If it's unworkable, how come it'll generate higher sales? Did I say it would? It won't. Not here.
Also, your trickly down comment is ignorant. As one of the elites of Egypt, I am sure you are unaware of the needs of the poor.
1. Ad hominem isn't constructive. 2. Without giving out my bank statement on/., suffice it you know I'm not an elite. I'm not poor either, for that matter. 3. I think I have a good idea of what low-income Egyptians need. It isn't that difficult to tell. If they're dying of bilharzia, then there's a good chance that they need focus on health issues. Freshmeat is devoid of a software solution to bilharzia. 4. I've worked with microfinance, information systems for socio-economic tracking to monitor the effects of development projects, and grass-roots Linux advocacy (and also govt. advocacy, but let's stay on topic here). If I don't know what the country needs for economic and social advancement. Plenty of exposure to the impoverished segments there.
how much does electricity cost over there? It's subsidized; not very much unless you're running a lot of A/C or oil heaters. As an elite, I get the monthly average of maybe 5 or 10 dollars maximum.
The cost of electricity isn't the issue (what with the Aswan dam and all). Water's a bigger issue, really, and until the Egyptian middle class discovers water cooled UT gaming rigs, I'd say that more efficient computing won't help there. Offtopic, we did do some GIS development for managing national water resources at my old job, so yea, if there's a technological solution to a real problem I've been there.
Clearly if many governments are buying into the $100 laptop, there's either not enough trickle down hardware or there is a need for them
So if the govt. invests in something, it's a good idea?
As I said, there's enough trickle down hardware but there's no mechanism for it to trickle down (support, installation, marketing, etc.)
Why don't you go about improving the process, seeing as how new yorkers and californians supposedly can't do it?
I'm half Danish; what do you think I'm doing here?
I'm sorry, I was assuming we were talking socio-economic development, not lets-give-photogenic-villagers-computers-and-pat-o urselves-on-the-back-development.
Fact: The availability of relatively reliable electricity does not translate to ubiquitous computer literacy. Computers are too expensive. Fact: The urban population can contribute to bridging the digital divide just as well as the villager can (arguably better; sorry, it's economics) Fact: Speaking more pragmatically now, it's more effective to work on computer literacy in urban areas and in Egypt, the percentage of urban to total is high and is increasing rapidly. Fact: People with lower standards of living do not regard a computer as anything vital when compared to water, access to fair markets for produce, etc.
Now, a hand-cranked machine doesn't target this market as much as the rural areas, true. Which makes it, ultimately...
An ineffective tool of socio-economic development through technology
I do this for a living. I know. I've seen too many moronic ICT4D projects to let your comment slide.
Sorry for being abrasive; it wasn't intentional. There's just too much techno-fancy-pants'ing in ICT4D these days.
Based in Cairo, Egypt here. We have long slagged the USD 100 laptop project, since for that price you can get a more functional second hand pc. What the market here needs is more efficient hardware trickle down mechanics, not new architectures.
Now, if they're building a kiosk, then the lest they can do is make the machine fnction in multiseat mode. This is possible both using Linux and windows.
But then again, that would translate to lower Intel sales, so I guess this is just another case of developing markets being receptacles for unworkable ideas developed by some guy in a suit in NY or CA whose idea of field visits involve brave runs down to the mall.
I'm not all that enthusiastic about yet another iteration of Firefox... It's my primary browser and I do like it, but it will never be the browser that I would regard as the ultimate.
I envision a web browser which is the browser equivalent of Linux; a collection of simple programs performing very specific and narrowly defined tasks, all working through clean APIs or protocols. The HTML rendering being split off entirely, the javascript in its own library, image rendering separate, cookie management, security features, history management, bookmarks display, etc. Ideally, the various parts would be so simple that the barriers to development would be lowered drastically resulting in the organic rise of alternatives in the various segments; imagine having a flamewar over which js rendering plugin/library were better!
Extensions are not the solution by far. The functionality decentralization necessary to realize the vision of a browser like this far exceeds what the design idea behind extensions was.
Firefox will never be this. The only thing I've seen which might be salvaged into some sort of semblance of this vision is Kazehakaze, though that remains to be seen (I'm not sure you can even hotswap html rendering in Kazhakaze; I've never managed to keep it from crashing for long enough to test).
No, I haven't.:) I don't know their academic pricing schemes, I was just saying that since he'd already established that XP was too expensive, his decision was already made. He did make that premise.
What constitutes maturity is not exactly well defined; these fellows just seem to have chosen a bunch of criteria (ability to navigate the world my ass) and proceeded on such basis.
The problem here isn't when people mature, that part's easy enough given an accepted definition of maturity. The problem is reaching that definition.
Do they allow people to do research now without the prerequisite of being able to distinguish between subjectivity and objectivity?
This research is like if I stated that the volume of an alarm clock is a good determinant of how likely one is to be a successful employee. There's just so much wrong with the premises it isn't even worth the few minutes to read.
That statements of the obvious with respect to perceived technology trends will continue throughout 2006. More daringly, I foresee the emergence of recursive self-referential statements of the obvious with respect to technology trends.
In my opinion, the problem with RSS adoption is not the name. It is the fact that employing RSS is really a pretty fundamental change to the way people use the internet.
Most people are used, I think, to giong online and surfing over to their usual bouquet of sites and checking those. The content provider effectively has to "pull" the content consumers in to the content.
RSS on the other hand, is "pushed" out to the recipients. Sure, people still have to surf to the site to get the feed URL, but it's still broadly a push content strategy.
I realize this doesn't sound like much of a change, but for many less sophisticated internet users, the concept of having the news come to you rather than having to go to the news is not familiar.
As an additional point, I suspect that dedicated RSS users will tend to have tens and often hundreds of feeds to sift through. Most people just don't want or can't handle that much information. As a consequence, it is not al that attractive to them.
If the bug tracking system can be deployed using existing resources and is free, then all you have to do is to show that its value is anywhere above zero for the cost-benefit angle to work itself out. There are mature open source bug tracking systems which don't take more than a half an hour to install and another hour to read up on and begin using, this also needs to be highlighted (i.e. to show that it won't take too much of your time which equates to the company's money).
Make accounts for the PHB, read only access if possible. Show them the fancy stats page where there's pie charts and statistics relating to bug fixing performance.
Find some trivial system the PHB uses and enter it as a product on the bug tracker and have the PHB use it; that gives them a sense of involvement and empowerment.
Brand it with the company logo, license permitting.
Maybe something like 6 years ago, I co-founded the Egyptian Linux Users' Group. Me and my 3 co-conspirators had a vision of free software as a social movement, not just as a different kind of software development approach.
6 years on, we have what has got to be one of the most vibrant communities in a LUG anywhere. We teach one another, we help with downloading distros, we do activism, we hold installfests, we go out for coffee, dinner, hold LAN parties where one unnamed individual always beats us into submission at bzflag, and we work to bolster the bottom line of Egyptian beer manufacturers.
Since when was a LUG about helping people install Linux? It's a community Goddamn you. Communities will always be relevant. If there was no community there would be no free software: a LUG is simply the most evident face of this community.
It strikes me that this thing represents a more abstract achievement which can be reapplied in very interesting ways with a little thought.
If it's accurate to any degree then this means that fairly minute body gestures can be interpreted and recorded digitally. So, you can:
1. Record body mechanics of top athletes and use the recordings to do diffs against people in training 2. Preserve a record of folk dances for dying cultures 3. Maintain a record of surgery performed. In a litigous society this would probably be very interesting 4. Add sign language to the babel fish 5. I dunno, use the middle finger to reboot your computer?
no linux distribution on earth includes those plugins
The obvious stares you in the face, Anonymous Coward, and yet you refuse to accept it. Do you know of a reason why only earthbound beings can make linux distributions?
how are they getting away with it?
Well, before this/. frontpage story they were small and obscure and the risk of getting their asses hauled into court were negligible. Now...
why don't the linux distro makers adopt their strategy?
I'm not sure that "License? What license? We're too small and this project is too dumb to bother with that. Dude, Chill!" qualifies as an actual strategy.
It occurs to me that one application of technology to ameliorate the less desirable effects of nature is in Early Warning Systems as built on top of a GIS. (Good example here)
Not to contradict Miletti, but there are very clear cases where technology in the configuration I described above has done real work averting disasters.
There's such a system deployed by the Civil Defense in Peru, that's one I know about. We're demoing another one at a GIS conference in Cairo next week, that's another. If I understand things correctly, even Homeland Security has done work in this area.
Okay. Now pay attention. The day we get something like that is the day Linus' head explodes and the stump of his neck becomes a nesting ground for wild geese.
Linux cannot, by unwritten rule, have IM with solid video capabilities. It's common law; it's like our magna carta.
Anyhow, if that's what you want then you could probably ask some guru which CLI tools to chain together quite against their will. Maybe something like this will work:
echo/dev/Webcam > mplayer | gaim >&/dev/null &
(disclaimer: I love linux, but the parent is right; nothing decent like that for linux; careful, I have mod points - mention gnome meeting and I'll, err... err.)
Slashdot Mirror
Can we please have headlines which actually tell something of the story rather than try to be clever? Some of us use the rss feed.
If it's unworkable, how come it'll generate higher sales?
/., suffice it you know I'm not an elite. I'm not poor either, for that matter.
Did I say it would? It won't. Not here.
Also, your trickly down comment is ignorant. As one of the elites of Egypt, I am sure you are unaware of the needs of the poor.
1. Ad hominem isn't constructive.
2. Without giving out my bank statement on
3. I think I have a good idea of what low-income Egyptians need. It isn't that difficult to tell. If they're dying of bilharzia, then there's a good chance that they need focus on health issues. Freshmeat is devoid of a software solution to bilharzia.
4. I've worked with microfinance, information systems for socio-economic tracking to monitor the effects of development projects, and grass-roots Linux advocacy (and also govt. advocacy, but let's stay on topic here). If I don't know what the country needs for economic and social advancement. Plenty of exposure to the impoverished segments there.
how much does electricity cost over there?
It's subsidized; not very much unless you're running a lot of A/C or oil heaters. As an elite, I get the monthly average of maybe 5 or 10 dollars maximum.
The cost of electricity isn't the issue (what with the Aswan dam and all). Water's a bigger issue, really, and until the Egyptian middle class discovers water cooled UT gaming rigs, I'd say that more efficient computing won't help there. Offtopic, we did do some GIS development for managing national water resources at my old job, so yea, if there's a technological solution to a real problem I've been there.
Clearly if many governments are buying into the $100 laptop, there's either not enough trickle down hardware or there is a need for them
So if the govt. invests in something, it's a good idea?
As I said, there's enough trickle down hardware but there's no mechanism for it to trickle down (support, installation, marketing, etc.)
Why don't you go about improving the process, seeing as how new yorkers and californians supposedly can't do it?
I'm half Danish; what do you think I'm doing here?
I'm sorry, I was assuming we were talking socio-economic development, not lets-give-photogenic-villagers-computers-and-pat-o urselves-on-the-back-development.
Fact: The availability of relatively reliable electricity does not translate to ubiquitous computer literacy. Computers are too expensive.
Fact: The urban population can contribute to bridging the digital divide just as well as the villager can (arguably better; sorry, it's economics)
Fact: Speaking more pragmatically now, it's more effective to work on computer literacy in urban areas and in Egypt, the percentage of urban to total is high and is increasing rapidly.
Fact: People with lower standards of living do not regard a computer as anything vital when compared to water, access to fair markets for produce, etc.
Now, a hand-cranked machine doesn't target this market as much as the rural areas, true. Which makes it, ultimately...
An ineffective tool of socio-economic development through technology
I do this for a living. I know. I've seen too many moronic ICT4D projects to let your comment slide.
Sorry for being abrasive; it wasn't intentional. There's just too much techno-fancy-pants'ing in ICT4D these days.
Based in Cairo, Egypt here. We have long slagged the USD 100 laptop project, since for that price you can get a more functional second hand pc. What the market here needs is more efficient hardware trickle down mechanics, not new architectures.
Now, if they're building a kiosk, then the lest they can do is make the machine fnction in multiseat mode. This is possible both using Linux and windows.
But then again, that would translate to lower Intel sales, so I guess this is just another case of developing markets being receptacles for unworkable ideas developed by some guy in a suit in NY or CA whose idea of field visits involve brave runs down to the mall.
Coincidence? I think not...
Shared codebase? Hmm?
I'm not all that enthusiastic about yet another iteration of Firefox... It's my primary browser and I do like it, but it will never be the browser that I would regard as the ultimate.
I envision a web browser which is the browser equivalent of Linux; a collection of simple programs performing very specific and narrowly defined tasks, all working through clean APIs or protocols. The HTML rendering being split off entirely, the javascript in its own library, image rendering separate, cookie management, security features, history management, bookmarks display, etc. Ideally, the various parts would be so simple that the barriers to development would be lowered drastically resulting in the organic rise of alternatives in the various segments; imagine having a flamewar over which js rendering plugin/library were better!
Extensions are not the solution by far. The functionality decentralization necessary to realize the vision of a browser like this far exceeds what the design idea behind extensions was.
Firefox will never be this. The only thing I've seen which might be salvaged into some sort of semblance of this vision is Kazehakaze, though that remains to be seen (I'm not sure you can even hotswap html rendering in Kazhakaze; I've never managed to keep it from crashing for long enough to test).
No, I haven't. :) I don't know their academic pricing schemes, I was just saying that since he'd already established that XP was too expensive, his decision was already made. He did make that premise.
You can't afford XP, so the decision is to use Linux.
Decisions don't have to be difficult to be correct.
they doubted Edmondson's ability to pull it off after it became clear he had lied about his education
What was the problem?
Was he hiding the fact that he had an MBA or something?
Worthless research.
What constitutes maturity is not exactly well defined; these fellows just seem to have chosen a bunch of criteria (ability to navigate the world my ass) and proceeded on such basis.
The problem here isn't when people mature, that part's easy enough given an accepted definition of maturity. The problem is reaching that definition.
Do they allow people to do research now without the prerequisite of being able to distinguish between subjectivity and objectivity?
This research is like if I stated that the volume of an alarm clock is a good determinant of how likely one is to be a successful employee. There's just so much wrong with the premises it isn't even worth the few minutes to read.
Bad science has a home on slashdot, I see.
How could they leave hotbabe out?
That statements of the obvious with respect to perceived technology trends will continue throughout 2006. More daringly, I foresee the emergence of recursive self-referential statements of the obvious with respect to technology trends.
In my opinion, the problem with RSS adoption is not the name. It is the fact that employing RSS is really a pretty fundamental change to the way people use the internet.
Most people are used, I think, to giong online and surfing over to their usual bouquet of sites and checking those. The content provider effectively has to "pull" the content consumers in to the content.
RSS on the other hand, is "pushed" out to the recipients. Sure, people still have to surf to the site to get the feed URL, but it's still broadly a push content strategy.
I realize this doesn't sound like much of a change, but for many less sophisticated internet users, the concept of having the news come to you rather than having to go to the news is not familiar.
As an additional point, I suspect that dedicated RSS users will tend to have tens and often hundreds of feeds to sift through. Most people just don't want or can't handle that much information. As a consequence, it is not al that attractive to them.
Being a semi-PHB myself...
If the bug tracking system can be deployed using existing resources and is free, then all you have to do is to show that its value is anywhere above zero for the cost-benefit angle to work itself out. There are mature open source bug tracking systems which don't take more than a half an hour to install and another hour to read up on and begin using, this also needs to be highlighted (i.e. to show that it won't take too much of your time which equates to the company's money).
Make accounts for the PHB, read only access if possible. Show them the fancy stats page where there's pie charts and statistics relating to bug fixing performance.
Find some trivial system the PHB uses and enter it as a product on the bug tracker and have the PHB use it; that gives them a sense of involvement and empowerment.
Brand it with the company logo, license permitting.
Maybe something like 6 years ago, I co-founded the Egyptian Linux Users' Group. Me and my 3 co-conspirators had a vision of free software as a social movement, not just as a different kind of software development approach.
6 years on, we have what has got to be one of the most vibrant communities in a LUG anywhere. We teach one another, we help with downloading distros, we do activism, we hold installfests, we go out for coffee, dinner, hold LAN parties where one unnamed individual always beats us into submission at bzflag, and we work to bolster the bottom line of Egyptian beer manufacturers.
Since when was a LUG about helping people install Linux? It's a community Goddamn you. Communities will always be relevant. If there was no community there would be no free software: a LUG is simply the most evident face of this community.
It strikes me that this thing represents a more abstract achievement which can be reapplied in very interesting ways with a little thought.
If it's accurate to any degree then this means that fairly minute body gestures can be interpreted and recorded digitally. So, you can:
1. Record body mechanics of top athletes and use the recordings to do diffs against people in training
2. Preserve a record of folk dances for dying cultures
3. Maintain a record of surgery performed. In a litigous society this would probably be very interesting
4. Add sign language to the babel fish
5. I dunno, use the middle finger to reboot your computer?
What else can you people come up with?
Everyone okay with that?
+1 contextually relevant, perhaps? :)
I stand corrected. Thanks for the clarification, DataPath.
Mods please avoid modding up the grandparent.
Doesn't the LGPL permit this?
No. You're thinking BSD-like licenses.
If you're using LGPL code then you're allowed to link it against non-GPL code, but you're not freed from the requirement to make the code available.
slingshots, baby, they're working on slingshots.
I can see you didn't RTFA.
no linux distribution on earth includes those plugins
/. frontpage story they were small and obscure and the risk of getting their asses hauled into court were negligible. Now...
The obvious stares you in the face, Anonymous Coward, and yet you refuse to accept it. Do you know of a reason why only earthbound beings can make linux distributions?
how are they getting away with it?
Well, before this
why don't the linux distro makers adopt their strategy?
I'm not sure that "License? What license? We're too small and this project is too dumb to bother with that. Dude, Chill!" qualifies as an actual strategy.
Am I the only one who thought the trolls had gotten their own publication?
It occurs to me that one application of technology to ameliorate the less desirable effects of nature is in Early Warning Systems as built on top of a GIS. (Good example here)
Not to contradict Miletti, but there are very clear cases where technology in the configuration I described above has done real work averting disasters.
There's such a system deployed by the Civil Defense in Peru, that's one I know about. We're demoing another one at a GIS conference in Cairo next week, that's another. If I understand things correctly, even Homeland Security has done work in this area.
Any chances for a linux client that does video?
/dev/Webcam > mplayer | gaim >& /dev/null &
No.
How many times do we have to go over this?
Okay. Now pay attention. The day we get something like that is the day Linus' head explodes and the stump of his neck becomes a nesting ground for wild geese.
Linux cannot, by unwritten rule, have IM with solid video capabilities. It's common law; it's like our magna carta.
Anyhow, if that's what you want then you could probably ask some guru which CLI tools to chain together quite against their will. Maybe something like this will work:
echo
(disclaimer: I love linux, but the parent is right; nothing decent like that for linux; careful, I have mod points - mention gnome meeting and I'll, err... err.)