"I agree that Land ownership rights by individual farmers would, all by itself, improve production, and also improve preservation of the soil."
No, it won't. Or at least it's not a silver bullet. Unless the individual farmer can grow everything by himself/herself, a farmer needs to sell his produce in order to buy the other food and items that he needs, meat, fertilizer, pest control, cellphone service etc. This would require access to fair markets not denominated by monopolies that can dictate the price at which he can sell his produce.
Without the right infrastructure, a small farmer would be forced to sell his land to larger farmers, which may or may not be a good thing. Or the land would be bought by individual or corporations not interested at all in agriculture but in building shopping malls and other higher value developments.
"Why has the rainfall been reduced? Serious question."
More like, why has the rainfall been diverted? The only thing that can really reduce total rainfall is global cooling. Unless it's the sort that would cause oceans to boil, global warming should produce more rain. Drought somewhere produces floods elsewhere.
Changes in wind pattern are probably a major factor in this. Also deserts might produce a feedback loop where warm, dry land reduces the evaporation in a given land area or prevents rain from falling, which causes the land to be even warmer and drier.
"'Large-scale governmental surveillance of e-mail and Internet traffic ought to be forbidden as a means to combat international crime and terrorism,' by switching 'forbidden' to 'permitted'."
Maybe this just proves that people get confused by long sentences made up of long words. What if the sentence was simply phrased as "Spying on people's email and Facebook accounts is bad"? How many more will notice when the "bad" is changed to "good".
I don't know what's worse, the weasel words of bureaucrats or the oversimplified slogans of some politicians and religious demagogues.
If you're not looking for something only two people and their dogs care about, Wikipedia can provide enough information to get you up to speed. Even with the deletionists, trolls, and shills, I find Wikipedia to be more relevant, if not more accurate, than running a typical Google search which would point to a Wikipedia article anyway.
The reference/links section at the end of an article is often more valuable than the article itself, which is how I use Wikipedia as a "search" engine. Like any large web site, Wikipedia has a site search feature, which, as far as I can tell, has not been outsourced to the two or three search giants. The major browsers can also be configured to use Wikipedia as a search engine.
Of course what we really need is a true crowd-sourced search engine that isn't controlled by a single humongous corporation. But there's already more information in Wikipedia than when Google started indexing the web in the late 1990s. This trove of information can serve as the seed.
"Even if not locked down, there would just be a small club of alpha geeks wanting to buy it just to get a cheap Android tablet"
A "real" alpha geek would buy a really cheap no-name crap tablet, and see if they can install their own Android mod in it. That or they'll build their own tablet using parts salvaged from eBay or cannibalize the PCB of their old smartphones and mate it to a tablet-sized screen.
News like this could be a sign that dedicated consoles, consoles for the hardcore gamer are a dying breed. Whle I won't go so far as say that the iPad is going to kill the XBox, buy your Galaxy Tab now, I see gaming consoles evolving into a kitchen sink type of device where the ability to play games is one of a range of functions. The next console would be a gadget that allows you to play games better than a general-purpose tablet or media PC, a function that modern consoles can do now anyway.
For the same reason that Windows XP still has considerable inertia over the desktop OS market, a subscription model fails for casual, non-enthusiast users.
Gamers appear to be more than willing to put up with DRM or at least to pay the drug dealer for their regular dose. I doubt your grand folks that only want to see photos of their grandkids on Facebook would want to subscribe just so they can input rows of numbers.
Which makes me wonder if home users were ever a large market for MS Office. Do home users really do any office tasks besides letter writing? Only business-minded people would be interested in spreadsheets and dbases. Presentations might have a place in schoolwork.
Maybe that's why Microsoft is pushing for a subscription model because they know the number of office suite users is only going to shrink even further.
"No Japan either, probably because they tend not to use the same trackers as western countries and so were not monitored. They also use other P2P apps that are almost unused in the west such as Share and Perfect Dark, which again where not part of the study."
Missed that big fish. Yes it's probably down to the weird solutions that Japan has developed for certain technnical problems: love hotels, automatic taxi doors, toilet paper-free toilets, etc. I suspect it's also partly due to the "honor" system where if you want something you pay for it or at least be clever enough not to get caught.
It depends on: a) What you mean by "task". Is a task an activity taken in isolation? Or a series of smaller related activities. Let's say you're a cook. You chop the onions while waiting for the broth to cook. Or you can do a totally unrelated activity like Facebook rather than "unproductively" stare at the oven for an hour.
b) Speed that you switch tasks. If you change tasks every few minutes, your productivity drops because you need to speed some time acquainting or reacquainting yourself with the new or suspended task. Extreme example: you're a farmer, obviously you should be doing something while waiting for the corn field to bloom.
c) Whether you can do some activities autonomically. Is breathing while talking multitasking? Is listening to music while editing a news report?
For those too lazy to look. Here's the Top 20 "pirate" countries.
1. United States 2. United Kingdom 3. Italy 4. Canada 5. Brazil 6. Australia 7. Spain 8. India 9. France 10. Philippines 11. Mexico 12. Netherlands 13. Portugal 14. Poland 15. Greece 16. Hungary 17. Chile 18. Romania 19. Sweden 20. Belgium
Interesting is the absence of China and Russia, countries not known for having authoritarian copy laws. Maybe the Chinese and Russians are happier exchanging thumb drives and DVDRs. I would be very worried, if I were Hu and Putin, of all that info that can't be censored or monitored with a few key strokes.
While the presence of India at #8 isn't surprising, given its huge population, somewhat surprising is the presence of smaller Third World countries like Brazil and Philiippines that you don't expect to have the broadband speed necessary for a decent BT download.
"Office romances (especially within the same team) are always bad news. Though the story comes off as a poorly written romance novel - a sort of Shades of Grey fantasy novel for geeks."
If it's Shades of Grey for geeks, show me the pr0n. It's more like Days of Our Lives, soap opera reruns for bored code monkeys. There's more sex in Twilight than in this drivel. Of course that may be the point. The guy didn't get shagged because he was too busy getting fragged by the girl.
Right. If you want a mobile device with a better benchmark, get a laptop. Even an anemic netbook should be faster. Smartphones are for making calls and playing Angry Birds.
"The Chinese have at least done some of their own engineering, looking at Huawei and their space program."
While not as advanced as China's, India has its own space program. While China might be an hardware superpower, India is a software powerhouse, literally and figuratively: programmers, prize-wiinning authors, and theoretical physicists, including that guy whose name is half of the Higgs Boson.
It seems as if Intel and AMD are repeating Nokia's mistake in signing on to some exclusivity agreement with Microsoft. Likely to be the only winner in such a deal is the software company, since software has traditionally been the more profitable business.
What may well seal the future of Windows, however, aren't deals with big Western corporations, but Microsoft's ability to shift the low-end players into adopting the OS. The question is, will the generic gadget manufacturers of China willingly abandon the relative freedom they've enjoyed with installing an OS they can already fork and bastardize without seeking the blessings of some big American company?
Maybe it's time for Microsoft to opensource some bare-bones version of Windows, perhaps rewriting it to ensure that installing it on premium hardware is enough of a pain to merit licensing the full OS?
Valid point, but for a forum dominated by people presumably knowledgeable in IT, any mention of AMD is presumed to be related to its 64/32-bit x86 chips, unless otherwise noted. While AMD just "might" be selling more non-x86 hardware, at the moment that's what they're famous for. Even their ATI-inherited GPU designs target mostly the x86 PC market. So there, no need to say Obama is the incumbent president and Romney his Republican challenger in a discussion about current US politics.
As compared to Firefox for Windows that is. If they can make Firefox run smoothly on a poorly spec'd device only a hardware-hacking Slashdot reader would love, why can't Mozilla make it run smoother on a multicore GHz-class desktop?
Does this mean the X + desktop environment layer really sucks and that baremetal Linux can run Firefox faster than Chrome on steroids?
"What I don't understand is how Aliyun can even sell it. Not the mechanism by which they get money in exchange for some code, but how anyone would willingly pay these people for something they can get for free. What exactly is Aliyun adding to the Android base that isn't already there?"
Better access to the mainland market? A number of Google offerings are banned or censored in mainland China. I'm assuming Aliyun is going to replace them with their mainland equivalents. But then who knows if Alibaba merely has the right "connections" and Acer is simply trying to please the local boss? I remember reading somewhere that Aliyun is nearly as big as Amazon and Ebay combined, so here's a company you definitely want to brownose.
"A backlit screen will use at the very least the power it emits in light, etc... It is not simply a matter of technological advances."
Our technologically won't be sufficiently advanced unless it's as energy efficient as nature. How much energy does a bioluminiscent fish consume? I often read about the brain being compared to a light bulb, and not just because of the Edison "invention" connection. Cellphones already consume less energy than a 5W lightbulb but are nowhere near as powerful as the MacDonald's-powered supercomputer inside our heads.
Maybe the trick isn't getting as near to zero energy as physically possible but making our information devices sophisticated enough to recharge itself using whatever "free" energy source is available, be that the heat and radiation of the sun, the kinetic energy of a jogger, or the mere act of carrying the cellphone in your pocket while walking on the way to the office.
While there are clearly other "iPhone-like" phones released before the iPhone, the Samsung F700 wasn't it. All that Wikipedia notes is that Samsung was ISSUED a design patent for the phone before Steve Jobs made his iPhone product announcement.
The Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_SGH-F700) cites a Businessweek article (http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles/16106-apple-s-war-on-android) that points to a convergence in the evolution of cellphone designs.
"Several Asian manufacturers were noodling around with similar-looking rectangular smartphones before the iPhone came to market. Tipping its hat to a fellow Korean manufacturer, Samsung notes that in 2006, nearly a year before the iPhone appeared, LG Electronics announced the round-cornered LG Chocolate, with 'virtually all of the [design] features Apple claims' to have patented. In December 2006, before Apple released images of the iPhone, Samsung itself filed a design patent in Korea for a similar rectangular phone called the F700. Smartphone and tablet-computer design was 'naturally evolving' in the direction Apple claims it has exclusive rights to use, according to Samsung. If true, that matters because basic patent law states that if an idea is 'obvious' to an 'ordinary observer' at the time of its invention, it doesn't deserve patent protection. By attacking Samsung, Apple has inadvertently put its own patents into play."
I'm not sure but perhaps Apple's only real innovation is in being the first (?) to eliminate the hardware keyboard completely. If I'm not mistaken all the previous "iPhone-like" designs had some sort of hidden/slide-out keyboard. Who knows, maybe Apples does have a patent for crippling hardware to make it look and feel "cool".
No, these are the types of activities that authoritarian rulers everywhere do. The exception might be some really poor African or Asian country where majority of the citizens live in rural villages whose only means of electronic communication are dirt cheap dumb phones. For the rest of the non-democratic world, the leaders have to somehow show their soft or human side. People want leaders who give the impression of being just another bloke who happened to carry the "burden" of leadership. So here you get the Great Leader and/or Leaders visiting factories, having a face-to-face "chat" with some poor but smiling farmer, or playing basketball or whatever is the most popular sport in the country.
Of course leaders of democratic countries also do this but not to the stage-managed extent shown in countries like North Korea. For example, Obama seemingly dropping by a fastfood restaurant, when we all know that the shop has been secured in advance by the Secret Service.
The QR codes would only work as advertised if the "cloud" part of the system is still intact. Otherwise you'd have just some fancy hieroglyphics for future archaelogists to decipher. If this is the case, why not just carve out the human readable URL of the poor dude's FB/Twitter/G+ page.
First time I heard about Bettina Wulff. So maybe her attempt to repair her bad reputation is going to damage it further instead?
On the other hand she could also benefit from a reverse Streisand effect. Surely a person everybody calls bad can't be that bad? There are a number of celebrities who actually benefited from getting "exposed" in public. Paris Hilton and Hugh Grant come to mind. They're much bigger stars now than they were before the scandal that outed them.
Up to a point fragmentation or variety is a good thing. And not just in software. In agriculture, if your field consists of only one crop, your goose is cooked if there's an outbreak of a plant disease. A country whose GDP comes from a single source, say oil or a single cash crop, is also more vulnerable to price fluctuations in the global market. A crash in the prices of that product would lead to a crash in the country's economy as well.
Too much fragmentation of course is bad. But as far as Linux, the major distros are quite few, namely, Ubuntu, Redhat, Fedora, Debian, and possibly Suse. It's their derivatives that give the impression of excessive fragmentation. Derivatives tend to be compatible with the mother distro at least as far as the installation of third party programs not in the main repository. A binary-only printer driver that can run in Ubuntu would be compatible with Linux Mint for example.
We live in a high-rise building. The only exploring he'll be doing outside is running down the hallway or playing Superman.
My recommendation is for two devices: a low-powered personal computer for the software side and a cheap gadget like an old mp3 player or a pocket calculator that still works but is rarely used. The gadget can be dis/reassembled for educational purposes.
Slashdot Mirror
"I agree that Land ownership rights by individual farmers would, all by itself, improve production, and also improve preservation of the soil."
No, it won't. Or at least it's not a silver bullet. Unless the individual farmer can grow everything by himself/herself, a farmer needs to sell his produce in order to buy the other food and items that he needs, meat, fertilizer, pest control, cellphone service etc. This would require access to fair markets not denominated by monopolies that can dictate the price at which he can sell his produce.
Without the right infrastructure, a small farmer would be forced to sell his land to larger farmers, which may or may not be a good thing. Or the land would be bought by individual or corporations not interested at all in agriculture but in building shopping malls and other higher value developments.
"Why has the rainfall been reduced? Serious question."
More like, why has the rainfall been diverted? The only thing that can really reduce total rainfall is global cooling. Unless it's the sort that would cause oceans to boil, global warming should produce more rain. Drought somewhere produces floods elsewhere.
Changes in wind pattern are probably a major factor in this. Also deserts might produce a feedback loop where warm, dry land reduces the evaporation in a given land area or prevents rain from falling, which causes the land to be even warmer and drier.
"'Large-scale governmental surveillance of e-mail and Internet traffic ought to be forbidden as a means to combat international crime and terrorism,' by switching 'forbidden' to 'permitted'."
Maybe this just proves that people get confused by long sentences made up of long words. What if the sentence was simply phrased as "Spying on people's email and Facebook accounts is bad"? How many more will notice when the "bad" is changed to "good".
I don't know what's worse, the weasel words of bureaucrats or the oversimplified slogans of some politicians and religious demagogues.
If you're not looking for something only two people and their dogs care about, Wikipedia can provide enough information to get you up to speed. Even with the deletionists, trolls, and shills, I find Wikipedia to be more relevant, if not more accurate, than running a typical Google search which would point to a Wikipedia article anyway.
The reference/links section at the end of an article is often more valuable than the article itself, which is how I use Wikipedia as a "search" engine. Like any large web site, Wikipedia has a site search feature, which, as far as I can tell, has not been outsourced to the two or three search giants. The major browsers can also be configured to use Wikipedia as a search engine.
Of course what we really need is a true crowd-sourced search engine that isn't controlled by a single humongous corporation. But there's already more information in Wikipedia than when Google started indexing the web in the late 1990s. This trove of information can serve as the seed.
"Even if not locked down, there would just be a small club of alpha geeks wanting to buy it just to get a cheap Android tablet"
A "real" alpha geek would buy a really cheap no-name crap tablet, and see if they can install their own Android mod in it. That or they'll build their own tablet using parts salvaged from eBay or cannibalize the PCB of their old smartphones and mate it to a tablet-sized screen.
News like this could be a sign that dedicated consoles, consoles for the hardcore gamer are a dying breed. Whle I won't go so far as say that the iPad is going to kill the XBox, buy your Galaxy Tab now, I see gaming consoles evolving into a kitchen sink type of device where the ability to play games is one of a range of functions. The next console would be a gadget that allows you to play games better than a general-purpose tablet or media PC, a function that modern consoles can do now anyway.
For the same reason that Windows XP still has considerable inertia over the desktop OS market, a subscription model fails for casual, non-enthusiast users.
Gamers appear to be more than willing to put up with DRM or at least to pay the drug dealer for their regular dose. I doubt your grand folks that only want to see photos of their grandkids on Facebook would want to subscribe just so they can input rows of numbers.
Which makes me wonder if home users were ever a large market for MS Office. Do home users really do any office tasks besides letter writing? Only business-minded people would be interested in spreadsheets and dbases. Presentations might have a place in schoolwork.
Maybe that's why Microsoft is pushing for a subscription model because they know the number of office suite users is only going to shrink even further.
"No Japan either, probably because they tend not to use the same trackers as western countries and so were not monitored. They also use other P2P apps that are almost unused in the west such as Share and Perfect Dark, which again where not part of the study."
Missed that big fish. Yes it's probably down to the weird solutions that Japan has developed for certain technnical problems: love hotels, automatic taxi doors, toilet paper-free toilets, etc. I suspect it's also partly due to the "honor" system where if you want something you pay for it or at least be clever enough not to get caught.
Like everything in life, it depends.
It depends on: a) What you mean by "task". Is a task an activity taken in isolation? Or a series of smaller related activities. Let's say you're a cook. You chop the onions while waiting for the broth to cook. Or you can do a totally unrelated activity like Facebook rather than "unproductively" stare at the oven for an hour.
b) Speed that you switch tasks. If you change tasks every few minutes, your productivity drops because you need to speed some time acquainting or reacquainting yourself with the new or suspended task. Extreme example: you're a farmer, obviously you should be doing something while waiting for the corn field to bloom.
c) Whether you can do some activities autonomically. Is breathing while talking multitasking? Is listening to music while editing a news report?
For those too lazy to look. Here's the Top 20 "pirate" countries.
1. United States
2. United Kingdom
3. Italy
4. Canada
5. Brazil
6. Australia
7. Spain
8. India
9. France
10. Philippines
11. Mexico
12. Netherlands
13. Portugal
14. Poland
15. Greece
16. Hungary
17. Chile
18. Romania
19. Sweden
20. Belgium
Interesting is the absence of China and Russia, countries not known for having authoritarian copy laws. Maybe the Chinese and Russians are happier exchanging thumb drives and DVDRs. I would be very worried, if I were Hu and Putin, of all that info that can't be censored or monitored with a few key strokes.
While the presence of India at #8 isn't surprising, given its huge population, somewhat surprising is the presence of smaller Third World countries like Brazil and Philiippines that you don't expect to have the broadband speed necessary for a decent BT download.
"Office romances (especially within the same team) are always bad news. Though the story comes off as a poorly written romance novel - a sort of Shades of Grey fantasy novel for geeks."
If it's Shades of Grey for geeks, show me the pr0n. It's more like Days of Our Lives, soap opera reruns for bored code monkeys. There's more sex in Twilight than in this drivel. Of course that may be the point. The guy didn't get shagged because he was too busy getting fragged by the girl.
"A phone you could roll up? The first two would hardly have been groundbreaking and the latter is tech that doesn't really exist yet."
Haha. Hopefully, we'll be wearing our next smartphone: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Glass
Right. If you want a mobile device with a better benchmark, get a laptop. Even an anemic netbook should be faster. Smartphones are for making calls and playing Angry Birds.
"The Chinese have at least done some of their own engineering, looking at Huawei and their space program."
While not as advanced as China's, India has its own space program. While China might be an hardware superpower, India is a software powerhouse, literally and figuratively: programmers, prize-wiinning authors, and theoretical physicists, including that guy whose name is half of the Higgs Boson.
It seems as if Intel and AMD are repeating Nokia's mistake in signing on to some exclusivity agreement with Microsoft. Likely to be the only winner in such a deal is the software company, since software has traditionally been the more profitable business.
What may well seal the future of Windows, however, aren't deals with big Western corporations, but Microsoft's ability to shift the low-end players into adopting the OS. The question is, will the generic gadget manufacturers of China willingly abandon the relative freedom they've enjoyed with installing an OS they can already fork and bastardize without seeking the blessings of some big American company?
Maybe it's time for Microsoft to opensource some bare-bones version of Windows, perhaps rewriting it to ensure that installing it on premium hardware is enough of a pain to merit licensing the full OS?
Valid point, but for a forum dominated by people presumably knowledgeable in IT, any mention of AMD is presumed to be related to its 64/32-bit x86 chips, unless otherwise noted. While AMD just "might" be selling more non-x86 hardware, at the moment that's what they're famous for. Even their ATI-inherited GPU designs target mostly the x86 PC market. So there, no need to say Obama is the incumbent president and Romney his Republican challenger in a discussion about current US politics.
As compared to Firefox for Windows that is. If they can make Firefox run smoothly on a poorly spec'd device only a hardware-hacking Slashdot reader would love, why can't Mozilla make it run smoother on a multicore GHz-class desktop?
Does this mean the X + desktop environment layer really sucks and that baremetal Linux can run Firefox faster than Chrome on steroids?
"What I don't understand is how Aliyun can even sell it. Not the mechanism by which they get money in exchange for some code, but how anyone would willingly pay these people for something they can get for free. What exactly is Aliyun adding to the Android base that isn't already there?"
Better access to the mainland market? A number of Google offerings are banned or censored in mainland China. I'm assuming Aliyun is going to replace them with their mainland equivalents. But then who knows if Alibaba merely has the right "connections" and Acer is simply trying to please the local boss? I remember reading somewhere that Aliyun is nearly as big as Amazon and Ebay combined, so here's a company you definitely want to brownose.
"A backlit screen will use at the very least the power it emits in light, etc... It is not simply a matter of technological advances." Our technologically won't be sufficiently advanced unless it's as energy efficient as nature. How much energy does a bioluminiscent fish consume? I often read about the brain being compared to a light bulb, and not just because of the Edison "invention" connection. Cellphones already consume less energy than a 5W lightbulb but are nowhere near as powerful as the MacDonald's-powered supercomputer inside our heads. Maybe the trick isn't getting as near to zero energy as physically possible but making our information devices sophisticated enough to recharge itself using whatever "free" energy source is available, be that the heat and radiation of the sun, the kinetic energy of a jogger, or the mere act of carrying the cellphone in your pocket while walking on the way to the office.
While there are clearly other "iPhone-like" phones released before the iPhone, the Samsung F700 wasn't it. All that Wikipedia notes is that Samsung was ISSUED a design patent for the phone before Steve Jobs made his iPhone product announcement.
The Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_SGH-F700) cites a Businessweek article (http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles/16106-apple-s-war-on-android) that points to a convergence in the evolution of cellphone designs.
"Several Asian manufacturers were noodling around with similar-looking rectangular smartphones before the iPhone came to market. Tipping its hat to a fellow Korean manufacturer, Samsung notes that in 2006, nearly a year before the iPhone appeared, LG Electronics announced the round-cornered LG Chocolate, with 'virtually all of the [design] features Apple claims' to have patented. In December 2006, before Apple released images of the iPhone, Samsung itself filed a design patent in Korea for a similar rectangular phone called the F700. Smartphone and tablet-computer design was 'naturally evolving' in the direction Apple claims it has exclusive rights to use, according to Samsung. If true, that matters because basic patent law states that if an idea is 'obvious' to an 'ordinary observer' at the time of its invention, it doesn't deserve patent protection. By attacking Samsung, Apple has inadvertently put its own patents into play."
I'm not sure but perhaps Apple's only real innovation is in being the first (?) to eliminate the hardware keyboard completely. If I'm not mistaken all the previous "iPhone-like" designs had some sort of hidden/slide-out keyboard. Who knows, maybe Apples does have a patent for crippling hardware to make it look and feel "cool".
No, these are the types of activities that authoritarian rulers everywhere do. The exception might be some really poor African or Asian country where majority of the citizens live in rural villages whose only means of electronic communication are dirt cheap dumb phones. For the rest of the non-democratic world, the leaders have to somehow show their soft or human side. People want leaders who give the impression of being just another bloke who happened to carry the "burden" of leadership. So here you get the Great Leader and/or Leaders visiting factories, having a face-to-face "chat" with some poor but smiling farmer, or playing basketball or whatever is the most popular sport in the country.
Of course leaders of democratic countries also do this but not to the stage-managed extent shown in countries like North Korea. For example, Obama seemingly dropping by a fastfood restaurant, when we all know that the shop has been secured in advance by the Secret Service.
The QR codes would only work as advertised if the "cloud" part of the system is still intact. Otherwise you'd have just some fancy hieroglyphics for future archaelogists to decipher. If this is the case, why not just carve out the human readable URL of the poor dude's FB/Twitter/G+ page.
First time I heard about Bettina Wulff. So maybe her attempt to repair her bad reputation is going to damage it further instead?
On the other hand she could also benefit from a reverse Streisand effect. Surely a person everybody calls bad can't be that bad? There are a number of celebrities who actually benefited from getting "exposed" in public. Paris Hilton and Hugh Grant come to mind. They're much bigger stars now than they were before the scandal that outed them.
Up to a point fragmentation or variety is a good thing. And not just in software. In agriculture, if your field consists of only one crop, your goose is cooked if there's an outbreak of a plant disease. A country whose GDP comes from a single source, say oil or a single cash crop, is also more vulnerable to price fluctuations in the global market. A crash in the prices of that product would lead to a crash in the country's economy as well.
Too much fragmentation of course is bad. But as far as Linux, the major distros are quite few, namely, Ubuntu, Redhat, Fedora, Debian, and possibly Suse. It's their derivatives that give the impression of excessive fragmentation. Derivatives tend to be compatible with the mother distro at least as far as the installation of third party programs not in the main repository. A binary-only printer driver that can run in Ubuntu would be compatible with Linux Mint for example.
We live in a high-rise building. The only exploring he'll be doing outside is running down the hallway or playing Superman.
My recommendation is for two devices: a low-powered personal computer for the software side and a cheap gadget like an old mp3 player or a pocket calculator that still works but is rarely used. The gadget can be dis/reassembled for educational purposes.