True. But it is fairly arrogant of a student in the west to assume that he knows so much better than the education ministeries that have decided that this is a good investment for their countries, particularly when his assumptions are badly flawed (such as assuming that these countries can't afford to pay for the OLPC boxes without taking out loans)
Nigeria is one of the countries considering the OLPC. It is not uncommon for people to live on $1/day in Nigeria. A cost of $840 to train and maintain those boxes simply isn't realistic unless major components break on a fairly frequent basis. There'd be an initial training cost to get a core of local people trained on maintaining and using them, of course, but once that's done, local training and maintenance would be extremely cheap even assuming much training would be needed.
It's typical of adults to underestimate how quickly kids learn to do stuff like that themselves if they have the chance - I was replacing components on my C64 by the time I was 8-9 years old, based purely on having diagrams in the manual, despite the fact it was in English (English is my second language - I didn't know a word of English apart from BASIC keywords at the time). Of course not everyone would learn that way, but you don't need everyone to - just a reasonable percentage.
I also note that the article repeats the same old bullshit about lack of access to electricity etc. as a hindrance for internet access - blatantly ignoring that this isn't really the case for the countries signed up so far AND the fact that the unit depends on mesh networking of the boxes themselves to expand the reach of the network, and falling back to the hand crank as a last resort for providing electricity to the unit itself exactly to reduce the infrastructure requirements.
He's also coming out with ignorant statements like "naturally all the countries will be taking out loans to cover this purchase". Ignoring that one of the poorest countries to sign up so far - Nigeria - repaid $10 BILLION in debt over the last couple of years, and as a result got developed nations to forgive another $18 BILLION, saving them many times the cost of the OLPC purchase they'll be making EVERY YEAR in interest payments. The $10 billion was paid back thanks to increasing oil revenue, which is now also freed up for other purposes after the debt repayment is over.
The countries signed up so far aren't the poorest in the world - they are developing countries with reasonable economies. There's no reason why they'd need to take up loads to cover a purchase costing them a few hundred million.
In any case, it is a little but stupid to have container library unable to store objects in object oriented language (I know, C++ is called "multiparadigm", but objects are dominant part of language in many problem domains).
Of course it can store objects. What are you on about? Perhaps your misunderstanding is because STL requires objects to be copyable to store them? I store objects in STL containers all the time. It's very hard to take your criticism seriously if you don't even know a fundamental thing like that.
It's also a pretty silly jab, considering that mens suits are one of M&S's strongest selling product lines - and they are still one of the UK's largest clothes retailers, so that still means something. It's also one of their clothing lines that's been showing significant growth lately.
Possibly, but in any case, the plasma with sharpness set to 100% still looked far better to me than any LCD I've seen demo'ed.
I've never seen anything remotely like the blocky, pixelized images of LCD's with either CRTs or plasmas, and close up it's very obvious that the reason is that the LCD image is far crisper (i.e. it'll typically be almost completely steady, for instance, which a plasma image isn't). The problem is that a crisp image requires a lot higher resolution than a blurry one to look ok. Once most of the content I'm watching is HD the situation might be different (and that's why I chose a low end plasma I can afford to replace in a year or two), but for now an LCD would be pure torture for me.
It's like the good old days when I used to use a C-64 on a TV, and then at one point hooked it up to a proper monitor - the image was undoubtably far clearer and crisper, but all my games looked like shit because the low resolution was suddenly very obvious.
The issue isn't that it's "surprising" that I see pixels, but that LCD's look significantly worse to me at any reasonable distance. I typically sit less than 4m from the TV, and with my plasma with the sharpness turned down to a reasonable level the picture is great. No LCD's I've seen has an image I could tolerate at even twice that distance for non-HD content.
The problem is sharpness rather than slow updates.
I just bought a 42" HDTV capable plasma, and had to turn the sharpness down to 50%, as otherwise all non-HDTV contents, including DVD's looked extremely blocky and I could see the MPEG artifacts everywhere - the default image was far too clear. I shudder at the thought of how horrendous it would have looked on an LCD screen, as I usually notice the pixelation far easier on LCD screens than I do on plasmas.
Maybe I'll consider an LCD screen when I'm using all HD content, or if they start supporting adaptively blurring lower resolution content sufficiently.
Sharp images only works for me when the DPI of the source is high enough that you can't see individual pixels at normal viewing distances.
Yes, I realize that means that I've on purpose chosen a screen with a "lower" picture quality, but the end result is far better with 90%+ of the content available to me. And it was cheap enough to replace in a couple of years if a usable LCD screen (or other tech) comes along.
Comparing UK lounges to American ones and pronouncing American rooms tend to be much bigger than elsewhere is rather silly - my first impression when I moved to the UK (from Norway) was that I'd never before seen such cramped, narrow lounges anywhere.... The UK suffer from high population density coupled with a legal system and regulatory system that have made it unattractive to build in height (London for hundreds of years even had a regulation preventing building higher than four floors).
As a result you get those ridiculous long rows of narrow terraced houses. You will find some of that elsewhere in Europe too, but a lot of countries does also have traditions for far larger rooms than the UK (often making up for it by fewer rooms - a house that would have two reception rooms in the UK would often be considered barely large enough for one in many other countries in Europe).
It is less about indentation per se than it is about the use of indentation instead of other indications of where blocks end - I know that wasn't clear in the message you replied to.
And I've given reasons for that elsewhere - indentation is just too brittle. Passing code through cut and paste, e-mail, editors with various settings etc. frequently messes up formatting. In other languages you can trivially automatically reformat code with broken indentation without any risk of changing the semantics. In Python you can't. To me that is a deficiency.
To me, the Python indentation is a "solution" that causes problems without solving any.
Maybe you never run across those issues or don't care, but I do, and syntax and code layout is too important for me to want to use a language with a limitation like that when I have alternatives that works just as well without those limits.
Maybe I'd not care so much if the other features of Python had been more compelling to me, but whenever I've looked at Python my reaction has been indifference, and if I'm indifferent to the features available in a language, then any negative is going to put me off it.
If he did, then the comment he posted was just plain stupid, as my post in no way indicate that I don't indent my code, but that I don't want to be forced to indent my code in the way that Python requires. I chose to interpret his post in the best light possible - if you're right, then he's a moron.
Except that if you'd RTFA, you'd have known that the theory of what the unit does that those "working units" are based on will supposedly be discredited by this new research.
And if you use any decent editor you don't ever have that problem with C/C++, Ruby or any other sane language either.
Sorry, but you will never convince me that making indentation affect semantics of the code is a good idea, considering the amount of badly indented code and people using different tab/space settings in their editors, cut and past problems (i.e. programs that strip all repeated whitespace when they paste, or combine lines etc.) and other code mangling I see on a regular basis. As long as there are proper tokens to indicate the start and end of a scope I can fix that trivially, and get the code reformatted exactly the way I want it (using "indent" and similar apps, or even just my preferred editor modes).
I've tried Python on enough occasions to know it's just not interesting enough for me to overcome my hatred for that "feature". Maybe when I was doing mostly C++ I could have been convinced if someone were persistent enough, but now that I do Ruby too I just don't see the point of even considering making the effort.
True, but 128MB is not roomy if you want to run Gnome or KDE. The point being that their choices of non-memory and disk hogging desktop systems for Linux is pretty limited. Hence they've written something that fits their needs.
And I don't see anything that indicate they don't support buttons, spinners, edit and check boxes and "movable windows". In fact, they use GTK, which would have given them all the GUI elements they need, and unless they're running X without a window manager they presumably have movable windows too.
Presumably you don't know Python, or you would have understood that the "Python indentation stuff" I referred to is Python's use of indentation to determine nesting level in code, a practice which a lot of Python fans love, and which a lot of non-Python people absolutely loathe and which in many cases is people's main justification for wanting to avoid Python whenever possible (I'm in the latter camp).
I hate it because I hate having formatting imposed on me by the language. Formatting is very important to me in any language, and with Python I feel limited to the point where I never use it unless I absolutely have to (i.e. when I need to work on someone elses code). Ever seen how long C/C++ people can talk about positioning of braces? Well, it happens because people care deeply about formatting. When the choice is taken away, some people stop arguing, and some people refuse to work with that language.
Regardless what Python fans think of it, it's one of those issues that will keep quite a few people (like me) from seriously considering it as a language for their projects, regardless of other merits, because some of us find it too painful.
Presumably it's a memory issue. With 128MB or 512MB RAM (the website and the video seems to conflict) and flash as the only secondary storage (meaning you really don't want to swap) running a heavy desktop environment really isn't something you want to do.
Take a look at the software components list. It looks like they are planning to add a shell, and a lot of the system is already Python based. I really do hope the shell gets included as standard. As a Ruby fan (and someone intensely hating the Python indentation stuff), I question the choice of Python, but I guess it's better than nothing;) (and inevitable when Redhat is involved...).
I don't agree it must be dumbed down - I started programming on a VIC-20 where almost anything remotely interesting required lots of PEEK/POKE. I was 5 at the time, and didn't know a word of English. By the time I was 7 we got a C64, and I could program it better than my dad (who wrote programs for it as part of work) within months. I was an exception among my friends, but even the ones that didn't take up programming had no problems picking up whatever they needed to do what they wanted to with the machine.
It's adults without computer experience that needs dumbed down interfaces, not children. All you need is some examples they can copy and modify to get them started.
And hundreds of millions of people in developing nations have all of what you mention. It's elitist people like you with their head stuck up their assholes who fail to realize that when you see pictures of starving people in mud huts that isn't representative of all of several billions who live in developing countries.
Many of these "tribes" you refer to live in urban sprawl, such as the around 15 million people living in Lagos, Nigeria - the main commercial city of a developing country with 20 million cell phone subscriptions (of 130 million people), one of the highest cell phone growth rates in the world, and a GDP growth rate about twice that of the US. As it happens, Lagos is also Nigeria's main manufacturing location, including electronics and motor vehicle manufacturing.
The trouble is most developing countries don't have a starving population, and though many of them import food they are much better served by teaching their children skills that will help boost the country's GDP than growing more food and increasing competition for their already poor farmers.
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True. But it is fairly arrogant of a student in the west to assume that he knows so much better than the education ministeries that have decided that this is a good investment for their countries, particularly when his assumptions are badly flawed (such as assuming that these countries can't afford to pay for the OLPC boxes without taking out loans)
It's typical of adults to underestimate how quickly kids learn to do stuff like that themselves if they have the chance - I was replacing components on my C64 by the time I was 8-9 years old, based purely on having diagrams in the manual, despite the fact it was in English (English is my second language - I didn't know a word of English apart from BASIC keywords at the time). Of course not everyone would learn that way, but you don't need everyone to - just a reasonable percentage.
I also note that the article repeats the same old bullshit about lack of access to electricity etc. as a hindrance for internet access - blatantly ignoring that this isn't really the case for the countries signed up so far AND the fact that the unit depends on mesh networking of the boxes themselves to expand the reach of the network, and falling back to the hand crank as a last resort for providing electricity to the unit itself exactly to reduce the infrastructure requirements.
He's also coming out with ignorant statements like "naturally all the countries will be taking out loans to cover this purchase". Ignoring that one of the poorest countries to sign up so far - Nigeria - repaid $10 BILLION in debt over the last couple of years, and as a result got developed nations to forgive another $18 BILLION, saving them many times the cost of the OLPC purchase they'll be making EVERY YEAR in interest payments. The $10 billion was paid back thanks to increasing oil revenue, which is now also freed up for other purposes after the debt repayment is over.
The countries signed up so far aren't the poorest in the world - they are developing countries with reasonable economies. There's no reason why they'd need to take up loads to cover a purchase costing them a few hundred million.
Of course it can store objects. What are you on about? Perhaps your misunderstanding is because STL requires objects to be copyable to store them? I store objects in STL containers all the time. It's very hard to take your criticism seriously if you don't even know a fundamental thing like that.
It's also a pretty silly jab, considering that mens suits are one of M&S's strongest selling product lines - and they are still one of the UK's largest clothes retailers, so that still means something. It's also one of their clothing lines that's been showing significant growth lately.
You use a laptop and put a pillow on your abdomen or beside you.... I love working from home, reclining on the sofa...
I've never seen anything remotely like the blocky, pixelized images of LCD's with either CRTs or plasmas, and close up it's very obvious that the reason is that the LCD image is far crisper (i.e. it'll typically be almost completely steady, for instance, which a plasma image isn't). The problem is that a crisp image requires a lot higher resolution than a blurry one to look ok. Once most of the content I'm watching is HD the situation might be different (and that's why I chose a low end plasma I can afford to replace in a year or two), but for now an LCD would be pure torture for me.
It's like the good old days when I used to use a C-64 on a TV, and then at one point hooked it up to a proper monitor - the image was undoubtably far clearer and crisper, but all my games looked like shit because the low resolution was suddenly very obvious.
The issue isn't that it's "surprising" that I see pixels, but that LCD's look significantly worse to me at any reasonable distance. I typically sit less than 4m from the TV, and with my plasma with the sharpness turned down to a reasonable level the picture is great. No LCD's I've seen has an image I could tolerate at even twice that distance for non-HD content.
I just bought a 42" HDTV capable plasma, and had to turn the sharpness down to 50%, as otherwise all non-HDTV contents, including DVD's looked extremely blocky and I could see the MPEG artifacts everywhere - the default image was far too clear. I shudder at the thought of how horrendous it would have looked on an LCD screen, as I usually notice the pixelation far easier on LCD screens than I do on plasmas.
Maybe I'll consider an LCD screen when I'm using all HD content, or if they start supporting adaptively blurring lower resolution content sufficiently.
Sharp images only works for me when the DPI of the source is high enough that you can't see individual pixels at normal viewing distances.
Yes, I realize that means that I've on purpose chosen a screen with a "lower" picture quality, but the end result is far better with 90%+ of the content available to me. And it was cheap enough to replace in a couple of years if a usable LCD screen (or other tech) comes along.
As a result you get those ridiculous long rows of narrow terraced houses. You will find some of that elsewhere in Europe too, but a lot of countries does also have traditions for far larger rooms than the UK (often making up for it by fewer rooms - a house that would have two reception rooms in the UK would often be considered barely large enough for one in many other countries in Europe).
And I've given reasons for that elsewhere - indentation is just too brittle. Passing code through cut and paste, e-mail, editors with various settings etc. frequently messes up formatting. In other languages you can trivially automatically reformat code with broken indentation without any risk of changing the semantics. In Python you can't. To me that is a deficiency.
To me, the Python indentation is a "solution" that causes problems without solving any.
Maybe you never run across those issues or don't care, but I do, and syntax and code layout is too important for me to want to use a language with a limitation like that when I have alternatives that works just as well without those limits.
Maybe I'd not care so much if the other features of Python had been more compelling to me, but whenever I've looked at Python my reaction has been indifference, and if I'm indifferent to the features available in a language, then any negative is going to put me off it.
If he did, then the comment he posted was just plain stupid, as my post in no way indicate that I don't indent my code, but that I don't want to be forced to indent my code in the way that Python requires. I chose to interpret his post in the best light possible - if you're right, then he's a moron.
Except that if you'd RTFA, you'd have known that the theory of what the unit does that those "working units" are based on will supposedly be discredited by this new research.
More like it took some serious corrosion etc. to turn it all essentially into a block that would crumble if they started to pick it apart.
Obviously you didn't RTFA, or you would have seen that they did ITFM engraved on the device itself.
Sorry, but you will never convince me that making indentation affect semantics of the code is a good idea, considering the amount of badly indented code and people using different tab/space settings in their editors, cut and past problems (i.e. programs that strip all repeated whitespace when they paste, or combine lines etc.) and other code mangling I see on a regular basis. As long as there are proper tokens to indicate the start and end of a scope I can fix that trivially, and get the code reformatted exactly the way I want it (using "indent" and similar apps, or even just my preferred editor modes).
I've tried Python on enough occasions to know it's just not interesting enough for me to overcome my hatred for that "feature". Maybe when I was doing mostly C++ I could have been convinced if someone were persistent enough, but now that I do Ruby too I just don't see the point of even considering making the effort.
And I don't see anything that indicate they don't support buttons, spinners, edit and check boxes and "movable windows". In fact, they use GTK, which would have given them all the GUI elements they need, and unless they're running X without a window manager they presumably have movable windows too.
Presumably you don't know Python, or you would have understood that the "Python indentation stuff" I referred to is Python's use of indentation to determine nesting level in code, a practice which a lot of Python fans love, and which a lot of non-Python people absolutely loathe and which in many cases is people's main justification for wanting to avoid Python whenever possible (I'm in the latter camp).
Regardless what Python fans think of it, it's one of those issues that will keep quite a few people (like me) from seriously considering it as a language for their projects, regardless of other merits, because some of us find it too painful.
Presumably it's a memory issue. With 128MB or 512MB RAM (the website and the video seems to conflict) and flash as the only secondary storage (meaning you really don't want to swap) running a heavy desktop environment really isn't something you want to do.
And you obviously missed the entire point of the message you just replied to... Try reading it again, and keep an eye out for sarcasm..
I don't agree it must be dumbed down - I started programming on a VIC-20 where almost anything remotely interesting required lots of PEEK/POKE. I was 5 at the time, and didn't know a word of English. By the time I was 7 we got a C64, and I could program it better than my dad (who wrote programs for it as part of work) within months. I was an exception among my friends, but even the ones that didn't take up programming had no problems picking up whatever they needed to do what they wanted to with the machine.
It's adults without computer experience that needs dumbed down interfaces, not children. All you need is some examples they can copy and modify to get them started.
And how are you "wasting your money on other people" seeing as the countries who want this will pay for it themselves?
Your point is still half-valid in that people in the US tends to drive more and have more cars per capita than elsewhere, though.
Many of these "tribes" you refer to live in urban sprawl, such as the around 15 million people living in Lagos, Nigeria - the main commercial city of a developing country with 20 million cell phone subscriptions (of 130 million people), one of the highest cell phone growth rates in the world, and a GDP growth rate about twice that of the US. As it happens, Lagos is also Nigeria's main manufacturing location, including electronics and motor vehicle manufacturing.
The trouble is most developing countries don't have a starving population, and though many of them import food they are much better served by teaching their children skills that will help boost the country's GDP than growing more food and increasing competition for their already poor farmers.