I'd rather see an official GNOME distro, an official KDE distro, and a 'server' distro that people can install their own stuff on. After-all, Fedora running GNOME is more similar to Ubuntu running GNOME than Fedora running KDE, as far as users are concerned. It's ridiculous to have dozens of distros, almost all of which use one of two (or both!) windowing systems.
This problem is a side effect of not taking the 10 minutes to research what's actually getting used. There aren't "dozens of distros" - for any given application domain there are - at most - three relevant distributions.
If you're having trouble figuring out which distros are relevant, filter on the following criteria: $0 per-seat license cost, available commercial support. That basically leaves you with Ubuntu. And that's probably fine, because if you really wanted something other than Ubuntu you wouldn't need to bother anyone about there being "too many distros".
I seriously doubt any major city could use 10x the power and not run into any problems.
Sure, we can't get there immediately. We'd need to build the extra generating capacity - hopefully using modern power generation techniques.
As for why you can't use solar as your major source... well first off, it's not reliable. You need to be able to produce a given level of energy consistently.
That depends entirely on how good power storage is. With the cost & quality of batteries today and the current cost of electricity, you're right - it's most effective to use solar to supplement grid power. But, as I've said three times now, if electricity prices increase we will quickly get to the point where buying the solar panels and batteries is cheaper than buying grid power. And, both photovoltaic and battery technologies are rapidly improving.
Solar, wind, and other "eco" sources are only useful to supplement the grid.
That's a ridiculous overgeneralization. Lumping together the "eco sources" is silly. Solar and wind both have inconsistency issues at an "hours" time scale, but their inconsistencies aren't linked, and with enough energy storage for "days" it tends to average out. Hydropower and Tidal are excellent base load sources, but we're already using all our hydropower resources and haven't put much effort into tidal. Geothermal provides excellent base load, but it's probably not really a renewable resource.
In any case, I'll come back to my central point about solar power. The solar panels and batteries commonly available on the open market can be used to build a reliable power generation system - the electricity cost of that system is a hard cap on future rising electricity prices.
They're still inappropriate for most of the market.
The neat thing about markets is that the *buyer* gets to decide what's most appropriate for them. Happily, in the CPU market, the buyers have decided to buy what's new and consistently push processor power for the past 20 years. Sacrificing that rate of progress for a little bit of power conservation would be a horrible economic decision for a central manager - luckily our economy mostly doesn't have one.
But you keep thinking that we should consume more resources without end. And when electricity hits 50 cents per kWh, gasoline is 10$ a galon, etc, you can wonder what happened.
The solar panel / battery hard cap is a bit less than 50 cents / kwh - so I'll never have to pay that price for longer than it takes to install the PV system. As for $10/gallon gas, I'm ready - I'll have to change my driving habits a bit, but my Prius is pretty good on gas.
I'm going to assume for a moment that you're serious. The only way that could be true is if you misinterpreted my original comment to be "helping a child in Cambodia makes the world a better place then helping a child in Compton would". That's not what I said. A more clear statement of what I meant was: "If helping a child makes the world a better place, it where that child is isn't important."
You're an idiot. We're already demanding enough energy from our natural resources.
You're the idiot. We could easily be using ten times the electricity we're using today without seriously taxing the power generation techniques available to us right now. And our technology is only getting better. Sure, we're using our fossil fuels damn fast, but we have replacements - and technology only improves with time.
We should be finding better ways to make due with less, not consume more.
Conservation as a solution to our power problem is foolish and shortsighted. This is simple Economics 101 - there is a market price for electricity, and people will purchase it for their use if it is efficient for them to do so. Governments really shouldn't be subsidizing the use of fossil fuels - in fact they should probably be taxing to discourage usage because of environmental concerns - but there are other methods for generating power in the same price range that don't have those problems.
Solar cells are about 10-20% efficient and are not useful as a source of primary power only as a supplement.
Who cares how efficient they are at converting sunlight to energy? Having no solar cell is 0% efficient - 20% efficiency is a 100% improvement. As for "useful only as a supplement", that's bullshit. Power generated through photovoltaics has a price, and when that price is lower than the market price for grid power everyone will install photovoltaics. The difference is only like a factor of three - if the technology improves a bit, and the price of electricity increases a bit then we're there - and once that happens the price of electricity will only go down as the pv technology improves further.
I take it you don't pay rent or for your utilities.
Huh? Expenses are something you need to budget for - if you have a problem with that, get a job. Electricity, specifically, isn't expensive enough for me to worry about for any application but air conditioning. If it gets too expensive, I'll have to consider alternatives to electric air conditioning - that's ok.
Electricity has been getting more expensive, not cheaper, over the years. Same with gasoline.
If you adjust properly for inflation, this is mostly false. If the government screwed with the energy market less, they'd both probably cost half as much. But... instead they've outlawed safe nuclear, subsidized petroleum, outlawed small diesel cars (California did and 8 other states copied them), and allowed anticompeditive behavior around electric cars. Even so - if you have economic reason to, conserve. If you don't, conserving just keeps prices higher longer by allowing less capacity to be built.
And really you should care about what others pay for electricity since it affects what you pay for it.
Demand for electricity should only increase price in the short term, because it's reasonably easy to generate. The price is further constrained by the current "almost economical" status of photovoltaics. If anything, I want to see demand for electricity go up just so that electricity generation technology improves.
i'm not saying no fast processors should exist. I'm saying we should stop trying to convince the laymen that they actually need it. The amount of power that is wasted on higher performance cpus idling is enormous compared to what our technology could allow for.
I value the innovative push higher than I value other people's money being spent on electricity. If at any point in the computer industry people had really, strongly decided to buy cheap processors instead of getting "top of the line" processors, progress would have slowed way down. People have been saying that "processors are way faster than what the average person needs" for 20 years now - and I think we can easily benefit from another 20 years at this rate of progress.
It'd be like everyone driving hotrods since the extra HP is "nice to have."
That's a horrible comparison. Other than racing, there is no task that can be done with a hotrod that can't be accomplished with a normal car. More relevently, I can't think of any task that's likely to become possible if a large chunk of the population owned hotrods that were twice as powerful as today's hotrods.
With computers there are a number of applications that get really interesting when everyone has a 16 core Opteron and 1024-stream-processor GPGPU in their laptop.
Not that I'm against low-power processors. If you can get a dual core processor in 2 watts, that means I can have a 64 core processor in less than 70 watts. =P
Texting while driving has no benefit worth the risk.
What? Are you omnipotent or something? Able to see the future? Even if you are, you're wrong on this one. Text based communication over a wireless network from a moving vehicle has a shitload of potential applications. I agree that trying to do it on a mobile phone with today's input methods is reckless, but that doesn't mean that there aren't any number of other ways of doing it that this law is preemptively disallowing.
In fact, with a good HUD-like display and some sort of safe input method, texting could be far safer than CB radio communication - simply because you can stop focusing on it for a second and then restart without losing your place.
I suppose being a thrifty racist is better than being a spendthrift racist - but it doesn't change the nature of the base metal.
What's racist about wanting to be able to have the largest beneficial impact on the lives of the most children for a constant amount of investment? I'm not sure if that's the most effective decision criteria or not, but it's definitely not racist - or even unreasonable.
but the top of the article should describe, in a simple way, what it's about, in a way that anyone who's graduated from elementary school, with no expert knowledge on the subject, should be able to understand it.
For some topics, that's really a waste of space in the article. Some topics require some background to make any sense at all. You can't write a meaningful article about something like Hilbert Space (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_space) without using the jargon of the field. Sure, you could write something in plain english - but it wouldn't mean anything useful.
You still have one brain and one single point of concentration. Multitasking makes you less alert in each of the tasks you perform, but most people don't realize it.
If driving is really that dangerous, it should be outlawed. People multitask all the time while driving - saying that all texting is bad but eating while driving is acceptable is absurd.
I will never accept laws that crush my freedom to drink a liter of rum and drive a truck through your front door either!
Bad comparison. This is more like having a law that makes it illegal to drink a rum-colored beverage because the legislators were too thick-headed to remember that Cola exists. Laws that specifically prevent some socially undesirable behavior are one thing, but broad laws that illegalize non-harmful activities are something that legislators should go out of their way to avoid. If there's no way to phrase a law to avoid collateral damage, it's worth reconsidering the law.
Laws can be re-evaluated and modified or discarded if necessary, or the enforcement arm can just stop enforcing obsolete laws.
Or laws can be written in such a way as to try to avoid needing this sort of change in the future. As for "the enforcement arm can just stop enforcing obsolete laws", that's utterly unacceptible - leaving everyone as criminals is the simplest way for an abusive government to harass people.
What a truly disturbing point of view - helping a child in Uruguay (in some unspecified way) 'makes the world a better place', but helping a child in Compton (in some unspecified way) 'makes the United States more dominant'. Even worse, you probably don't even realize how racist that sounds.
A MPEG hardware decoder could decode the stream with much less power consumption.
That's great, as long as you're sure that decoding video in that specific format is the only compute-intensive task the user will ever do.
Actually, I agree that GPUs should have MPEG4 decoders in them. It's a common enough format, and offloading the processing may well provide a significant performance gain for the cost. But... just because that specific task can be solved by dedicated hardware doesn't change the fact that general purpose computing power (i.e. more powerful CPUs and GPGPUs) is very useful, and much more valuable overall than a task-specific hardware accelerator.
Your 'freedom' to text while driving directly impacts the safety of everyone else on the road.
This is a tradeoff, and it can be rationally evaluated. I don't think that banning unknown future technology can ever be the rational result of such an evaluation.
Point is for most people who read webpages, listen to music, watch a movie, whatever, processors are VASTLY overpowered for what they do.
It's better for everyone if these people get fast processors anyway. First, it's impossible to be sure that they'll never want to do anything taxing with their computer. Second, more demand for powerful processors drives the technology - that makes good kit cheaper for everyone and continually allows for the development of new applications that make use of more powerful processors.
Interestingly, one of your examples is inaccurate. A low end processor *cannot* playback high quality video. Without video acceleration, even a Core 2 Duo would struggle weakly trying to decode and display a well compressed high definition video file.
Point is, XO is just fine with a "P2 class" processor.
That's a different point, and I agree with it. But it's not that these kids wouldn't be better off if the XO had a more powerful processor, it's that these kids have constraints like money and electricity that make the Geode LX @ 500Mhz the right choice for the machine. The gain from moving to a more powerful processor would be more than offset by reduced battery life and less kids getting machines because they'd be more expensive.
Sure, texting while driving using today's technology is pretty stupid. It takes forever, and it definitely distracts from the road.
But... this law probably doesn't specifically ban "text messaging on a hand-held cellular telephone using a numberpad based text input method", instead it probably bans all text messaging while driving. I'm sure some of you will say that "anything that distracts from the road is unacceptably dangerous, I'm willing to trade your freedom to use new technologies in the future for a warm feeling of safety now". Well - I'm never willing to make that trade. I can think of a number of interfaces that would make text messaging way safer than a kid in the back seat, and I don't need to have my ability to use that technology nanny-stated away today.
I saw this institutional video someone posted here, with the kids playing with their new $150 laptops.
That video was disturbing. First, why did every shot consist of like 15 kids crowded around one tiny laptop? Isn't this supposed to be "one laptop per child"? Second, why did every shot focus on giant external mice? Aren't these things supposed to have awesome touchpads? Wouldn't that increase the price from $150 to like $160?
OLPC uses AMD Geode CPU at 366 MHz while CMPC runs at Intel Celeron Mobile 900 MHz. so who's the really winner?
Actually, the OLPC is using a 500mhz Geode... but that doesn't really matter. The XO runs software that was specifically designed for its hardware - the software will run great on it. The Classmate will be running software designed for modern desktop PCs - for that, a 900 MHz processor and 256 megs of RAM will be dog slow.
but all computer literate people would know a larger resolution on the 7' or 9' screen will make fonts look rather too smaller to be read or making eyeballs very painful eventually.
This comment displays an utter misunderstanding of the concept of "resolution". When text resolution is increased, the text doesn't get smaller - instead, each letter is represented by more dots so that it's clearer and easier to read. It's true that Windows users occasionally have trouble getting their fonts to be larger because of poor software design, but the XO won't have this problem. As a closing thought, laser printers tend to print at 600dpi - about 36 times the resolution of a common computer screen - is the text 36 times smaller?
I know why Intel spreads the myth that you need power to use a computer. They're in the business of pushing high end processors that most people don't need.
A more powerful computer will be more useful. The "myth" that you're spreading is that no-one will ever want to do anything unexpected with their computer - computers are general purpose tools, and you rarely know everything that you might want to do with one when you get it.
But... that doesn't change the fact that the XO is probably strictly better than the Classmate for its purpose. The increase in computing power a student would get in moving to the classmate doesn't really enable any interesting application categories; basically it just allows people to buy expensive (and largely useless) proprietary software. In comparison, the XO allows the user to do some really interesting stuff that the classmate does not - like surfing the web in direct sunlight over a mesh network when the nearest WAP is 5km away.
I think porn reform is needed first before computers can be introduced to schools.
Fear of porn is definitely going to set back education by years, but waiting for things to change is just going delay education further. Just give the damn kids the computers, and (optionally) yell at them if you catch them with naked chicks on the screen.
Remember the $3 "starter" licenses that MS announced - with XP Starter Edition and a stripped down MS Office. It'd be nice if Microsoft priced themselves out of the computer market in most of the world, but unfortunately they've decided not to. Not that a *nix system isn't obviously better than an intentionally crippled version of windows, but...
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This problem is a side effect of not taking the 10 minutes to research what's actually getting used. There aren't "dozens of distros" - for any given application domain there are - at most - three relevant distributions.
If you're having trouble figuring out which distros are relevant, filter on the following criteria: $0 per-seat license cost, available commercial support. That basically leaves you with Ubuntu. And that's probably fine, because if you really wanted something other than Ubuntu you wouldn't need to bother anyone about there being "too many distros".
Sure, we can't get there immediately. We'd need to build the extra generating capacity - hopefully using modern power generation techniques.
That depends entirely on how good power storage is. With the cost & quality of batteries today and the current cost of electricity, you're right - it's most effective to use solar to supplement grid power. But, as I've said three times now, if electricity prices increase we will quickly get to the point where buying the solar panels and batteries is cheaper than buying grid power. And, both photovoltaic and battery technologies are rapidly improving.
That's a ridiculous overgeneralization. Lumping together the "eco sources" is silly. Solar and wind both have inconsistency issues at an "hours" time scale, but their inconsistencies aren't linked, and with enough energy storage for "days" it tends to average out. Hydropower and Tidal are excellent base load sources, but we're already using all our hydropower resources and haven't put much effort into tidal. Geothermal provides excellent base load, but it's probably not really a renewable resource.
In any case, I'll come back to my central point about solar power. The solar panels and batteries commonly available on the open market can be used to build a reliable power generation system - the electricity cost of that system is a hard cap on future rising electricity prices.
The neat thing about markets is that the *buyer* gets to decide what's most appropriate for them. Happily, in the CPU market, the buyers have decided to buy what's new and consistently push processor power for the past 20 years. Sacrificing that rate of progress for a little bit of power conservation would be a horrible economic decision for a central manager - luckily our economy mostly doesn't have one.
The solar panel / battery hard cap is a bit less than 50 cents / kwh - so I'll never have to pay that price for longer than it takes to install the PV system. As for $10/gallon gas, I'm ready - I'll have to change my driving habits a bit, but my Prius is pretty good on gas.
I'm going to assume for a moment that you're serious. The only way that could be true is if you misinterpreted my original comment to be "helping a child in Cambodia makes the world a better place then helping a child in Compton would". That's not what I said. A more clear statement of what I meant was: "If helping a child makes the world a better place, it where that child is isn't important."
You're the idiot. We could easily be using ten times the electricity we're using today without seriously taxing the power generation techniques available to us right now. And our technology is only getting better. Sure, we're using our fossil fuels damn fast, but we have replacements - and technology only improves with time.
Conservation as a solution to our power problem is foolish and shortsighted. This is simple Economics 101 - there is a market price for electricity, and people will purchase it for their use if it is efficient for them to do so. Governments really shouldn't be subsidizing the use of fossil fuels - in fact they should probably be taxing to discourage usage because of environmental concerns - but there are other methods for generating power in the same price range that don't have those problems.
Who cares how efficient they are at converting sunlight to energy? Having no solar cell is 0% efficient - 20% efficiency is a 100% improvement. As for "useful only as a supplement", that's bullshit. Power generated through photovoltaics has a price, and when that price is lower than the market price for grid power everyone will install photovoltaics. The difference is only like a factor of three - if the technology improves a bit, and the price of electricity increases a bit then we're there - and once that happens the price of electricity will only go down as the pv technology improves further.
Huh? Expenses are something you need to budget for - if you have a problem with that, get a job. Electricity, specifically, isn't expensive enough for me to worry about for any application but air conditioning. If it gets too expensive, I'll have to consider alternatives to electric air conditioning - that's ok.
If you adjust properly for inflation, this is mostly false. If the government screwed with the energy market less, they'd both probably cost half as much. But... instead they've outlawed safe nuclear, subsidized petroleum, outlawed small diesel cars (California did and 8 other states copied them), and allowed anticompeditive behavior around electric cars. Even so - if you have economic reason to, conserve. If you don't, conserving just keeps prices higher longer by allowing less capacity to be built.
Demand for electricity should only increase price in the short term, because it's reasonably easy to generate. The price is further constrained by the current "almost economical" status of photovoltaics. If anything, I want to see demand for electricity go up just so that electricity generation technology improves.
I value the innovative push higher than I value other people's money being spent on electricity. If at any point in the computer industry people had really, strongly decided to buy cheap processors instead of getting "top of the line" processors, progress would have slowed way down. People have been saying that "processors are way faster than what the average person needs" for 20 years now - and I think we can easily benefit from another 20 years at this rate of progress.
That's a horrible comparison. Other than racing, there is no task that can be done with a hotrod that can't be accomplished with a normal car. More relevently, I can't think of any task that's likely to become possible if a large chunk of the population owned hotrods that were twice as powerful as today's hotrods.
With computers there are a number of applications that get really interesting when everyone has a 16 core Opteron and 1024-stream-processor GPGPU in their laptop.
Not that I'm against low-power processors. If you can get a dual core processor in 2 watts, that means I can have a 64 core processor in less than 70 watts. =P
What? Are you omnipotent or something? Able to see the future? Even if you are, you're wrong on this one. Text based communication over a wireless network from a moving vehicle has a shitload of potential applications. I agree that trying to do it on a mobile phone with today's input methods is reckless, but that doesn't mean that there aren't any number of other ways of doing it that this law is preemptively disallowing.
In fact, with a good HUD-like display and some sort of safe input method, texting could be far safer than CB radio communication - simply because you can stop focusing on it for a second and then restart without losing your place.
Now the country has a cheap, educated labor force available so they can compete with Taiwan and I can get RAM modules cheaper.
I don't know, I'm not an economist. But, everything else being equal, I'd rather that family had the higher standard of living.
What's racist about wanting to be able to have the largest beneficial impact on the lives of the most children for a constant amount of investment? I'm not sure if that's the most effective decision criteria or not, but it's definitely not racist - or even unreasonable.
For some topics, that's really a waste of space in the article. Some topics require some background to make any sense at all. You can't write a meaningful article about something like Hilbert Space (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_space) without using the jargon of the field. Sure, you could write something in plain english - but it wouldn't mean anything useful.
If driving is really that dangerous, it should be outlawed. People multitask all the time while driving - saying that all texting is bad but eating while driving is acceptable is absurd.
Bad comparison. This is more like having a law that makes it illegal to drink a rum-colored beverage because the legislators were too thick-headed to remember that Cola exists. Laws that specifically prevent some socially undesirable behavior are one thing, but broad laws that illegalize non-harmful activities are something that legislators should go out of their way to avoid. If there's no way to phrase a law to avoid collateral damage, it's worth reconsidering the law.
Or laws can be written in such a way as to try to avoid needing this sort of change in the future. As for "the enforcement arm can just stop enforcing obsolete laws", that's utterly unacceptible - leaving everyone as criminals is the simplest way for an abusive government to harass people.
Helping children in Uruguay is cheaper.
That's great, as long as you're sure that decoding video in that specific format is the only compute-intensive task the user will ever do.
Actually, I agree that GPUs should have MPEG4 decoders in them. It's a common enough format, and offloading the processing may well provide a significant performance gain for the cost. But... just because that specific task can be solved by dedicated hardware doesn't change the fact that general purpose computing power (i.e. more powerful CPUs and GPGPUs) is very useful, and much more valuable overall than a task-specific hardware accelerator.
This is a tradeoff, and it can be rationally evaluated. I don't think that banning unknown future technology can ever be the rational result of such an evaluation.
Not if texting while driving is illegal I won't.
It's better for everyone if these people get fast processors anyway. First, it's impossible to be sure that they'll never want to do anything taxing with their computer. Second, more demand for powerful processors drives the technology - that makes good kit cheaper for everyone and continually allows for the development of new applications that make use of more powerful processors.
Interestingly, one of your examples is inaccurate. A low end processor *cannot* playback high quality video. Without video acceleration, even a Core 2 Duo would struggle weakly trying to decode and display a well compressed high definition video file.
That's a different point, and I agree with it. But it's not that these kids wouldn't be better off if the XO had a more powerful processor, it's that these kids have constraints like money and electricity that make the Geode LX @ 500Mhz the right choice for the machine. The gain from moving to a more powerful processor would be more than offset by reduced battery life and less kids getting machines because they'd be more expensive.
Sure, texting while driving using today's technology is pretty stupid. It takes forever, and it definitely distracts from the road.
But... this law probably doesn't specifically ban "text messaging on a hand-held cellular telephone using a numberpad based text input method", instead it probably bans all text messaging while driving. I'm sure some of you will say that "anything that distracts from the road is unacceptably dangerous, I'm willing to trade your freedom to use new technologies in the future for a warm feeling of safety now". Well - I'm never willing to make that trade. I can think of a number of interfaces that would make text messaging way safer than a kid in the back seat, and I don't need to have my ability to use that technology nanny-stated away today.
The OLPC project is trying to make the world a better place, not make the United States more dominant.
On the other hand, uneducated farmers working 60 hours a week to feed themselves in Cambodia don't help the US economy much - do they?
That video was disturbing. First, why did every shot consist of like 15 kids crowded around one tiny laptop? Isn't this supposed to be "one laptop per child"? Second, why did every shot focus on giant external mice? Aren't these things supposed to have awesome touchpads? Wouldn't that increase the price from $150 to like $160?
Actually, the OLPC is using a 500mhz Geode... but that doesn't really matter. The XO runs software that was specifically designed for its hardware - the software will run great on it. The Classmate will be running software designed for modern desktop PCs - for that, a 900 MHz processor and 256 megs of RAM will be dog slow.
This comment displays an utter misunderstanding of the concept of "resolution". When text resolution is increased, the text doesn't get smaller - instead, each letter is represented by more dots so that it's clearer and easier to read. It's true that Windows users occasionally have trouble getting their fonts to be larger because of poor software design, but the XO won't have this problem. As a closing thought, laser printers tend to print at 600dpi - about 36 times the resolution of a common computer screen - is the text 36 times smaller?
A more powerful computer will be more useful. The "myth" that you're spreading is that no-one will ever want to do anything unexpected with their computer - computers are general purpose tools, and you rarely know everything that you might want to do with one when you get it.
But... that doesn't change the fact that the XO is probably strictly better than the Classmate for its purpose. The increase in computing power a student would get in moving to the classmate doesn't really enable any interesting application categories; basically it just allows people to buy expensive (and largely useless) proprietary software. In comparison, the XO allows the user to do some really interesting stuff that the classmate does not - like surfing the web in direct sunlight over a mesh network when the nearest WAP is 5km away.
Fear of porn is definitely going to set back education by years, but waiting for things to change is just going delay education further. Just give the damn kids the computers, and (optionally) yell at them if you catch them with naked chicks on the screen.
You're not going to fix brain drain by denying children education. You'll just have a couple more uneducated people.
Remember the $3 "starter" licenses that MS announced - with XP Starter Edition and a stripped down MS Office. It'd be nice if Microsoft priced themselves out of the computer market in most of the world, but unfortunately they've decided not to. Not that a *nix system isn't obviously better than an intentionally crippled version of windows, but...