I hope they don't waste it on their Turbo Memory technology. That's something that looked good on paper, but really didn't work as expected. But I can't wait until we get solid state hard drives of a decent size. Maybe in a few years, we'll have 100GB flash hard drives, which will make laptops last longer on its battery...
My everyday work laptop only has a 32Gb disk, it seems to be enough for corporate purposes. I would not use it to develop code unless I was in an airplane and really bored and I can't store my iTunes catalog on it, but thats what an iPod is for. I might use it to do a really lightweight edit of a podcast but after using a 30" screen as my every day monitor I really find the 12" laptop effort too piddly to bother with at this point.
In fact I can't really see what I would do that needs more than 32Gb but less than 500Gb or so. 32Gb fills up pretty quick if you are going to start dumping out flash memory from the cameras or doing video editing.
I'm shocked that the military would try to edit Gitmo facts out of Wikipedia. Don't they know that pages' history is saved, so that improper deletions can be easily restored? Don't they know that there are dozens, if not hundreds, of editors paranoid enough about the Bush administration and war on terror to monitor the Gitmo page?
There are plenty of POV pushers who get away with it. During Huricane Katrina there was a team of GOP staffers diligently removing any material that mentioned the fact that the federal govt. was asleep at the switch. And quite often you find that the GOP propaganda is being spread from a military IP address. Seems like all they are allowed to listen to in the military is Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.
Some edits from Congress are actually useful, the staffers usually get things like the biography right and usually on the ball with graphiti removal. But its pretty hard to scrub the page of any well known politician. Katherine Harris tried to have the Cruella Deville stuff taken out of her article but it never worked, the people were just not subtle enough.
The POV peddling that sticks is in the subtler edits, like the guy who tried to turn 'First Responder' into a page redefining what a first responder is to fit with some wingnut conspiracy theory.
wait a minute...a soldier putting his life on the line for doing his job? Shit, that never happens.
I found the asumption that Wikileaks was pro-US was somewhat naive. There are plenty of folk out there on the Internet, most of them are not US citizens and a vanishingly small percentage of them approve of US run gulags.
It should be pretty obvious that anyone who has been involved in the Bush administration torture policy has become a target for assasination and worse. That is one of the many reasons why civilized countries do not engage in such activities, people do not forget. The torture of US prisoners in Vietnam created a grudge that continued for decades. Not so long ago there were still people peddling stories about the MIA-POWs still being kept captive.
No kidding. I'm from Western Oregon; we have a ten-month rainy season. I've got chains if I need 'em, but mostly I just keep my tires full and use antifreeze as needed.
You will find at some point in time that you fall in love with a woman for more than her looks and ability and willingness to give you sex whenever you want. I know this sounds crazy but it's really true ( imo, though I'm only 18 so judge for yourself ),
I find it somewhat of a mystery why anyone would think that the story is in the least unlikely. There are already people who have fallen in love with their sex dolls. These folk dress them, drive them to movies in their cars, etc. etc.
Of course there are some folk who are going to prefer a robo-wife to the real thing, just like there are women today who prefer a vibrator. And there are going to be some folk for whom it isn't exactly a matter of choice, particularly as the supply of third world brides dries up.
Rather more interesting is going to be the impact on prostitution law. We can imagine that some countries are going to have a liberal approach while others are going to be proscriptive.
And that is before you consider the implications for blackmail. After all the dolls are going to have CCD devices for eyes, so how is anyone to know they are not recording?
Isn't this already solved through public key cryptography (i.e. message signing in PGP/GPG)?
Its what SSL is for.
Now we could have done message level security like some people proposed, but we didn't. SSL will defeat this type of attack fine, even with a domain validated cert. A self signed cert could be intercepted and replaced by this type of scheme - unless an SSH like scheme was used to check to see if the cert was the same as seen last time or a DKIM like domain key was used.
If Rogers really wants to contact the user in this way they should redirect the Web page to their own Web server just like WiFi connections do. Mixing their content into other people's pages sounds like a good way to provoke lawsuits.
Yes Ogg is completely patent-free. Thats the entire point of it.
That may be the intent but unless you can prove that the entire algorithm was published in full twenty years ago you can never be sure. And even then you cannot be sure that someone won't get a submarine patent that applies to ogg.
If you had had any involvement with patent lawsuits as I have you would know that infringement claims can be utterly ludicrous. The judge certainly won't understand the technology. It is pretty easy to spend $5 million defending a case against a patent that does not conceivably apply to your product.
In the case of GIF we did not know that the UNISYS patent even existed until after we started using it in the Web. Nobody knew that the algorithm was encumbered when Compuserve designed it because the patent application was still secret. There are still continuations issuing from patent applications from that era. Some of them qualify for a full 17 year term after issue.
If you take a look at the MPEG-LA list of patents covering MPEG you will soon realize that it would take someone several years to work out whether the claims might apply to Ogg. I know that the idea is to create something that is unencumbered but setting out to do that and achieving that goal are two different things.
Not as funny as the only person in this thread that actually read the article, which was about Nokia's complaints over Ogg+Theora as a video standard getting modded troll for pointing out that all of the other random drivel about the superior audio format is completely irrelevant...
Well thats par for the course here, slashy tends to be more of a fanzine.
I read the Nokia paper, the summary seems to misrepresent it. Some of the points were actually ones that I had made at the W3C AC plenary: Some of the older audio and video formats are comming out of patent soon, it might be nice to know precisely when. I would like to see an unencumbered standard CODEC that all browsers support, that does not necessarily have to be Ogg if MPEG2 and AC3 are due to expire in the near future.
I know that ACC and H.264 offer better compression and in fact I expect them to be used to deliver the bulk of Web content. The trick is how to ensure that the cost of using these technologies is proportional to the value of the bandwidth that they save (a few hundred million dollars) rather than the value of the applications they enable (a few hundred billion dollars).
One of the somewhat frustrating problems here is that useful comparisons of compression quality are pretty hard to come by. One comparison I read disqualified Ogg Theora because it did not compress The Matrix to fit on a CD. In other words a totally arbitrary cut off point. Why choose that movie, who cares about the capacity of a CDROM?
Quite a few MPEG2 patents have expired already, it would take a lot of work to find out when they all expire though. Main question would be what happens with submarine patents at this point.
The reason I prefer this approach is that I just don't think that anyone can invent a new video compression scheme and be sure that it is unencumbered. We thought that GIF was unencumbered when we made it the standard image format for the Web, turned out that we were wrong but there was no way we could have known at the time. I don't like chosing Ogg for the same reason, I would prefer to be absolutely sure we have an unencumbered spec which means choosing something obsolete.
The problem with the phone is not that it's a phone, but that the service provider purposefully locks it down and restricts access to developer tools. The XO most emphatically does not have this problem! In fact, it's the opposite: everything about it was explicitly designed to be easy to develop for (even by the children themselves), and that is why it is useful.
It might have been designed, but it certainly has not been tested.
Negroponte has a model of the world where super boffins like himself decide what is good for the rest of us. His vision of the future for the West is the automated refrigerator, why anyone would want such a thing, what needs it would serve just don't occur to him as being important questions.
So the kids can program their computer themselves. Well thats great. But there are less than a million XO laptops and over a billion PCs. There are almost a hundred times more Linux boxes about than XO boxes. That means that the network effect is going to work against these people. Even if all the skilled XO programers spent all their time converting existing Linux code to work on the XO there would only be a small fraction of the software available on mainstream Linux machines and that in turn is much less than that available for Windows.
There is another model on offer here, instead of insisting on one machine per student, one or two machines per village. Nicky's retort that we don't talk about community pencils is rubbish. First each XO machine costs more than is spent on educating an entire village - yes pencils are a scarce commodity that is often shared. But more importantly sharing a computer is exactly how most people of my generation had to learn.
I went to an elite private school in England, there was one computer for the whole school. The idea of one computer per desk in the computer lab did not come in until much later. This was back when the state of the art was the PET 2001 series. The state schools didn't have a computer at all then.
So during break time six of us would sit round the machine and take it in turns to type. We used to write programs together. This was the most efficient way to learn as none of us knew how to program (nor did any of the staff).
I know that Nicky has a bunch of features that he thinks are vital to the success of the project in the third world. But what does he know? Why should the needs of rural Nigrea be comparable to those of Lagos? Why do we have to make several hundred thousand of the macines before finding out what is really needed?
Dvorak's criticism is ignorant, people in the third world do recognize that education is the way to get out of their current situation. But Negroponte's world view is too dictatorial to do any good.
Hey, I hate python (did Guido learn nothing from the Makefile debacle?), but I can't imagine that the XO kids will learn nothing from a system designed with a very intelligent architecture, with security designed in from the ground up, with access to source for everything and with a focus on learning. I imagine that children who learn about computers from an XO would be much better developers than kids raised on Windows.
Yeah, give 'em a Lisp machine.
The issue isn't just learning programming, its being able to take advantage of software from other sources. Windows beats Linux there. Just as Linux beats XO by a mile.
None of us here are likely to be writing stuff for the XO. Some of the handful of folk in the West who have bought XOs will write stuff for it.
None of the computer aided learning software that is being written in the West is being written for the XO. Its all going to be written for either Windows or Mac.
There is a passage in Fiasco, the story of the US invasion of Iraq which gives a similar tale. In the aftermath of the invasion the US put a thirty something with no experience of either the Arab world or financial markets in charge of restarting the Baghdad stock exchange. After his plans to leap forward to a fully electronic exchange collapsed the Arab traders did it their way - returning to the whiteboards they had used for years and had served them well.
Yes it is great fun to try to perpetrate a great leap forward. Only the results tend to fall well short of hopes. Depending on the power wielded and the autocracy of the leader the results can range from mere fiasco to a Maoist cultural revolution.
Did anyone go out and ask the third world what they really wanted? If they had said a Linux PC for $200 or a Windows box for $210 were they an option? By ask I don't mean ask a bunch of politicians, I mean ask the intended end users, give them options, &ct.
I know the folk at OLPC are well meaning, I know some of them personally, I shared an office with Jim Gettys for a year. Perhaps I should have taken more notice and been more critical earlier. The result does not give me good vibes.
The XO, on the other hand, is very unlikely to put local chip fabs and ISVs out of business. Instead, it will facilitate learning and communication.
The problem with the XO is not that it competes with food, its the fact that we seem to be deliberately building out the developing world on an incompatible technology infrastructure.
There is not going to be much demand in the West for XO programming skils. Its a bit like the folk who got a BBC computer rather than a ZX Spectrum, muc more powerful but not the standard so much less useful.
OK so the thing runs Linux, well so does my cell phone and fat lot of good that would do for learning programming. The XO is not a standard platform, its not a standard platform with extra stuff. Its a platform written by MIT folk.
This might not have mattered if Negroponte had met his original target price. But they missed and the price is not far short of the price of a conventional machine but with a huge number of compromises.
I have always thought Negroponte somewhat on the whacky side. He seems to be oblivious of the iron law of IT: standard is cheaper than non-standard. It does not matter much how much something costs today, wait one technology cycle and what was the bleeding edge is the commodity item, wait two cycles and its on closeout. Keyboards with PS/2 connectors can be bought really cheap now, only problem is finding a computer they will work with as many modern machines only have USB.
I bought a desktop from Dell complete with an LCD display for $400 three years ago. The same spec machine could be built for $200 today.
Still one positive outcome of the OLPC failure is that the conventional manufacturers have been forced to compete at that price point.
The big issue was, I think, that if they had PDF in MSOffice, they could artificially deprectate it by having a 'This format may not save all the features of this document, use ours instead'. That was the groklaw suspicion I recall. Everyone else says 'use this, use ours, whatever you want', which does not harm Adobe.
Oh really? You don't think that Adobe's actual concern was that virtually everyone who buys Adobe Acrobat today buys it to produce PDF documents from Microsoft Office and that this market would pretty much vanish overnight if producing output in PDF was a standard Office feature, just like producing documents in HTML, XML, RDF, &ct, &ct is a standard feature?
PDF writers for applications that Adobe does not support anyway do not threaten Adobe's market. Extending Office to support PDF does.
OK so why is this good but the Microsoft format is bad?
Fact is that some proprietary formats become defacto standards. If the proprietary owners are willing to make them more open then they should be recognized as official standards.
Apple used AT&T as a launch pad to roll out the iPhone. The word it out and it isn't some conceptual technology anymore. Apple would benefit by cutting its ties with AT&T at this point and selling an unlocked phone. They'd lose the visual voicemail, but who cares.
True, Apple does not need AT&T, but it does like the premium that AT&T pays for the iPhone exclusive. At some point Apple and AT&T are going to part ways but not for another 18 months at the least and probably not until Apple is in a position to help end the subsidized phone retail model entirely and sell unlocked phones at commodity prices (plus the Apple style premium)
I suspect that the issue is not a dispute between Apple and AT&T but rather an attempt to manage expectations and demand. Apple received a lot of criticism for their early price cut. AT&T does not want to be caught out again. Priming people in advance of the switch helps avoid another issue.
Another likely motive for AT&T is that they are facing a massive excess of demand for their EDGE network but its their 3G network that they want to expand. The really impressive feat in the iPhone rollout is the fact that they have kept up with demand.
Apple's big challenge is how to build the iPhones fast enough to meet the Xmas demand. They might not be adverse to seeing some of that demand delayed somewhat.
Public Domain is good for shorter snippets that one might throw away one a forum or the like, but something of a more project-y character is probably better off with a license of some sort. The exact boundary is, of course, up to personal preference.
We deliberately put the source codes for the original Web browser and client library into the public domain in order to create the maximum chance of growth.
At the time there was no Apache license and the GPL poison pill simply did not meet our needs. At the time we were actively lobbying Microsoft and IBM to come on board with the Web.
The only regret I have about it is that if we had had a license it would not have been possible for NCSA to put out the early releases of Mosaic which consisted of 75% or more of CERN code without a single mention of CERN or even the Web in the documentation. I would probably recommend that people think about the attribution issue carefully, the behavior of NCSA is the main reason that the Web received very shabby treatment from CERN, in the early days NCSA was getting all the press attention and they simply were not mentioning the fact that the ideas had come from Tim.
I don't think this applies in Bernstein's case. Nor would I be too concerned about possibly insecure extensions. There are some open source projects that have successfully maintained a very strict security process over ten years or more.
I know it's hard, but try to read the article. They don't say that homicide is the only way that violent video games are harmful.
I know its hard, but try to use your brain. If the article states that video game violence leads to effects almost as bad as smoking that statement should be defensible according to some objective measure.
If you have a health problem that is causing 400,000 deaths a year there is simply no imaginable non fatal effect that could be comparable.
I tried to locate the paper referred to in TFA. Not available yet. When someone issues a press release on a paper without making the paper itself available you can be sure that they are a scoundrel. What they are trying to do is to put a claim out in the public space that cannot be refuted because they haven't made the case to support their claim.
So fools in the media then report the claim and it becomes accepted as fact despite the fact that no facts or even substantive arguments were made to back it.
17,000 (homicides per year in USA) is not 'almost' 400,000 (deaths due to smoking).
The number of deaths in which violent video games played a part is unknown but certainly much smaller than domestics or drugs. If the victims of the Virginia Tech shootings were due to video games (an unproven assumption) that would make it 1 to 20,000 or so.
Four orders of magnitude difference does not mean 'almost'.
You're assuming that the only way to measure harm is murder rate. That's short-sighted and inaccurate.
We're talking about increased aggression here, which does not necessarily translate into homicide rates.
Yes but to claim that the effects of video games are worse than smoking that causes 400,000 deaths in the US each year and ten times that worldwide, seems to be stretching it somewhat?
Prohibition increased the power of organised crime and, while it's dropped since, rates never returned to earlier levels.
True and another big difference is the knock on effects of slavery and seggregation. Having created a much larger underclass that was forcibly separated from mainstream society, the US has been a much moreviolent society. Other important differences are the lack of a US welfare state..
Britons just don't kill each other much; per-capita, Americans kill each other more with knives than Britons kill each other by any means. Meanwhile, gun crime in Britain is growing rapidly as criminals have few problems getting hold of guns to prey on a disarmed population.
I have a hard time beleiving that this is true per capita. Maybe there are 700 kife murders in the US but certainly not 20% of all murders which is what it would have to be for the rates to be equivalent.
And yes, UK criminals do find t easier than they should to get guns, they mostly come from the USA. As for the effects of being disarmed, I used to have to check under the car every morning in case the Irish terrorists that Rudy Giuliani raised money for had planted a bomb under it. Exactly how does carrying a gun help protect one from a car bomb? Likewise in any situation where you are facing an armed criminal in the process of a crime the chances that they have their weapon drawn and you do not is much more likely than the reverse.
If we want to get worried about violence in society the blowback from the Bush era torture policy is going to be much worse. Just wait till we see a run of serial killers who were former CIA interrogation specialists.
So even in the US you are more likely to die from smoking than be murdered.
And thats not taking into account the fact that not everyone smokes. The number of people who play violent video games is surely higher in most younger demographics.
That still leaves the US with a murder rate that is about five times higher than the UK after adjusting for the larger population. There is certainly not a major difference in the number of people playing violent video games. In fact back in the 80s the UK had more personal computers per head of population than any other country. Many of the top games come from the UK.
I am sure that you might be able to crunch the numbers and come up with some sort of effect due to violent games. But to say that violent games have a bigger impact than smoking is just utterly ridiculous. Smoking worldwide causes more deaths than 9.11 every single day. In fact smoking killed more people in the 20th century than all the wars of the 20th century combined. To use smoking as a comparison demonstrates a profound indifference to the facts.
I'm just waiting for the study that shows that exposure to porn makes people less violent. Can you imagine the response here in America if THAT were found to be true?
Lets see, violent crime in the UK is pretty steady at 650-900 homicides a year for a country of 55 million. The recent trend has been sharply down despite 52 homicide victims of 7/7. Of those the vast majority are domestics, killing sprees are pretty much a once a decade affair.
I don't think that you could honestly attribute more than 50 or so homicides a year to the effects of computer games in the UK if you took the most liberal interpretation imaginable.
Allowing for the fact that ASH might well overstate the case somewhat the fact is that we don't have a single UK case where computer games are confirmed as a major factor. So I would be pretty confident in stating that smoking is at least a thousand times more dangerous than video games and the evidence points to the difference being more like a hundred thousand.
So let us imagine what the difference between the UK and the US could be. Oh yes the fact that you let every loony and criminal arm themselves to the teeth with cheap firearms. The fact that this is not even mentioned as a possibly significant issue in the article kinda shows that the entire study is worthless. Or is the idea here that controlling fictional materials in which guns play a role is somehow more politically practical than controlling actual guns?
You can tell that its a fit up job in the first sentence "After reviewing more than 50 years of research on the impact of violence in the media,". In other words this is not an objective study, its a fishing expedition through existing research. Lets take a look at his bibliography. Does not exactly look like the guy is a disinterested party here.
Sure lets talk about controlling violent video games, right after the US adopts the UK gun control laws.
Someone mod this parent up, it actually has some useful info.
The point I am making here is that yes, we do know rather more about making nuclear power safe today from an engineering point of view. The problem is that we have not progressed in our ability to establish political controls. Anyone want to trust President George 'Waterboarding' Bush with oversight of new nuclear power?
I don't consider gravity drop control rods as being very fail safe, at best its active fail safe: Something has to move. Passive failsafe is the standard to judge designs by. And I fully agree that CANDU is not perfect, it is also a 40 year old design.
I don't think that we should be building out new nuclear power at this stage. But I think that we definitely should be investing in developing alternative nuclear power designs. Otherwise what is going to happen is that we will get to a crunch point and embark on a crash program of building nuclear power stations to the discredited 1950s design and end up with all the same problems of reprocessing, waste and a real risk of catastrophe.
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Problems exist to be solved.
The Eye-Fi is an alternative solution.
Now you can watch Tristan Taormino anywhere.
So? I have not attempted to breed with Anna Nichole Smith, that does not mean that I am a different species.
Question, which was larger, the number of Californians wo ran for Governor or the number who claimed paternity of the child?
My everyday work laptop only has a 32Gb disk, it seems to be enough for corporate purposes. I would not use it to develop code unless I was in an airplane and really bored and I can't store my iTunes catalog on it, but thats what an iPod is for. I might use it to do a really lightweight edit of a podcast but after using a 30" screen as my every day monitor I really find the 12" laptop effort too piddly to bother with at this point.
In fact I can't really see what I would do that needs more than 32Gb but less than 500Gb or so. 32Gb fills up pretty quick if you are going to start dumping out flash memory from the cameras or doing video editing.
There are plenty of POV pushers who get away with it. During Huricane Katrina there was a team of GOP staffers diligently removing any material that mentioned the fact that the federal govt. was asleep at the switch. And quite often you find that the GOP propaganda is being spread from a military IP address. Seems like all they are allowed to listen to in the military is Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.
Some edits from Congress are actually useful, the staffers usually get things like the biography right and usually on the ball with graphiti removal. But its pretty hard to scrub the page of any well known politician. Katherine Harris tried to have the Cruella Deville stuff taken out of her article but it never worked, the people were just not subtle enough.
The POV peddling that sticks is in the subtler edits, like the guy who tried to turn 'First Responder' into a page redefining what a first responder is to fit with some wingnut conspiracy theory.
I found the asumption that Wikileaks was pro-US was somewhat naive. There are plenty of folk out there on the Internet, most of them are not US citizens and a vanishingly small percentage of them approve of US run gulags.
It should be pretty obvious that anyone who has been involved in the Bush administration torture policy has become a target for assasination and worse. That is one of the many reasons why civilized countries do not engage in such activities, people do not forget. The torture of US prisoners in Vietnam created a grudge that continued for decades. Not so long ago there were still people peddling stories about the MIA-POWs still being kept captive.
You put anti-freeze in your tires???
I find it somewhat of a mystery why anyone would think that the story is in the least unlikely. There are already people who have fallen in love with their sex dolls. These folk dress them, drive them to movies in their cars, etc. etc.
Of course there are some folk who are going to prefer a robo-wife to the real thing, just like there are women today who prefer a vibrator. And there are going to be some folk for whom it isn't exactly a matter of choice, particularly as the supply of third world brides dries up.
Rather more interesting is going to be the impact on prostitution law. We can imagine that some countries are going to have a liberal approach while others are going to be proscriptive.
And that is before you consider the implications for blackmail. After all the dolls are going to have CCD devices for eyes, so how is anyone to know they are not recording?
Its what SSL is for.
Now we could have done message level security like some people proposed, but we didn't. SSL will defeat this type of attack fine, even with a domain validated cert. A self signed cert could be intercepted and replaced by this type of scheme - unless an SSH like scheme was used to check to see if the cert was the same as seen last time or a DKIM like domain key was used.
If Rogers really wants to contact the user in this way they should redirect the Web page to their own Web server just like WiFi connections do. Mixing their content into other people's pages sounds like a good way to provoke lawsuits.
That may be the intent but unless you can prove that the entire algorithm was published in full twenty years ago you can never be sure. And even then you cannot be sure that someone won't get a submarine patent that applies to ogg.
If you had had any involvement with patent lawsuits as I have you would know that infringement claims can be utterly ludicrous. The judge certainly won't understand the technology. It is pretty easy to spend $5 million defending a case against a patent that does not conceivably apply to your product.
In the case of GIF we did not know that the UNISYS patent even existed until after we started using it in the Web. Nobody knew that the algorithm was encumbered when Compuserve designed it because the patent application was still secret. There are still continuations issuing from patent applications from that era. Some of them qualify for a full 17 year term after issue.
If you take a look at the MPEG-LA list of patents covering MPEG you will soon realize that it would take someone several years to work out whether the claims might apply to Ogg. I know that the idea is to create something that is unencumbered but setting out to do that and achieving that goal are two different things.
Well thats par for the course here, slashy tends to be more of a fanzine.
I read the Nokia paper, the summary seems to misrepresent it. Some of the points were actually ones that I had made at the W3C AC plenary: Some of the older audio and video formats are comming out of patent soon, it might be nice to know precisely when. I would like to see an unencumbered standard CODEC that all browsers support, that does not necessarily have to be Ogg if MPEG2 and AC3 are due to expire in the near future.
I know that ACC and H.264 offer better compression and in fact I expect them to be used to deliver the bulk of Web content. The trick is how to ensure that the cost of using these technologies is proportional to the value of the bandwidth that they save (a few hundred million dollars) rather than the value of the applications they enable (a few hundred billion dollars).
One of the somewhat frustrating problems here is that useful comparisons of compression quality are pretty hard to come by. One comparison I read disqualified Ogg Theora because it did not compress The Matrix to fit on a CD. In other words a totally arbitrary cut off point. Why choose that movie, who cares about the capacity of a CDROM?
Quite a few MPEG2 patents have expired already, it would take a lot of work to find out when they all expire though. Main question would be what happens with submarine patents at this point.
The reason I prefer this approach is that I just don't think that anyone can invent a new video compression scheme and be sure that it is unencumbered. We thought that GIF was unencumbered when we made it the standard image format for the Web, turned out that we were wrong but there was no way we could have known at the time. I don't like chosing Ogg for the same reason, I would prefer to be absolutely sure we have an unencumbered spec which means choosing something obsolete.
It might have been designed, but it certainly has not been tested.
Negroponte has a model of the world where super boffins like himself decide what is good for the rest of us. His vision of the future for the West is the automated refrigerator, why anyone would want such a thing, what needs it would serve just don't occur to him as being important questions.
So the kids can program their computer themselves. Well thats great. But there are less than a million XO laptops and over a billion PCs. There are almost a hundred times more Linux boxes about than XO boxes. That means that the network effect is going to work against these people. Even if all the skilled XO programers spent all their time converting existing Linux code to work on the XO there would only be a small fraction of the software available on mainstream Linux machines and that in turn is much less than that available for Windows.
There is another model on offer here, instead of insisting on one machine per student, one or two machines per village. Nicky's retort that we don't talk about community pencils is rubbish. First each XO machine costs more than is spent on educating an entire village - yes pencils are a scarce commodity that is often shared. But more importantly sharing a computer is exactly how most people of my generation had to learn.
I went to an elite private school in England, there was one computer for the whole school. The idea of one computer per desk in the computer lab did not come in until much later. This was back when the state of the art was the PET 2001 series. The state schools didn't have a computer at all then.
So during break time six of us would sit round the machine and take it in turns to type. We used to write programs together. This was the most efficient way to learn as none of us knew how to program (nor did any of the staff).
I know that Nicky has a bunch of features that he thinks are vital to the success of the project in the third world. But what does he know? Why should the needs of rural Nigrea be comparable to those of Lagos? Why do we have to make several hundred thousand of the macines before finding out what is really needed?
Dvorak's criticism is ignorant, people in the third world do recognize that education is the way to get out of their current situation. But Negroponte's world view is too dictatorial to do any good.
Yeah, give 'em a Lisp machine.
The issue isn't just learning programming, its being able to take advantage of software from other sources. Windows beats Linux there. Just as Linux beats XO by a mile.
None of us here are likely to be writing stuff for the XO. Some of the handful of folk in the West who have bought XOs will write stuff for it.
None of the computer aided learning software that is being written in the West is being written for the XO. Its all going to be written for either Windows or Mac.
There is a passage in Fiasco, the story of the US invasion of Iraq which gives a similar tale. In the aftermath of the invasion the US put a thirty something with no experience of either the Arab world or financial markets in charge of restarting the Baghdad stock exchange. After his plans to leap forward to a fully electronic exchange collapsed the Arab traders did it their way - returning to the whiteboards they had used for years and had served them well.
Yes it is great fun to try to perpetrate a great leap forward. Only the results tend to fall well short of hopes. Depending on the power wielded and the autocracy of the leader the results can range from mere fiasco to a Maoist cultural revolution.
Did anyone go out and ask the third world what they really wanted? If they had said a Linux PC for $200 or a Windows box for $210 were they an option? By ask I don't mean ask a bunch of politicians, I mean ask the intended end users, give them options, &ct.
I know the folk at OLPC are well meaning, I know some of them personally, I shared an office with Jim Gettys for a year. Perhaps I should have taken more notice and been more critical earlier. The result does not give me good vibes.
The problem with the XO is not that it competes with food, its the fact that we seem to be deliberately building out the developing world on an incompatible technology infrastructure.
There is not going to be much demand in the West for XO programming skils. Its a bit like the folk who got a BBC computer rather than a ZX Spectrum, muc more powerful but not the standard so much less useful.
OK so the thing runs Linux, well so does my cell phone and fat lot of good that would do for learning programming. The XO is not a standard platform, its not a standard platform with extra stuff. Its a platform written by MIT folk.
This might not have mattered if Negroponte had met his original target price. But they missed and the price is not far short of the price of a conventional machine but with a huge number of compromises.
I have always thought Negroponte somewhat on the whacky side. He seems to be oblivious of the iron law of IT: standard is cheaper than non-standard. It does not matter much how much something costs today, wait one technology cycle and what was the bleeding edge is the commodity item, wait two cycles and its on closeout. Keyboards with PS/2 connectors can be bought really cheap now, only problem is finding a computer they will work with as many modern machines only have USB.
I bought a desktop from Dell complete with an LCD display for $400 three years ago. The same spec machine could be built for $200 today.
Still one positive outcome of the OLPC failure is that the conventional manufacturers have been forced to compete at that price point.
Oh really? You don't think that Adobe's actual concern was that virtually everyone who buys Adobe Acrobat today buys it to produce PDF documents from Microsoft Office and that this market would pretty much vanish overnight if producing output in PDF was a standard Office feature, just like producing documents in HTML, XML, RDF, &ct, &ct is a standard feature?
PDF writers for applications that Adobe does not support anyway do not threaten Adobe's market. Extending Office to support PDF does.
Putin is not my cup of tea.
I don't like it laced with Polonium
Fact is that some proprietary formats become defacto standards. If the proprietary owners are willing to make them more open then they should be recognized as official standards.
True, Apple does not need AT&T, but it does like the premium that AT&T pays for the iPhone exclusive. At some point Apple and AT&T are going to part ways but not for another 18 months at the least and probably not until Apple is in a position to help end the subsidized phone retail model entirely and sell unlocked phones at commodity prices (plus the Apple style premium)
I suspect that the issue is not a dispute between Apple and AT&T but rather an attempt to manage expectations and demand. Apple received a lot of criticism for their early price cut. AT&T does not want to be caught out again. Priming people in advance of the switch helps avoid another issue.
Another likely motive for AT&T is that they are facing a massive excess of demand for their EDGE network but its their 3G network that they want to expand. The really impressive feat in the iPhone rollout is the fact that they have kept up with demand.
Apple's big challenge is how to build the iPhones fast enough to meet the Xmas demand. They might not be adverse to seeing some of that demand delayed somewhat.
We deliberately put the source codes for the original Web browser and client library into the public domain in order to create the maximum chance of growth.
At the time there was no Apache license and the GPL poison pill simply did not meet our needs. At the time we were actively lobbying Microsoft and IBM to come on board with the Web.
The only regret I have about it is that if we had had a license it would not have been possible for NCSA to put out the early releases of Mosaic which consisted of 75% or more of CERN code without a single mention of CERN or even the Web in the documentation. I would probably recommend that people think about the attribution issue carefully, the behavior of NCSA is the main reason that the Web received very shabby treatment from CERN, in the early days NCSA was getting all the press attention and they simply were not mentioning the fact that the ideas had come from Tim.
I don't think this applies in Bernstein's case. Nor would I be too concerned about possibly insecure extensions. There are some open source projects that have successfully maintained a very strict security process over ten years or more.
I know its hard, but try to use your brain. If the article states that video game violence leads to effects almost as bad as smoking that statement should be defensible according to some objective measure.
If you have a health problem that is causing 400,000 deaths a year there is simply no imaginable non fatal effect that could be comparable.
I tried to locate the paper referred to in TFA. Not available yet. When someone issues a press release on a paper without making the paper itself available you can be sure that they are a scoundrel. What they are trying to do is to put a claim out in the public space that cannot be refuted because they haven't made the case to support their claim.
So fools in the media then report the claim and it becomes accepted as fact despite the fact that no facts or even substantive arguments were made to back it.
17,000 (homicides per year in USA) is not 'almost' 400,000 (deaths due to smoking).
The number of deaths in which violent video games played a part is unknown but certainly much smaller than domestics or drugs. If the victims of the Virginia Tech shootings were due to video games (an unproven assumption) that would make it 1 to 20,000 or so.
Four orders of magnitude difference does not mean 'almost'.
Yes but to claim that the effects of video games are worse than smoking that causes 400,000 deaths in the US each year and ten times that worldwide, seems to be stretching it somewhat?
True and another big difference is the knock on effects of slavery and seggregation. Having created a much larger underclass that was forcibly separated from mainstream society, the US has been a much moreviolent society. Other important differences are the lack of a US welfare state..
Britons just don't kill each other much; per-capita, Americans kill each other more with knives than Britons kill each other by any means. Meanwhile, gun crime in Britain is growing rapidly as criminals have few problems getting hold of guns to prey on a disarmed population.
I have a hard time beleiving that this is true per capita. Maybe there are 700 kife murders in the US but certainly not 20% of all murders which is what it would have to be for the rates to be equivalent.
And yes, UK criminals do find t easier than they should to get guns, they mostly come from the USA. As for the effects of being disarmed, I used to have to check under the car every morning in case the Irish terrorists that Rudy Giuliani raised money for had planted a bomb under it. Exactly how does carrying a gun help protect one from a car bomb? Likewise in any situation where you are facing an armed criminal in the process of a crime the chances that they have their weapon drawn and you do not is much more likely than the reverse.
If we want to get worried about violence in society the blowback from the Bush era torture policy is going to be much worse. Just wait till we see a run of serial killers who were former CIA interrogation specialists.
So even in the US you are more likely to die from smoking than be murdered.
And thats not taking into account the fact that not everyone smokes. The number of people who play violent video games is surely higher in most younger demographics.
That still leaves the US with a murder rate that is about five times higher than the UK after adjusting for the larger population. There is certainly not a major difference in the number of people playing violent video games. In fact back in the 80s the UK had more personal computers per head of population than any other country. Many of the top games come from the UK.
I am sure that you might be able to crunch the numbers and come up with some sort of effect due to violent games. But to say that violent games have a bigger impact than smoking is just utterly ridiculous. Smoking worldwide causes more deaths than 9.11 every single day. In fact smoking killed more people in the 20th century than all the wars of the 20th century combined. To use smoking as a comparison demonstrates a profound indifference to the facts.
Lets see, violent crime in the UK is pretty steady at 650-900 homicides a year for a country of 55 million. The recent trend has been sharply down despite 52 homicide victims of 7/7. Of those the vast majority are domestics, killing sprees are pretty much a once a decade affair.
I don't think that you could honestly attribute more than 50 or so homicides a year to the effects of computer games in the UK if you took the most liberal interpretation imaginable.
Smoking causes about 110,000 deaths a year according to the leading anti-smoking campaign.
Allowing for the fact that ASH might well overstate the case somewhat the fact is that we don't have a single UK case where computer games are confirmed as a major factor. So I would be pretty confident in stating that smoking is at least a thousand times more dangerous than video games and the evidence points to the difference being more like a hundred thousand.
So let us imagine what the difference between the UK and the US could be. Oh yes the fact that you let every loony and criminal arm themselves to the teeth with cheap firearms. The fact that this is not even mentioned as a possibly significant issue in the article kinda shows that the entire study is worthless. Or is the idea here that controlling fictional materials in which guns play a role is somehow more politically practical than controlling actual guns?
You can tell that its a fit up job in the first sentence "After reviewing more than 50 years of research on the impact of violence in the media,". In other words this is not an objective study, its a fishing expedition through existing research. Lets take a look at his bibliography. Does not exactly look like the guy is a disinterested party here.
Sure lets talk about controlling violent video games, right after the US adopts the UK gun control laws.
The point I am making here is that yes, we do know rather more about making nuclear power safe today from an engineering point of view. The problem is that we have not progressed in our ability to establish political controls. Anyone want to trust President George 'Waterboarding' Bush with oversight of new nuclear power?
I don't consider gravity drop control rods as being very fail safe, at best its active fail safe: Something has to move. Passive failsafe is the standard to judge designs by. And I fully agree that CANDU is not perfect, it is also a 40 year old design.
I don't think that we should be building out new nuclear power at this stage. But I think that we definitely should be investing in developing alternative nuclear power designs. Otherwise what is going to happen is that we will get to a crunch point and embark on a crash program of building nuclear power stations to the discredited 1950s design and end up with all the same problems of reprocessing, waste and a real risk of catastrophe.