Even pictures you didn't know existed get posted on the Internet and become essentially public information tied to you through facebook due to your meddling friends. This is how my privacy was breached: I accepted a friend's invitation to join Facebook. I input my real name, username and a password. That's it, I added no other details because I didn't really want an account, I just wanted to see pictures in his profile. Little did I know that I'd be subsequently deluged with requests from various acquaintances to reconnect after a dozen or more years -- I graciously accepted connect invitations, but refused to add any applications at all. Then a number of my friends who snap pictures at bars we hang out at or football game we go to, started identifying me in various snapshots, and these pictures are forever tied to my account. No I'm not happy about this, but serves me right for even signing up in the first place.
I don't think you're going to lose your money or anything, but I don't have great confidence that they can deliver those computers in the near-term (next 4-6 weeks) based on what I've seen so far. Ask them to clearly define a delivery window for your laptops and ask whether the ongoing G1G1 inventory backlog will have any effect on your laptops. Who knows, your donation may get the proper attention it deserves since it's for a large number.
Minerva (the trolling company run by one John Ki Kim) also filed a similar suit against 44 companies last June... From their website: http://www.gigatec.com/news060607.asp
Have a look at their "Products" section. It consists of some technical drawings related to a patent filing: http://www.gigatec.com/products.asp
All I want is for OLPC to survive and make a positive impact worldwide -- and that's why I participated in G1G1. But let me tell you, it's amateur hour as far as logistics go. They naively thought that because the laptop hardware was ready, everything else would magically fall into place, so they rushed all starry-eyed into shipping laptops before Christmas. As it turns out, their completely untested shipping and support infrastructure was inadequate given the load.
I've received a total of 3 different tracking numbers for my single laptop over the past 2 months. All 3 are invalid according to Fedex. I've called, verified that they have my correct address and been told my laptop was in the queue to ship a month ago. I was subsequently promised a delivery by the end of the year, then by January 15th, both of which have come and gone. Then they promised to reveal the shipping date by this Wednesday in an email sent on Monday. On Thursday they backed off of that claim, and said that hardware supply issues were at fault and assured me that I would receive another email at some point in the future with a shipping date. And so the saga continues...
Look, I'm cutting them a lot of slack because they're a non-profit trying to get off the ground and the primary goal here is to get laptops into the hands of needy children... but the problem is that they've been a model of evasive, unhelpful and secretive with regard to logistics problems from the start. If they had said, "hey we'll do our best to get you a laptop by March 2008" from the beginning, I think we all would have gone on with our lives, but for a not insignificant number of us, it's been one story after another -- all of which leads some of us to wonder whether the organization is hiding something with regard to our charitable donations.
Anyway, I fully comprehend that G1G1 logistics issues do not imply that they'll have problems fulfilling orders overseas. And in fact, the G1G1 program was for the most part an afterthought with regard to OLPC's primary mission. However, I think they've hurt themselves a great deal by not getting their act together with G1G1. Third-world purchase estimates have been cut by orders of magnitude since the heady days when Dr. Negroponte went around boasting that they wouldn't even talk to countries who weren't willing to buy a million laptops. The G1G1 program has become an instrumental tool in seeding laptop programs in places where reluctant national governments have backed off of early purchase promises. By pissing off G1G1 donors, they've essentially bit the hand that feeds them, and this will make it that much more difficult to realize Dr. Negroponte's original vision of one laptop per child.
For the vast majority of folks, many of whom might share audio from a watermarked source, the watermarking thing is a moot topic. The logic goes something like this: Since the watermark data will be placed in the files in such a way that they will presumably be inaudible, the watermark bits are not going to survive a *lossy* compression algorithm like MP3. Even at MP3's highest bitrate of 320kbps, there's no way you could take a watermarked.wav file, compress it to Mp3, decompress it and expect to see any reasonable part of the original watermark left. Furthermore, MP3 encoders could be instructed to add their own random inaudible data, thereby thoroughly defeating anyone trying to discover the original watermark.
for a while now. Does anyone realize the linked article is A YEAR OLD? It was written Jan 2, 2007. Subsequently, you can see a little back and forth with the accused (Wayan Vota) in the comments section through Jan 4, 2007. Then no one comments on the damn thing for *AN ENTIRE YEAR*. Then someone makes a comment on Jan 4, 2008, and the accusations fly again. Jan 12, 2008? Slashdot picks it up as if it's news. Problem is, Wayan quit Geekcorps a long time ago, so the article is no longer valid except that at one point in the past, there was an undisclosed conflict interest that no longer exists. At its height, you could say this was a bit shady and Wayan has most certainly continued to be an open critic of OLPC, but come on now, can we at least check the year before posting out-of-date crap like this in the future?
In all seriousness, anyone who's actually used an XO would be able to tell you that it's not gonna handle XP very well... I know Microsoft is trying their darndest to slim it down to a footprint that will run on the XO, but let me tell you... even with the exceedingly lean Fedora base, the XO is sluggish by today's standards. For example, it can't run Flash animations/videos with smooth playback -- not that the system really needs to be able to do any of this to achieve its pedagogic goals. I'm just trying to illustrate how monumental the effort will be for Microsoft to achieve suitable performance with this hardware. In the short-run, this effort *might* help OLPC sell to Nigeria and a few other countries who would prefer a more standard platform like Windows to teach kids on, but I believe political and bureaucratic barriers are an even greater concern for OLPC within these countries.
I think the renewed interest in Windows stems largely from the half-finished thought that is the current state of the Sugar UI. It needs a lot of attention. This should not come as a surprise to anyone who's developed an operating system UI before -- these things are big, complex and usually require years of development to achieve a user-friendly experience. Not to belittle what the Sugar devs did here, I just think OLPC bit off a piece bigger than it could chew in trying to revolutionize the user interface. IMHO, OLPC would be in less of a bind had they chosen to customize a more conventional, yet resource-stingy desktop interface like xfce rather than trying to create one from scratch using highly experimental, unproven interface design elements.
...Intel's behavior regarding the OLPC is reprehensible. Instead of offering cut-rate chips to support the project and potentially gain goodwill and new loyal customers worldwide they took the low road. Reprehensible? I dunno, I prefer inevitable. OLPC is like an antelope that made a pact with a lion not to eat it. What's that you say, the lion is nipping at the heels of the antelope despite the pact?
Frankly, I put the blame mostly on Negroponte for being so naive at business to think that this agreement could work in the first place. Do you really think that the CEO of a large multinational corporation has much control over his thousands strong sales team -- especially if he orders them *not* to compete? I've seen similar scenarios play out many times in the past. Sales people are hired to bring in deals and get fired when they don't hit their quotas. Their compensation schemes generally don't care how or where they get the deals from, so that's the bottom line, regardless of lofty declarations made by upper management.
a commenter claiming to be Mary Lou Jepsen has responded to a similar story on olpcnews.com:
Hi all,
Thanks for all the interest in my new company!
some comments:
1) My new company *is* trying to explore the concepts of open hardware - and trying to figure out the right way to do it. I've been asking many people for advice on this: Richard Stallman, Eben Moglen, Larry Lessig, John Gilmore, Brewster Kahle, etc. We are struggling through it. Hardware is different from software - but how can we open it up?
2) Doesn't anyone want a 50 Euro laptop? I do. I'm not talking about designing last years product for next year. Other people can do that..I plan to continue to innovate and invent.
3) Finally: I'm not taking my inventions from OLPC - I'm licensing them from OLPC. Why: An inventor has a good chance of improving the price/performance of her inventions. Why restrict her access to them if our goal is lower cost computing for the developing world?
Turns out Newton's laws *are* wrong. They just aren't wrong *enough* for it to make much of a difference to us when you're talking about for example, day-to-day human activities, most of which involve speeds much lower than the speed of light. For calculating speeds of airplanes and automobiles, Newton's laws are reasonable approximations -- but they are indeed wrong according to the world of relativity.
"It seems more likely to me that Collins' metric of return on money invested is the wrong way to measure greatness in a company."
Agreed. Furthermore, there's an underlying premise in GTG that greatness is a company that endures for a long period of time. Look at many of the companies that have been responsible for significant innovations... Guess what? Many of them have shot up like firecrackers and fizzled out quickly -- but not before pulling society forward in the process. Doesn't mean they're any less important or 'great'.
On a side note, the book strikes me as a dangerous exercise in data mining. He was bound to find some patterns that correlate with so-called 'greatness' just out of random chance, given enough historical data to crunch through... Just like if you look hard enough, you can find messages hidden in the bible (and Moby Dick apparently.) It's definitely an interesting study, but implementing his data-mined concepts is no guarantee of anything going forward... just ask Circuit City.
Did anyone bother to notice that your mobile and landline phone companies know *WAY* more about you than this program could ever hope to collect? I mean, these guys bill you for every call you make, know exactly who you're calling and for how long, have been known to allow just about anyone in law enforcement to wiretap your line for even the flimsiest premise, yet the Slashdot crowd is more concerned with an open-source-based PBX collecting some high-level meta-data from users in an opt-out fashion?
From tfa: "The United States -- the largest donor to the U.N. World Food program -- sends Africa corn, wheat, sorghum and soybeans. Aid agencies then have to hand out free or cheap American food instead of buying from African farmers. The cheap imported grain keeps Africans poor, and dependent on cheap imported grain."
Hey, what do you know? HANDOUTS DON'T WORK. They're a short-term fix that let rich folks live with less guilt, but they make the problem worse for the people they're claiming to help. OLPC may ultimately fail, but I'd much rather be known as one of the ones who at least tried to end the vicious cycle.
We all know that everyone outside the US lives in mud and straw shacks and need nothing but rice handouts from us. Think of the children!
In all seriousness, the vast majority of children this laptop is aimed at have clothes, electricity and sufficient food to stay reasonably healthy... but generation after generation remain in relative poverty because they don't have access to the educational tools needed to make it in this world. The XO laptop aims at leveling the tables a little bit, that's all.
That's right, by spending $399 on a laptop for the Give One, Get One promotion, money that Dvorak would rather have me spend on rice, some child, somewhere will die as a result of my callous disregard for human life. Then again, I'm a pretty nasty person in general, so it won't come as a surprise to anyone who knows me that I would be aiming to increase global misery.
Though I'm starting to think there is a silver lining to Dvorak's plan. Perhaps the best way to ensure extended suffering in the third world is to keep spoon feeding them rice. That way we can ensure that generation after generation will require handouts! Oh Dvorak, thank you for showing me the way!/sarcasm
That's cause Symantec acquired Peter Norton's company in 1990 in a mostly successful attempt to lend credibility to their crappy, resource-hogging security products.
but for most desktops and servers, at 6-8 watts idle and 10-12 watts when actively seeking, HDD power consumption typically represents 5% or less of the overall power consumption of a modern system. Good PR for Hitachi though.
If we ever build AI that's able to perform the kind of "intelligent thought" that we humans are capable of, then this is exactly the kind of thing we should expect to run into more and more. I've always contended that the closer we come to building computer circuits that mimic the processing within the human brain, the less that output will be what we generally consider to be computer-like (logical, predictable, mathematical).
I can't think of a way to stop 'streamripping.' I mean, even if you closed the loop all the way down to my soundcard, it would still have to come out as sound in some quality or another. Once it's in that analog form, I just pipe it into another input device on the same or different machine and begin recording. I've used TotalRecorder to just copy the buffer of my sound card to a file and have captured many NPR shows that I could not find otherwise to purchase.
How in the hell could DRM prevent this? Actually, it doesn't have to. The industry can enforce Draconian licenses to prevent streamripping. Check out Pandora Radio. Essentially, they are an Internet radio station that respresent the future of what Net radio is likely to become. They give you some freedom to hear the genre of music you like, but zero control over exactly what you will hear at any given time -- making streamripping to obtain certain songs extremely tedious and out of reach for all but the most dedicated pirates.
They accomplish this through these restrictions: 1. They stop you from specifically being able to play a particular song or artist. Instead they'll create a station that you can customize based on genre, that will from time to time randomly play a song from the artist you chose. 2. You can't programatically find out what's playing. The radio player itself is flash-based, no handy Shoutcast stream tags here. 3. Even if you and a friend listen to the same custom station at the same time, both will be randomly playing through a different part of that station's universe --> no predictability. 4. You have limited ability to skip songs (something like 7 per hour). 5. You can't go back and listen to a song that's already played (fully or partially). 6. You can't restart a song that's just started playing. 7. You can't tell what going to play next.
Aside from these restrictions, it's actually a pretty cool idea and I listen to Pandora from time to time, but the music license effectively makes it so that there's simply no viable way to record the songs you want unless you're willing to sit there for hours, manually chopping up and labeling audio.
RSS helps sites by attracting busy people like me who don't have time to surf a dozen sites to find an interesting article. But at the same time it's killing them, because people like me surgically link in to read an article and then close the tab immediately, never so much as considering looking at other features of their site. (It probably doesn't help that I use adblock and overlay all Flash content with control buttons, but that's beside the point.)
I skim approximately three mainstream news sources, a handful of blogs and a few independent news sites for RSS headlines that catch my attention. I spend the rest of my online time reading select forums that are mostly inhabited by people who present what I believe to be intelligent/interesting discourse (yes, believe it or not, that *does* include Slashdot from time to time).
Guess how much time I spend surfing random links and going page to page within a site using their fancy ajax navigation elements? I don't know what the percentage is, but pretty close to zero. 40 page article about Nvidia's latest Geforce gizmo? Skip to conclusion, then go to three of their competitors' sites to see if they concur. There's just too much damn noise and information out there to do it any other way. I use RSS, del.icio.us and a few simple techniques to reduce the web into my own personal CliffsNotes. If I'm representative of any significant segment of the population, then no wonder mainstream news sites are hurting.
Ever wonder why your cat has no interest in sweets? Never developed the taste buds. Its ancestors' diets simply didn't require it. So why did we humans develop sweet-sensing taste buds? Well, so we'd be attracted to consuming fruit, of course. And why would our ancestor's have been better off eating fruit? Well, it was probably a key nutrient pathway for many of the vitamins and minerals that are so crucial to our body's processes. For the most part, it appears to have worked out well enough for our 'primitive' ancestors.
Fast forward to today, however, and you can see that our society has learned to exploit our own genetic predisposition to enjoy sweet things. From the obvious things like cookies, cakes, candy and soft drinks, to the less obvious foods like marinades, dressings, sauces, TV dinners, soups and breakfast cereals (even many of the so-called "healthy" ones.) Many of these products are chock full of refined sugars, mostly in the form of the cheap and readily available high fructose corn syrup.
But it's not the corn lobby that's to blame. They're just the latest and most evident in a long history of exploiters. Refined sweets are so universally accepted by most cultures living on the planet today that it's practically impossible to see them for what they are. Kids are taught from a young age to enjoy the taste of refined sweets, rather than fruit. Don't we all literally have a good laugh when someone calls fruit "nature's candy"!? And what kind of sick f*ck gives out apples at Hallowe'en anyway? And don't forget: "C is for Cookie that's good enough for me!"
And we pay the price, in the form of Diabetes and a multitude of other disorders which can at least partially be blamed on the ease with which we substitute the delicate taste of fresh fruit for the overpoweringly sweet taste of nutrient-less concentrated corn syrup.
Slashdot Mirror
Even pictures you didn't know existed get posted on the Internet and become essentially public information tied to you through facebook due to your meddling friends. This is how my privacy was breached: I accepted a friend's invitation to join Facebook. I input my real name, username and a password. That's it, I added no other details because I didn't really want an account, I just wanted to see pictures in his profile. Little did I know that I'd be subsequently deluged with requests from various acquaintances to reconnect after a dozen or more years -- I graciously accepted connect invitations, but refused to add any applications at all. Then a number of my friends who snap pictures at bars we hang out at or football game we go to, started identifying me in various snapshots, and these pictures are forever tied to my account. No I'm not happy about this, but serves me right for even signing up in the first place.
I don't think you're going to lose your money or anything, but I don't have great confidence that they can deliver those computers in the near-term (next 4-6 weeks) based on what I've seen so far. Ask them to clearly define a delivery window for your laptops and ask whether the ongoing G1G1 inventory backlog will have any effect on your laptops. Who knows, your donation may get the proper attention it deserves since it's for a large number.
Minerva (the trolling company run by one John Ki Kim) also filed a similar suit against 44 companies last June... From their website: http://www.gigatec.com/news060607.asp
Have a look at their "Products" section. It consists of some technical drawings related to a patent filing: http://www.gigatec.com/products.asp
All I want is for OLPC to survive and make a positive impact worldwide -- and that's why I participated in G1G1. But let me tell you, it's amateur hour as far as logistics go. They naively thought that because the laptop hardware was ready, everything else would magically fall into place, so they rushed all starry-eyed into shipping laptops before Christmas. As it turns out, their completely untested shipping and support infrastructure was inadequate given the load.
I've received a total of 3 different tracking numbers for my single laptop over the past 2 months. All 3 are invalid according to Fedex. I've called, verified that they have my correct address and been told my laptop was in the queue to ship a month ago. I was subsequently promised a delivery by the end of the year, then by January 15th, both of which have come and gone. Then they promised to reveal the shipping date by this Wednesday in an email sent on Monday. On Thursday they backed off of that claim, and said that hardware supply issues were at fault and assured me that I would receive another email at some point in the future with a shipping date. And so the saga continues...
Look, I'm cutting them a lot of slack because they're a non-profit trying to get off the ground and the primary goal here is to get laptops into the hands of needy children... but the problem is that they've been a model of evasive, unhelpful and secretive with regard to logistics problems from the start. If they had said, "hey we'll do our best to get you a laptop by March 2008" from the beginning, I think we all would have gone on with our lives, but for a not insignificant number of us, it's been one story after another -- all of which leads some of us to wonder whether the organization is hiding something with regard to our charitable donations.
Anyway, I fully comprehend that G1G1 logistics issues do not imply that they'll have problems fulfilling orders overseas. And in fact, the G1G1 program was for the most part an afterthought with regard to OLPC's primary mission. However, I think they've hurt themselves a great deal by not getting their act together with G1G1. Third-world purchase estimates have been cut by orders of magnitude since the heady days when Dr. Negroponte went around boasting that they wouldn't even talk to countries who weren't willing to buy a million laptops. The G1G1 program has become an instrumental tool in seeding laptop programs in places where reluctant national governments have backed off of early purchase promises. By pissing off G1G1 donors, they've essentially bit the hand that feeds them, and this will make it that much more difficult to realize Dr. Negroponte's original vision of one laptop per child.
Yup didn't think of that. But I still contend that mp3 encoders could add their own time-domain noise and defeat it just the same.
For the vast majority of folks, many of whom might share audio from a watermarked source, the watermarking thing is a moot topic. The logic goes something like this: Since the watermark data will be placed in the files in such a way that they will presumably be inaudible, the watermark bits are not going to survive a *lossy* compression algorithm like MP3. Even at MP3's highest bitrate of 320kbps, there's no way you could take a watermarked .wav file, compress it to Mp3, decompress it and expect to see any reasonable part of the original watermark left. Furthermore, MP3 encoders could be instructed to add their own random inaudible data, thereby thoroughly defeating anyone trying to discover the original watermark.
for a while now. Does anyone realize the linked article is A YEAR OLD? It was written Jan 2, 2007. Subsequently, you can see a little back and forth with the accused (Wayan Vota) in the comments section through Jan 4, 2007. Then no one comments on the damn thing for *AN ENTIRE YEAR*. Then someone makes a comment on Jan 4, 2008, and the accusations fly again. Jan 12, 2008? Slashdot picks it up as if it's news. Problem is, Wayan quit Geekcorps a long time ago, so the article is no longer valid except that at one point in the past, there was an undisclosed conflict interest that no longer exists. At its height, you could say this was a bit shady and Wayan has most certainly continued to be an open critic of OLPC, but come on now, can we at least check the year before posting out-of-date crap like this in the future?
In all seriousness, anyone who's actually used an XO would be able to tell you that it's not gonna handle XP very well... I know Microsoft is trying their darndest to slim it down to a footprint that will run on the XO, but let me tell you... even with the exceedingly lean Fedora base, the XO is sluggish by today's standards. For example, it can't run Flash animations/videos with smooth playback -- not that the system really needs to be able to do any of this to achieve its pedagogic goals. I'm just trying to illustrate how monumental the effort will be for Microsoft to achieve suitable performance with this hardware. In the short-run, this effort *might* help OLPC sell to Nigeria and a few other countries who would prefer a more standard platform like Windows to teach kids on, but I believe political and bureaucratic barriers are an even greater concern for OLPC within these countries.
I think the renewed interest in Windows stems largely from the half-finished thought that is the current state of the Sugar UI. It needs a lot of attention. This should not come as a surprise to anyone who's developed an operating system UI before -- these things are big, complex and usually require years of development to achieve a user-friendly experience. Not to belittle what the Sugar devs did here, I just think OLPC bit off a piece bigger than it could chew in trying to revolutionize the user interface. IMHO, OLPC would be in less of a bind had they chosen to customize a more conventional, yet resource-stingy desktop interface like xfce rather than trying to create one from scratch using highly experimental, unproven interface design elements.
...Intel's behavior regarding the OLPC is reprehensible. Instead of offering cut-rate chips to support the project and potentially gain goodwill and new loyal customers worldwide they took the low road. Reprehensible? I dunno, I prefer inevitable. OLPC is like an antelope that made a pact with a lion not to eat it. What's that you say, the lion is nipping at the heels of the antelope despite the pact?Frankly, I put the blame mostly on Negroponte for being so naive at business to think that this agreement could work in the first place. Do you really think that the CEO of a large multinational corporation has much control over his thousands strong sales team -- especially if he orders them *not* to compete? I've seen similar scenarios play out many times in the past. Sales people are hired to bring in deals and get fired when they don't hit their quotas. Their compensation schemes generally don't care how or where they get the deals from, so that's the bottom line, regardless of lofty declarations made by upper management.
Thanks for all the interest in my new company!
some comments:
1) My new company *is* trying to explore the concepts of open hardware - and trying to figure out the right way to do it. I've been asking many people for advice on this: Richard Stallman, Eben Moglen, Larry Lessig, John Gilmore, Brewster Kahle, etc. We are struggling through it. Hardware is different from software - but how can we open it up?
2) Doesn't anyone want a 50 Euro laptop? I do. I'm not talking about designing last years product for next year. Other people can do that..I plan to continue to innovate and invent.
3) Finally: I'm not taking my inventions from OLPC - I'm licensing them from OLPC. Why: An inventor has a good chance of improving the price/performance of her inventions. Why restrict her access to them if our goal is lower cost computing for the developing world?
Posted by: Mary Lou Jepsen on January 01, 2008
Turns out Newton's laws *are* wrong. They just aren't wrong *enough* for it to make much of a difference to us when you're talking about for example, day-to-day human activities, most of which involve speeds much lower than the speed of light. For calculating speeds of airplanes and automobiles, Newton's laws are reasonable approximations -- but they are indeed wrong according to the world of relativity.
"It seems more likely to me that Collins' metric of return on money invested is the wrong way to measure greatness in a company."
Agreed. Furthermore, there's an underlying premise in GTG that greatness is a company that endures for a long period of time. Look at many of the companies that have been responsible for significant innovations... Guess what? Many of them have shot up like firecrackers and fizzled out quickly -- but not before pulling society forward in the process. Doesn't mean they're any less important or 'great'.
On a side note, the book strikes me as a dangerous exercise in data mining. He was bound to find some patterns that correlate with so-called 'greatness' just out of random chance, given enough historical data to crunch through... Just like if you look hard enough, you can find messages hidden in the bible (and Moby Dick apparently.) It's definitely an interesting study, but implementing his data-mined concepts is no guarantee of anything going forward... just ask Circuit City.
Did anyone bother to notice that your mobile and landline phone companies know *WAY* more about you than this program could ever hope to collect? I mean, these guys bill you for every call you make, know exactly who you're calling and for how long, have been known to allow just about anyone in law enforcement to wiretap your line for even the flimsiest premise, yet the Slashdot crowd is more concerned with an open-source-based PBX collecting some high-level meta-data from users in an opt-out fashion?
From tfa: "The United States -- the largest donor to the U.N. World Food program -- sends Africa corn, wheat, sorghum and soybeans. Aid agencies then have to hand out free or cheap American food instead of buying from African farmers. The cheap imported grain keeps Africans poor, and dependent on cheap imported grain."
Hey, what do you know? HANDOUTS DON'T WORK. They're a short-term fix that let rich folks live with less guilt, but they make the problem worse for the people they're claiming to help. OLPC may ultimately fail, but I'd much rather be known as one of the ones who at least tried to end the vicious cycle.
fiasco (f-s'k, -ä'sk)
n. pl. fiascoes or fiascos
A complete failure.
Aren't we jumping the gun a little bit there, Johnny?
We all know that everyone outside the US lives in mud and straw shacks and need nothing but rice handouts from us. Think of the children!
In all seriousness, the vast majority of children this laptop is aimed at have clothes, electricity and sufficient food to stay reasonably healthy... but generation after generation remain in relative poverty because they don't have access to the educational tools needed to make it in this world. The XO laptop aims at leveling the tables a little bit, that's all.
That's right, by spending $399 on a laptop for the Give One, Get One promotion, money that Dvorak would rather have me spend on rice, some child, somewhere will die as a result of my callous disregard for human life. Then again, I'm a pretty nasty person in general, so it won't come as a surprise to anyone who knows me that I would be aiming to increase global misery.
/sarcasm
Though I'm starting to think there is a silver lining to Dvorak's plan. Perhaps the best way to ensure extended suffering in the third world is to keep spoon feeding them rice. That way we can ensure that generation after generation will require handouts! Oh Dvorak, thank you for showing me the way!
That's cause Symantec acquired Peter Norton's company in 1990 in a mostly successful attempt to lend credibility to their crappy, resource-hogging security products.
but for most desktops and servers, at 6-8 watts idle and 10-12 watts when actively seeking, HDD power consumption typically represents 5% or less of the overall power consumption of a modern system. Good PR for Hitachi though.
If we ever build AI that's able to perform the kind of "intelligent thought" that we humans are capable of, then this is exactly the kind of thing we should expect to run into more and more. I've always contended that the closer we come to building computer circuits that mimic the processing within the human brain, the less that output will be what we generally consider to be computer-like (logical, predictable, mathematical).
How in the hell could DRM prevent this? Actually, it doesn't have to. The industry can enforce Draconian licenses to prevent streamripping. Check out Pandora Radio. Essentially, they are an Internet radio station that respresent the future of what Net radio is likely to become. They give you some freedom to hear the genre of music you like, but zero control over exactly what you will hear at any given time -- making streamripping to obtain certain songs extremely tedious and out of reach for all but the most dedicated pirates.
They accomplish this through these restrictions:
1. They stop you from specifically being able to play a particular song or artist. Instead they'll create a station that you can customize based on genre, that will from time to time randomly play a song from the artist you chose.
2. You can't programatically find out what's playing. The radio player itself is flash-based, no handy Shoutcast stream tags here.
3. Even if you and a friend listen to the same custom station at the same time, both will be randomly playing through a different part of that station's universe --> no predictability.
4. You have limited ability to skip songs (something like 7 per hour).
5. You can't go back and listen to a song that's already played (fully or partially).
6. You can't restart a song that's just started playing.
7. You can't tell what going to play next.
Aside from these restrictions, it's actually a pretty cool idea and I listen to Pandora from time to time, but the music license effectively makes it so that there's simply no viable way to record the songs you want unless you're willing to sit there for hours, manually chopping up and labeling audio.
RSS helps sites by attracting busy people like me who don't have time to surf a dozen sites to find an interesting article. But at the same time it's killing them, because people like me surgically link in to read an article and then close the tab immediately, never so much as considering looking at other features of their site. (It probably doesn't help that I use adblock and overlay all Flash content with control buttons, but that's beside the point.)
I skim approximately three mainstream news sources, a handful of blogs and a few independent news sites for RSS headlines that catch my attention. I spend the rest of my online time reading select forums that are mostly inhabited by people who present what I believe to be intelligent/interesting discourse (yes, believe it or not, that *does* include Slashdot from time to time).
Guess how much time I spend surfing random links and going page to page within a site using their fancy ajax navigation elements? I don't know what the percentage is, but pretty close to zero. 40 page article about Nvidia's latest Geforce gizmo? Skip to conclusion, then go to three of their competitors' sites to see if they concur. There's just too much damn noise and information out there to do it any other way. I use RSS, del.icio.us and a few simple techniques to reduce the web into my own personal CliffsNotes. If I'm representative of any significant segment of the population, then no wonder mainstream news sites are hurting.
Ever wonder why your cat has no interest in sweets? Never developed the taste buds. Its ancestors' diets simply didn't require it. So why did we humans develop sweet-sensing taste buds? Well, so we'd be attracted to consuming fruit, of course. And why would our ancestor's have been better off eating fruit? Well, it was probably a key nutrient pathway for many of the vitamins and minerals that are so crucial to our body's processes. For the most part, it appears to have worked out well enough for our 'primitive' ancestors.
Fast forward to today, however, and you can see that our society has learned to exploit our own genetic predisposition to enjoy sweet things. From the obvious things like cookies, cakes, candy and soft drinks, to the less obvious foods like marinades, dressings, sauces, TV dinners, soups and breakfast cereals (even many of the so-called "healthy" ones.) Many of these products are chock full of refined sugars, mostly in the form of the cheap and readily available high fructose corn syrup.
But it's not the corn lobby that's to blame. They're just the latest and most evident in a long history of exploiters. Refined sweets are so universally accepted by most cultures living on the planet today that it's practically impossible to see them for what they are. Kids are taught from a young age to enjoy the taste of refined sweets, rather than fruit. Don't we all literally have a good laugh when someone calls fruit "nature's candy"!? And what kind of sick f*ck gives out apples at Hallowe'en anyway? And don't forget: "C is for Cookie that's good enough for me!"
And we pay the price, in the form of Diabetes and a multitude of other disorders which can at least partially be blamed on the ease with which we substitute the delicate taste of fresh fruit for the overpoweringly sweet taste of nutrient-less concentrated corn syrup.
the RIAArdvark came across a Black Widow... who ate it for lunch. Gulp!
I meant -270 degrees C.