Donating free licenses of software that is not needed does not equal donating $2M in cash.
In any case, it misses the point that one of the key goals is a system that is hackable and modifiable and that is easily supported even in the absence of the ability of pay for support to, say, translate the system to one of the 1800 languages spoken in Africa that is NOT on the list of supported languages for any commercial OS's, or any number of other modifications they may like to better tailor the solution to specific needs.
Neither KDE (which I somehow doubt will be very useful on a platform as limited as this, and on an 8" screen - not that I think Gnome would be better for this system) nor APT are reasons to go with Debian over Redhat. Both are available, well tested and widely used on Redhat.
So your only remaining point is easy of use. Personally ease of use is exactly why I prefer Redhat/Fedora, so unless you have something more concrete you'll have to accept that "ease of use" is largely a matter of taste in this case - the differences simply aren't particularly great.
Seeing as you don't seem to know the difference between the package management system and frontends (such as APT), I sincerely doubt you're the right person to make any statements about what system to use.
Hint: I sometimes use APT to install my RPM's on my Fedora box, sometimes Yum. If I'd like to (which I don't - I often install software over ssh connections) I could easily install graphical frontends to manage my RPMs and update my boxes from a myriad of APT and Yum repositories. On Redhat Enterprise Linux boxes I have access to, I use up2date to do the same job, including installing RPM's from APT repositories. See how I use both at the same time? That's because APT isn't a replacement for RPM any more than it is a replacements for Debians package manager. It's just a tool for dependency resolution and package retrieval.
Or it smacks of unmet design goals, such as having the ability to let kids tinker with the entire system and use it to learn about how computers work in great details instead of limiting it to what the designers happens to tink is best, as well as the ability for the project to adapt and modify the system to meet specific needs for different groups of recipients.
To be able to perform tasks on the computer should not require you to know WTF the kernel is, what a module is, and why a certain line in a configuration file breaks a certain program. That's the job of the developer, not the user.
And pray tell, how do you think most of todays professional software developers learned the game? Don't think these countries will need software developers? Just look around you at how dependent modern economies are on computers to drive up efficiency and try to tell us how the developing world will ever catch up if it can't bridge that divide or how they can bridge that divide if they don't have their own developers and can't afford to hire in developers from more developed countries.
And before you even try to bring up shrink wrap software, that's a tiny part of the software needs of a typical enterprise. The vast majority of software engineers are employed to work on internal projects that are never turned into sellable products but that are used to support business operations.
If the developing world is going to be ready to take the leap to a more computerised business environment over the next 15-25 years, they need to start teaching kids now.
Look at India, and how important software engineering skills has become to them. To get there, India put in decades of heavy investments in education in engineering disciplines and science. It's a great credit to them that they saw the value of it and took advantage of the fact that they were willing to take the cost despite the many short term fixes they could have spent the money on instead.
This is about education, not about making everything dumbed down and as easy as possible at the cost of teaching kids less.
Where does it says the designers want somehing they can tinker with? Did it not for a second occur to you they want something the kids can learn to tinker with?
Several generations of software engineers learned to program by having systems they could tinker freely with. Many of them on closed source systems, but on closed source systems that were small enough and well documented enough that they were still easy to tinker with.
Giving these kids the tools they need to become the future sys admins and software developers for their nations a decade or two down the line is a significant additional benefit.
The downside? How many of the apps you believe these people could get for free for OS X (they certainly won't have the money to buy commercial software so bringing up commercial software is meaningless) and not for Linux do you think they would have any use for? Can you name a single FREE OS X software package that has no equivalent for Linux that would be useful for a school kid between 5 and 15 or so in sub-Saharan Africa for example?
And do you think Apple will be easily convinced to translate their OS into the 1800 or so languages spoken in Africa alone? Yet with an open system, a single industrious school teacher that knows English or another language the system has been translated to could learn enough to do a translation into a language that would otherwise remain unsupported.
Don't think teachers will do it? I knew plenty of kids when I was at school that did have teachers that started out just as ignorant of computers as most of the teachers exposed to this box will be, yet that picked up far more advanced computer skills in a couple of years than that simply because they felt it was important.
It seems from your response that you haven't even considered the idea that these people may in fact have carefully considered the goals and needs of the people the machines will be handed to, or that they may very well even have discussed those needs with a lot of people in the respective countries - this is not development aid - many of the countries that may receive these machines are going to be paying for it because they think it's a benefit to their children.
but why? That doesn't make much sense in the context of this project. if the goal is to help people - why put this software ideology and zealotry ahead of the wants or needs of users?
Exactly. Why indeed should we put software ideology and zealotry ahead of providing a platform that is open wherever possible so these people and this project will not be beholden to profit making corporation whenever they want or need a customisation (such as localisation to any of the 1800 or so African languages that are mostly unsupported by commercial software because the market is too small, yet that are spoken by many of the children this laptop is aimed at), or make a choice that prevents these kids from being able to learn not only through a standard curriculum but also from having a platform they can change and adapt?
You're severely underestimating children if you think that there isn't a significant number of kids amongst the 150 million this project has set as it's initial target that will quickly understand the system well enough to start modifying it (including programming) and many that will be able to help extend the usability of this project by contributing changes (such as translations).
Being part of a generation where 3-4 people in my class of 25-30 kids could program before the age of 10 and were lots of kids started cranking out demo's that did things the computer manufacturers thought impossible with their hardware before the age of 13, I find the whole attitude of thinking that children need to be handheld into computer usage quite appalling.
In an education setting I'd pick a platform that can be picked apart and modified freely over nearly anything else.
Practically any platform can be used for writing reports or reading electronic books or surfing the net. Where the difference lies is in openness and hackability. That's the differentiation factor that matters.
You seem to, in your zealotry, automatically assume that no thought has been put into the policy of preferring open source software for this system, with absolutely no facts to back it up.
As for letting people choose, nowhere did I read that people will be forced to keep Linux on these laptops. But this project is meant to be self sustainable.
For this project to spend resources on supporting multiple OS's that could be better spent cranking out more machines or localising the system to more languages, or spending more time optimizing the platform would be counter their goals.
Corporate charity is good, yes. But this isn't charity - it's marketing, and it would have negatively affected the goals of the project.
And yes, I'm sure they do expect some of these kids to compile their own kernels, or at the very least user level programs and learn how to use development tools.
Kids have learned that way with minimal guidance since the dawn of home computers, on far more primitive systems fit far steeper learning curves.
I learned to program that way, and a large number of my friends learned to program that way
It is also about being able to customise the device for local needs. Do you think Apple or Microsoft would commit to continue development of their respective OS's for this device for free as the hardware changes? What about localisation to local tribal languages (of which India and Africa alone have a few thousand)? For such a project to reach it's full potential, it needs to be flexible. You don't get that flexibility if you are beholden to a profit making corporation that have other concerns than guaranteeing long term support for something like this.
No, most of those people will be doing subsistence farming or work in factories for a pittance because they lack any reasonable chance at gaining significant marketable skills.
It's all well and fine to address basic needs, but if you only address lack of food and water and nothing else you only end up with an increasing number of people dependent on regular handouts while the rest of the world leave them further and further behind development wise and skills wise.
Without a solid focus on furthering education those people will never stand a chance of improving their situation much beyond being cheap labour.
Your argument seems reasonable at first glance, but in essence it's a "but think of the children!" type argument that gets people to ignore all rational thinking in favour of short sighted short term solutions.
Starvation, unclean water and diseases are significant challenges, yes. But lack of education will have a much more significant long term effect on how many people die of poverty.
Better education also helps address many of those issues:
It's a way of helping getting out information about better farming methods. To get out information on how to avoid and threat diseases in areas where doctors and access to medicines are scarce. To teach people skills that will help them improve their own lives and the lives of those around them - such as how to take water supply into their own hands and work together to secure the water supply for a whole village. To effectivise business to increase the profits and lower costs.
And a significant reason for many of the modern day famines are lack of understanding of environmental factors and farming methods that safeguard a consistent food supply, for instance. In some places these are skills that used to be widespread and shared, but where things like AIDS have ruined much of the traditional education by killing off essential people. In other places it's simply a matter of providing information about more modern methods that often can double or triple yields with little extra effort - just some new understanding.
It boils down to this: Do we want to help these people get the skills to develop their countries and take their futures into their own hands, or do we want them to be forever dependent on foreign and and handouts to just get by?
You underestimate children a lot. The first machine I learned to program on was a VIC 20. I was 5 years old. I watched my dad program for a while and started copying what he did. He noticed, handed me the manual (in English - I could spell my way through words quite well, but I'm Norwegian and didn't know a word of English) and let me try out the things in it.
Within weeks I knew more about how the machine worked than he did - largely because of the extreme perseverence a child can show... For instance I POKE'd my way through almost every register the thing had, and kept calling my parents at work to describe what strange things I'd gotten the machine to do (though most of them may have required a machine restart afterwards...:) )
When we got a Commodore 64 a year or two later I hogged the machine every chance I had. The fact that the manuals were in English meant that I learned English years ahead of most of my class mates because I "had to" to figure out how things worked.
The point is, kids learn surprisingly fast when given the chance. In part because they're not worried about "details" such as the consequences of what they do (so yeah, expect a few messed up partition tables and formatted disks and systems with vital files deleted...) and just go ahead and try things, and in part because they are much more willing to spend ages fiddling with something to try to figure out how it works.
Personally I haven't had to "fuck around with RPM dependencies and libc incompatibilities" in years thanks to APT and Yum and well designed distro's (currently running Fedora Core).
I've had much more trouble with my Windows laptop at work than I've ever had with my Linux box at home.
Without getting an education these people will forever be stuck taking handouts. That's the point. There's also extensive experience in developing countries showing that when people are given training with technology they will quickly apply it to improve their economy by finding ways to increase efficieny. One such example is the cellphone which is quickly becoming an essential business tool in many rural villages in several African countries for instance, where it for instance helps farmers find out where they'll get the best price for their goods before setting out on several hour long treks to a market.
It's short sighted to just automatically assume that none of these people have any use for modern technology because they are poor.
But you don't have the ability to end world hunger. This guy could potentially advance our knowledge of the AIDS virus. Instead of doing that, though, he cries to himself about the "emotional trauma" of his experience, sues someone, and totally ignores the fact that millions of people are affected by this disease.
First of all, nobody as far as I have seen has claimed he actually sued someone, only that he "sought compensation", which may very well include nothing more than writing a letter to the appropriate authorities stating his case and asking for it to be considered.
Second, have you personally verified that that is even accurate reporting?
Third, do you know his reason was "emotional trauma" and not for instance real economic impacts caused by the original diagnosis (such as cashing in his pension and spending money left and right because he had good reason to believe he didn't need it - for what you know he could have given his entire pension to charity)? The article also mentions him becoming suicidal and depressed, which may very well have affected his work and had economic impacts.
You're making unsubstantiated claims about this guys motivations which you have no basis for.
My point wasn't addressing the inherent inequality in our reality, it was addressing this guy's selfish and stupid behavior. Nevermind the fact that he does nothing, it's that he does nothing and sues someone! He knows first hand the trauma of this disease, but he's so self centered that he can't look out at the world and see all the good he could do with a little self sacrifice.
Quote from the article: "He has told the papers he would do anything he could to help find a cure."
So how exactly is it you know that he is doing nothing? You are again assuming one part of the article is true without any corroborating evidence while ignoring another part of the article and assuming the worst.
I'm not saying you can't be right, merely that you are jumping to an awful lot of conclusions with essentially no evidence.
He lived for a year or so thinking he had a lethal disease and having to stay clear of sex partners, and may for what you know have made a lot of other decisions as a result of the original test which may have negatively affected his long term economic prospects ("hey, I'm going to be dead in a few years, I might as well cash in my pension and by a Porsche"). Without knowing more about the reasons you don't really have any basis for judging his behaviour.
That's even assuming that the story was reported accurately, which you also don't know.
Re:This is highly interesting
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A Flu Pandemic?
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· Score: 1
You're mixing up the infection rate and the lethality. A milder (i.e. less lethal) virus need not spread any slower. And a less lethal virus will have an advantage over a more lethal virus if both infect equally easily since the less lethal virus will be able to spread for a longer period of time per host on average.
With something with as high a mutation rate as a flu virus that makes a huge difference.
However, the more tightly packed groups of people are the longer it may take that advantage to make a difference, since both a highly lethal and a less lethal strain might have plenty of time to exhaust the local population of hosts before people start dying.
So yes, of course more densely packed populations equal a better environment for them. However, we also live in communities that are much better prepared for this - even most poor villages in developing countries have at least a radio or a phone somewhere, and most people will know about the spread of the disease very quickly if it happens, giving people a lot better chance of isolating themselves or taking precautions to reduce their exposure to others.
That could have a significant effect in slowing down the spread enough to let milder variations of the virus get a chance to overpower the deadliest strains pretty quickly.
It's quite possible we'll see a pandemic and lots of dead, but I don't think it will be anywhere near the doomsday scenarios we see in the press these days.
I'd rather the press spent more time writing about the 1.3 million or so yearly deaths from Malaria, or 1.6 million or so deaths from Tuberculosis, or the 600.000 or so from Measles - almost all of those deaths are easily preventable with proper treatments and/or vaccines. This is EVERY year.
But of course diseases that mainly hit poor people aren't particularly interesting.
Re:I've been polled twice about the flu
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A Flu Pandemic?
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· Score: 3, Informative
It isn't wiped out - there are still around a thousand cases a year. But it's yet another of the diseases we could easily get rid of if the will was there.
Polio is a particularly good example because it's been flaring up again in isolated areas on a regular basis due to lack of political will - for instance in Kano province in Nigeria in 2003 after muslim leaders caused the immunisation programs to be suspended over paranoia that Western nations used the polio vaccines to distribute drugs to reduce fertility and spread HIV... Yes, you read that right.
As of this year Polio is still endemic (exists in the wild) in at least 5 countries. The other countries with significant Polio outbreaks have all been cases of it being imported from elsewhere.
The good news is that the Polio vaccine programs in Nigeria were reinstated, though despite that Nigeria alone have had about a third of all Polio outbreaks this year.
In my "traditional" project management course syllabus, the issues of how much detail to break tasks down into and the various methods of tracking progress (such as by complete tasks, by estimated time remaining per task, by budgeted cost of work completed/scheduled or actual cost of work completed/scheduled and a large number of others) were covered in detail.
There's nothing new here - most of the texts on project management we worked with were 10-20 years old, and all covered these issues and pros and cons for all of them.
The problem isn't that traditional project management can't be easily applied to software, but that most "project managers" have no training beyond how to start up Microsoft Project and think that project management consists of moving the percent complete marker on a GANTT chart.
I can't speak for the poster you replied to, but I can give one good reason: Many developers refuse to do it. Personally, I'd quit within days if I was forced to do pair programming for instance - I can't work productively with some annoying backseat coder hanging over my shoulder and I would be bored to death watching someone else code. Yes, I've tried it. Hated it intensely.
Off the bat I can't think of any other methodology I've looked at that have been capable of causing such intense hatred from people as XP.
That does NOT mean that I will not sit down with someone while they try to solve specific problems or walk me through code if they ask me to, or have people do the same for me - it means I will only do it when there are specific problems that require an extra head or as part of training.
But the fact remains that XP is a methodology that only works for some personality types, and when many of the people it fails for are highly productive when developing using other methodologies, forcing XP on people becomes a barrier to being competitive and also means that many companies simply will steer clear even though it may work well on a voluntary basis.
From the few 3D movies I've seen (using polarised glasses), I can tell you why: Even when there aren't special effects that make particular use of it, things still look a lot less flat when your eyes see slightly different versions of the same scene.
But I'd gladly bet that a lot of movies WILL start making use of 3D for special effects, particularly light-on-story action movies that survive on their over the top effects.
That depends entirely on the characteristics you need. Shared memory is typically in large contiguous chunks, yes, but that doesn't mean you can't implement a shared memory queue - you just need to allocate the memory for the individual messages from the shared memory.
However what you'll typically see is that heavily message oriented programs will either use System V IPC, or serialize it's messages through pipes or sockets. The advantage of using sockets/pipes is that it's easy to switch the application from being multi process on the same machine to splitting it out over several machines, which can provide a significant scalability advantage. It also eases synchronisation and safety (no chance of the processes failing to acquire locks or clobbering parts of shared memory).
mmap() or system V shared memory are typically used mainly when processes need to work on large amounts of shared data.
The various methods are often combined - you'll find apps using mmap() for shared memory but
uses pipes to synchronise access to it, for instance.
Personally I see using threads as a premature optimization - I've yet to come across a case where the overhead of process oriented IPC was sufficient to warrant switching to use threading instead of multiple process (of course they exist - they're just exceedingly rare in the types of fields I've worked in). In a well structured application the switch, if needed, should involve only minor changes, and by using a multi process approach from the start you end up being forced to structure things in a way that minimize communication which will only benefit you if you switch to threads too.
Then again this is what happens when people limit themselves to voting for the corporatist party (Republicans) versus the socialist party (Democrats).
Either way you get a system where big institutions are allowed to become laws unto themselves. *Cue some leftist to come tell me how socialism works, how no American understands Real Socialism(tm) and why Capitalism is absolutely identical in practice to Italian Fascism*
Given the quote above, you certainly do seem to need someone to explain to you what socialism is. I'm not even going to bother to try as I doubt you'd take any of it in, except to point out one thing that most of the "leftists" you complain about probably won't bring up or agree with:
Socialism is not restricted to the left - socialism is a label for a set of common traits of political ideologies, not a single ideology. Those ideologies span a very wide part of the political spectrum, to the extent that Marx and Engels felt it neccessary to devote a full chapter (of four) of the Communist Manifesto to deriding alternative socialist ideologies ranging from the far left to the far right.
As such, you may actually be justified in calling the Democrats "socialist" to some extent, they're just not supporters of the kind of socialism most people on the left support (and from a non-US standpoint, the Democrats would generally be considered a right wing party) - under Marx' classification they might fit into what he called "petty borgeois socialists". In other words a group that claim they work for social justice, but who does so from a middle class standpoint - that is, as long as it's just about getting the rich that foots the bill as opposed to a true redistribution of wealth and economic power.
Marx' claimed that such socialists are a distraction and ultimately serves the right wing by making poor people believe that their needs could be served within the confines of the bourgeois state.
My impression of the jesuits is also pretty good. Mainly because they tend to see science as a way of observing and learning about their God's creation - a natural conclusion from that view is that denying observable scientific fact would be the same as refusing to accept what God has created.
So while I might disagree with them about that existence of God thing, at least they aren't generally anywhere near as narrow minded as most other christian groups.
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In any case, it misses the point that one of the key goals is a system that is hackable and modifiable and that is easily supported even in the absence of the ability of pay for support to, say, translate the system to one of the 1800 languages spoken in Africa that is NOT on the list of supported languages for any commercial OS's, or any number of other modifications they may like to better tailor the solution to specific needs.
So your only remaining point is easy of use. Personally ease of use is exactly why I prefer Redhat/Fedora, so unless you have something more concrete you'll have to accept that "ease of use" is largely a matter of taste in this case - the differences simply aren't particularly great.
Hint: I sometimes use APT to install my RPM's on my Fedora box, sometimes Yum. If I'd like to (which I don't - I often install software over ssh connections) I could easily install graphical frontends to manage my RPMs and update my boxes from a myriad of APT and Yum repositories. On Redhat Enterprise Linux boxes I have access to, I use up2date to do the same job, including installing RPM's from APT repositories. See how I use both at the same time? That's because APT isn't a replacement for RPM any more than it is a replacements for Debians package manager. It's just a tool for dependency resolution and package retrieval.
In other words you're talking out of your ass.
Or it smacks of unmet design goals, such as having the ability to let kids tinker with the entire system and use it to learn about how computers work in great details instead of limiting it to what the designers happens to tink is best, as well as the ability for the project to adapt and modify the system to meet specific needs for different groups of recipients.
And up2date in Redhat Enterprise Linux can actually use both Yum and Apt repositories, as well as Redhat Network and any filesystem directory.
And pray tell, how do you think most of todays professional software developers learned the game? Don't think these countries will need software developers? Just look around you at how dependent modern economies are on computers to drive up efficiency and try to tell us how the developing world will ever catch up if it can't bridge that divide or how they can bridge that divide if they don't have their own developers and can't afford to hire in developers from more developed countries.
And before you even try to bring up shrink wrap software, that's a tiny part of the software needs of a typical enterprise. The vast majority of software engineers are employed to work on internal projects that are never turned into sellable products but that are used to support business operations.
If the developing world is going to be ready to take the leap to a more computerised business environment over the next 15-25 years, they need to start teaching kids now.
Look at India, and how important software engineering skills has become to them. To get there, India put in decades of heavy investments in education in engineering disciplines and science. It's a great credit to them that they saw the value of it and took advantage of the fact that they were willing to take the cost despite the many short term fixes they could have spent the money on instead.
This is about education, not about making everything dumbed down and as easy as possible at the cost of teaching kids less.
Several generations of software engineers learned to program by having systems they could tinker freely with. Many of them on closed source systems, but on closed source systems that were small enough and well documented enough that they were still easy to tinker with.
Giving these kids the tools they need to become the future sys admins and software developers for their nations a decade or two down the line is a significant additional benefit.
The downside? How many of the apps you believe these people could get for free for OS X (they certainly won't have the money to buy commercial software so bringing up commercial software is meaningless) and not for Linux do you think they would have any use for? Can you name a single FREE OS X software package that has no equivalent for Linux that would be useful for a school kid between 5 and 15 or so in sub-Saharan Africa for example?
And do you think Apple will be easily convinced to translate their OS into the 1800 or so languages spoken in Africa alone? Yet with an open system, a single industrious school teacher that knows English or another language the system has been translated to could learn enough to do a translation into a language that would otherwise remain unsupported.
Don't think teachers will do it? I knew plenty of kids when I was at school that did have teachers that started out just as ignorant of computers as most of the teachers exposed to this box will be, yet that picked up far more advanced computer skills in a couple of years than that simply because they felt it was important.
It seems from your response that you haven't even considered the idea that these people may in fact have carefully considered the goals and needs of the people the machines will be handed to, or that they may very well even have discussed those needs with a lot of people in the respective countries - this is not development aid - many of the countries that may receive these machines are going to be paying for it because they think it's a benefit to their children.
Exactly. Why indeed should we put software ideology and zealotry ahead of providing a platform that is open wherever possible so these people and this project will not be beholden to profit making corporation whenever they want or need a customisation (such as localisation to any of the 1800 or so African languages that are mostly unsupported by commercial software because the market is too small, yet that are spoken by many of the children this laptop is aimed at), or make a choice that prevents these kids from being able to learn not only through a standard curriculum but also from having a platform they can change and adapt?
You're severely underestimating children if you think that there isn't a significant number of kids amongst the 150 million this project has set as it's initial target that will quickly understand the system well enough to start modifying it (including programming) and many that will be able to help extend the usability of this project by contributing changes (such as translations).
Being part of a generation where 3-4 people in my class of 25-30 kids could program before the age of 10 and were lots of kids started cranking out demo's that did things the computer manufacturers thought impossible with their hardware before the age of 13, I find the whole attitude of thinking that children need to be handheld into computer usage quite appalling.
In an education setting I'd pick a platform that can be picked apart and modified freely over nearly anything else.
Practically any platform can be used for writing reports or reading electronic books or surfing the net. Where the difference lies is in openness and hackability. That's the differentiation factor that matters.
You seem to, in your zealotry, automatically assume that no thought has been put into the policy of preferring open source software for this system, with absolutely no facts to back it up.
As for letting people choose, nowhere did I read that people will be forced to keep Linux on these laptops. But this project is meant to be self sustainable.
For this project to spend resources on supporting multiple OS's that could be better spent cranking out more machines or localising the system to more languages, or spending more time optimizing the platform would be counter their goals.
And yes, I'm sure they do expect some of these kids to compile their own kernels, or at the very least user level programs and learn how to use development tools.
Kids have learned that way with minimal guidance since the dawn of home computers, on far more primitive systems fit far steeper learning curves.
I learned to program that way, and a large number of my friends learned to program that way
It is also about being able to customise the device for local needs. Do you think Apple or Microsoft would commit to continue development of their respective OS's for this device for free as the hardware changes? What about localisation to local tribal languages (of which India and Africa alone have a few thousand)? For such a project to reach it's full potential, it needs to be flexible. You don't get that flexibility if you are beholden to a profit making corporation that have other concerns than guaranteeing long term support for something like this.
It's all well and fine to address basic needs, but if you only address lack of food and water and nothing else you only end up with an increasing number of people dependent on regular handouts while the rest of the world leave them further and further behind development wise and skills wise.
Without a solid focus on furthering education those people will never stand a chance of improving their situation much beyond being cheap labour.
Your argument seems reasonable at first glance, but in essence it's a "but think of the children!" type argument that gets people to ignore all rational thinking in favour of short sighted short term solutions.
Starvation, unclean water and diseases are significant challenges, yes. But lack of education will have a much more significant long term effect on how many people die of poverty.
Better education also helps address many of those issues:
It's a way of helping getting out information about better farming methods. To get out information on how to avoid and threat diseases in areas where doctors and access to medicines are scarce. To teach people skills that will help them improve their own lives and the lives of those around them - such as how to take water supply into their own hands and work together to secure the water supply for a whole village. To effectivise business to increase the profits and lower costs.
And a significant reason for many of the modern day famines are lack of understanding of environmental factors and farming methods that safeguard a consistent food supply, for instance. In some places these are skills that used to be widespread and shared, but where things like AIDS have ruined much of the traditional education by killing off essential people. In other places it's simply a matter of providing information about more modern methods that often can double or triple yields with little extra effort - just some new understanding.
It boils down to this: Do we want to help these people get the skills to develop their countries and take their futures into their own hands, or do we want them to be forever dependent on foreign and and handouts to just get by?
Within weeks I knew more about how the machine worked than he did - largely because of the extreme perseverence a child can show... For instance I POKE'd my way through almost every register the thing had, and kept calling my parents at work to describe what strange things I'd gotten the machine to do (though most of them may have required a machine restart afterwards... :) )
When we got a Commodore 64 a year or two later I hogged the machine every chance I had. The fact that the manuals were in English meant that I learned English years ahead of most of my class mates because I "had to" to figure out how things worked.
The point is, kids learn surprisingly fast when given the chance. In part because they're not worried about "details" such as the consequences of what they do (so yeah, expect a few messed up partition tables and formatted disks and systems with vital files deleted...) and just go ahead and try things, and in part because they are much more willing to spend ages fiddling with something to try to figure out how it works.
I've had much more trouble with my Windows laptop at work than I've ever had with my Linux box at home.
It's short sighted to just automatically assume that none of these people have any use for modern technology because they are poor.
First of all, nobody as far as I have seen has claimed he actually sued someone, only that he "sought compensation", which may very well include nothing more than writing a letter to the appropriate authorities stating his case and asking for it to be considered.
Second, have you personally verified that that is even accurate reporting?
Third, do you know his reason was "emotional trauma" and not for instance real economic impacts caused by the original diagnosis (such as cashing in his pension and spending money left and right because he had good reason to believe he didn't need it - for what you know he could have given his entire pension to charity)? The article also mentions him becoming suicidal and depressed, which may very well have affected his work and had economic impacts.
You're making unsubstantiated claims about this guys motivations which you have no basis for.
My point wasn't addressing the inherent inequality in our reality, it was addressing this guy's selfish and stupid behavior. Nevermind the fact that he does nothing, it's that he does nothing and sues someone! He knows first hand the trauma of this disease, but he's so self centered that he can't look out at the world and see all the good he could do with a little self sacrifice.
Quote from the article: "He has told the papers he would do anything he could to help find a cure."
So how exactly is it you know that he is doing nothing? You are again assuming one part of the article is true without any corroborating evidence while ignoring another part of the article and assuming the worst.
I'm not saying you can't be right, merely that you are jumping to an awful lot of conclusions with essentially no evidence.
That's even assuming that the story was reported accurately, which you also don't know.
With something with as high a mutation rate as a flu virus that makes a huge difference.
However, the more tightly packed groups of people are the longer it may take that advantage to make a difference, since both a highly lethal and a less lethal strain might have plenty of time to exhaust the local population of hosts before people start dying.
So yes, of course more densely packed populations equal a better environment for them. However, we also live in communities that are much better prepared for this - even most poor villages in developing countries have at least a radio or a phone somewhere, and most people will know about the spread of the disease very quickly if it happens, giving people a lot better chance of isolating themselves or taking precautions to reduce their exposure to others.
That could have a significant effect in slowing down the spread enough to let milder variations of the virus get a chance to overpower the deadliest strains pretty quickly.
It's quite possible we'll see a pandemic and lots of dead, but I don't think it will be anywhere near the doomsday scenarios we see in the press these days.
I'd rather the press spent more time writing about the 1.3 million or so yearly deaths from Malaria, or 1.6 million or so deaths from Tuberculosis, or the 600.000 or so from Measles - almost all of those deaths are easily preventable with proper treatments and/or vaccines. This is EVERY year.
But of course diseases that mainly hit poor people aren't particularly interesting.
Polio is a particularly good example because it's been flaring up again in isolated areas on a regular basis due to lack of political will - for instance in Kano province in Nigeria in 2003 after muslim leaders caused the immunisation programs to be suspended over paranoia that Western nations used the polio vaccines to distribute drugs to reduce fertility and spread HIV... Yes, you read that right.
As of this year Polio is still endemic (exists in the wild) in at least 5 countries. The other countries with significant Polio outbreaks have all been cases of it being imported from elsewhere.
The good news is that the Polio vaccine programs in Nigeria were reinstated, though despite that Nigeria alone have had about a third of all Polio outbreaks this year.
There's nothing new here - most of the texts on project management we worked with were 10-20 years old, and all covered these issues and pros and cons for all of them.
The problem isn't that traditional project management can't be easily applied to software, but that most "project managers" have no training beyond how to start up Microsoft Project and think that project management consists of moving the percent complete marker on a GANTT chart.
Off the bat I can't think of any other methodology I've looked at that have been capable of causing such intense hatred from people as XP.
That does NOT mean that I will not sit down with someone while they try to solve specific problems or walk me through code if they ask me to, or have people do the same for me - it means I will only do it when there are specific problems that require an extra head or as part of training.
But the fact remains that XP is a methodology that only works for some personality types, and when many of the people it fails for are highly productive when developing using other methodologies, forcing XP on people becomes a barrier to being competitive and also means that many companies simply will steer clear even though it may work well on a voluntary basis.
Just imagine the innovative new fades that the marketing department will spend months coming up with...
But I'd gladly bet that a lot of movies WILL start making use of 3D for special effects, particularly light-on-story action movies that survive on their over the top effects.
man ipc
man socket
man mmap
man pipe
The long answer:
That depends entirely on the characteristics you need. Shared memory is typically in large contiguous chunks, yes, but that doesn't mean you can't implement a shared memory queue - you just need to allocate the memory for the individual messages from the shared memory.
However what you'll typically see is that heavily message oriented programs will either use System V IPC, or serialize it's messages through pipes or sockets. The advantage of using sockets/pipes is that it's easy to switch the application from being multi process on the same machine to splitting it out over several machines, which can provide a significant scalability advantage. It also eases synchronisation and safety (no chance of the processes failing to acquire locks or clobbering parts of shared memory).
mmap() or system V shared memory are typically used mainly when processes need to work on large amounts of shared data.
The various methods are often combined - you'll find apps using mmap() for shared memory but uses pipes to synchronise access to it, for instance.
Personally I see using threads as a premature optimization - I've yet to come across a case where the overhead of process oriented IPC was sufficient to warrant switching to use threading instead of multiple process (of course they exist - they're just exceedingly rare in the types of fields I've worked in). In a well structured application the switch, if needed, should involve only minor changes, and by using a multi process approach from the start you end up being forced to structure things in a way that minimize communication which will only benefit you if you switch to threads too.
Doesn't take a genius to predict that seeing as it had happened before this article was even posted...
Either way you get a system where big institutions are allowed to become laws unto themselves. *Cue some leftist to come tell me how socialism works, how no American understands Real Socialism(tm) and why Capitalism is absolutely identical in practice to Italian Fascism*
Given the quote above, you certainly do seem to need someone to explain to you what socialism is. I'm not even going to bother to try as I doubt you'd take any of it in, except to point out one thing that most of the "leftists" you complain about probably won't bring up or agree with:
Socialism is not restricted to the left - socialism is a label for a set of common traits of political ideologies, not a single ideology. Those ideologies span a very wide part of the political spectrum, to the extent that Marx and Engels felt it neccessary to devote a full chapter (of four) of the Communist Manifesto to deriding alternative socialist ideologies ranging from the far left to the far right.
As such, you may actually be justified in calling the Democrats "socialist" to some extent, they're just not supporters of the kind of socialism most people on the left support (and from a non-US standpoint, the Democrats would generally be considered a right wing party) - under Marx' classification they might fit into what he called "petty borgeois socialists". In other words a group that claim they work for social justice, but who does so from a middle class standpoint - that is, as long as it's just about getting the rich that foots the bill as opposed to a true redistribution of wealth and economic power.
Marx' claimed that such socialists are a distraction and ultimately serves the right wing by making poor people believe that their needs could be served within the confines of the bourgeois state.
So while I might disagree with them about that existence of God thing, at least they aren't generally anywhere near as narrow minded as most other christian groups.