The article mentions the Kenyan people are concerned about the risks of nuclear power. Not surprising at all after the Japanese accident this past year.
Have they considered partnering with anyone to develop and deploy some of the non-uranium technologies that are being developed by companies like Fuji with their work on Thorium Molten Salt Reactors? It's a much safer design than uranium systems, and proven to work in the 1960s. I don't know how close Fuji is to shipping them, but maybe they're close enough to establish an early-adopter partnership and get a little free advertising for the first deployment or two while doing good for the needy people of Kenya.
I can't imagine anyone going to an electronics store and saying "I want to buy an Ubuntu TV." No, they're going to ask for features or for a name-brand.
Who is going to be shipping them? The author of the software behind a smart/internet-enabled TV is way down my priority list when considering the purchase of a TV.
From what I've read, none of the so-called "Smart TV" products works with ALL content. They're all broken for one media site or another, a far from perfect solution for anyone.
How about listing the streaming protocols and formats Ubuntu supports? Are there any it doesn't support? Why?
I guess we'll just have to hope for more info when CES rolls around. But for now, I'd appreciate it if the Slashbot editors would stop posting pre-announcements for products as if they're telling us anything useful in them. All you're doing is providing free advertising for products that haven't been shown yet and about which we know nothing.
I'd much rather see some articles during and after CES that actually have some information about the products, not just the names of the vendors involved.
Well, that's baffling. Why build up a new business and sell it off as soon as it's profitable enough to find a buyer? That's kind of a counter-intuitive way to build an empire, isn't it?
Rather than saying a company can be sunk by a single bad decision, I'd say it's one specific TYPE of bad decision: hiring the wrong executive.
Look at NorTel in it's heyday. It was one of the top technology companies in the world; the patents sold in the bankruptcy are still very valuable.
But they brought in a hot-shot "save the company" American executive to run the place. He laid off THOUSANDS, and many thousands more who were good resources left of their own accord in addition before the axe could fall on them. The company never did recover from the devastation of those late-80s layoffs, and continued it's decline for years afterward.
But it wasn't a single bad decision in the sense of backing the wrong technology or the wrong business model. It was hiring a rapist to run the company.
But that's the point, isn't it? They HAD the assets to work with to change the face of the company and leverage the brand to do something new. They wasted a LOT of years that have could have been spent on R&D and product development.
But people who have a local high speed provider of any kind are VERY unlikely to consider satellite at all. The primary market of satellite-based ISPs are the rural dwellers who have no other choice. For them, this is a tremendous improvement of 15-20 year old technology that they have been stuck with up until now.
A decline from such heights doesn't happen overnight. It takes years of mismanagement, mistakes, failure to read the market, failure to adapt, and in this case, failure to realize that the entire market on which your business is based is going away.
I find it interesting that Fuji in Japan was a much more diverse company, and seems to be working on Thorium Molten Salt Reactor technology based on the PROVEN trials of the 1960s. That's a pretty radical leap from Fuji's "traditional" camera market.
A smart company invests their assets in developing new markets and new products, not tenaciously clinging to old and failing models until their last dying breath.
My apologies for cursing, but not the sentiment. My language was uncalled for. But your implied insinuation that I would do business with a repressive regime was extremely offensive to me.
Why do you think I insist on doing all my future business on Canadian soil, under Canadian law, and for Canadian dollars? So I don't HAVE to comply with local law that conflicts with my morality, but instead can force them to go through appropriate legal channels according to Canada's international cooperation policies.
Awesome write-up. Thank you for doing such a great job of explaining the difference between the Stasi and the idealism of the three-letter-agencies.
Abandoning Charter of Rights ideals in Canada and Constitutional ideas in the US does NOT mean we have all-out police states, but it is an erosion of the protections against abuse that were built into the system.
I do not have the faith and trust in my fellow humans to believe that once those protections are discarded that there won't be a madman in the future who tries to leverage the opened loopholes to seize power, and then we're ALL in a world of hurt that makes 1984 look like paradise.
Half of these sound extremely fake. Most of these look like it's VERY unlikely they would get themselves on this list if it didn't gain them money
Not ALL lobbyists are trying to game the system for personal or corporate benefit like the media companies are.
Some of them are just run by people who have an opinion and want to support what they think is a good idea, no matter how much I might disagree with them. Everyone has an opinion, but very few have reached a logical conclusion based on facts.
Personally I prefer plain old HTML to wiki engines for handling documentation. But I can see where wiki engines are handy because they usually have built-in keyword search capabilities, while an HTML-based documentation approach requires setting up a search engine to scan the pages.
But no matter what approach to take, you will always have some duplication because it makes it easier for the USER of the documentation to understand what you're talking about than having them constantly clicking links to tiny little topic pages that deal with definitions and other core information.
It's not just an issue of protecting "trade secrets", but of protecting customer information in compliance with law and being able to prove that corporate decisions are made in compliance with law without collusion and back-room deals.
Most employees (including a HUGE segment of the Slashdot crowd) do not understand the fundamental reason companies do NOT want you using "personal devices" to do business, but to use the company-provided equipment instead.
The company's obligation to legal and ethical requirements to protect and manage data FAR outstrip your desire to use your iToy at the office.
There is no substitute for classroom discussion refereed by a Professor of Philosophy when you're learning how to construct an argument.
There is no substitute for classroom discussion about history and literature, or any other subject where the course is about forming and expressing opinions, not learning what the "right" answer is.
As those two items are the most critical things I felt I got out of my 4 year BScAdv in Computer Science, I definitely do not feel online education is a threat to the universities, though it is a game-changing supplement to the traditional university or college environment.
All you can do as a company is decide whether you want a market badly enough to sacrifice your personal morals to abide by their rules. And sadly enough, the vast majority of corporations have NO morality to guide them, only the hunger for PROFIT.
There is NO DOUBT many nations put such pressure on tech companies, and that they get their way if the company wants to do business in their country.
It is the fundamental right of any nation to demand that a foreign company comply with local law if they want to do business with the people and companies of that nation.
For the life of me, I can NOT understand why so many people cannot grasp that simple and basic concept.
You do NOT get to impose your local laws on the world when you do business with them. It's the other way around -- the world imposes it's laws on YOU.
Thanks for the info, I'll keep it in mind. But I wasn't talking near term, I'm kind of swamped right now, and I haven't put any thought into what I MIGHT actually do with such a device, so asking for free hardware to work on it would definitely be premature.:)
Understand I meant no insult. But you have the money and the infrastructure to access the internet. How can YOU possibly hold judgement from that lofty position on people who have NOTHING?
Well, there is one concern in the slightly more developed nations: smart phones.
Certainly for populations where the income levels allow it, most people would prefer a smart phone to an OLPC device.
But those people can also pay for app development, which is why if I work on any such device, it'll be this one. Understand I'm not talking about corporate projects, but for fun and satisfaction projects I'd post under open source with no hope or wish of ever making a dime off them.
There are enough people developing for vendor-specific devices. I'm not needed, and I have more productive things to focus my work efforts on than being another dreamer of the next "Angry Birds" product.
And you are COMPLETELY misunderstanding the point of the OLPC designs -- unlike every vendor's smart phone or tablet on the planet, you do not need an AC power line to charge an OLPC device. If you think the areas serviced by OLPC have power, you have no idea what their lives are like. For God's sake, many of them don't even have clean water and sanitation, never mind luxuries like a power grid.
The fact that OLPC has not had as wide spread an impact as they hope does not mean the project is a failure AT ALL. Ask someone who has and uses one of their earlier devices if THEY consider it a failure. They're the only opinion that really matters. Yours is neither needed nor wanted.
While I await my Alan Kay designed fantasy notepad-sized stylus tablet, I really believe in OLPC's fundamental mission.
If I develop for any vendor specific device, it'll be this one. Not the market-hyped iPad.
I hope they have the buy-two-get-one program again. Hopefully I can scratch up the coin to see someone who can't afford a device piggyback off my purchase.
You mean under 50MPH on flat land with no hills and several miles to accelerate? Sorry, buddy, but REALITY is that NO ONE drives like that. Not even in the prairies and midwest where the land IS flat and there often IS a big gap between vehicles on a low volume road.
When any car company relies on "EPA Testing" to make it's mileage claims, they are based on the same unrealistic driving conditions and restrictions as the hybrid manufacturers.
The problem is not that hybrid manufacturers are specifically lying, but that the EPA testing approach needs to be modified to incorporate REAL WORLD DRIVING STYLES, not unrealistic fantasies about how they "should drive."
Any other industry making such unrealistic claims is charged with fraudulent or false advertising, because they can't point to a government agency as the body doing the testing. It's a smokescreen to allow false advertising to be done "legally."
Ask Martha Stewart -- she's an example of someone who WAS jailed for her "white collar" crimes. It CAN be done. But with the rarity of it, when it does happen, the guilty are likely to claim they were "singled out" for special prosecution. At least Martha had the dignity to accept and serve her sentence gracefully instead of making any such claims.
As much as I have a problem with the way the Israelis oppress the Palestinians and deny them fundamental human rights....
They're not wrong to call crackers who steal people's financial data terrorists.
The people whose credit is being damaged and whose money is stolen are NOT the ones who make decisions for the Israeli government. Nor were the people who had their info stolen by Anonymous in North America or Europe.
When you victimize the people at random, you are committing a terrorist act. You are punishing the innocent for the decisions and actions of the guilty who are not harmed in the LEAST when you victimize the people. Terrorism does NOT have to include death and murder.
True, there is usually less inflammatory legislation in place that can be used to prosecute crackers, but it's also largely ineffective, because it's classed as a "white collar" crime. "White Collar" is a smokescreen for "business crime" laws, with watered down penalties to avoid "hurting" the unethical business people who get caught in fraud, extortion, money laundering, ponzi schemes, and other scams. It downplays the number of people who are hurt by their actions. Financial crimes which hurt hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people should have much harsher punishments and jail time than they do.
Fines do not stop a business, nor do they punish the executives who made the illegal decisions. They're treated as a cost of doing business, and the company pays the tab because the executives are protected from financial damages by the very structure of a legal corporation. JAIL TIME FOR EXECUTIVES, not fines for companies! Their role as officers of the company does NOT protect them from personal prosecution for illegal management of a company. There is absolutely NOTHING in Canadian or US corporate law that says otherwise. It's just not done very often, because these buggers have DEEP pockets for lawyers to fight the charges tooth and nail.
Slashdot Mirror
The article mentions the Kenyan people are concerned about the risks of nuclear power. Not surprising at all after the Japanese accident this past year.
Have they considered partnering with anyone to develop and deploy some of the non-uranium technologies that are being developed by companies like Fuji with their work on Thorium Molten Salt Reactors? It's a much safer design than uranium systems, and proven to work in the 1960s. I don't know how close Fuji is to shipping them, but maybe they're close enough to establish an early-adopter partnership and get a little free advertising for the first deployment or two while doing good for the needy people of Kenya.
Just a thought.
I can't imagine anyone going to an electronics store and saying "I want to buy an Ubuntu TV." No, they're going to ask for features or for a name-brand.
Who is going to be shipping them? The author of the software behind a smart/internet-enabled TV is way down my priority list when considering the purchase of a TV.
From what I've read, none of the so-called "Smart TV" products works with ALL content. They're all broken for one media site or another, a far from perfect solution for anyone.
How about listing the streaming protocols and formats Ubuntu supports? Are there any it doesn't support? Why?
I guess we'll just have to hope for more info when CES rolls around. But for now, I'd appreciate it if the Slashbot editors would stop posting pre-announcements for products as if they're telling us anything useful in them. All you're doing is providing free advertising for products that haven't been shown yet and about which we know nothing.
I'd much rather see some articles during and after CES that actually have some information about the products, not just the names of the vendors involved.
Well, that's baffling. Why build up a new business and sell it off as soon as it's profitable enough to find a buyer? That's kind of a counter-intuitive way to build an empire, isn't it?
Yes, they made acquisitions and later sold them off. But what did they do that was NEW?
Rather than saying a company can be sunk by a single bad decision, I'd say it's one specific TYPE of bad decision: hiring the wrong executive.
Look at NorTel in it's heyday. It was one of the top technology companies in the world; the patents sold in the bankruptcy are still very valuable.
But they brought in a hot-shot "save the company" American executive to run the place. He laid off THOUSANDS, and many thousands more who were good resources left of their own accord in addition before the axe could fall on them. The company never did recover from the devastation of those late-80s layoffs, and continued it's decline for years afterward.
But it wasn't a single bad decision in the sense of backing the wrong technology or the wrong business model. It was hiring a rapist to run the company.
But that's the point, isn't it? They HAD the assets to work with to change the face of the company and leverage the brand to do something new. They wasted a LOT of years that have could have been spent on R&D and product development.
But people who have a local high speed provider of any kind are VERY unlikely to consider satellite at all. The primary market of satellite-based ISPs are the rural dwellers who have no other choice. For them, this is a tremendous improvement of 15-20 year old technology that they have been stuck with up until now.
A decline from such heights doesn't happen overnight. It takes years of mismanagement, mistakes, failure to read the market, failure to adapt, and in this case, failure to realize that the entire market on which your business is based is going away.
I find it interesting that Fuji in Japan was a much more diverse company, and seems to be working on Thorium Molten Salt Reactor technology based on the PROVEN trials of the 1960s. That's a pretty radical leap from Fuji's "traditional" camera market.
A smart company invests their assets in developing new markets and new products, not tenaciously clinging to old and failing models until their last dying breath.
My apologies for cursing, but not the sentiment. My language was uncalled for. But your implied insinuation that I would do business with a repressive regime was extremely offensive to me.
Why do you think I insist on doing all my future business on Canadian soil, under Canadian law, and for Canadian dollars? So I don't HAVE to comply with local law that conflicts with my morality, but instead can force them to go through appropriate legal channels according to Canada's international cooperation policies.
Jesus but your fucking stupid. I would NEVER do business with such a country. I have ethics. That's the whole point.
Awesome write-up. Thank you for doing such a great job of explaining the difference between the Stasi and the idealism of the three-letter-agencies.
Abandoning Charter of Rights ideals in Canada and Constitutional ideas in the US does NOT mean we have all-out police states, but it is an erosion of the protections against abuse that were built into the system.
I do not have the faith and trust in my fellow humans to believe that once those protections are discarded that there won't be a madman in the future who tries to leverage the opened loopholes to seize power, and then we're ALL in a world of hurt that makes 1984 look like paradise.
Not ALL lobbyists are trying to game the system for personal or corporate benefit like the media companies are.
Some of them are just run by people who have an opinion and want to support what they think is a good idea, no matter how much I might disagree with them. Everyone has an opinion, but very few have reached a logical conclusion based on facts.
Personally I prefer plain old HTML to wiki engines for handling documentation. But I can see where wiki engines are handy because they usually have built-in keyword search capabilities, while an HTML-based documentation approach requires setting up a search engine to scan the pages.
But no matter what approach to take, you will always have some duplication because it makes it easier for the USER of the documentation to understand what you're talking about than having them constantly clicking links to tiny little topic pages that deal with definitions and other core information.
It's not just an issue of protecting "trade secrets", but of protecting customer information in compliance with law and being able to prove that corporate decisions are made in compliance with law without collusion and back-room deals.
Most employees (including a HUGE segment of the Slashdot crowd) do not understand the fundamental reason companies do NOT want you using "personal devices" to do business, but to use the company-provided equipment instead.
The company's obligation to legal and ethical requirements to protect and manage data FAR outstrip your desire to use your iToy at the office.
There is no substitute for classroom discussion refereed by a Professor of Philosophy when you're learning how to construct an argument.
There is no substitute for classroom discussion about history and literature, or any other subject where the course is about forming and expressing opinions, not learning what the "right" answer is.
As those two items are the most critical things I felt I got out of my 4 year BScAdv in Computer Science, I definitely do not feel online education is a threat to the universities, though it is a game-changing supplement to the traditional university or college environment.
All you can do as a company is decide whether you want a market badly enough to sacrifice your personal morals to abide by their rules. And sadly enough, the vast majority of corporations have NO morality to guide them, only the hunger for PROFIT.
There is NO DOUBT many nations put such pressure on tech companies, and that they get their way if the company wants to do business in their country.
It is the fundamental right of any nation to demand that a foreign company comply with local law if they want to do business with the people and companies of that nation.
For the life of me, I can NOT understand why so many people cannot grasp that simple and basic concept.
You do NOT get to impose your local laws on the world when you do business with them. It's the other way around -- the world imposes it's laws on YOU.
After all, they only announced the finalization of the design today -- they haven't even shown them at CES yet!
But I'll be a thinkin...
Thanks for the info, I'll keep it in mind. But I wasn't talking near term, I'm kind of swamped right now, and I haven't put any thought into what I MIGHT actually do with such a device, so asking for free hardware to work on it would definitely be premature. :)
Understand I meant no insult. But you have the money and the infrastructure to access the internet. How can YOU possibly hold judgement from that lofty position on people who have NOTHING?
Well, there is one concern in the slightly more developed nations: smart phones.
Certainly for populations where the income levels allow it, most people would prefer a smart phone to an OLPC device.
But those people can also pay for app development, which is why if I work on any such device, it'll be this one. Understand I'm not talking about corporate projects, but for fun and satisfaction projects I'd post under open source with no hope or wish of ever making a dime off them.
There are enough people developing for vendor-specific devices. I'm not needed, and I have more productive things to focus my work efforts on than being another dreamer of the next "Angry Birds" product.
And you are COMPLETELY misunderstanding the point of the OLPC designs -- unlike every vendor's smart phone or tablet on the planet, you do not need an AC power line to charge an OLPC device. If you think the areas serviced by OLPC have power, you have no idea what their lives are like. For God's sake, many of them don't even have clean water and sanitation, never mind luxuries like a power grid.
The fact that OLPC has not had as wide spread an impact as they hope does not mean the project is a failure AT ALL. Ask someone who has and uses one of their earlier devices if THEY consider it a failure. They're the only opinion that really matters. Yours is neither needed nor wanted.
While I await my Alan Kay designed fantasy notepad-sized stylus tablet, I really believe in OLPC's fundamental mission.
If I develop for any vendor specific device, it'll be this one. Not the market-hyped iPad.
I hope they have the buy-two-get-one program again. Hopefully I can scratch up the coin to see someone who can't afford a device piggyback off my purchase.
"driven properly"?
You mean under 50MPH on flat land with no hills and several miles to accelerate? Sorry, buddy, but REALITY is that NO ONE drives like that. Not even in the prairies and midwest where the land IS flat and there often IS a big gap between vehicles on a low volume road.
When any car company relies on "EPA Testing" to make it's mileage claims, they are based on the same unrealistic driving conditions and restrictions as the hybrid manufacturers.
The problem is not that hybrid manufacturers are specifically lying, but that the EPA testing approach needs to be modified to incorporate REAL WORLD DRIVING STYLES, not unrealistic fantasies about how they "should drive."
Any other industry making such unrealistic claims is charged with fraudulent or false advertising, because they can't point to a government agency as the body doing the testing. It's a smokescreen to allow false advertising to be done "legally."
Ask Martha Stewart -- she's an example of someone who WAS jailed for her "white collar" crimes. It CAN be done. But with the rarity of it, when it does happen, the guilty are likely to claim they were "singled out" for special prosecution. At least Martha had the dignity to accept and serve her sentence gracefully instead of making any such claims.
As much as I have a problem with the way the Israelis oppress the Palestinians and deny them fundamental human rights....
They're not wrong to call crackers who steal people's financial data terrorists.
The people whose credit is being damaged and whose money is stolen are NOT the ones who make decisions for the Israeli government. Nor were the people who had their info stolen by Anonymous in North America or Europe.
When you victimize the people at random, you are committing a terrorist act. You are punishing the innocent for the decisions and actions of the guilty who are not harmed in the LEAST when you victimize the people. Terrorism does NOT have to include death and murder.
True, there is usually less inflammatory legislation in place that can be used to prosecute crackers, but it's also largely ineffective, because it's classed as a "white collar" crime. "White Collar" is a smokescreen for "business crime" laws, with watered down penalties to avoid "hurting" the unethical business people who get caught in fraud, extortion, money laundering, ponzi schemes, and other scams. It downplays the number of people who are hurt by their actions. Financial crimes which hurt hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people should have much harsher punishments and jail time than they do.
Fines do not stop a business, nor do they punish the executives who made the illegal decisions. They're treated as a cost of doing business, and the company pays the tab because the executives are protected from financial damages by the very structure of a legal corporation. JAIL TIME FOR EXECUTIVES, not fines for companies! Their role as officers of the company does NOT protect them from personal prosecution for illegal management of a company. There is absolutely NOTHING in Canadian or US corporate law that says otherwise. It's just not done very often, because these buggers have DEEP pockets for lawyers to fight the charges tooth and nail.