence to the idea that it's gameplay, not high-quality graphics or sound, that makes a game fun.
I'm sure that the standard will soon be "improved" so it conforms with Office 2007
Which would require the revised standard to go through the entire approval process again, would it not?
Microsoft just paid a lot of money to get ISO to approve a standard that they do not, and possibly can not, implement. Seems like a pointless waste of time to me.
Is it that hard to unmaximize a web browser, resize it to half the screen width, and put another page into a second window?
Web pages today are typically optimized for a 1024-pixel-wide display pane. Unless your laptop has a 2048x1152 widescreen display -- and it doesn't -- when you reduce your browser window to 1/2 the screen width, you're probably going to end up needing a horizontal scroll bar for many sites, which is anathema to common principles of good information layout (as well as a waste of screen space).
I'm not sold on the benefits of 16:9 widescreen for ANY display, let alone notebook PCs. We should not be basing the proportions of 15-inch-diagonal portable computer screens on a marketing gimmick that was developed to keep people interested in the 50-foot-diagonal screens at the movie theatre back when television was introduced to the home.
I would like to say that I a fan of Ben Stein. But this movie is blemish in what I think is an outstanding career.
Indeed. Thanks to this propaganda piece, I may never be able to fully enjoy Stein's speeches for President Nixon, his game-show repoire with Jimmy Kimmel, nor his Clear Eyes eyedrop commercials again.
We feel accountable to our target nations, and we behave accordingly. We don't feel particularly accountable to Slashdot. Sorry.
As an Anonymous Coward, you have no justification for saying "we". You do not represent the position of the OLPC Foundation, even if you do happen to not get a paycheck from them.
Thank God that the OLPC program has other volunteers who, unlike you, actually respect and value the people who have believed in and invested in the mission.
Remember, the keyboards were supposed to be designed to withstand some abuse, which is why they suck to type on
I dunno about suck -- sure, it's no IBM Model M, but for a rubber-membrane keyboard I quite like the tactile response that the OLPC XO-1 keyboard achieves. The main problem I have with the keyboard is the size of the thing; it's clearly scaled down for a small child's hands, which makes sense given the target user of the device, but makes it impossible for an adult, or even a teenager who had grown up using an XO-1 as a child, to touch-type.
OLPC does have a plan for dealing with hardware breakage. The plan is that they're trying to get the defect rate very low, and then have people in the communities receiving the laptops take care of the small number of defects by cannibalizing machines. That seems like a very reasonable plan for a village in Mongolia where 100 kids have 100 laptops.
Until one of them breaks; then 100 kids will have 99 laptops. Then when the next one breaks, hopefully a single working laptop can be assembled from the parts of the two broken ones -- but they'll still only have 99 laptops for 100 kids.
Making the hardware field-cannibalizable certainly can slow the rate at which hardware becomes unusable, but a return to "one laptop per child" parity can still never be achieved unless spare parts are made obtainable.
As one of the tens of thousands of donors who had to wait over four months to receive their Give One, Get One laptop, I can only respond: HEEEEEEEELL NO.
The retail price of the Linux kernel, or of Google's web applications, is zero; as such, consumers should be (and are) a little more willing to accept partial or imperfect functionality.
Microsoft deigns to ask up to $300 for their flawed software product -- and will ask for another $150 to upgrade to their next major release, the one that will fix many of the flaws of this one while introducing a new, different set of problems. And that's not even including deployment or support costs.
For that kind of money, consumers should (and do) expect better quality.
Distribute an encrypted patch, and then once all clients have downloaded it reveal the key, which is short and can be sent in a single network packet.
How would one determine that "all" clients had finished downloading the encrypted patch?
Couldn't I prevent the patch from ever being applied anywhere in the world by spoofing a client which keeps reporting "haven't finished downloading it yet..." back to the central authority forever?
If I was an ISP who wanted to slow the use of P2P on my network, I only have a few options.
If you're an ISP, you shouldn't be caring a whit what KIND of traffic is being carried over your network, only the AMOUNT.
If one of the nodes on your network is taking up so much bandwidth so persistently that you're losing money, or it's affecting other nodes' ability to use the network, you throttle that node down. No payload analysis required, no packet forgery. Just cap them until they come down to a more reasonable level.
Do you realize the amount of wasted time the operators of some websites will spend, processing the trash data that doing this will create? I speak mainly of feedback forms, e-mail signups, and the like.
If your site uses GET for a non-idempotent action like sending a feedback form or signing up for an email newsletter, you're doing it Wrong.
FTS: "'Big announcements' are often backed up by a dubiously small data set or not backed up at all."
In this case, the data set is very large, but still of dubious relevance.
The data was collected from the 1.6 million computers by an anti-malware software product I've never heard of, using techniques that would get it itself labeled malware by more reputable anti-malware products. A product that rates only 3 out of 5 stars at Download.com. From a company that rolled over when Gator sued them for calling their spyware "spyware".
Unless there is data to support the assumption that the rubes who blindly install and run PC Pitstop software on their Windows boxes are a representative sampling of the computer user community as a whole, I don't see how this announcement contains any meaningful findings at all.
I want my government reduced to 1890 levels, and armies of government useless eaters forced to find honest work.
Maybe we can put all the ex-civil servants to work with sledgehammers and pickaxes destroying the interstate highway system, the space program, the Internet, and a load of other infrastructure and programs that either were funded by federal tax increases post-1890, or derived from programs that were...
Don't you mean the EPA showed up and made them meet air quality controls?
Safety standards are also a big part of the reason why street-legal cars have failed to make very much progress on net fuel efficiency in the last 30 years.
Airbags and a steel safety cage around the passenger cabin make it less likely you'll be killed should you get in a head-on collision with an SUV whose driver has fallen asleep while talking on a cell phone, but they also make your vehicle much heavier.
Personally, I wish the government would let consumer decide for themselves how much safety is worth. Sure, a classic VW bug or a 3-cylinder Geo Metro was a flimsy aluminum coffin if you happened to get in a severe accident, but as long as you didn't, those things got over 50 miles to the gallon...!
Microsoft has no obligation to implement any changes the ISO group may advise
But if they don't, wouldn't they lose the ability to tout their products as "ISO-certified", and thus lose their eligibility to bid on contracts where ISO certification is a prerequisite? Thus nullifying the entire point of pushing their Office-derived format as an "open standard" in the first place?
For 23 years they have not just controlled, the word is 'dominated' the desktop environment.
Check your numbers. Windows 1.0 may have come out in 1985, but it was pretty much a joke, a slightly prettier version of DOSSHELL.EXE. Windows 2.x was hardly any better.
It wasn't until 1992, with version 3.1, that the Windows monoculture really began to take hold, and not until Win95 that 'domination' could be rightly claimed.
Microsoft wants to consolidate the online Yahoo! brand, which has a big following, with the MSN brand, which has had mixed results. This consolidation, in Microsoft's mind, will prime them for competition with Google.
I'm trying to arrange financial backing for my own brilliant business plan, in which I propose a merger between TheGlobe.com, Altavista, and Inktomi. Because it's comprised of THREE failed Web1.0 portals instead of just two, it's going to be even MORE of a threat to Google than MS-Yahoo!.
That will solve one of the two worst problems about school : rote learning. You simply CAN NOT ask kids to learn anything by rote when they KNOW they can find ANY information whasoever with a few skills that complement the "relevancy" algorithms of search engines.
That doesn't mean that certain knowledge isn't still appropriate to be learned by rote.
Yes, I have a calculator on my mobile phone that can multiply any two numbers in less time than it takes to key them into the thing, but I'm not going to pull it out of my pocket just to find out what six times eight is.
I know instantly that the answer is 48, because I was in 3rd grade once, and had to learn the multiplication table from 0x0 to 10x10. By rote. Now I have a hashtable burned into my brain.
it scares me that anybody would think that ANY job is worth wasting 4 hours a day of your life commuting to. They should either get a new job, or move closer to their job. I think the grandparent poster probably has their priorities wrong.
I think you should cram it. Who the hell are you to tell anybody else what their priorities should be?
Spending four hours a day in transit is only a waste of time if it deprives one of the opportunity do things one would otherwise be doing. If somebody can check email or write a TPS report or take a nap seated in a train instead of at a desk in a building, what time is being wasted?
$100 and it's its own Internet infrastructure. That is perfect.
It's also not what the OLPC project offers, at least not yet. Each laptop costs closer to US$200, and there's no Internet infrastructure included (unless you mean the mesh networking, which could be implemented on just about any 802.11 device given an appropriate driver).
And, having received my Give One, Get One laptop just yesterday, I can say that while the industrial design of the laptop is sublime, I do wish it had a little more horsepower under the hood. top can easily report a load of 0.5 or more when idling, and every application takes longer than it ought to launch.
Corporate tax breaks and subsidies for electric car production. Electric cars have existed - even electric SUV's (the old RAV-4, anyone? Don't tell me I'm wrong, I NOW HAVE ONE - they're just not being made anymore).
Until an electric car can be fully recharged at any gas station within five minutes, Americans are not going to accept them as a replacement for gasoline-powered vehicles.
I really see zero need to get a soundcard these days.
I don't, either.
99% of the computer market has their audio needs met by the AC97 integrated into their motherboards. The other 1% -- audiophiles and home recording hobbyists -- are opting for specialized external DAC boxes, far from the noise inside the computer case.
I hope Creative has been planning alternate revenue streams, because the internal all-purpose sound peripheral is going to be pretty much extinct within the next few years.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine trying to port GTA3 to the original Nintendo system and you'll have some idea how bad this game probably is.
You could imagine it, or you could actually do it.
I find back-ports of game titles from more to less powerful hardware to be fascinating -- paring down a complex premise into something more simple really exposes a programmer's cleverness, and it really does give credence to the idea that it's gameplay, not high-quality graphics or sound, that makes a game fun.
I'm sure that the standard will soon be "improved" so it conforms with Office 2007
Which would require the revised standard to go through the entire approval process again, would it not?
Microsoft just paid a lot of money to get ISO to approve a standard that they do not, and possibly can not, implement. Seems like a pointless waste of time to me.
Is it that hard to unmaximize a web browser, resize it to half the screen width, and put another page into a second window?
Web pages today are typically optimized for a 1024-pixel-wide display pane. Unless your laptop has a 2048x1152 widescreen display -- and it doesn't -- when you reduce your browser window to 1/2 the screen width, you're probably going to end up needing a horizontal scroll bar for many sites, which is anathema to common principles of good information layout (as well as a waste of screen space).
I'm not sold on the benefits of 16:9 widescreen for ANY display, let alone notebook PCs. We should not be basing the proportions of 15-inch-diagonal portable computer screens on a marketing gimmick that was developed to keep people interested in the 50-foot-diagonal screens at the movie theatre back when television was introduced to the home.
I would like to say that I a fan of Ben Stein. But this movie is blemish in what I think is an outstanding career.
Indeed. Thanks to this propaganda piece, I may never be able to fully enjoy Stein's speeches for President Nixon, his game-show repoire with Jimmy Kimmel, nor his Clear Eyes eyedrop commercials again.
We feel accountable to our target nations, and we behave accordingly. We don't feel particularly accountable to Slashdot. Sorry.
As an Anonymous Coward, you have no justification for saying "we". You do not represent the position of the OLPC Foundation, even if you do happen to not get a paycheck from them.
Thank God that the OLPC program has other volunteers who, unlike you, actually respect and value the people who have believed in and invested in the mission.
Remember, the keyboards were supposed to be designed to withstand some abuse, which is why they suck to type on
I dunno about suck -- sure, it's no IBM Model M, but for a rubber-membrane keyboard I quite like the tactile response that the OLPC XO-1 keyboard achieves. The main problem I have with the keyboard is the size of the thing; it's clearly scaled down for a small child's hands, which makes sense given the target user of the device, but makes it impossible for an adult, or even a teenager who had grown up using an XO-1 as a child, to touch-type.
The XO-1 is not a consumer product. It is an educational tool
I reject the notion that an educational tool need not be held to the same standards as any other consumer product.
OLPC does have a plan for dealing with hardware breakage. The plan is that they're trying to get the defect rate very low, and then have people in the communities receiving the laptops take care of the small number of defects by cannibalizing machines. That seems like a very reasonable plan for a village in Mongolia where 100 kids have 100 laptops.
Until one of them breaks; then 100 kids will have 99 laptops. Then when the next one breaks, hopefully a single working laptop can be assembled from the parts of the two broken ones -- but they'll still only have 99 laptops for 100 kids.
Making the hardware field-cannibalizable certainly can slow the rate at which hardware becomes unusable, but a return to "one laptop per child" parity can still never be achieved unless spare parts are made obtainable.
Did OLPC deploy their hardware too soon?
As one of the tens of thousands of donors who had to wait over four months to receive their Give One, Get One laptop, I can only respond: HEEEEEEEELL NO.
The retail price of the Linux kernel, or of Google's web applications, is zero; as such, consumers should be (and are) a little more willing to accept partial or imperfect functionality.
Microsoft deigns to ask up to $300 for their flawed software product -- and will ask for another $150 to upgrade to their next major release, the one that will fix many of the flaws of this one while introducing a new, different set of problems. And that's not even including deployment or support costs.
For that kind of money, consumers should (and do) expect better quality.
Distribute an encrypted patch, and then once all clients have downloaded it reveal the key, which is short and can be sent in a single network packet.
How would one determine that "all" clients had finished downloading the encrypted patch?
Couldn't I prevent the patch from ever being applied anywhere in the world by spoofing a client which keeps reporting "haven't finished downloading it yet..." back to the central authority forever?
If I was an ISP who wanted to slow the use of P2P on my network, I only have a few options.
If you're an ISP, you shouldn't be caring a whit what KIND of traffic is being carried over your network, only the AMOUNT.
If one of the nodes on your network is taking up so much bandwidth so persistently that you're losing money, or it's affecting other nodes' ability to use the network, you throttle that node down. No payload analysis required, no packet forgery. Just cap them until they come down to a more reasonable level.
Do you realize the amount of wasted time the operators of some websites will spend, processing the trash data that doing this will create? I speak mainly of feedback forms, e-mail signups, and the like.
If your site uses GET for a non-idempotent action like sending a feedback form or signing up for an email newsletter, you're doing it Wrong.
FTS: "'Big announcements' are often backed up by a dubiously small data set or not backed up at all."
In this case, the data set is very large, but still of dubious relevance.
The data was collected from the 1.6 million computers by an anti-malware software product I've never heard of, using techniques that would get it itself labeled malware by more reputable anti-malware products. A product that rates only 3 out of 5 stars at Download.com. From a company that rolled over when Gator sued them for calling their spyware "spyware".
Unless there is data to support the assumption that the rubes who blindly install and run PC Pitstop software on their Windows boxes are a representative sampling of the computer user community as a whole, I don't see how this announcement contains any meaningful findings at all.
I want my government reduced to 1890 levels, and armies of government useless eaters forced to find honest work.
Maybe we can put all the ex-civil servants to work with sledgehammers and pickaxes destroying the interstate highway system, the space program, the Internet, and a load of other infrastructure and programs that either were funded by federal tax increases post-1890, or derived from programs that were...
Don't you mean the EPA showed up and made them meet air quality controls?
Safety standards are also a big part of the reason why street-legal cars have failed to make very much progress on net fuel efficiency in the last 30 years.
Airbags and a steel safety cage around the passenger cabin make it less likely you'll be killed should you get in a head-on collision with an SUV whose driver has fallen asleep while talking on a cell phone, but they also make your vehicle much heavier.
Personally, I wish the government would let consumer decide for themselves how much safety is worth. Sure, a classic VW bug or a 3-cylinder Geo Metro was a flimsy aluminum coffin if you happened to get in a severe accident, but as long as you didn't, those things got over 50 miles to the gallon...!
Microsoft has no obligation to implement any changes the ISO group may advise
But if they don't, wouldn't they lose the ability to tout their products as "ISO-certified", and thus lose their eligibility to bid on contracts where ISO certification is a prerequisite? Thus nullifying the entire point of pushing their Office-derived format as an "open standard" in the first place?
For 23 years they have not just controlled, the word is 'dominated' the desktop environment.
Check your numbers. Windows 1.0 may have come out in 1985, but it was pretty much a joke, a slightly prettier version of DOSSHELL.EXE. Windows 2.x was hardly any better.
It wasn't until 1992, with version 3.1, that the Windows monoculture really began to take hold, and not until Win95 that 'domination' could be rightly claimed.
Microsoft wants to consolidate the online Yahoo! brand, which has a big following, with the MSN brand, which has had mixed results. This consolidation, in Microsoft's mind, will prime them for competition with Google.
I'm trying to arrange financial backing for my own brilliant business plan, in which I propose a merger between TheGlobe.com, Altavista, and Inktomi. Because it's comprised of THREE failed Web1.0 portals instead of just two, it's going to be even MORE of a threat to Google than MS-Yahoo!.
I keep laughing when I see these $400-$500 that are marketed as "budget".
I'm laughing too, because ten years ago "budget laptop" meant under $1500, and twenty years ago there were no laptops under $3000.
(Give or take. You really don't need to browse your collection of old Byte magazines looking for counterexamples, you guys.)
That will solve one of the two worst problems about school : rote learning. You simply CAN NOT ask kids to learn anything by rote when they KNOW they can find ANY information whasoever with a few skills that complement the "relevancy" algorithms of search engines.
That doesn't mean that certain knowledge isn't still appropriate to be learned by rote.
Yes, I have a calculator on my mobile phone that can multiply any two numbers in less time than it takes to key them into the thing, but I'm not going to pull it out of my pocket just to find out what six times eight is.
I know instantly that the answer is 48, because I was in 3rd grade once, and had to learn the multiplication table from 0x0 to 10x10. By rote. Now I have a hashtable burned into my brain.
it scares me that anybody would think that ANY job is worth wasting 4 hours a day of your life commuting to. They should either get a new job, or move closer to their job. I think the grandparent poster probably has their priorities wrong.
I think you should cram it. Who the hell are you to tell anybody else what their priorities should be?
Spending four hours a day in transit is only a waste of time if it deprives one of the opportunity do things one would otherwise be doing. If somebody can check email or write a TPS report or take a nap seated in a train instead of at a desk in a building, what time is being wasted?
$100 and it's its own Internet infrastructure.
That is perfect.
It's also not what the OLPC project offers, at least not yet. Each laptop costs closer to US$200, and there's no Internet infrastructure included (unless you mean the mesh networking, which could be implemented on just about any 802.11 device given an appropriate driver).
And, having received my Give One, Get One laptop just yesterday, I can say that while the industrial design of the laptop is sublime, I do wish it had a little more horsepower under the hood. top can easily report a load of 0.5 or more when idling, and every application takes longer than it ought to launch.
Corporate tax breaks and subsidies for electric car production. Electric cars have existed - even electric SUV's (the old RAV-4, anyone? Don't tell me I'm wrong, I NOW HAVE ONE - they're just not being made anymore).
Until an electric car can be fully recharged at any gas station within five minutes, Americans are not going to accept them as a replacement for gasoline-powered vehicles.
I really see zero need to get a soundcard these days.
I don't, either.
99% of the computer market has their audio needs met by the AC97 integrated into their motherboards. The other 1% -- audiophiles and home recording hobbyists -- are opting for specialized external DAC boxes, far from the noise inside the computer case.
I hope Creative has been planning alternate revenue streams, because the internal all-purpose sound peripheral is going to be pretty much extinct within the next few years.