Yes, it is tiny. It would be awesome if a future consumer version of the XO had a larger keyboard, maybe even a larger screen. The screen being readable in sunlight outweighs the size though:)
Having the consumer version "adult sized" would be a good way to differentiate between the educational version and the consumer version, too...
I agree that education by itself is not sufficient to solve all of the world's problems, but I suspect you will also agree that education is a necessary ingredient when it comes to improving people's lives.
OLPC is trying to help out with one of the necessities of developing countries. Other projects work on other necessities.
As I understand it, they are the same pixels. The software always renders in 1200x900 color, which the display chip either turns into 1200x900 greyscale when the laptop is in reflective mode, or into a lower resolution color mode.
I am not quite sure how this works either, but I could imagine the color mask of the backlight to be behind a half-reflective layer, which either lets the colored light pass through to the LCD pixels, or act as a mirror for sunlight. That way the same LCD switching pixels can be used for both the color mode and the reflective black & white mode.
Instead of having 3 black & white pixels turn into one color pixel, you can do sub-pixel tricks (like antialiasing, but at a sub-pixel level) to make the color resolution higher than you would expect.
Indeed it does. Note that color pixels in displays do not really exist but are a composite of three different pixels (red, green and blue), and the OLPC laptop goes into a higher resolution when it switches from transmissive color mode to reflective mono mode.
The higher resolution makes the mono mode very suitable for reading ebooks...
I've seen an early XO machine in action at the office (I'm lucky enough to have some of the XO team as colleagues) and I know I want one for my self, too.
I would not mind buying two for children overseas - especially if the system of charitable contributions is set up so we end up with a "negative salestax" - but I do not want to miss out on one for myself either.
The screen may be a bit small compared to what I use on my desktop, but it's got a decent resolution and can be read outside. I want to be able to sit on the deck or in the garden and edit wiki pages, browse the web, listen to music or show stuff using the built-in camera.
The XO is also much more rugged than normal laptops. You can actually take it outside without worrying about it breaking because of dust or some raindrops. I want one:)
A pledge is a lot nicer, since a license would need to be signed and returned by every recipient of software covered by the specifications.
This, in turn, creates issues where somebody who distributes free software cannot automatically pass the license on to the people dowloading the software.
A universal pledge, that covers everybody, is a lot more practical.
This agreement allows the organizations running the TLDs themselves to raise prices. The organizations that your registrar is a customer of.
These organizations are monopolies. Eg. there is one company running.ORG, one company running.BIZ and one company running.INFO. There is no competition within each TLD.
What is worse is that domains do not intrinsically become valuable by themselves, or through anything the registry does. Domains become valuable because of what the user does with them. For example, 10 years ago Google.com was worth nothing, today the registry could decide it would be worth $100m/year.
This in effect punishes people for doing valuable things with the internet.
I believe that this bad idea needs to be stopped.
Looking at some of ICANN's previous bad ideas, maybe ICANN as a whole needs to be abandoned...
A wiki can be a great tool for sharing information in a company or another community.
However, the information does need to be organized, otherwise you can only really put info into it and nobody will ever find it. Luckily Sinorca4moin provides a wiki editable navigation menu, that allows you to put some minimal organization on top of your wiki.
This has allowed me to migrate the Kernelnewbies site to a wiki. Now it gets regular updates again...
She works for the "Initiative for Software Choice", which was founded by Microsoft and several other proprietary software companies. If you want to read objective articles, you should read pieces written by journalists, not opinion columns...
AFAIK Brazil is not ignoring the patents for AIDS drugs. Instead, they have negotiated a deep discount with the patent holder. IIRC this is done using the (WTO?) rule - that patents can be ignored to save human lives in an epidemic - as a really big bargaining chip. Because of this heavy bargaining chip, the AIDS drug manufacturer sells their drugs really cheaply in Brazil. They still get a profit, probably a decent one too because the drugs are affordable enough that they're actually being sold...
I believe that Taiwan is doing the right thing, since the manufacturer of the bird flu drugs did not want to sell them the drugs for a price they were able/willing to pay.
I believe the rules for negotiating price are a bit different when one of the parties can write the law;)
It also had a few factual errors, for example ext2 and ext3 are not extent based at all, they are classical block based filesystems.
Also, most of the Linux page fault code is architecture independant. As it happens, I just wrote an article explaining Linux page fault handling for the Linux-MM wiki. You can find some details there...
It's inevitable that communications, which need electricity anyway, will one day travel over the same lines that provide power.
Then why does your network use a different cable than the power? I mean, both computers are plugged in to the same power strip, why not send your data over the power cable?
Oh right - you need twisted pair in order to be able to go faster than 10Mbit/s, otherwise the signals from each computer will interfere with each other. That's right, the signals will interfere with each other, no need for external interference.
If non-twisted pair cables can't do faster than a few Mbit/s for a few feet, BPL should be worse since it's not just non-twisted, but unbalanced too. You can forget about more than a few people on each block having BPL, since they'd just end up interfering with each other.
Don't believe me? Just try to run 100Mbit ethernet over a CAT6 (untwisted) cable instead of a CAT5 (twisted pair) cable and you'll see for yourself.
The Lagrange points you mention are those of the sun/earth system. The article refers to the earth/moon Lagrange points...
The moon L1 point is useful for something else - you can build a space elevator from the moon, past the L1 point and with a big weight on the earth side of the L1 point as a counterbalance to the cable itself. This is needed since the moon is tidally locked to earth, which means there's no luna-stable orbit around the moon.
Hiring said Indian or Canadian worker to work and pay taxes in the US for 30-50K is the alternative to hiring those same people to work for even less money outside the US, having them pay taxes elsewhere and vacating the US office (where US workers could have applied for a job).
Not letting H1B workers compete inside the US simply means that, in time, American workers will have to find jobs overseas. How's your Hindi?
You're going to end up competing with workers from all over the world no matter what. You can't wish away free market economics just because they're inconvenient.
The only question is, do you want to compete with foreign workers inside the US, or would you prefer to compete with them in India? Surely competing with them inside the US should be a lot easier, since this is your home country...
Most of the spamtrap domains (for PSBL, at least) do have SPF records. However, they get ignored by a lot of Challenge/Response Authentication Protocol (hey, that spells CRAP - coincidence?) software...
Whenever a false positive is pointed out to me, I add a regular expression to the software to make sure that challenge/response software, mailing list manager or MTA bounce type will not result in future listings. It doesn't help that many MTAs appear to be sending out bounces that aren't RFC compliant.
Note that I cannot control what other Spamikaze lists do - but they do tend to get most of my regular expressions whenever they update from CVS;)
Note that while Spamikaze is still pretty early in its development (we've got some fancy ideas on how to make it really fly), PSBL already seems reasonably popular.
I hope that means Spamikaze is going in the right direction...;)
I can think of some more appropriate words said by Homer Simpson, in the epsiode where Barney abandons Homer's car in New York, talking to the khalkash selling guy:
Slashdot Mirror
Registrars play a huge part in keeping the internet safe.
How do you think phishing sites like c1tybank.com would get removed from DNS, or at least taken away from the scammers?
Yes, it is tiny. It would be awesome if a future consumer version of the XO had a larger keyboard, maybe even a larger screen. The screen being readable in sunlight outweighs the size though :)
Having the consumer version "adult sized" would be a good way to differentiate between the educational version and the consumer version, too...
I agree that education by itself is not sufficient to solve all of the world's problems, but I suspect you will also agree that education is a necessary ingredient when it comes to improving people's lives.
OLPC is trying to help out with one of the necessities of developing countries. Other projects work on other necessities.
As I understand it, they are the same pixels. The software always renders in 1200x900 color, which the display chip either turns into 1200x900 greyscale when the laptop is in reflective mode, or into a lower resolution color mode.
I am not quite sure how this works either, but I could imagine the color mask of the backlight to be behind a half-reflective layer, which either lets the colored light pass through to the LCD pixels, or act as a mirror for sunlight. That way the same LCD switching pixels can be used for both the color mode and the reflective black & white mode.
Instead of having 3 black & white pixels turn into one color pixel, you can do sub-pixel tricks (like antialiasing, but at a sub-pixel level) to make the color resolution higher than you would expect.
Indeed it does. Note that color pixels in displays do not really exist but are a composite of three different pixels (red, green and blue), and the OLPC laptop goes into a higher resolution when it switches from transmissive color mode to reflective mono mode.
The higher resolution makes the mono mode very suitable for reading ebooks...
I've seen an early XO machine in action at the office (I'm lucky enough to have some of the XO team as colleagues) and I know I want one for my self, too.
:)
I would not mind buying two for children overseas - especially if the system of charitable contributions is set up so we end up with a "negative salestax" - but I do not want to miss out on one for myself either.
The screen may be a bit small compared to what I use on my desktop, but it's got a decent resolution and can be read outside. I want to be able to sit on the deck or in the garden and edit wiki pages, browse the web, listen to music or show stuff using the built-in camera.
The XO is also much more rugged than normal laptops. You can actually take it outside without worrying about it breaking because of dust or some raindrops. I want one
I've tried to put together an easy to understand overview of the various Linux virtualization technologies, at http://virt.kernelnewbies.org/TechComparison
CBL, DSBL, Spamcop, AHBL and a bunch of smaller blocklists (like my own PSBL and bl.csma.biz) are all operating out of the USA.
Freedom of speech is a wonderful thing for blocklists.
A pledge is a lot nicer, since a license would need to be signed and returned by every recipient of software covered by the specifications.
This, in turn, creates issues where somebody who distributes free software cannot automatically pass the license on to the people dowloading the software.
A universal pledge, that covers everybody, is a lot more practical.
This agreement allows the organizations running the TLDs themselves to raise prices. The organizations that your registrar is a customer of.
.ORG, one company running .BIZ and one company running .INFO. There is no competition within each TLD.
These organizations are monopolies. Eg. there is one company running
What is worse is that domains do not intrinsically become valuable by themselves, or through anything the registry does. Domains become valuable because of what the user does with them. For example, 10 years ago Google.com was worth nothing, today the registry could decide it would be worth $100m/year.
This in effect punishes people for doing valuable things with the internet.
I believe that this bad idea needs to be stopped.
Looking at some of ICANN's previous bad ideas, maybe ICANN as a whole needs to be abandoned...
Sorry dude, but the Kernelnewbies wiki runs at my home :)
Having said that, Greg-KH is one of the largest contributors on the kernelnewbies mailing list...
A wiki can be a great tool for sharing information in a company or another community.
However, the information does need to be organized, otherwise you can only really put info into it and nobody will ever find it. Luckily Sinorca4moin provides a wiki editable navigation menu, that allows you to put some minimal organization on top of your wiki.
This has allowed me to migrate the Kernelnewbies site to a wiki. Now it gets regular updates again...
Well, biased articles are her job.
She works for the "Initiative for Software Choice", which was founded by Microsoft and several other proprietary software companies. If you want to read objective articles, you should read pieces written by journalists, not opinion columns...
AFAIK Brazil is not ignoring the patents for AIDS drugs. Instead, they have negotiated a deep discount with the patent holder. IIRC this is done using the (WTO?) rule - that patents can be ignored to save human lives in an epidemic - as a really big bargaining chip. Because of this heavy bargaining chip, the AIDS drug manufacturer sells their drugs really cheaply in Brazil. They still get a profit, probably a decent one too because the drugs are affordable enough that they're actually being sold...
;)
I believe that Taiwan is doing the right thing, since the manufacturer of the bird flu drugs did not want to sell them the drugs for a price they were able/willing to pay.
I believe the rules for negotiating price are a bit different when one of the parties can write the law
While ext2 and ext3 have inode space reserved for extents, I do not believe the code to use that has been implemented yet.
It also had a few factual errors, for example ext2 and ext3 are not extent based at all, they are classical block based filesystems.
Also, most of the Linux page fault code is architecture independant. As it happens, I just wrote an article explaining Linux page fault handling for the Linux-MM wiki. You can find some details there...
Then why does your network use a different cable than the power? I mean, both computers are plugged in to the same power strip, why not send your data over the power cable?
Oh right - you need twisted pair in order to be able to go faster than 10Mbit/s, otherwise the signals from each computer will interfere with each other. That's right, the signals will interfere with each other, no need for external interference.
If non-twisted pair cables can't do faster than a few Mbit/s for a few feet, BPL should be worse since it's not just non-twisted, but unbalanced too. You can forget about more than a few people on each block having BPL, since they'd just end up interfering with each other.
Don't believe me? Just try to run 100Mbit ethernet over a CAT6 (untwisted) cable instead of a CAT5 (twisted pair) cable and you'll see for yourself.
I'd happily get a ham license and transmit with enough power to make you lose your BPL connection.
Of course, this won't be needed if everybody gets BPL. Then the BPL connections from you and all your neighbors will simply interfere with each other.
I suspect BPL will scale worse than old-style coaxial cable ethernet.
The Lagrange points you mention are those of the sun/earth system. The article refers to the earth/moon Lagrange points...
The moon L1 point is useful for something else - you can build a space elevator from the moon, past the L1 point and with a big weight on the earth side of the L1 point as a counterbalance to the cable itself. This is needed since the moon is tidally locked to earth, which means there's no luna-stable orbit around the moon.
If there's no rivalry to get to the Lagrange points, chances are it's because nobody wants to go there.
Going to space is a major undertaking, so any extra bit of motivation we can find is a good thing, IMHO.
Hiring said Indian or Canadian worker to work and pay taxes in the US for 30-50K is the alternative to hiring those same people to work for even less money outside the US, having them pay taxes elsewhere and vacating the US office (where US workers could have applied for a job).
Not letting H1B workers compete inside the US simply means that, in time, American workers will have to find jobs overseas. How's your Hindi?
You're going to end up competing with workers from all over the world no matter what. You can't wish away free market economics just because they're inconvenient.
The only question is, do you want to compete with foreign workers inside the US, or would you prefer to compete with them in India? Surely competing with them inside the US should be a lot easier, since this is your home country...
Whenever a false positive is pointed out to me, I add a regular expression to the software to make sure that challenge/response software, mailing list manager or MTA bounce type will not result in future listings. It doesn't help that many MTAs appear to be sending out bounces that aren't RFC compliant.
Note that I cannot control what other Spamikaze lists do - but they do tend to get most of my regular expressions whenever they update from CVS ;)
I hope that means Spamikaze is going in the right direction... ;)
I can think of some more appropriate words said by Homer Simpson, in the epsiode where Barney abandons Homer's car in New York, talking to the khalkash selling guy:
"Ewwwww YUCK, I'll have a crab juice."