How would you explain General Theory of Relative to a eleven year old. If the child comes across a site about GTR, the child will be equally perplexed as with www.goatse.cx (If not she/he is not longer a child:-)
If the parent maintains a good communication with the child all along, it will be always possible to explain any complex matter in terms understood by the child - you know the wavelength after all!!
As far as controlling access to internet is concerned, I feel the same way. Give full access to all that internet has to provide. Explain the reasons and request the child to save transcripts of all chats for future reference! Again the trust level built up over the years is important.
Frankly speaking I do not understand the need for software to protect children. What I will do is to give them a free hand. I have seen in IE, history folder and temporary internet files folder which can give me an idea what they are into, if I really want to know (If a kid is smart enough to remove the contents of these, then she/he is no longer a kid
You can put thousand of controls and shackles in place, if you do not have the kid as your friend. The kid will head straight back to you and ask about the thing he/she does not understand, so you do not have to snoop around.
It is not only to do with printing. It is going to give power to the reader! You can link and cross reference all the books in your collection! You can search the books!
As far as information access by humans are concerned it is the next giant leap after the invention of print press by Gutenberg, in my opinion.
How many books, magazines, newspaper you buy in a week?
The idea is to have one device for a person which will take care of all his reading needs plus more. You download you daily newspaper into the device, read your favourite magazine, read your novel and also the text book. All this will be replaced by a single device which will serve you for years, may a life time and more
This reminds me of one of my co-worker, who was against using the PC for customer order maintanance. His argument was "Can I add comments to an entry using a pencil?" "Can I access any entry just by turning a few pages?" "Can I carry it to meetings with customers? "What about when I travel?"
This was a few years back. Today with the availability of PDAs he can do almost everything he wanted. The issue is not the idea itself, but the format in which it is available now.
Just imagine a device which is as big as a paper back novel of present time, which can hold a few hundred titles in it and display the text with the printed quality of today's books? Let it come with an idiot proof outer cover!
Even today's e-book readers have the option to mark where you left reading and go back to it at a latter time. If I recall correct, you have the option of picking from any page, furthest read page, last read page etc
You want to lent it to someone? One solution will be to connect your reader to their's ---SWISH ---the copy of the book your are lending goes through to your friend's machine and your machine loses the copy. It is a move rather than a copy action. When your friend is finished you move it back into your reader. Pretty close to what you have with the print books! eh?
Eye strain? When there were no books, and knowledge were transmitted orally you never strained your eyes by reading, and I am sure one of the argument against the first written word would have been the eye strain!:-) Be open to new ideas! Come on!!
Look at the millions of inventory in each book store, consider the amount of paper each avid reader is holding, e-book will be a great leap forward for man kind in terms of dissemination of knowledge in the most efficient form.
If you further read in the article, it talks about books talking to each other (reminds one of MS "smart tags":-).
I would love that feature. When you read 'A Brief history of Time" you can flip into parts of John Gribbin's "In Search of Schroedinger's Cat". Will be really cool!!
In my opinion, what we need is a good medium and format for accessing e-books and it is a matter of years before we can all enjoy the ultimate reading pleasure.
PS: I really think that the original poster read till the Microsoft part and posted his comment! It is a pretty lengthy article. To read and digest it will take the best part of an hour. I am one quarter of the way into it:-)
Whether one believes in him or not, this man comes through as pretty convinced about what he is doing. His views on Taiwan and Tibet are very 'rational' from the point of view of a Chinese. He may be making money by cheating some people into buying rings, but he is not stupid or crazy. He is clever in what he is doing and talks well.
There is always a way to look at things in the worst possible light. What James Martin says is that WE have the responsibility and ability to get things right. If there is an accident we will learn from it and correct the systems.
1. The messy jumble of cash, keys, and credit cards will be distilled into a single smart card that can be carried in a pocket.
Implication: A robber will gain full and total access to every aspect of your life, ruining it in one fell swoop, and police/government forces in many nations will destroy their opponents just as easily. And this will happen, because human's have both good and evil impulses.
Comment: If this happens the next step will be to replace the card with some system which identify the palm of your hand. Or better, we start with a system which does not employ a robbable identification:-)
2.
A TV will choose programs the viewer enjoys. Better yet, commercials that annoy will not be repeated
Implication: Who chooses? Will we control it? Will the TV rat on you? Will you be jailed due to what you watch (they subpeona your book purchases in the US, after all). 1984, anyone?
Comment: It will be an open source software. The user will have the option to have it just the way he wants it. If he/she does not want any outside control, so be it.
Remember, this TV is going to access program stored on the web and the consumer demand will make certain that privacy and individual freedom is protected.
3. Cars will report good driving so that insurance rates drop
Implication: Cars will report bad driving. Rich people will buy cars that expunge thier bad driving, poor people will have their cars turn them in and go to jail. Those with money and power make the rules, as anyone in France can tell you. And a rich person can hire (and have jailed) a chauffeur.
Comment: If you do not want the option, just turn it off. If you want to take an insurance with lower premium you will install the software report you driving for a few weeks and get your premium dropped. If you do not want to, it is your choice, either pay a high premium or go without an insurance:-)
4. A house will sense the mood of its owner: The coffee machine will kick in when it's needed.
And, when you have a brownout, it will mess up the files and go back to the factory settings. Or it will listen in to your morning gripings and save them to the FBI/SS file kept on you.
Comment: Again this depends on how you look at things. A brownout can be eliminated and even if there is one there will be back up batteries!
Wrong! It is not that they will be branded as Criminals, it is just that special needs of each indiviudal will be more accurately identified and education and training and will be tailored accordingly.
This is not a bad thing. The quote you have given also does not say that someone will be branded criminal before they commit a crime!
When Linux becomes more popular and widespread among non-technical users, there will be more and
more worms targeted at Linux systems (as is the case with Windows today).
If you have a good Virus prevention program installed you can have a virus free Windows system. The problem is majority of ordinary users are not aware of such programs or too careless to install one in their system. Therefore, Windows machines are breeding ground for various virii.
In case Linux, if some one creates a worm and spreads it around, it is easy for the community to create a vaccine and send it using the same route as the virus. This will take care of the users even when they are not paying attention.
Thanks to Microsoft, the argument favouring open source now has a platform to reach the people who really count. But for Craig Mundie's speech there would not be a high batteried response like this from the community and never before is the chance to reach the target audience as effectively(reply to what MICROSOFT said, let us see what it is?).
Give a fish to a hungry person, he will feed himself once, teach him fishing, he will feed himself for ever.
To bring food to the starving millions we have to provide the means by which they can create value and earn their food.
This is a wonderful device in that respect.
Morever, $200 is Indian Rupees 10,000 (appx). If the device catches on there will be enough "poor illiterate farmers" who will pawn their 'family silver' to get one and better their lives.
The utility of open source and community spirit is manifested here and hope this works out.
Is it feasible to have a central clearing house for bytes exchanged (or something like that) and each user of the net is charged for that.
Each ISP can maintain the account for individual users as to how much they downloaded into their machines while browsing the web, ftp or by way of email. They should be billed monthly for this volume.
All the ISPs should settle their account with the central clearing house.
Any site who want to charge for the content should register with the clearing house and fix the charges. At the end of each day their account can be credited from the date received from all the ISPs.
Is it technically feasible? Just a thought. How the web may evolve in the future.
That is not true. The economy of India is vastly different from that of USA. In US a recession means
many people lose jobs and families post pone purchase of new homes and new cars by a few months.
Basically a belt tightening.
In India there is no recession in this sense. Majority of People have their fixed way of life enough to feed and clothe them if everything goes well. Only when there is a famine or flood their life is changed dramatically. Otherwise there is not much to lose.
I am talking about the masses living in villages and rural areas. There is a small part of economy which is linked to the western (read - developed) economies. They may get affected by reduced income and fall in standard of living. Then, that is same as the fall in standard of living as relevant to US also.
Thus a recession in US is not going to make people die in India.
When the distributions charge for the CD version and provide free download of the same iso image what they are doing is a sort of regressive subsidizing.
Those with high band width connections (have's) can download the image and pay not a dime. Those who have only dial up connections decide to pay for the CD (which includes the cost of running the distribtuion). This money is used to provide the downloads for the have's. Pretty unfair.
This is the beginning I think. All the companies should come this way sooner or latter. Only the price will be debatable and will reach a equilibrium level eventually.
"once we reach this point in our technological sophistication, we can go no further"
I think this is seen in all branches of science all the time. The front line research is always concerned with the next step, not the step 20 kilometers away. A thousand mile march begins with a step and each step as important as the next one.
This setting milestones are also like that. You work on beating a limit and once you beat that you know how to do it and better the methods which leads to further challenges and so on.
And all these hypes are needed for the companies who invest in the research to prepare the market for the coming thing!
Ofcourse it is good news! Taking into account the contribution they made in terms of software development it is definitely good news.
Red hat employs hundreds of employees, building up a brand for linux distribution and strive to provide ease of use to the consumers. All these came about because of the existence of the company.
Open source is not a revolutionary concept for many in the third world, but a necessity. Being able to open the hood and fix things one self is very critical for the success of any product in under developed economies. If the user does not know how to fix it him/herself there will be plenty of street corner shops to offer the service at reasonable cost. The closed source of software distribution will not reach the majority of population in the legal way.
As far as governments adopting the concept is concerned, it gives an institutional backing to the concept which is a big selling point. For example in India any thing approved by the government is looked high and the fact is used in promotion of many products.
The concept is the need of the hour and thanks to all who are working on this.
As I understand it, the concept of open sourcing is all about hackers working on goals relevant to them than working for a 'common cause'.
I hope that in a few years time each city will have their own distribution. This will be leaner and more useful as only the relevant features will be included in the distribution. Today my Red Hat installation includes time zone option for tens of cities all over the world. If there is distro by a local software firm, this will be out. and so on.
Slashdot Mirror
How would you explain General Theory of Relative to a eleven year old. If the child comes across a site about GTR, the child will be equally perplexed as with www.goatse.cx (If not she/he is not longer a child :-)
If the parent maintains a good communication with the child all along, it will be always possible to explain any complex matter in terms understood by the child - you know the wavelength after all!!
As far as controlling access to internet is concerned, I feel the same way. Give full access to all that internet has to provide. Explain the reasons and request the child to save transcripts of all chats for future reference! Again the trust level built up over the years is important.
Frankly speaking I do not understand the need for software to protect children. What I will do is to give them a free hand. I have seen in IE, history folder and temporary internet files folder which can give me an idea what they are into, if I really want to know (If a kid is smart enough to remove the contents of these, then she/he is no longer a kid
You can put thousand of controls and shackles in place, if you do not have the kid as your friend. The kid will head straight back to you and ask about the thing he/she does not understand, so you do not have to snoop around.
It is not only to do with printing. It is going to give power to the reader! You can link and cross reference all the books in your collection! You can search the books!
As far as information access by humans are concerned it is the next giant leap after the invention of print press by Gutenberg, in my opinion.
How many electronic devices you buy in a week?
How many books, magazines, newspaper you buy in a week?
The idea is to have one device for a person which will take care of all his reading needs plus more. You download you daily newspaper into the device, read your favourite magazine, read your novel and also the text book. All this will be replaced by a single device which will serve you for years, may a life time and more
This reminds me of one of my co-worker, who was against using the PC for customer order maintanance. His argument was "Can I add comments to an entry using a pencil?" "Can I access any entry just by turning a few pages?" "Can I carry it to meetings with customers? "What about when I travel?"
:-) Be open to new ideas! Come on!!
:-).
I would love that feature. When you read 'A Brief history of Time" you can flip into parts of John Gribbin's "In Search of Schroedinger's Cat". Will be really cool!!
:-)
This was a few years back. Today with the availability of PDAs he can do almost everything he wanted. The issue is not the idea itself, but the format in which it is available now.
Just imagine a device which is as big as a paper back novel of present time, which can hold a few hundred titles in it and display the text with the printed quality of today's books? Let it come with an idiot proof outer cover!
Even today's e-book readers have the option to mark where you left reading and go back to it at a latter time. If I recall correct, you have the option of picking from any page, furthest read page, last read page etc
You want to lent it to someone? One solution will be to connect your reader to their's ---SWISH ---the copy of the book your are lending goes through to your friend's machine and your machine loses the copy. It is a move rather than a copy action. When your friend is finished you move it back into your reader. Pretty close to what you have with the print books! eh?
Eye strain? When there were no books, and knowledge were transmitted orally you never strained your eyes by reading, and I am sure one of the argument against the first written word would have been the eye strain!
Look at the millions of inventory in each book store, consider the amount of paper each avid reader is holding, e-book will be a great leap forward for man kind in terms of dissemination of knowledge in the most efficient form.
If you further read in the article, it talks about books talking to each other (reminds one of MS "smart tags"
In my opinion, what we need is a good medium and format for accessing e-books and it is a matter of years before we can all enjoy the ultimate reading pleasure.
PS: I really think that the original poster read till the Microsoft part and posted his comment! It is a pretty lengthy article. To read and digest it will take the best part of an hour. I am one quarter of the way into it
Whether one believes in him or not, this man comes through as pretty convinced about what he is doing. His views on Taiwan and Tibet are very 'rational' from the point of view of a Chinese. He may be making money by cheating some people into buying rings, but he is not stupid or crazy. He is clever in what he is doing and talks well.
There is always a way to look at things in the worst possible light. What James Martin says is that WE have the responsibility and ability to get things right. If there is an accident we will learn from it and correct the systems.
:-)
:-)
1. The messy jumble of cash, keys, and credit cards will be distilled into a single smart card that can be carried in a pocket.
Implication: A robber will gain full and total access to every aspect of your life, ruining it in one fell swoop, and police/government forces in many nations will destroy their opponents just as easily. And this will happen, because human's have both good and evil impulses.
Comment: If this happens the next step will be to replace the card with some system which identify the palm of your hand. Or better, we start with a system which does not employ a robbable identification
2.
A TV will choose programs the viewer enjoys. Better yet, commercials that annoy will not be repeated
Implication: Who chooses? Will we control it? Will the TV rat on you? Will you be jailed due to what you watch (they subpeona your book purchases in the US, after all). 1984, anyone?
Comment: It will be an open source software. The user will have the option to have it just the way he wants it. If he/she does not want any outside control, so be it.
Remember, this TV is going to access program stored on the web and the consumer demand will make certain that privacy and individual freedom is protected.
3. Cars will report good driving so that insurance rates drop
Implication: Cars will report bad driving. Rich people will buy cars that expunge thier bad driving, poor people will have their cars turn them in and go to jail. Those with money and power make the rules, as anyone in France can tell you. And a rich person can hire (and have jailed) a chauffeur.
Comment: If you do not want the option, just turn it off. If you want to take an insurance with lower premium you will install the software report you driving for a few weeks and get your premium dropped. If you do not want to, it is your choice, either pay a high premium or go without an insurance
4. A house will sense the mood of its owner: The coffee machine will kick in when it's needed.
And, when you have a brownout, it will mess up the files and go back to the factory settings. Or it will listen in to your morning gripings and save them to the FBI/SS file kept on you.
Comment: Again this depends on how you look at things. A brownout can be eliminated and even if there is one there will be back up batteries!
Wrong! It is not that they will be branded as Criminals, it is just that special needs of each indiviudal will be more accurately identified and education and training and will be tailored accordingly.
This is not a bad thing. The quote you have given also does not say that someone will be branded criminal before they commit a crime!
How about this?
When Linux becomes more popular and widespread among non-technical users, there will be more and
more worms targeted at Linux systems (as is the case with Windows today).
If you have a good Virus prevention program installed you can have a virus free Windows system. The problem is majority of ordinary users are not aware of such programs or too careless to install one in their system. Therefore, Windows machines are breeding ground for various virii.
In case Linux, if some one creates a worm and spreads it around, it is easy for the community to create a vaccine and send it using the same route as the virus. This will take care of the users even when they are not paying attention.
Something along this line should sound good.
Thanks to Microsoft, the argument favouring open source now has a platform to reach the people who really count. But for Craig Mundie's speech there would not be a high batteried response like this from the community and never before is the chance to reach the target audience as effectively(reply to what MICROSOFT said, let us see what it is?).
Good.
Give a fish to a hungry person, he will feed himself once, teach him fishing, he will feed himself for ever.
To bring food to the starving millions we have to provide the means by which they can create value and earn their food.
This is a wonderful device in that respect.
Morever, $200 is Indian Rupees 10,000 (appx). If the device catches on there will be enough "poor illiterate farmers" who will pawn their 'family silver' to get one and better their lives.
The utility of open source and community spirit is manifested here and hope this works out.
Is it feasible to have a central clearing house for bytes exchanged (or something like that) and each user of the net is charged for that.
Each ISP can maintain the account for individual users as to how much they downloaded into their machines while browsing the web, ftp or by way of email. They should be billed monthly for this volume.
All the ISPs should settle their account with the central clearing house.
Any site who want to charge for the content should register with the clearing house and fix the charges. At the end of each day their account can be credited from the date received from all the ISPs.
Is it technically feasible? Just a thought. How the web may evolve in the future.
That is not true. The economy of India is vastly different from that of USA. In US a recession means
many people lose jobs and families post pone purchase of new homes and new cars by a few months.
Basically a belt tightening.
In India there is no recession in this sense. Majority of People have their fixed way of life enough to feed and clothe them if everything goes well. Only when there is a famine or flood their life is changed dramatically. Otherwise there is not much to lose.
I am talking about the masses living in villages and rural areas. There is a small part of economy which is linked to the western (read - developed) economies. They may get affected by reduced income and fall in standard of living. Then, that is same as the fall in standard of living as relevant to US also.
Thus a recession in US is not going to make people die in India.
When the distributions charge for the CD version and provide free download of the same iso image what they are doing is a sort of regressive subsidizing.
Those with high band width connections (have's) can download the image and pay not a dime. Those who have only dial up connections decide to pay for the CD (which includes the cost of running the distribtuion). This money is used to provide the downloads for the have's. Pretty unfair.
This is the beginning I think. All the companies should come this way sooner or latter. Only the price will be debatable and will reach a equilibrium level eventually.
"once we reach this point in our technological sophistication, we can go no further"
I think this is seen in all branches of science all the time. The front line research is always concerned with the next step, not the step 20 kilometers away. A thousand mile march begins with a step and each step as important as the next one.
This setting milestones are also like that. You work on beating a limit and once you beat that you know how to do it and better the methods which leads to further challenges and so on.
And all these hypes are needed for the companies who invest in the research to prepare the market for the coming thing!
"Making no money is good news?"
Ofcourse it is good news! Taking into account the contribution they made in terms of software development it is definitely good news.
Red hat employs hundreds of employees, building up a brand for linux distribution and strive to provide ease of use to the consumers. All these came about because of the existence of the company.
Open source is not a revolutionary concept for many in the third world, but a necessity. Being able to open the hood and fix things one self is very critical for the success of any product in under developed economies. If the user does not know how to fix it him/herself there will be plenty of street corner shops to offer the service at reasonable cost. The closed source of software distribution will not reach the majority of population in the legal way.
As far as governments adopting the concept is concerned, it gives an institutional backing to the concept which is a big selling point. For example in India any thing approved by the government is looked high and the fact is used in promotion of many products.
The concept is the need of the hour and thanks to all who are working on this.
As I understand it, the concept of open sourcing is all about hackers working on goals relevant to them than working for a 'common cause'.
I hope that in a few years time each city will have their own distribution. This will be leaner and more useful as only the relevant features will be included in the distribution. Today my Red Hat installation includes time zone option for tens of cities all over the world. If there is distro by a local software firm, this will be out. and so on.