Backspace switches to the parent folder; it doesn't open a new window. It sounds like Windows Explorer may finally be settling with the "spatial" navigation paradigm of one window per folder, as used by Mac Finder (and Amiga Workbench, and recent versions of Nautilus).
They don't talk about it, but many ISPs are already transparently caching P2P traffic (and throttling, and blocking files reported as copyright violations) using CacheLogic products.
Windows won't run on the OLPC laptops, though I hear Microsoft is having a go at adapting it (I think this will involve driver and boot support, and a lot of trimming). The OLPC buyers (mostly ministries of education, not individual children) will of course be able to choose which software they want installed. They will probably get some localised version of the distribution that OLPC has commissioned from Red Hat, but there's nothing to stop them picking Windows (except that it will probably suck).
I think you're being confused by the moderation system, as I was when I first posted to his blog. When you post, your comment is shown to you as confirmation, but it won't be shown again until it has passed moderation. Look back in a day and it will probably be visible.
Its just a fact of life that the encoding scheme implemented has a limited set of characters that is readable by the technically adept people who built the thing.
That problem has been solved by "Punycode" - see the links near the bottom of this page for examples (Slashdot won't let me post IDN URLs). However, the phishing threat from similar-looking characters seems to have stalled full support for IDNs; Mozilla disabled them by default after the paypal.com demo.
Then there are characters that are technically equivilent but have different representations.
IDN requires normalisation which deals with most such problems, but not the trickier one of similar-looking characters. Unfortunately that's font-dependent and isn't even specific to IDN - some fonts don't adequately distinguish I, l and 1, or O and 0, for example.
IDN uses a "Punycode" encoding which doesn't use any bytes outside the range currently used. In fact the only thing that makes IDN domains invalid in the old scheme is that they include two consecutive hyphens (they all begin with "xn--").
I don't know about hardware customisation - all I know about OLPC I learned from Jim Gettys's talk at DebConf earlier this year - but I suppose there may be some flexibility there. There are apparently some interested state governments in the US, so it's not completely out of the question for Florida to buy them.
Isn't the %age for the manufacturer part of the production cost?
Normally a computer vendor will come up with a specification for a laptop model and then ask laptop manufacturers (ODMs) to make a bid to produce it. The selected ODM is then responsible for the detailed design and manufacturing. Any reduction in manufacturing cost is pure profit for them. In this case, unusually, the ODM is breaking down these costs for the OLPC project, and asking a %age on top of them. It won't make as much profit per unit, but it can make up for that in volume.
How does the production cost depend on the size of the order? Are these being custom built?
They will be built to order, and naturally there are economies of scale.
If the cost isn't being subsidized, then there should be no problem with me buying one for my son.
The minimum order size is about a million, so you'll need to find an intermediary that's prepared to sell you just one. And there's probably going to be a queue...
The hardware design has been finalised (modulo minor bug fixes, I suppose) and working samples have been delivered. The laptops are not meant to be subsidised; they're supposed to be sold for production cost plus a small %age for the manufacturer. The production cost will depend on the spot price of memory and probably on the size of the order, hence the lack of a precise price.
Yes. However, the education resource budget (as distinct from staff and buildings) in many of the prospective purchasing countries is about $20/child/year. At an estimated initial price of $135, the laptops must replace, not supplement, textbooks. This is why they are designed with a low-power reflective display mode for extended reading off the screen. If they turn out not to be a practical replacement, this could ruin their users' educations. Of course, if they work well as reading (and writing) devices then schools can provide far more books to their students than they do now.
The commodore, apple, amiga, and the like were all closed hardware. Linux wouldn't have done well with having so many hardware variations. I also doubt those companies would have allowed for it with published hardware info and the like. Remember Be Inc? Apple blew them out of the water when Be left the hardware buisness and stuck with software.
I don't think that's true. The Amiga hardware was quite well documented in the Hardware Reference Manual, the Atari seems to have been well understood by game programmers, and later Macs supported many hardware expansions, presumably based on official documentation. As a result, there has been an m68k port of Linux supporting many of these machines from a very early stage in Linux development.
Also, part of the "standardisation" of the PC is the standardisation of interfaces (ISA, PCI, USB, etc.), allowing for much variation in components. There's a much larger variety of hardware in use on i386 machines than on m68k machines.
As I understand it, Columbus always intended to reach the "Indies", believing the world was about 28,000 km in circumference. (People were sceptical about his voyage not because they believed the earth was flat but because they knew the Indies were much too far away.)
Whether or not the FBI got the right names or photos - I don't believe they claim to have the ID presented on the day, do they? - this seems to have little bearing on the question of whether OBL, the Taleban or Iraq had anything to do with the attacks. Now, if you're arguing that the so-called War On Terror is wrong, or that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks, I'm in complete agreement with you. If you're saying OBL had nothing to do with them, I'm not convinced. I hope you're not suggesting that they were part of some government conspiracy, because it would be far too hard to organise such a thing without someone talking.
If there isn't a human being checking passports, just a machine -- and one day, that is exactly how it will be -- one of those cloned RFID chips will be enough to get you past it.
That's not the idea at all. The information on the passport is digitised so that it can be digitally signed and verified. The encryption on this information is only supposed to stop people from reading it if they don't already have physical access to the passport. The article hints at some flaws in this, but I think they're somewhat exaggerated.
It says the facial biometric is a joke, but that's based on a study of untrained people looking at low-resolution pictures and doesn't seem entirely applicable to the situation of trained border-control people looking at quite good digital images.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, LAMP is "Linux, Apache, Most of our scripting languages start with P, and PostgreSQL" (according to Jeff Waugh).
More nonsense from climate change deniers.
Backspace switches to the parent folder; it doesn't open a new window. It sounds like Windows Explorer may finally be settling with the "spatial" navigation paradigm of one window per folder, as used by Mac Finder (and Amiga Workbench, and recent versions of Nautilus).
They don't talk about it, but many ISPs are already transparently caching P2P traffic (and throttling, and blocking files reported as copyright violations) using CacheLogic products.
Windows won't run on the OLPC laptops, though I hear Microsoft is having a go at adapting it (I think this will involve driver and boot support, and a lot of trimming). The OLPC buyers (mostly ministries of education, not individual children) will of course be able to choose which software they want installed. They will probably get some localised version of the distribution that OLPC has commissioned from Red Hat, but there's nothing to stop them picking Windows (except that it will probably suck).
I think you're being confused by the moderation system, as I was when I first posted to his blog. When you post, your comment is shown to you as confirmation, but it won't be shown again until it has passed moderation. Look back in a day and it will probably be visible.
That problem has been solved by "Punycode" - see the links near the bottom of this page for examples (Slashdot won't let me post IDN URLs). However, the phishing threat from similar-looking characters seems to have stalled full support for IDNs; Mozilla disabled them by default after the paypal.com demo.
IDN requires normalisation which deals with most such problems, but not the trickier one of similar-looking characters. Unfortunately that's font-dependent and isn't even specific to IDN - some fonts don't adequately distinguish I, l and 1, or O and 0, for example.
IDN uses a "Punycode" encoding which doesn't use any bytes outside the range currently used. In fact the only thing that makes IDN domains invalid in the old scheme is that they include two consecutive hyphens (they all begin with "xn--").
Last I checked, they weren't proposing to stop you using Copy-Paste or following links from a Google results page.
I don't know about hardware customisation - all I know about OLPC I learned from Jim Gettys's talk at DebConf earlier this year - but I suppose there may be some flexibility there. There are apparently some interested state governments in the US, so it's not completely out of the question for Florida to buy them.
Normally a computer vendor will come up with a specification for a laptop model and then ask laptop manufacturers (ODMs) to make a bid to produce it. The selected ODM is then responsible for the detailed design and manufacturing. Any reduction in manufacturing cost is pure profit for them. In this case, unusually, the ODM is breaking down these costs for the OLPC project, and asking a %age on top of them. It won't make as much profit per unit, but it can make up for that in volume.
They will be built to order, and naturally there are economies of scale.
The minimum order size is about a million, so you'll need to find an intermediary that's prepared to sell you just one. And there's probably going to be a queue...
The hardware design has been finalised (modulo minor bug fixes, I suppose) and working samples have been delivered. The laptops are not meant to be subsidised; they're supposed to be sold for production cost plus a small %age for the manufacturer. The production cost will depend on the spot price of memory and probably on the size of the order, hence the lack of a precise price.
I was with you up to Wolverhampton. There's nothing wrong with it that a tacnuke wouldn't fix.
Yes. However, the education resource budget (as distinct from staff and buildings) in many of the prospective purchasing countries is about $20/child/year. At an estimated initial price of $135, the laptops must replace, not supplement, textbooks. This is why they are designed with a low-power reflective display mode for extended reading off the screen. If they turn out not to be a practical replacement, this could ruin their users' educations. Of course, if they work well as reading (and writing) devices then schools can provide far more books to their students than they do now.
There was a session led by Jim Gettys of OLPC at DebConf 6 (Ogg Theora format) in which he explained some of this.
Ouch. I drove in Belgium without knowing these rules but somehow managed to stay out of trouble.
It always strikes me that 4 way stops are a terrible waste of gas. US roads need fewer "stop" and more "yield" signs.
Here in the UK, if a roundabout develops that problem, we add traffic lights to it!
I don't think that's true. The Amiga hardware was quite well documented in the Hardware Reference Manual, the Atari seems to have been well understood by game programmers, and later Macs supported many hardware expansions, presumably based on official documentation. As a result, there has been an m68k port of Linux supporting many of these machines from a very early stage in Linux development.
Also, part of the "standardisation" of the PC is the standardisation of interfaces (ISA, PCI, USB, etc.), allowing for much variation in components. There's a much larger variety of hardware in use on i386 machines than on m68k machines.
As I understand it, Columbus always intended to reach the "Indies", believing the world was about 28,000 km in circumference. (People were sceptical about his voyage not because they believed the earth was flat but because they knew the Indies were much too far away.)
As I understand it, Columbus always intended to reach the "", believing the world was about 28,000 km in circumference. (People were sceptical about his voyage not because they believed the earth was flat but because they knew the Indies were much too far away.)
Whether or not the FBI got the right names or photos - I don't believe they claim to have the ID presented on the day, do they? - this seems to have little bearing on the question of whether OBL, the Taleban or Iraq had anything to do with the attacks. Now, if you're arguing that the so-called War On Terror is wrong, or that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks, I'm in complete agreement with you. If you're saying OBL had nothing to do with them, I'm not convinced. I hope you're not suggesting that they were part of some government conspiracy, because it would be far too hard to organise such a thing without someone talking.
That's not the idea at all. The information on the passport is digitised so that it can be digitally signed and verified. The encryption on this information is only supposed to stop people from reading it if they don't already have physical access to the passport. The article hints at some flaws in this, but I think they're somewhat exaggerated.
Several people with names matching those of the suspects are alive. So what?
It says the facial biometric is a joke, but that's based on a study of untrained people looking at low-resolution pictures and doesn't seem entirely applicable to the situation of trained border-control people looking at quite good digital images.