I think the theory is that these things are going to be given away, paid for by somebody. I'm not clear who exactly is bankrolling this whole venture. Right now it's mostly private companies, but it seems like the actual manufacture and distribution would be paid for by somebody with deeper pockets: philanthropic ventures, the UNDP, etc. $100 a head is out of reach for most developing countries to spend on children; these are places where people are starving to death for lack of a few dollars of medicine or cents of rice. The only way the computers are going to get there is if somebody else pays for them.
If the Ugandan (or other country, I'm not indicting Uganda in particular here) goverment was actually purchasing these things with its own funds, I'd have far fewer reservations. By purchasing them it would show to me that they had made a determination that they wanted to spend money and resources on education, and thus would probably protect that investment.
Since I have a feeling they're going to arrive as a handout, I'm suspicious that the recipient governments might not really be all that into the concept of education, and instead might decide that they wanted hard currency (with which to purchase weapons) more than free computers for kids. So they take the computers, liquidate them for cash, and buy whatever it is they really want -- which very likely are things that the international community would be less willing to just give them, even though that's effectively what they just did.
I'm not sure that making them a particular color is going to change anything. You could have the words "WARNING: STOLEN" magically appear in huge letters on the case if they left the continent of Africa, and people in the US would still buy them on eBay. Just because it said that wouldn't make them immediately illegal to possess, and in the example I cited above, the devices wouldn't be stolen or illegal to buy at all. The computers would have been sold by the government of the African country (I used Uganda, but insert your favorite) in exchange for weapons. A completely morally bankrupt, but entirely legal, transaction.
Nowhere is it written that a government can not legally sell its children's school books or computers in exchange for assault rifles. Just because it's repugnant doesn't mean it's illegal.
If I'm taking somebody to the hospital, screw parallel parking, I'm just going to head into the space at an angle and drive up on the sidewalk/curb/grass/whatever. Hell, I'll just park on their lawn, if that's the easiest solution.
I actually quite distinctly remember never having being tested on my ability to parallel park, during my driving test, or even learning the skill in the driving school I went to.
I can't be unique in that. I'm sure there are a lot of other people who learned to drive in rural areas where learning to parallel park is just not a particularly useful skill; a young driver is better to spend their time learning to rock their car out of a snowdrift or what not to do when they hit a patch of ice.
I wouldn't park my car in a parallel spot anyway, I've seen too many people hit the car in front and behind them while they're attempting to park or get out. I don't even think it's accidental -- people just let the car roll back until it hits the car in back of them, then move forward until they hit the one in front, repeat as necessary. No thanks, I'll pass.
I think it's a real mistake to put much, if any, onboard storage into these things. In fact I think it's a bad idea to load them with an OS at all.
A computer with an OS (that's not burned into ROM) is just waiting to get borked up. Eventually, something's going to get messed up, and an unfamiliar user is going to have to seek support.
I think a much better design would be to just have a very minimal amount of storage built in, and have various program discs (cartridges, whatever) that were actually bootable. So you want to run OpenOffice? Stick an OpenOffice disk in there and turn it on. You save your work on a memory card (this way you can use cheap non-rewritable media for the programs), and you never have to worry about messing the system up. Want to play a game? Put the game disc in there and reboot. You can easily design software titles that maximize the machine's resources this way, since you can tweak the OS to your liking. Really it becomes more like programming for a video game system than for a conventional PC.
The Sony Playstation, not a ThinkPad, is really the goal that people should be working towards here.
I also think that such a system could help to build the economic system that's necessary for this whole concept to perpetuate itself. Rather than trying to discourage piracy (since hopefully most of the software would be Free), you encourage it. Give out micro-loans to people who have reliable sources of power, or who can create one, so they can create copying stations. They effectively become software librarians -- if you want a new software title, you go to your local copyist and pay a few cents (since really you're paying only for the blank media plus their profit) and they run you off a copy of what you want. Or if you have something they don't have yet, maybe you can let them copy yours in trade. Naturally they would also become the used equipment dealers, support technicians, print shop, etc. Sort of like a low-budget, full-service Kinkos. This sort of model has worked pretty well for cell phones in India, and water filtration systems in Bangledesh.
I just think that giving people without any support infrastructure a laptop that's anything like what we're used to in industrialized countries is a mistake. Having a read/write operating system that can be misconfigured, infected, accidentally deleted, etc., is just asking for trouble, especially when you're creating a situation where they won't be any natural path to go to for support or repair. I think the simplest solutions are the best, and there is just no reason for a hard drive and big OS that I can see.
The laptop is going to be distributed for free by governments and NGOs.
That's the one part of this plan that I have the most serious reservations about.
Here's what I think is likely to happen. Plane full of laptops is unloaded at airfield in Uganda. Negroponte gets photo op, handing first unit to smiling child. Technology companies, computer users, all get warm fuzzy feeling.
Cameras go off, Negroponte and cadre go home. Ugandan government officials come out, confiscate laptops, load into trucks, take to black-market smuggler, trade for AK-47s. Laptops go in shipping container, shipped to India where workers in sweatshops file serial numbers off, then to LA where they get sold in stores and via eBay for $125. Ugandan goverment officials draft children into Army, give each one an AK-47.
Net result: African children get guns, Americans get warm fuzzy feeling and cheap black-market technology.
The only computer I've ever been near that "didn't require troubleshooting" was an Apple IIc. And even there I'm not sure that it's a true statement -- it's just that the troubleshooting was so simple, the group of 1st graders that I saw using it could do it themselves.
Put disk into drive. Turn on computer. Computer runs program. When done with program, turn computer off. Remove disk. Repeat.
Now that's the kind of computer they should be laboring to build. Maybe make it run on little optical cartridges or something instead of 5-1/4" floppies, but the same idea. Put the disk in, turn it on, it runs. Anything else is needlessly complex and will require support infrastructure.
Now maybe, like the old Apple II, you could have it do something special, an "advanced mode," if you will, when you turn it on without something in the drive. The old Apples booted to a text prompt where you could program in BASIC. Probably only 1 in 1,000 users will ever see it, and only 1 in 1,000 of them will ever bother to try to go further and figure out what it means and what they can do from there. But maybe you'll teach that 1 in 1,000,000 kid something, and he'll turn out to be the next Linux Torvalds. I can accept that.
However, if the machine is anything approaching the complexity of today's PCs, which most literate, educated people can hardly understand, much less troubleshoot and support, I think you're setting the whole thing up for failure. IMO, any device you're tossing out there like this ought to be like a Gameboy: just enough onboard, hardcoded intelligence to make the thing turn on and load code from external modules. That way no matter how bad you hose the software, you can't "break it." Plus it makes them a lot easier to share: one person can pull out the cartridge/disk for whatever they've been working on, and another person can plug theirs in and it's like they're on a different system.
Wait a second there... now, I'm willing to give Gates credit where credit's due, particularly in terms of being a shrewd (one might say ruthless) businessman, but I think it's totally out of line to just hand him credit for the PC revolution. Anybody who believes that is either seriously misguided, or getting a paycheck from Redmond, or both.
If IBM had gone with a different company to make an OS for its computers, nobody would have ever heard of Bill Gates or Microsoft, 90% of the world would be running some other operating system, and we'd still have computers on our desks. In fact, if you wanted to find a single company to give the majority of the credit to, I'd say Compaq is probably the most deserving, for reverse-engineering the IBM BIOS and producing the first clones, thus breaking IBM's pricing structure.
Really I think the only credit you can give Microsoft and Windows is for driving a very rapid hardware upgrade cycle over the last decade; this created sales volumes which led to economies of scale in the past few years which have kept the price of computer hardware on an ever-decreasing spiral.
I don't think there's anything that Microsoft did that you can't argue would have happened anyway, had they never existed or had IBM adopted a different OS. And frankly I can think of several scenarios which might have resulted in better outcomes for the average PC owner than the current one.
But before you go, here's an idea for you: maybe, just maybe, those people don't want to be waited on by other people? Maybe they'd prefer to be assisted by machines than to have other people, who have a tendency to be arrogant and self-righteous, do things for them?
Frankly if I was paraplegic, I think it would be far more dehumanizing to have to have another person around 24/7 to do things for me than it would be to have a small army of remote-controlled machines.
Granted, only legal in a few states... but there's also gambling, if that's more your style; high-risk sports... not to mention all the toys that are priced out of the range of kids. I have yet to see a performance car that's marketed at 10 to 13-year-olds, although admittedly I haven't watched the Disney channel in a while. Who knows what the car companies will do as they get desperate enough.
I have to admit that's an intriging concept. It's a little farfetched right now (it would have to be a pretty honking big virus, if it carried around a copy of VMWare inside of itself), but at the very least it does point out that there a lot of at least theoretical nasty-games you could play on a system that had virtualization installed but not running by default.
I think the solution might be, if you have the hardware overhead, just to run your insecure OS in a sandbox created through virtualization. That way if it gets hosed, or even if some virus managed to install another virtualized OS on top of while compromising it, you'd be able to get "one level below" the infected system and clean it out.
It would be a mistake to write it off as impossible, especially as computers get powerful enough for a casual user to be running a virtualized OS and never notice the difference from a native one.
I used to live with a guy who had a PC in his room that I never saw turned on. After a few months (of him borrowing my computer to check his Yahoo mail) I asked him what the deal was.
"It's broken, I just haven't gotten around to throwing it out yet," he said. I asked him what the problem was. "It has a virus."
To many people, when their computer gets slow or unstable because of viruses/spyware/etc., it's just a sign that the computer is 'worn out' and it's time to get a new one. Some people bring them down to CompUSA or wherever to have them cleaned off, but other people just treat them as disposable. We've created a culture where the common wisdom is that it's better to replace electronic devices than repair them, so why should computers be any different?
(And just in case anybody is wondering, yes, that computer is now a fileserver of mine.)
I'm not sure that I buy into this completely. Although there are certainly people out there who write malware for the sake of writing malware, I think that if everyone was running a system that was less inherently vunerable/insecure, that you would see criminals turning towards other ways of making money. The large-scale malware problems we're seeing today (e.g. botnetting) occur because it's profitable to write the malware, gather together a large net of bots, and then sell/lease/rent them out to someone for some malicious purpose. At some point, you can make it difficult or expensive enough to write the malware that it's no longer profitable to do that. It doesn't mean that the problem will disappear, but it might change -- criminals might put more effort into phishing and social engineering, rather than straight botnet+DDoS attacks.
That's kind of like arguing against putting a better lock on your door, because criminals are always going to figure out a way to break it. It's true, but really you don't need a lock that's strong enough to keep every criminal out, you just need to make it more secure than your neighbor's house. In OS terms, eventually you're just going to make it secure enough that it's easier to go after the user than break the system itself.
I think you got it exactly right. Email is a very mature mode of communications. It's been de-facto standardized: if I sit down in front of the Compose window of an Outlook system, even though I'm used to using Lotus Notes, I'm going to be able to figure it out.
When you get down to it, I'd argue that most email programs share about 90% of their functionality; product differentiation is all about that last 5%. The differences between programs are mostly in sorting and managing messages, filtering, creating automatic follow-ups and the like. They're not really even differences in the actual email part of the program, mostly. (Perhaps Exchange is a bit different.) "Collaboration" programs, on the other hand, can be totally different from each other. They may not even use the same basic UI metaphors. Some want to be 'online conference rooms,' others want to be 'electronic whiteboards.'
There's bound to be confusion about any new communications medium when the field of options is this fragmented. It probably won't be until the options become somewhat standardized and similar that people will begin to decide it's worth learning about, and thus getting comfortable with.
DAT wasn't always intended as just a professional format. It "coulda been a contendah" if only it hadn't been crippled by the record companies and their brickbats in Congress.
I think any time DAT comes up in discussion it's good to remember that, since its failure had a lot less to do with any shortcomings as a format than due to political maneuvering. That's not to say that it didn't have shortcomings (in particular, the mechanisms wouldn't have been cheap compared to analog cassettes) but I think the public would have liked it, if it had been introduced on time -- well before CDs.
What is the license on the contributed material going to be?
How does a person know, when they're contributing, that Splunk isn't going to take the site's content at some point down the road, and turn it into some steaming pile of ads and subscription fees like Experts Exchange?
If it's a wiki, it's difficult to separate individual contributions, so a Slashdot-style "Comments are owned by the Poster" probably wouldn't work. The actual work has to be owned by somebody, and frankly I don't know Splunk from Adam and I'd certainly question whether I wanted to spend a lot of time writing an article if at some point it might just become part of their "Premium Membership" service, or if they won't let other people mirror it as a backup in case they decide that being 'community oriented' isn't paying the bills in the way they thought it would.
Humm...yeah, good catch. It was really late when I wrote that, what can I say.
I think I might have left out a factor of 8.
So I guess you can use a flash-based player for a 90-min recording pretty practically, although I think the rest of my points still stand.
I think the recorders based on CF are probably going to be the closest to a "DAT replacement" for most places. It makes me wonder whether the manufacturers have done anything to standardize on their file formats that are stored on the cards, so that you could pop the card out of a Marantz and play it back in an Edirol. I have a suspicion that you cannot, just like you can't pop the card out of one brand of digital camera and view the photos in another (most of the time, anyway).
why would I want an 'experience' when I can just copy across my mp3s with explorer.
Because having to manually copy the files in Explorer is a pretty clumsy way of keeping two directories in sync?
I admit, there are ways to do it other than iTunes -- rsync, for example, via a shellscript would do the trick -- but having to copy the files over by hand is just a bad design IMO.
When I bring my iPod in from the car at night, I put it in its cradle and walk away. There is no step 2, it's done. Any new music that I've downloaded on the computer is sync'd up to it, new Podcasts are downloaded and updated, and the metadata on the files in iTunes is updated (playcounts, elapsed indicators, etc.). Any dynamic playlists that depend on this data, like "10 Most Played" are also updated.
Going to a player that had to be mounted as a mass-storage device and have files copied to it by hand would be a big step down, in my opinion. I had an MP3 player like that, pre-iPod (it was a Pontis). I never liked it; the reason the iPod works for me -- and I'm willing to bet for a whole lot of other people -- is because it's an automatic mirror image of their entire music library, without any effort involved in keeping the two synchronized.
Agreed. DAT is definitely on it's way out, but for right now it's a pretty accepted format in low-end studios, the kind you'd be likely to find at most music schools. I can understand if some computer music composers didn't have DAT decks anymore, but anybody who's working in an environment where they might have to deal with old recordings is going to have to have one around for a while.
I always liked DAT as a format because it could record for so much longer than anything else. If you wanted to get an entire 90 minute concert in some other format, and you didn't have an intermission to swap media, then you're either in trouble or you'd better have two decks so you can cutover (and splice later). I think the only replacement for that functionality right now are the hard drive recorders. Ninety minutes of uncompressed 44.1/16 stereo PCM audio is over 7GB; while I suppose that's not out of the question for flash-based recorders, it'll cost you almost $500 just for the media.
Plus, a lot of educational institutions don't have the network resources to easily move around data like that easily. While sending 2GB to another computer in the same building might not seem like much of a task for many people reading this, it can be a real trick if the computers aren't networked and if neither one has a DVD writer (yes, I know, you can segment the files...). Plus, having to use a computer is not necessarily a plus. It was always a lot easier to teach musicians how to make a CD out of their DAT using a rack-mounted CD burner and DAT deck than it was to teach them how to do it by using a computer. (Granted, people are probably more familiar now with burning CDs, and the software has made it considerably simpler.)
At any rate, I don't think it's amiss to recommend DAT to someone who's just looking to make some recordings of themselves. The equipment is going to be around for a while, and the volume of stuff recorded in the format and the lack of a clear replacement isn't going to speed it up. I still go into studios regularly where they have working 1/4" open-reel gear, and there's a whole industry built around reconditioning and restoring those machines; I don't think DAT will be any different. It's going to be a long time before we'll see the end of it.
I don't have much love for MiniDisc -- actually I rather hate it, just for the business it might have taken away from DAT, which is a format I really could have gotten behind if the labels hadn't conspired to kill it -- but I believe at least some of the MD players had digital-optical outputs. IIRC, MiniDisc equipment was where the 1/8" combination electrical-analog and optical-digital Toslink plug came from. It's a regular stereo mini-jack, but there's an optical transceiver in the very tip of the jack/plug. I can't cite specific models nor do I claim to know this for sure, but it's been suggested to me that this was the case.
So I think you could plug a MD player into a computer with a SPDIF port, and transfer the recording that way. Of course being "all digital" doesn't necessarily imply "high quality," since the recording is lossy. The resulting 44.1kHz PCM file that you'd get on the receiving end would include a lot of bits that were being reconstructed by the MD player, and not in the real on-disk recording.
Well said. I think though that there is a pretty fundamental gap between people who want all-in-one devices and people who want "do one thing and do it well" devices. I think the former class of people are eventually going to get all of their electronics, or at least the portable stuff, from a cellphone. And the latter group will decry these devices at sucking at pretty much everything, possibly including making phone calls.
Some people think it's cool to have a PDA/cellphone/camera/GPS unit that plays music. I don't. I'm not even really impressed by the fact that my cellphone takes pictures, and I've even used that a few times. I have a cell phone for making phone calls, a digital camera for taking pictures, an iPod for listening to music, and a GPS for figuring out my position. While I can accept that a certain amount of integration is beneficial, because it might cause you to have a device with you when you otherwise wouldn't (the GPS for example), I think it's naive to say that can happen without serious compromises happening in terms of functionality and interface. The phone is never going to be as good a picture-taking tool as a dedicated camera, and frankly it's not going to be as good a telephony tool as a dedicated phone, either, because of compromises that will have had to be made.
An integrated device is always going to be more complicated and more intimidating to learn how to use than a single-purpose device, and the interface isn't going to be as well-designed to the task at hand. Rather than form following function, you by necessity are going to have function being squeezed into pre-existing form.
That compromise may be beneficial to some people -- people who want all the functions being integrated, and want them all at the same time, and can't use the discrete ones -- but it's always going to be a step down if you just want one.
Well said. I think it's a combination of people really liking the seamlessness of the "iPod experience" and not needing or caring about the additional features like audio recording, FM radio, etc. Besides, the majority of those features are available to people who want them as optional accessories for the iPod. And most people don't need ALL of them, they just might want one in addition to the iPod's core featureset. Which is easily done by adding an accessory, a process that's perceived by many as less complicated than learning how to use a competing device from the start. (Because it makes the initial learning process much less intimidating.)
Frankly I think iPod-bashing has just turned into a sort of holier-than-thou sport here on Slashdot. It's done with such fervor by some that I have to wonder if it doesn't spring from some deep-rooted insecurity.
As for the whole Hi-MD thing, it's no iPod killer. It would take a backpack, or at least some really stuffed pockets, to hold the same amount of data that an iPod would -- a regular iPod, not a Shuffle or Nano. And a MD based player isn't going to be small enough to pick up the people who want something as small as a Shuffle or Nano, so there's no competition there. One of the original selling points of the iPod was that you could keep your entire music library available at your fingertips, anytime. That remains true today, except it doesn't get said as often because people are used to it. Even though you can replicate the capacity of a 40GB iPod by taking one MD player and 39 extra discs, that's nothing like the convenience of having it all inside a cigarette pack unit. I can just imagine some of my friends trying to find that 1 disc out of the 39 scattered around the passenger-side footwell of their car, for the correct one that has the song on it they want to hear. It's not a pretty sight.
Sony basically killed (by not marketing) Hi-MD for the right reasons: it's doomed to be a niche format, popular mostly with geeks and amateur recordists. Its capacity is an order of magnitude too small for the form factor to be a true "iPod killer," and Sony's brand name in MP3 players to anyone who's familiar with their past attempts is worse than Yugo is to automobiles.
I prefaced my comments by saying the same thing that everything in this discussion should say: it's all nothing but a bunch of hearsay and conjecture. However, unlike you, I never passed any of my claims off as definitive.
And you're even wrong when you say "We do know this -- Apple Computer paid millions of dollars..."; I've seen a much lower number quoted, in fact the Wikipedia article even says $80,000. So don't say that as if it's a known fact, either.
Re:Not available anywhere, not just on iTunes
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Actually I think it's an absolutely relevant point.
Let's say that I really want a Beatles track right now, to put on my iPod. Maybe not a whole CD -- or even perhaps one CD's worth of music, but a list that's scattered across five or six different albums -- I'm S.O.L. in terms of legitimate distribution methods. The only way for me to do this would be to buy the physical CDs, and then rip them in to my computer. If I don't want to do that, because it's cost-prohibitive (and let's face it: Beatles CD's aren't cheap; the White Album goes for almost $30 on Amazon right now), I'm pushed immediately into something less legal. And those 'side channels' don't bring any revenue to Apple Corps.
If they were just making money hand over fist I could understand; maybe they just don't care about the losses due to digital distribution and are content to let them slide. But they posted a not insignificant loss last year. I really can't think that's a good business plan for them to continue with, going forward.
There are lots of ways to get Beatles tracks besides buying them, for every range of technological ability. You can check one out from the library, borrow one from a friend, or download them from your choice of P2P service (Gnutella, DC++, whatever else they're using this week), or get it from our Russian friends. Why aren't there this many ways to get the music legally?
It's money out the window to Apple Corps., and I don't pretend to understand why.
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I think the theory is that these things are going to be given away, paid for by somebody. I'm not clear who exactly is bankrolling this whole venture. Right now it's mostly private companies, but it seems like the actual manufacture and distribution would be paid for by somebody with deeper pockets: philanthropic ventures, the UNDP, etc. $100 a head is out of reach for most developing countries to spend on children; these are places where people are starving to death for lack of a few dollars of medicine or cents of rice. The only way the computers are going to get there is if somebody else pays for them.
If the Ugandan (or other country, I'm not indicting Uganda in particular here) goverment was actually purchasing these things with its own funds, I'd have far fewer reservations. By purchasing them it would show to me that they had made a determination that they wanted to spend money and resources on education, and thus would probably protect that investment.
Since I have a feeling they're going to arrive as a handout, I'm suspicious that the recipient governments might not really be all that into the concept of education, and instead might decide that they wanted hard currency (with which to purchase weapons) more than free computers for kids. So they take the computers, liquidate them for cash, and buy whatever it is they really want -- which very likely are things that the international community would be less willing to just give them, even though that's effectively what they just did.
I'm not sure that making them a particular color is going to change anything. You could have the words "WARNING: STOLEN" magically appear in huge letters on the case if they left the continent of Africa, and people in the US would still buy them on eBay. Just because it said that wouldn't make them immediately illegal to possess, and in the example I cited above, the devices wouldn't be stolen or illegal to buy at all. The computers would have been sold by the government of the African country (I used Uganda, but insert your favorite) in exchange for weapons. A completely morally bankrupt, but entirely legal, transaction.
Nowhere is it written that a government can not legally sell its children's school books or computers in exchange for assault rifles. Just because it's repugnant doesn't mean it's illegal.
If I'm taking somebody to the hospital, screw parallel parking, I'm just going to head into the space at an angle and drive up on the sidewalk/curb/grass/whatever. Hell, I'll just park on their lawn, if that's the easiest solution.
I actually quite distinctly remember never having being tested on my ability to parallel park, during my driving test, or even learning the skill in the driving school I went to.
I can't be unique in that. I'm sure there are a lot of other people who learned to drive in rural areas where learning to parallel park is just not a particularly useful skill; a young driver is better to spend their time learning to rock their car out of a snowdrift or what not to do when they hit a patch of ice.
I wouldn't park my car in a parallel spot anyway, I've seen too many people hit the car in front and behind them while they're attempting to park or get out. I don't even think it's accidental -- people just let the car roll back until it hits the car in back of them, then move forward until they hit the one in front, repeat as necessary. No thanks, I'll pass.
I think it's a real mistake to put much, if any, onboard storage into these things. In fact I think it's a bad idea to load them with an OS at all.
A computer with an OS (that's not burned into ROM) is just waiting to get borked up. Eventually, something's going to get messed up, and an unfamiliar user is going to have to seek support.
I think a much better design would be to just have a very minimal amount of storage built in, and have various program discs (cartridges, whatever) that were actually bootable. So you want to run OpenOffice? Stick an OpenOffice disk in there and turn it on. You save your work on a memory card (this way you can use cheap non-rewritable media for the programs), and you never have to worry about messing the system up. Want to play a game? Put the game disc in there and reboot. You can easily design software titles that maximize the machine's resources this way, since you can tweak the OS to your liking. Really it becomes more like programming for a video game system than for a conventional PC.
The Sony Playstation, not a ThinkPad, is really the goal that people should be working towards here.
I also think that such a system could help to build the economic system that's necessary for this whole concept to perpetuate itself. Rather than trying to discourage piracy (since hopefully most of the software would be Free), you encourage it. Give out micro-loans to people who have reliable sources of power, or who can create one, so they can create copying stations. They effectively become software librarians -- if you want a new software title, you go to your local copyist and pay a few cents (since really you're paying only for the blank media plus their profit) and they run you off a copy of what you want. Or if you have something they don't have yet, maybe you can let them copy yours in trade. Naturally they would also become the used equipment dealers, support technicians, print shop, etc. Sort of like a low-budget, full-service Kinkos. This sort of model has worked pretty well for cell phones in India, and water filtration systems in Bangledesh.
I just think that giving people without any support infrastructure a laptop that's anything like what we're used to in industrialized countries is a mistake. Having a read/write operating system that can be misconfigured, infected, accidentally deleted, etc., is just asking for trouble, especially when you're creating a situation where they won't be any natural path to go to for support or repair. I think the simplest solutions are the best, and there is just no reason for a hard drive and big OS that I can see.
The laptop is going to be distributed for free by governments and NGOs.
That's the one part of this plan that I have the most serious reservations about.
Here's what I think is likely to happen. Plane full of laptops is unloaded at airfield in Uganda. Negroponte gets photo op, handing first unit to smiling child. Technology companies, computer users, all get warm fuzzy feeling.
Cameras go off, Negroponte and cadre go home. Ugandan government officials come out, confiscate laptops, load into trucks, take to black-market smuggler, trade for AK-47s. Laptops go in shipping container, shipped to India where workers in sweatshops file serial numbers off, then to LA where they get sold in stores and via eBay for $125. Ugandan goverment officials draft children into Army, give each one an AK-47.
Net result: African children get guns, Americans get warm fuzzy feeling and cheap black-market technology.
It won't need troubleshooting, it will run Linux.
You had me, right up to there.
The only computer I've ever been near that "didn't require troubleshooting" was an Apple IIc. And even there I'm not sure that it's a true statement -- it's just that the troubleshooting was so simple, the group of 1st graders that I saw using it could do it themselves.
Put disk into drive. Turn on computer. Computer runs program. When done with program, turn computer off. Remove disk. Repeat.
Now that's the kind of computer they should be laboring to build. Maybe make it run on little optical cartridges or something instead of 5-1/4" floppies, but the same idea. Put the disk in, turn it on, it runs. Anything else is needlessly complex and will require support infrastructure.
Now maybe, like the old Apple II, you could have it do something special, an "advanced mode," if you will, when you turn it on without something in the drive. The old Apples booted to a text prompt where you could program in BASIC. Probably only 1 in 1,000 users will ever see it, and only 1 in 1,000 of them will ever bother to try to go further and figure out what it means and what they can do from there. But maybe you'll teach that 1 in 1,000,000 kid something, and he'll turn out to be the next Linux Torvalds. I can accept that.
However, if the machine is anything approaching the complexity of today's PCs, which most literate, educated people can hardly understand, much less troubleshoot and support, I think you're setting the whole thing up for failure. IMO, any device you're tossing out there like this ought to be like a Gameboy: just enough onboard, hardcoded intelligence to make the thing turn on and load code from external modules. That way no matter how bad you hose the software, you can't "break it." Plus it makes them a lot easier to share: one person can pull out the cartridge/disk for whatever they've been working on, and another person can plug theirs in and it's like they're on a different system.
Wait a second there ... now, I'm willing to give Gates credit where credit's due, particularly in terms of being a shrewd (one might say ruthless) businessman, but I think it's totally out of line to just hand him credit for the PC revolution. Anybody who believes that is either seriously misguided, or getting a paycheck from Redmond, or both.
If IBM had gone with a different company to make an OS for its computers, nobody would have ever heard of Bill Gates or Microsoft, 90% of the world would be running some other operating system, and we'd still have computers on our desks. In fact, if you wanted to find a single company to give the majority of the credit to, I'd say Compaq is probably the most deserving, for reverse-engineering the IBM BIOS and producing the first clones, thus breaking IBM's pricing structure.
Really I think the only credit you can give Microsoft and Windows is for driving a very rapid hardware upgrade cycle over the last decade; this created sales volumes which led to economies of scale in the past few years which have kept the price of computer hardware on an ever-decreasing spiral.
I don't think there's anything that Microsoft did that you can't argue would have happened anyway, had they never existed or had IBM adopted a different OS. And frankly I can think of several scenarios which might have resulted in better outcomes for the average PC owner than the current one.
On the other hand, maybe you were just trolling.
I suggest you go do that then.
But before you go, here's an idea for you: maybe, just maybe, those people don't want to be waited on by other people? Maybe they'd prefer to be assisted by machines than to have other people, who have a tendency to be arrogant and self-righteous, do things for them?
Frankly if I was paraplegic, I think it would be far more dehumanizing to have to have another person around 24/7 to do things for me than it would be to have a small army of remote-controlled machines.
Don't forget hookers!
... but there's also gambling, if that's more your style; high-risk sports ... not to mention all the toys that are priced out of the range of kids. I have yet to see a performance car that's marketed at 10 to 13-year-olds, although admittedly I haven't watched the Disney channel in a while. Who knows what the car companies will do as they get desperate enough.
Granted, only legal in a few states
I have to admit that's an intriging concept. It's a little farfetched right now (it would have to be a pretty honking big virus, if it carried around a copy of VMWare inside of itself), but at the very least it does point out that there a lot of at least theoretical nasty-games you could play on a system that had virtualization installed but not running by default.
I think the solution might be, if you have the hardware overhead, just to run your insecure OS in a sandbox created through virtualization. That way if it gets hosed, or even if some virus managed to install another virtualized OS on top of while compromising it, you'd be able to get "one level below" the infected system and clean it out.
It would be a mistake to write it off as impossible, especially as computers get powerful enough for a casual user to be running a virtualized OS and never notice the difference from a native one.
I believe it.
I used to live with a guy who had a PC in his room that I never saw turned on. After a few months (of him borrowing my computer to check his Yahoo mail) I asked him what the deal was.
"It's broken, I just haven't gotten around to throwing it out yet," he said. I asked him what the problem was. "It has a virus."
To many people, when their computer gets slow or unstable because of viruses/spyware/etc., it's just a sign that the computer is 'worn out' and it's time to get a new one. Some people bring them down to CompUSA or wherever to have them cleaned off, but other people just treat them as disposable. We've created a culture where the common wisdom is that it's better to replace electronic devices than repair them, so why should computers be any different?
(And just in case anybody is wondering, yes, that computer is now a fileserver of mine.)
I'm not sure that I buy into this completely. Although there are certainly people out there who write malware for the sake of writing malware, I think that if everyone was running a system that was less inherently vunerable/insecure, that you would see criminals turning towards other ways of making money. The large-scale malware problems we're seeing today (e.g. botnetting) occur because it's profitable to write the malware, gather together a large net of bots, and then sell/lease/rent them out to someone for some malicious purpose. At some point, you can make it difficult or expensive enough to write the malware that it's no longer profitable to do that. It doesn't mean that the problem will disappear, but it might change -- criminals might put more effort into phishing and social engineering, rather than straight botnet+DDoS attacks.
That's kind of like arguing against putting a better lock on your door, because criminals are always going to figure out a way to break it. It's true, but really you don't need a lock that's strong enough to keep every criminal out, you just need to make it more secure than your neighbor's house. In OS terms, eventually you're just going to make it secure enough that it's easier to go after the user than break the system itself.
I think you got it exactly right. Email is a very mature mode of communications. It's been de-facto standardized: if I sit down in front of the Compose window of an Outlook system, even though I'm used to using Lotus Notes, I'm going to be able to figure it out.
When you get down to it, I'd argue that most email programs share about 90% of their functionality; product differentiation is all about that last 5%. The differences between programs are mostly in sorting and managing messages, filtering, creating automatic follow-ups and the like. They're not really even differences in the actual email part of the program, mostly. (Perhaps Exchange is a bit different.) "Collaboration" programs, on the other hand, can be totally different from each other. They may not even use the same basic UI metaphors. Some want to be 'online conference rooms,' others want to be 'electronic whiteboards.'
There's bound to be confusion about any new communications medium when the field of options is this fragmented. It probably won't be until the options become somewhat standardized and similar that people will begin to decide it's worth learning about, and thus getting comfortable with.
DAT wasn't always intended as just a professional format. It "coulda been a contendah" if only it hadn't been crippled by the record companies and their brickbats in Congress.
I think any time DAT comes up in discussion it's good to remember that, since its failure had a lot less to do with any shortcomings as a format than due to political maneuvering. That's not to say that it didn't have shortcomings (in particular, the mechanisms wouldn't have been cheap compared to analog cassettes) but I think the public would have liked it, if it had been introduced on time -- well before CDs.
What is the license on the contributed material going to be?
How does a person know, when they're contributing, that Splunk isn't going to take the site's content at some point down the road, and turn it into some steaming pile of ads and subscription fees like Experts Exchange?
If it's a wiki, it's difficult to separate individual contributions, so a Slashdot-style "Comments are owned by the Poster" probably wouldn't work. The actual work has to be owned by somebody, and frankly I don't know Splunk from Adam and I'd certainly question whether I wanted to spend a lot of time writing an article if at some point it might just become part of their "Premium Membership" service, or if they won't let other people mirror it as a backup in case they decide that being 'community oriented' isn't paying the bills in the way they thought it would.
Your post made my day.
It reminds me of a skit that a local radio station did once, on "What if the airlines ran a hardware store..." but yours is more up to date.
Humm...yeah, good catch. It was really late when I wrote that, what can I say.
I think I might have left out a factor of 8.
So I guess you can use a flash-based player for a 90-min recording pretty practically, although I think the rest of my points still stand.
I think the recorders based on CF are probably going to be the closest to a "DAT replacement" for most places. It makes me wonder whether the manufacturers have done anything to standardize on their file formats that are stored on the cards, so that you could pop the card out of a Marantz and play it back in an Edirol. I have a suspicion that you cannot, just like you can't pop the card out of one brand of digital camera and view the photos in another (most of the time, anyway).
why would I want an 'experience' when I can just copy across my mp3s with explorer.
Because having to manually copy the files in Explorer is a pretty clumsy way of keeping two directories in sync?
I admit, there are ways to do it other than iTunes -- rsync, for example, via a shellscript would do the trick -- but having to copy the files over by hand is just a bad design IMO.
When I bring my iPod in from the car at night, I put it in its cradle and walk away. There is no step 2, it's done. Any new music that I've downloaded on the computer is sync'd up to it, new Podcasts are downloaded and updated, and the metadata on the files in iTunes is updated (playcounts, elapsed indicators, etc.). Any dynamic playlists that depend on this data, like "10 Most Played" are also updated.
Going to a player that had to be mounted as a mass-storage device and have files copied to it by hand would be a big step down, in my opinion. I had an MP3 player like that, pre-iPod (it was a Pontis). I never liked it; the reason the iPod works for me -- and I'm willing to bet for a whole lot of other people -- is because it's an automatic mirror image of their entire music library, without any effort involved in keeping the two synchronized.
Agreed. DAT is definitely on it's way out, but for right now it's a pretty accepted format in low-end studios, the kind you'd be likely to find at most music schools. I can understand if some computer music composers didn't have DAT decks anymore, but anybody who's working in an environment where they might have to deal with old recordings is going to have to have one around for a while.
I always liked DAT as a format because it could record for so much longer than anything else. If you wanted to get an entire 90 minute concert in some other format, and you didn't have an intermission to swap media, then you're either in trouble or you'd better have two decks so you can cutover (and splice later). I think the only replacement for that functionality right now are the hard drive recorders. Ninety minutes of uncompressed 44.1/16 stereo PCM audio is over 7GB; while I suppose that's not out of the question for flash-based recorders, it'll cost you almost $500 just for the media.
Plus, a lot of educational institutions don't have the network resources to easily move around data like that easily. While sending 2GB to another computer in the same building might not seem like much of a task for many people reading this, it can be a real trick if the computers aren't networked and if neither one has a DVD writer (yes, I know, you can segment the files...). Plus, having to use a computer is not necessarily a plus. It was always a lot easier to teach musicians how to make a CD out of their DAT using a rack-mounted CD burner and DAT deck than it was to teach them how to do it by using a computer. (Granted, people are probably more familiar now with burning CDs, and the software has made it considerably simpler.)
At any rate, I don't think it's amiss to recommend DAT to someone who's just looking to make some recordings of themselves. The equipment is going to be around for a while, and the volume of stuff recorded in the format and the lack of a clear replacement isn't going to speed it up. I still go into studios regularly where they have working 1/4" open-reel gear, and there's a whole industry built around reconditioning and restoring those machines; I don't think DAT will be any different. It's going to be a long time before we'll see the end of it.
I don't have much love for MiniDisc -- actually I rather hate it, just for the business it might have taken away from DAT, which is a format I really could have gotten behind if the labels hadn't conspired to kill it -- but I believe at least some of the MD players had digital-optical outputs. IIRC, MiniDisc equipment was where the 1/8" combination electrical-analog and optical-digital Toslink plug came from. It's a regular stereo mini-jack, but there's an optical transceiver in the very tip of the jack/plug. I can't cite specific models nor do I claim to know this for sure, but it's been suggested to me that this was the case.
So I think you could plug a MD player into a computer with a SPDIF port, and transfer the recording that way. Of course being "all digital" doesn't necessarily imply "high quality," since the recording is lossy. The resulting 44.1kHz PCM file that you'd get on the receiving end would include a lot of bits that were being reconstructed by the MD player, and not in the real on-disk recording.
Well said. I think though that there is a pretty fundamental gap between people who want all-in-one devices and people who want "do one thing and do it well" devices. I think the former class of people are eventually going to get all of their electronics, or at least the portable stuff, from a cellphone. And the latter group will decry these devices at sucking at pretty much everything, possibly including making phone calls.
Some people think it's cool to have a PDA/cellphone/camera/GPS unit that plays music. I don't. I'm not even really impressed by the fact that my cellphone takes pictures, and I've even used that a few times. I have a cell phone for making phone calls, a digital camera for taking pictures, an iPod for listening to music, and a GPS for figuring out my position. While I can accept that a certain amount of integration is beneficial, because it might cause you to have a device with you when you otherwise wouldn't (the GPS for example), I think it's naive to say that can happen without serious compromises happening in terms of functionality and interface. The phone is never going to be as good a picture-taking tool as a dedicated camera, and frankly it's not going to be as good a telephony tool as a dedicated phone, either, because of compromises that will have had to be made.
An integrated device is always going to be more complicated and more intimidating to learn how to use than a single-purpose device, and the interface isn't going to be as well-designed to the task at hand. Rather than form following function, you by necessity are going to have function being squeezed into pre-existing form.
That compromise may be beneficial to some people -- people who want all the functions being integrated, and want them all at the same time, and can't use the discrete ones -- but it's always going to be a step down if you just want one.
Well said. I think it's a combination of people really liking the seamlessness of the "iPod experience" and not needing or caring about the additional features like audio recording, FM radio, etc. Besides, the majority of those features are available to people who want them as optional accessories for the iPod. And most people don't need ALL of them, they just might want one in addition to the iPod's core featureset. Which is easily done by adding an accessory, a process that's perceived by many as less complicated than learning how to use a competing device from the start. (Because it makes the initial learning process much less intimidating.)
Frankly I think iPod-bashing has just turned into a sort of holier-than-thou sport here on Slashdot. It's done with such fervor by some that I have to wonder if it doesn't spring from some deep-rooted insecurity.
As for the whole Hi-MD thing, it's no iPod killer. It would take a backpack, or at least some really stuffed pockets, to hold the same amount of data that an iPod would -- a regular iPod, not a Shuffle or Nano. And a MD based player isn't going to be small enough to pick up the people who want something as small as a Shuffle or Nano, so there's no competition there. One of the original selling points of the iPod was that you could keep your entire music library available at your fingertips, anytime. That remains true today, except it doesn't get said as often because people are used to it. Even though you can replicate the capacity of a 40GB iPod by taking one MD player and 39 extra discs, that's nothing like the convenience of having it all inside a cigarette pack unit. I can just imagine some of my friends trying to find that 1 disc out of the 39 scattered around the passenger-side footwell of their car, for the correct one that has the song on it they want to hear. It's not a pretty sight.
Sony basically killed (by not marketing) Hi-MD for the right reasons: it's doomed to be a niche format, popular mostly with geeks and amateur recordists. Its capacity is an order of magnitude too small for the form factor to be a true "iPod killer," and Sony's brand name in MP3 players to anyone who's familiar with their past attempts is worse than Yugo is to automobiles.
I prefaced my comments by saying the same thing that everything in this discussion should say: it's all nothing but a bunch of hearsay and conjecture. However, unlike you, I never passed any of my claims off as definitive.
And you're even wrong when you say "We do know this -- Apple Computer paid millions of dollars..."; I've seen a much lower number quoted, in fact the Wikipedia article even says $80,000. So don't say that as if it's a known fact, either.
Actually I think it's an absolutely relevant point.
Let's say that I really want a Beatles track right now, to put on my iPod. Maybe not a whole CD -- or even perhaps one CD's worth of music, but a list that's scattered across five or six different albums -- I'm S.O.L. in terms of legitimate distribution methods. The only way for me to do this would be to buy the physical CDs, and then rip them in to my computer. If I don't want to do that, because it's cost-prohibitive (and let's face it: Beatles CD's aren't cheap; the White Album goes for almost $30 on Amazon right now), I'm pushed immediately into something less legal. And those 'side channels' don't bring any revenue to Apple Corps.
If they were just making money hand over fist I could understand; maybe they just don't care about the losses due to digital distribution and are content to let them slide. But they posted a not insignificant loss last year. I really can't think that's a good business plan for them to continue with, going forward.
There are lots of ways to get Beatles tracks besides buying them, for every range of technological ability. You can check one out from the library, borrow one from a friend, or download them from your choice of P2P service (Gnutella, DC++, whatever else they're using this week), or get it from our Russian friends. Why aren't there this many ways to get the music legally?
It's money out the window to Apple Corps., and I don't pretend to understand why.