But the logic you use seems to imply a long life for the asset. In fact, Internet gear gets used up so quickly (as bandwidth demand rises) that in fact it typically has a life-in-place of two or three years. So, while it's charming to assert that the variable costs are low, it's also irrelevant.
Put it another way. To build an infrastructure that serves several million households and businesses will cost several billions of dollars. To make that network still useful in, say, three years' time, the operator has to again spend billions of dollars.
So the most useful way to compute the effective variable cost is NOT to assert "it's low" but to actually divide the entire cost by the traffic throughput (current peak offered load). A few years' back, doing the calculation this way suggests a variable cost for transmitting a DVD-quality movie to be about $2, and for transmitting an MP3 song about $0.05. I am sure these estimates are off now, perhaps by a factor of 10. But not by a factor of 100.
Also: the Comcast figures are obviously nonsense. If the variable cost to CMCSA was so low, they'd have deployed it everywhere. In fact, the figure the Comcast guy cites is the cost to upgrade the shared headend. Unfortunately, they also have to upgrade the taps ($100 plus labor) and the in-home terminal ($100 plus labor). Often, also the coax into the home needs to be replaced. And the hub near the home.
While Google is protesting Microsoft's de facto monopoly of desktop client software, it is working hard to create a de jure and de facto monopoly for itself in an important area of content. In the proposed settlement, Google is the ONLY legal site for ALL [in copyright but out of print] printed content.
How is this a good thing?
Apologies for the cowardly anonymity, not my normal style, but there's plenty to worry about here.
1. I don't believe he's an Intel drone. He's never hidden his GeekCorps credentials. He's simply passionate about the subject of laptops for kids in the developing world - which is what GeekCorps, and OLPC (and, perhaps, even the Classmate) are about. 2. The attacks today belong also in the category of mischief. He's actually getting married today. (No, I wasn't invited, and I'm not miffed. As mentioned: I've never met the man.) But, give the boy a break: kick him when he's in a position to defend himself. 3. OLPCNews, on more than one occasion, has printed drivel. It's made mistakes. It has criticized OLPC both when it needed criticism, and when - frankly - Wayan or other writers simply didn't understand what they were talking about.
But calling OLPCNews an Intel flack is nothing more than playground name-calling. Stop it children! Go back to your rooms.
Price is directly related to volume, and timing. OLPC has come down from its original one-million-unit minimum order goal, and is taking orders more around 100K units per customer. This makes the price of the laptop higher. Also, Q4 is an expensive time to start mass production this year: the factories are flat out full, as are the components makers - it means that to get a slot in a factory one has to pay a higher price. It's easy to see how to take $30 out of the OLPC price in the first half of 2008. However, hitting $100 in 2008 is unlikely. Still it's the least expensive laptop that has ever been made, and you can use it outside (sunlight readable screen).
True... with the obvious caveat that the power drain continues in any situation that might cause you to otherwise allow the house to do with less heat. Thus, not only when you want the house cooler, but also when you're not at home, or are asleep, etc. I imagine someone has calculated what percentage this might be... it is surely greater than half of the annual total, even in colder regions.
As economists are wont to say: On the one hand, this is surely one bright individual, congratulations and one wishes him well. The history of science, technology, etc., is replete with geniuses who graduated from college at such early ages. Perhaps this is another, budding in front of us. On the other... at what price did this feat come? Universal experience says the price would have been huge pain. The history of science, technology, etc., is also replete with individuals who were so burnt out after the early trajectory that they never recovered.
One of the sad things in this note is the implication that the $100 laptop won't have Internet access.
This is pure nonsense, and it is amazing to see this repeated at/. without even a brief attempt to look it up. It is not relevant what William Gates Jr. asserts. What is relevant is this: every description of the $100 laptops has repeatedly referred to the inclusion therein of WiFi. Further, Nicholas Negroponte, father of the machines, has for years espoused use of WiFi for ad hoc meshes.
I thought it was wonderful to see the Miro pic on Google; it made me smile.
I'm saddened by the response, and - along with near-all Slashdotters - am nauseated by litigation taking over from innovation. And, that Joan Miro, being dead and all, cannot benefit from this; the only benefits inure to people who never lifted a brush, or a finger, in support of Miro.
HOWEVER: there is a little wrinkle (note: IANAL). A right that is not defended can be argued to have lapsed. Thus, if the agency and the estate of Miro hadn't at least rattled their sabres and expressed annoyance... then some future, less-benevolent Miro-ripoff would be able to point to the earlier inaction as precedent.
THUS: if I'd been in the seat of the defenders of Miro's estate, I would also have sent of a cease-and-desist letter - and hoped that the whole matter would go away. And, Google (which is chock full-o-lawyers at the exec levels now) surely needs to create new form letters asking for non-commercial permission to exhibit content.
Bill Gates is actually angry and terrified both. He has proposed - seriously - using cellphones + keyboards as 'emerging world' machines. Now *that's* a seriously tiny screen. And he's wrong - actually, he's worse, he's actually lying - about the 'sharing' aspect. One Laptop Per Child: could be be more clear? And he's technically off base on the hard disk - given the plummeting prices for flash, a basic laptop can do v. nicely indeed sans HD -- so long, that is, as it isn't running a multi-gig OS.
Some realities about the HDL: 1. Quanta, the world's largest actual manufacturer of laptops has signed on to make them. 2. Announced funding and investment from... AMD and GOOG and Nortel and (other firms besides). AND many firms just plain believe in the project, and are kicking in resources out of goodwill. 3. Developer kits should be available in two months. 4. OLPC outreach to the Linux - hacker community is yielding huge energies focused on software for this. 5. While Gates (&, sadly, Craig 'gadget' Barrett and Bill Siu at Intel) and others have lampooned this... they're either missing a key fact, or trying to divert attention from it: when all is said and done, OLPC/HDL is likely to have defined a new 'platform'-level definition of computing. Massively reduced power consumption levels; entirely novel and different use of LCD screens; onboard wifi mesh;...
What upsets Bill Gates is evident - oops, open source machine installed base could exceed Windows installed base in as little as three years.
Let's agree on this: many poor countries can't afford this. But: many wealthy countries, corporations and individuals can. Imagine, just two years from now, your neighborhood school may be able to adopt a school in (Bostwana? Laos? Afghanistan? All three?) and, at relatively little cost ($100 is a ton for 'them', but pocket lint for many of 'us'). And, just as some years ago our parents' generation had pen pals. Our children's generation can have email pals... and share global experiences in a vivid way.
The HDL has to have extremely low power consumption (to enable, among other things, a human-power source). That excludes the baby CRTs this poster found.
It is also extremely, dangerously wrong to assert that this will be proprietary. The design is wedded to open source designs; the demo units are running a commercial (redhat) Linux distro. This is less, it is not at all, a way of bashing this vendor or that. Rather, the idea is this. Imagine the outcome of million laptops. Many, frankly, perhaps even most, will be underused (but never underestimate the hunger of the 'rest of the world' to join 'our world' via the Internet). Some modest number will really, truly have transformative educational experiences, by learning WITH computers. Another number, larger? smaller? will learn ABOUT computers, and will themselves join/. world, as enterpreneurs.
While Craig Barrett rails against the HDL as a 'gadget', it has higher compute-power targets than a 2000 - 2001 commercial laptop AND will run leaner OS and applications, likely (admittedly: TBD) yielding performance more akin to a 2003 - 2004 machine.
The poster also didn't note that: the HDL has to be a nearly sealed, highly rugged unit, capable of localization (e.g. keyboard replacement for local scripts). O, and it has to have USB ports and WiFi and...
AND: the screen is expected to be sunlight readable, both to cut power consumption AND to enable the target children to be able to see vivid images in areas where daylight is the only reliable light source.
Now, as the poster observes, you can kluge something together for about the same price sans these attributes. That's not the point.
QWERTY? Answer... the keyboard is designed to be nearly disposable (that's why the motherboard isn't under the keyboard, but behind the screen), to enable non-QWERTY.
Will it have WiFi? Yes.
Why does green protect against theft? Because: if you're seen w/ a shiny green machine... you'd better be a/ a kid or b/ a teacher. There are, however, some more subtle technical means that can be used, and have been experimented with. This, perhaps, is an exercise for the student.
"Why do this when their basic biological needs aren't being met?" Some posters have noted that the Rest of World isn't a single, drab 5 billion starving souls. In many countries, what I, in a naive way perhaps, consider the global middle class, where GDP/capita is $3,000/person/year (PPP), the amount already spent on text books and school supplies exceeds $30/year. Insofar as this is true, there's a pretty simple ROI calculation... all the books AND all the supplies AND Internet access AND a phone AND music-writing software AND math/educational tools AND... for the same aggregate cost. Similarly, most nations have their telephone companies beholden to some kind of universal service mandate. Mostly: this consists of placing payphones in poor villages. At least in one of the countries where the $100 laptop is slated to make its appearance, the local telephone companies have offered/pledged to trade a payphone mandate for one based on supply, logistics, networking support for $100laptops.
The arguments above DON'T work for the poorest countries. Here: dig into your pockets. I agree with all that note that if you give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach a man to fish... (Gandhi) but give a hungry man a computer and you've solved neither problem. HOWEVER: it's apparent that sending money, through official government channels, is nearly useless. Why? Imagine you're sending $100M to xxx, a fictitious poor and corrupt country. What fraction immediately goes to Swiss bank accounts? What subsequent fraction buys fancy cars for government officials? In some cases, the 'shrinkage' between donor and intended recipient is very close to 100%. In contrast: just what percentage of shiny green machines would be stolen? 10%?
Further, much of the aid from Western nations goes to... Western nations. We pay western consulting companies to take western planes and stay in western hotels... or deliver western goods (trucks, etc.) made in our own western factories.
Last: to take an analogy from British history - "royalty" used to assuage their guilty consciences by flinging coins to beggars. Alas, the most consistent result of reliably flinging coins to beggars is creation of more beggars, when peasants realize that there's better ROI in begging than tilling fields.
In these regards, perhaps, the HDL is not just a green machine, but a harbinger of a different way of spreading the benefits of the world we enjoy to those who don't enjoy the same wealth we all do.
Mainly true. 1. ASCAP as 'enforcer'. Its role, as I understand it, is to make sure that someone who IS making money from playing the music (neighborhood bar, club, etc. using the music either as a feature of the place or for ambiance) pays for that. I'm not offended by that; not sure why MrMs S. Moose is (seems to be). 2. Not all music is rock-n-roll/hip-hop/Britneypop. Consider: classical music. Very different equations. For classical music, opera, etc: the performances lose money, while the sale of CDs, etc., are important as income (and as a statement of broader interest in the music than just those who can get to the performances -- important when seeking grants/funding). Thus, for Harvey Danger: it's a good publicity move; it MAY get their new music played on radio stations (revenue) and in bars (revenue); it may also result in sales of legit CDs (revenue); it MAY get them new gigs (mucho revenue). They've endorsed it; their agents and managers may also have, thinking that otherwise HD would release their CD to exactly no sales. In many other cases, however: MP3s online remain illegal AND, sadly, unethical.
Good point... and an indication of how far a product can go against the awesome marketing might of MSFT without a big counter marketing campaign and the budget that implies. Or, at least, how far one can go in the first phase of deployment. Phase 1: early adopters/self-described cognoscenti/MSFT-haters. Phase 2: what? Is there enough viral momentum to double the installed base?
Not mentioned in the WSJ article: this is run as a not-for-profit. It is privately funded.
Unlike Google/cache, where the 'do no evil' motto is looking more & more as though it comes second to... 'unless we can take over the world by actually doing evil', WBM has no objective other than, say, making all data & knowledge on earth available to everyone for free.
Little known fact: the Internet Archive also has a search engine... as it must in order to find all those things to cache. It searches more of the Internet than Google.
Rove is still a lyingscumbagcrook. The WBM reference states: "He is married to the former Valerie Plame and has two sons and two daughters." (he = Joe Wilson) Rove, may he burn in hell, added the little extra: 'VP work in covert ops at the firm'.
100Mbps is indeed available in Japan, and 50Mbps is available in Korea. However, your mileage may differ. Here's why. The 100Mbps (Jpn) and the 50 Mbps (RoK) are nothing more than the clock rate on the downstream link. Meanwhile, back in The Network, bandwidths are massively oversubscribed. So, many subscribers, each with - say - 100 Mbps or lower speeds, end up sharing a single uplink from the DSLAM (DSL Aggregation Multiplexer) that is itself likely to only clock at 100 Mbps - 500 Mbps. The result of this is that, yes, your clock rate may be 100 Mbps... but the actual delivery of files is at far S L O W E R speeds. Thus, the moral of the story (so far) is that improving one part of the network and not the rest may not yield a net improvement.
But wait, there's more. In Japanese experience w/ IPTV... they've found that all that bandwidth on the link from the DSLAM to the user (high clock rate, low utilization because of low availability upstream from the DSLAM) has its own pernicious effects. Specifically, if a packet (or set of packets) drops into the downstream link at a time of low utilization,... versus going through the highly-oversubscribed DSLAM at a time of high utilization... the result is high jitter. The packets can be transmitted at regular intervals by the distant streaming server, but get to the customer in herky-jerky form. Then, the home TV equipment can lose lock (hmmm. no packets,...) and have to regain lock all over again once packet transmission resumes. AND SO; the improved moral of the story is... boosting the bit rate of one part of the network without the rest of the network can damage the performance of the whole.
Well said. I tire of hearing how innovative and important NapsterGrokster are, and how loathsome the evil barons are who make and distribute the music. 1. People who don't like the system aren't being forced to buy music. I'm not being forced to buy a Lexus or a book, or a song, or a video. 2. Grokster & Napster's fundamental innovation was little more than someone figuring out and publishing how to steal music from Tower Records, while others steal piles of CDs and leave them at the town square 'for free'. Like this writer, I prefer to witness the ideas being thrashed out in the open, and to hear some well-thought-out arguments presented at the Supreme Court.
US Government wiretap authorities are governed by rules known in the telecom racket as CALEA. (Communications Access for Law Enforcement Agencies). Shorthand: ISPs, telcos, etc., have to give access to your communications when they receive an order to do so. Those orders are not (at least in theory!) given willy-nilly, but require (under most circumstances) court orders. Insofar as most of the feds follow these guidelines, the Separation of Powers works: the administration (police) can't spy without permission from a separate area (Judiciary). rant/ The bad news is that the fed gov't has -- surprise! -- given itself expanded authority to use wiretaps of various kinds using an internal judge. The reasoning is that the fed gov't needs judges on tap who've got security clearances, etc., and are on hand 7/24. Insofar as the feds ACTUALLY stick to this, that'd be ok, kind of, also. Patriot Act expands the number of kinds of offenses that can get a court order from a pet judge inside the Dept of Homeland Security. At some point, they're likely to mess up, badly, ruin some poor bugger's life and end up in front of the Supreme Court./rant BUT: for the most part, CALEA...
Remember, y'all: Carleton Fiorina's principal interest in being CEO at HP was as a stepping stone to the job she REALLY wants. By all accounts, her next move was going to be to challenge Sen. Feinstein for Calif. senator. Then, plan her move into the house at the top of Pennsylvania Ave.
The wails of the mobile phone industry notwithstanding, it's clear to all that mobile phone use in some way occupies a slice of the brain, causing slowed reaction times. Nothing new here, move along everyone.
But wait! We've all been told (well, at least us Y-chromosome types have) that women pay more attention to conversations than men. Actually (what did you say, dear?) I think that's right. They do value relationships more, they actually HAVE more converations.
Next, put the woman in control of an SUV, which isolates the driver from the world around and woohoo!
Yes, I was in a car that was hit (rearended at a stop sign by a woman driver, on the phone, Range Rover) last year. And then, while the car was being rebuilt... was walking across a parking lot when I had to jump out of the way of a speeding SUV (Expedition!) whose non-Y chromosome driver was on the phone and looking in her purse. And, yes, thanks for asking, she was angry at me after I yelled at her.
Thus my theory: the most dangerous drivers on the road are, without any doubt, teenage boys in powerful cars. Next worst: women, in SUVs, on the phone.
A few months back, I had an accident which made it temporarily impossible for me to type with my dominant hand (left, in my case). Amazing... typing then becomes hunt-and-peck. Unfortunately, I have to write for my work. I have to write LOTS for my work. It's 2004, so there's no 'steno pool'. So: voice recognition, part 1. I used the speech recognition embedded in M$FTXP. I was quite prepared for a slow learning process... but was pleasantly surprised that it was quick. HOWEVER... it did not seem to improve much over the next week or so, being particularly bad at really common words. AND correcting it was slow. (To be fair to M$FT: it acknowledges that the embedded speech-rec software is NOT intended for extensive use... I actually think it's mainly intended for Chinese users to avoid the oddity of entering Han characters using a QWERTY keyboard.)
So, Speech Rec, part 2. It was clearly time to spend $$ and buy Dragon. I was particularly intrigued by the assertion in the ads that one can enter text using Dragon faster than in normal typing. Hmmm... I bought the professional version and its microphone and settled in to teaching my computer who I am. Again, you can get going pretty quickly. And it gets better and better...
Some weeks later, my hand is (pretty much) back to normal. I'm typing this using both hands, largely because it does remain a little time-consuming (a minute or two) to get Dragon going, and I just didn't. HOWEVER: when I have to write long documents, I now still fire up Dragon and dictate. It actually CAN BE faster than typing.
And, another thing: when I type, I look at the screen, see what's there,... more words flow, and what ends up is, in its first draft, stream-of-conscious writing. When I use Dragon, I can concentrate on what I *really* want to say. I can -- and do -- close my eyes, and try hard to create a logical flow. I have found, to my surprise, that what I create by dictation is actually better in grammatical and logical terms than what I get when I type.
Dragon is NOT flawless. Partly, I'm sure, this is my fault (yeah, have I read the manual???) I haven't mastered the art of commands. When I tell it to 'move (the cursor) to the end of the line'... about half of the time I get text instead of the command. And, it was more complex than it should have been to get Dragon to ignore the tiny, terrible microphone in my laptop. I did something that turned out to be a Bad Idea. I bought another, better microphone -- one for home, one for the office. Bad Idea, because the machine recognizes the Dragon microphone (which plugs into the a/v sockets) as being a different profile from the nifty USB microphone I bought. Different profile = different person.
On the final visit to the hand surgeon to check out my hand's recovery, I talked about this... and recommended that he look into the Professional version for medics, since -- at least from my experience -- Dragon really can enable much more fluid, lucid, accurate 'writing'. It can be faster than typing And without that dreadful problem of illegible handwriting, as well.
Thoughtful note, thanks! Agree: if it is set up to exceed "fair use"... which is mainly intended for personal use,... but instead is then made available for arbitrary numbers of unknown copiers... it doesn't matter how much legal finesse is thrown at it, it's illegal and, under the view that the original artist has some rights, it's unethical as well.
Agree: also, that the Mickey Mouse extension industry is nonsensical. HOWEVER, I have never understood why file copying networks should have different ethical position than someone who simply figures out how to hack the locks at Tower Records, steals the stuff, and leaves it in piles for you and I to pick up as we get our morning lattes. In this case, that's a specific location for the pile of stolen stuff: MIT. The fact that it's free to MITers doesn't mean that it's ethical or legal.
Slashdot Mirror
But the logic you use seems to imply a long life for the asset. In fact, Internet gear gets used up so quickly (as bandwidth demand rises) that in fact it typically has a life-in-place of two or three years. So, while it's charming to assert that the variable costs are low, it's also irrelevant.
Put it another way. To build an infrastructure that serves several million households and businesses will cost several billions of dollars. To make that network still useful in, say, three years' time, the operator has to again spend billions of dollars.
So the most useful way to compute the effective variable cost is NOT to assert "it's low" but to actually divide the entire cost by the traffic throughput (current peak offered load). A few years' back, doing the calculation this way suggests a variable cost for transmitting a DVD-quality movie to be about $2, and for transmitting an MP3 song about $0.05. I am sure these estimates are off now, perhaps by a factor of 10. But not by a factor of 100.
Also: the Comcast figures are obviously nonsense. If the variable cost to CMCSA was so low, they'd have deployed it everywhere. In fact, the figure the Comcast guy cites is the cost to upgrade the shared headend. Unfortunately, they also have to upgrade the taps ($100 plus labor) and the in-home terminal ($100 plus labor). Often, also the coax into the home needs to be replaced. And the hub near the home.
While Google is protesting Microsoft's de facto monopoly of desktop client software, it is working hard to create a de jure and de facto monopoly for itself in an important area of content. In the proposed settlement, Google is the ONLY legal site for ALL [in copyright but out of print] printed content.
How is this a good thing?
Apologies for the cowardly anonymity, not my normal style, but there's plenty to worry about here.
1. I don't believe he's an Intel drone. He's never hidden his GeekCorps credentials. He's simply passionate about the subject of laptops for kids in the developing world - which is what GeekCorps, and OLPC (and, perhaps, even the Classmate) are about.
2. The attacks today belong also in the category of mischief. He's actually getting married today. (No, I wasn't invited, and I'm not miffed. As mentioned: I've never met the man.) But, give the boy a break: kick him when he's in a position to defend himself.
3. OLPCNews, on more than one occasion, has printed drivel. It's made mistakes. It has criticized OLPC both when it needed criticism, and when - frankly - Wayan or other writers simply didn't understand what they were talking about.
But calling OLPCNews an Intel flack is nothing more than playground name-calling. Stop it children! Go back to your rooms.
Price is directly related to volume, and timing. OLPC has come down from its original one-million-unit minimum order goal, and is taking orders more around 100K units per customer. This makes the price of the laptop higher. Also, Q4 is an expensive time to start mass production this year: the factories are flat out full, as are the components makers - it means that to get a slot in a factory one has to pay a higher price. It's easy to see how to take $30 out of the OLPC price in the first half of 2008. However, hitting $100 in 2008 is unlikely. Still it's the least expensive laptop that has ever been made, and you can use it outside (sunlight readable screen).
True ... with the obvious caveat that the power drain continues in any situation that might cause you to otherwise allow the house to do with less heat. Thus, not only when you want the house cooler, but also when you're not at home, or are asleep, etc. ... it is surely greater than half of the annual total, even in colder regions.
I imagine someone has calculated what percentage this might be
As economists are wont to say: ... at what price did this feat come? Universal experience says the price would have been huge pain. The history of science, technology, etc., is also replete with individuals who were so burnt out after the early trajectory that they never recovered.
On the one hand, this is surely one bright individual, congratulations and one wishes him well. The history of science, technology, etc., is replete with geniuses who graduated from college at such early ages. Perhaps this is another, budding in front of us.
On the other
My recommendation: take a year off.
One of the sad things in this note is the implication that the $100 laptop won't have Internet access.
/. without even a brief attempt to look it up. It is not relevant what William Gates Jr. asserts. What is relevant is this: every description of the $100 laptops has repeatedly referred to the inclusion therein of WiFi. Further, Nicholas Negroponte, father of the machines, has for years espoused use of WiFi for ad hoc meshes.
This is pure nonsense, and it is amazing to see this repeated at
I thought it was wonderful to see the Miro pic on Google; it made me smile.
... then some future, less-benevolent Miro-ripoff would be able to point to the earlier inaction as precedent.
I'm saddened by the response, and - along with near-all Slashdotters - am nauseated by litigation taking over from innovation. And, that Joan Miro, being dead and all, cannot benefit from this; the only benefits inure to people who never lifted a brush, or a finger, in support of Miro.
HOWEVER: there is a little wrinkle (note: IANAL). A right that is not defended can be argued to have lapsed. Thus, if the agency and the estate of Miro hadn't at least rattled their sabres and expressed annoyance
THUS: if I'd been in the seat of the defenders of Miro's estate, I would also have sent of a cease-and-desist letter - and hoped that the whole matter would go away. And, Google (which is chock full-o-lawyers at the exec levels now) surely needs to create new form letters asking for non-commercial permission to exhibit content.
Bill Gates is actually angry and terrified both.
... AMD and GOOG and Nortel and (other firms besides). AND many firms just plain believe in the project, and are kicking in resources out of goodwill. ... they're either missing a key fact, or trying to divert attention from it: when all is said and done, OLPC/HDL is likely to have defined a new 'platform'-level definition of computing. Massively reduced power consumption levels; entirely novel and different use of LCD screens; onboard wifi mesh; ...
He has proposed - seriously - using cellphones + keyboards as 'emerging world' machines. Now *that's* a seriously tiny screen.
And he's wrong - actually, he's worse, he's actually lying - about the 'sharing' aspect. One Laptop Per Child: could be be more clear?
And he's technically off base on the hard disk - given the plummeting prices for flash, a basic laptop can do v. nicely indeed sans HD -- so long, that is, as it isn't running a multi-gig OS.
Some realities about the HDL:
1. Quanta, the world's largest actual manufacturer of laptops has signed on to make them.
2. Announced funding and investment from
3. Developer kits should be available in two months.
4. OLPC outreach to the Linux - hacker community is yielding huge energies focused on software for this.
5. While Gates (&, sadly, Craig 'gadget' Barrett and Bill Siu at Intel) and others have lampooned this
What upsets Bill Gates is evident - oops, open source machine installed base could exceed Windows installed base in as little as three years.
Let's agree on this: many poor countries can't afford this. But: many wealthy countries, corporations and individuals can. Imagine, just two years from now, your neighborhood school may be able to adopt a school in (Bostwana? Laos? Afghanistan? All three?) and, at relatively little cost ($100 is a ton for 'them', but pocket lint for many of 'us'). And, just as some years ago our parents' generation had pen pals. Our children's generation can have email pals ... and share global experiences in a vivid way.
The HDL has to have extremely low power consumption (to enable, among other things, a human-power source). That excludes the baby CRTs this poster found.
/. world, as enterpreneurs.
...
It is also extremely, dangerously wrong to assert that this will be proprietary. The design is wedded to open source designs; the demo units are running a commercial (redhat) Linux distro. This is less, it is not at all, a way of bashing this vendor or that. Rather, the idea is this. Imagine the outcome of million laptops. Many, frankly, perhaps even most, will be underused (but never underestimate the hunger of the 'rest of the world' to join 'our world' via the Internet). Some modest number will really, truly have transformative educational experiences, by learning WITH computers. Another number, larger? smaller? will learn ABOUT computers, and will themselves join
While Craig Barrett rails against the HDL as a 'gadget', it has higher compute-power targets than a 2000 - 2001 commercial laptop AND will run leaner OS and applications, likely (admittedly: TBD) yielding performance more akin to a 2003 - 2004 machine.
The poster also didn't note that: the HDL has to be a nearly sealed, highly rugged unit, capable of localization (e.g. keyboard replacement for local scripts). O, and it has to have USB ports and WiFi and
AND: the screen is expected to be sunlight readable, both to cut power consumption AND to enable the target children to be able to see vivid images in areas where daylight is the only reliable light source.
Now, as the poster observes, you can kluge something together for about the same price sans these attributes. That's not the point.
QWERTY? Answer ... the keyboard is designed to be nearly disposable (that's why the motherboard isn't under the keyboard, but behind the screen), to enable non-QWERTY.
... you'd better be a/ a kid or b/ a teacher. There are, however, some more subtle technical means that can be used, and have been experimented with. This, perhaps, is an exercise for the student.
... all the books AND all the supplies AND Internet access AND a phone AND music-writing software AND math/educational tools AND ... for the same aggregate cost. Similarly, most nations have their telephone companies beholden to some kind of universal service mandate. Mostly: this consists of placing payphones in poor villages. At least in one of the countries where the $100 laptop is slated to make its appearance, the local telephone companies have offered/pledged to trade a payphone mandate for one based on supply, logistics, networking support for $100laptops.
... (Gandhi) but give a hungry man a computer and you've solved neither problem. HOWEVER: it's apparent that sending money, through official government channels, is nearly useless. Why? Imagine you're sending $100M to xxx, a fictitious poor and corrupt country. What fraction immediately goes to Swiss bank accounts? What subsequent fraction buys fancy cars for government officials? In some cases, the 'shrinkage' between donor and intended recipient is very close to 100%. In contrast: just what percentage of shiny green machines would be stolen? 10%?
... Western nations. We pay western consulting companies to take western planes and stay in western hotels ... or deliver western goods (trucks, etc.) made in our own western factories.
Will it have WiFi? Yes.
Why does green protect against theft? Because: if you're seen w/ a shiny green machine
"Why do this when their basic biological needs aren't being met?" Some posters have noted that the Rest of World isn't a single, drab 5 billion starving souls. In many countries, what I, in a naive way perhaps, consider the global middle class, where GDP/capita is $3,000/person/year (PPP), the amount already spent on text books and school supplies exceeds $30/year. Insofar as this is true, there's a pretty simple ROI calculation
The arguments above DON'T work for the poorest countries. Here: dig into your pockets. I agree with all that note that if you give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach a man to fish
Further, much of the aid from Western nations goes to
Last: to take an analogy from British history - "royalty" used to assuage their guilty consciences by flinging coins to beggars. Alas, the most consistent result of reliably flinging coins to beggars is creation of more beggars, when peasants realize that there's better ROI in begging than tilling fields.
In these regards, perhaps, the HDL is not just a green machine, but a harbinger of a different way of spreading the benefits of the world we enjoy to those who don't enjoy the same wealth we all do.
Mainly true.
1. ASCAP as 'enforcer'. Its role, as I understand it, is to make sure that someone who IS making money from playing the music (neighborhood bar, club, etc. using the music either as a feature of the place or for ambiance) pays for that. I'm not offended by that; not sure why MrMs S. Moose is (seems to be).
2. Not all music is rock-n-roll/hip-hop/Britneypop. Consider: classical music. Very different equations. For classical music, opera, etc: the performances lose money, while the sale of CDs, etc., are important as income (and as a statement of broader interest in the music than just those who can get to the performances -- important when seeking grants/funding).
Thus, for Harvey Danger: it's a good publicity move; it MAY get their new music played on radio stations (revenue) and in bars (revenue); it may also result in sales of legit CDs (revenue); it MAY get them new gigs (mucho revenue). They've endorsed it; their agents and managers may also have, thinking that otherwise HD would release their CD to exactly no sales.
In many other cases, however: MP3s online remain illegal AND, sadly, unethical.
Good point ... and an indication of how far a product can go against the awesome marketing might of MSFT without a big counter marketing campaign and the budget that implies.
Or, at least, how far one can go in the first phase of deployment. Phase 1: early adopters/self-described cognoscenti/MSFT-haters. Phase 2: what? Is there enough viral momentum to double the installed base?
Not mentioned in the WSJ article: this is run as a not-for-profit. It is privately funded.
... 'unless we can take over the world by actually doing evil', WBM has no objective other than, say, making all data & knowledge on earth available to everyone for free.
... as it must in order to find all those things to cache. It searches more of the Internet than Google.
Unlike Google/cache, where the 'do no evil' motto is looking more & more as though it comes second to
Little known fact: the Internet Archive also has a search engine
Rove is still a lyingscumbagcrook. The WBM reference states: "He is married to the former Valerie Plame and has two sons and two daughters." (he = Joe Wilson)
Rove, may he burn in hell, added the little extra: 'VP work in covert ops at the firm'.
100Mbps is indeed available in Japan, and 50Mbps is available in Korea. However, your mileage may differ. Here's why. The 100Mbps (Jpn) and the 50 Mbps (RoK) are nothing more than the clock rate on the downstream link. ... but the actual delivery of files is at far S L O W E R speeds.
... they've found that all that bandwidth on the link from the DSLAM to the user (high clock rate, low utilization because of low availability upstream from the DSLAM) has its own pernicious effects. Specifically, if a packet (or set of packets) drops into the downstream link at a time of low utilization, ... versus going through the highly-oversubscribed DSLAM at a time of high utilization ... the result is high jitter. The packets can be transmitted at regular intervals by the distant streaming server, but get to the customer in herky-jerky form. Then, the home TV equipment can lose lock (hmmm. no packets, ...) and have to regain lock all over again once packet transmission resumes. ... boosting the bit rate of one part of the network without the rest of the network can damage the performance of the whole.
Meanwhile, back in The Network, bandwidths are massively oversubscribed. So, many subscribers, each with - say - 100 Mbps or lower speeds, end up sharing a single uplink from the DSLAM (DSL Aggregation Multiplexer) that is itself likely to only clock at 100 Mbps - 500 Mbps.
The result of this is that, yes, your clock rate may be 100 Mbps
Thus, the moral of the story (so far) is that improving one part of the network and not the rest may not yield a net improvement.
But wait, there's more.
In Japanese experience w/ IPTV
AND SO; the improved moral of the story is
Well said.
I tire of hearing how innovative and important NapsterGrokster are, and how loathsome the evil barons are who make and distribute the music.
1. People who don't like the system aren't being forced to buy music. I'm not being forced to buy a Lexus or a book, or a song, or a video.
2. Grokster & Napster's fundamental innovation was little more than someone figuring out and publishing how to steal music from Tower Records, while others steal piles of CDs and leave them at the town square 'for free'.
Like this writer, I prefer to witness the ideas being thrashed out in the open, and to hear some well-thought-out arguments presented at the Supreme Court.
The fire-bombing of Dresden was vengeance. Partially, I believe, it was prompted by the fire-bombing of Coventry, an English medieval city.
US Government wiretap authorities are governed by rules known in the telecom racket as CALEA. (Communications Access for Law Enforcement Agencies). Shorthand: ISPs, telcos, etc., have to give access to your communications when they receive an order to do so. Those orders are not (at least in theory!) given willy-nilly, but require (under most circumstances) court orders. Insofar as most of the feds follow these guidelines, the Separation of Powers works: the administration (police) can't spy without permission from a separate area (Judiciary). /rant
rant/
The bad news is that the fed gov't has -- surprise! -- given itself expanded authority to use wiretaps of various kinds using an internal judge. The reasoning is that the fed gov't needs judges on tap who've got security clearances, etc., and are on hand 7/24. Insofar as the feds ACTUALLY stick to this, that'd be ok, kind of, also. Patriot Act expands the number of kinds of offenses that can get a court order from a pet judge inside the Dept of Homeland Security. At some point, they're likely to mess up, badly, ruin some poor bugger's life and end up in front of the Supreme Court.
BUT: for the most part, CALEA...
Remember, y'all:
Carleton Fiorina's principal interest in being CEO at HP was as a stepping stone to the job she REALLY wants.
By all accounts, her next move was going to be to challenge Sen. Feinstein for Calif. senator. Then, plan her move into the house at the top of Pennsylvania Ave.
The wails of the mobile phone industry notwithstanding, it's clear to all that mobile phone use in some way occupies a slice of the brain, causing slowed reaction times. Nothing new here, move along everyone.
... was walking across a parking lot when I had to jump out of the way of a speeding SUV (Expedition!) whose non-Y chromosome driver was on the phone and looking in her purse. And, yes, thanks for asking, she was angry at me after I yelled at her.
But wait!
We've all been told (well, at least us Y-chromosome types have) that women pay more attention to conversations than men. Actually (what did you say, dear?) I think that's right. They do value relationships more, they actually HAVE more converations.
Next, put the woman in control of an SUV, which isolates the driver from the world around and woohoo!
Yes, I was in a car that was hit (rearended at a stop sign by a woman driver, on the phone, Range Rover) last year. And then, while the car was being rebuilt
Thus my theory: the most dangerous drivers on the road are, without any doubt, teenage boys in powerful cars. Next worst: women, in SUVs, on the phone.
perhaps that's why M$FT decided to $ell $late?
A few months back, I had an accident which made it temporarily impossible for me to type with my dominant hand (left, in my case). ... typing then becomes hunt-and-peck. ... but was pleasantly surprised that it was quick. HOWEVER ... it did not seem to improve much over the next week or so, being particularly bad at really common words. AND correcting it was slow. (To be fair to M$FT: it acknowledges that the embedded speech-rec software is NOT intended for extensive use ... I actually think it's mainly intended for Chinese users to avoid the oddity of entering Han characters using a QWERTY keyboard.)
... I bought the professional version and its microphone and settled in to teaching my computer who I am. Again, you can get going pretty quickly. And it gets better and better ...
... more words flow, and what ends up is, in its first draft, stream-of-conscious writing. When I use Dragon, I can concentrate on what I *really* want to say. I can -- and do -- close my eyes, and try hard to create a logical flow. I have found, to my surprise, that what I create by dictation is actually better in grammatical and logical terms than what I get when I type.
... about half of the time I get text instead of the command. And, it was more complex than it should have been to get Dragon to ignore the tiny, terrible microphone in my laptop. I did something that turned out to be a Bad Idea. I bought another, better microphone -- one for home, one for the office. Bad Idea, because the machine recognizes the Dragon microphone (which plugs into the a/v sockets) as being a different profile from the nifty USB microphone I bought. Different profile = different person.
... and recommended that he look into the Professional version for medics, since -- at least from my experience -- Dragon really can enable much more fluid, lucid, accurate 'writing'. It can be faster than typing And without that dreadful problem of illegible handwriting, as well.
Amazing
Unfortunately, I have to write for my work. I have to write LOTS for my work. It's 2004, so there's no 'steno pool'. So: voice recognition, part 1. I used the speech recognition embedded in M$FTXP. I was quite prepared for a slow learning process
So, Speech Rec, part 2. It was clearly time to spend $$ and buy Dragon. I was particularly intrigued by the assertion in the ads that one can enter text using Dragon faster than in normal typing. Hmmm
Some weeks later, my hand is (pretty much) back to normal. I'm typing this using both hands, largely because it does remain a little time-consuming (a minute or two) to get Dragon going, and I just didn't. HOWEVER: when I have to write long documents, I now still fire up Dragon and dictate. It actually CAN BE faster than typing.
And, another thing: when I type, I look at the screen, see what's there,
Dragon is NOT flawless. Partly, I'm sure, this is my fault (yeah, have I read the manual???) I haven't mastered the art of commands. When I tell it to 'move (the cursor) to the end of the line'
On the final visit to the hand surgeon to check out my hand's recovery, I talked about this
Thoughtful note, thanks! ... which is mainly intended for personal use, ... but instead is then made available for arbitrary numbers of unknown copiers ... it doesn't matter how much legal finesse is thrown at it, it's illegal and, under the view that the original artist has some rights, it's unethical as well.
Agree: if it is set up to exceed "fair use"
Agree: also, that the Mickey Mouse extension industry is nonsensical. HOWEVER, I have never understood why file copying networks should have different ethical position than someone who simply figures out how to hack the locks at Tower Records, steals the stuff, and leaves it in piles for you and I to pick up as we get our morning lattes. In this case, that's a specific location for the pile of stolen stuff: MIT. The fact that it's free to MITers doesn't mean that it's ethical or legal.