i know this is going to sound strange - you asked one question but get an answer to another, but the root cause of the problem isn't the keyboard, it's the fact that you're hunched over it, tensed up, locking out the blood supply from your arms and screwing up your hands.
to fix that, you should AT LEAST be doing the overarm stretch: stick hand straight up, bend elbow so that hand goes behind head with elbow still up in air, then take other hand onto elbow, pull and lean geeeently sideways so that entire side stretches
you should also be doing "horse stance" from tai-ji, which is really quite complex to describe, but imagine that you're sat on a horse: your legs are apart, knees bent, and hands outstretched imagine holding reins _but_, the actual tai-ji "horse stance" has some quite complex and specific positions and purpose. the primary purpose is to stretch tendons on the *underside* of your arms and in fingers (forearms as well) as well as elevating the heart-rate.
so, you have to push your elbows outwards so that your upper arms are 45 degrees from vertical, but forearms are absolutely horizontal. hands you have to imagine that you are holding two basket-balls, one in each, palms down but slightly elevated a fraction, fingers splayed as far wide as you can go.
get it right and you should feel loots of tendons stretching under your armpits, at your elbow-forearm _and_ wrists _and_ the thumb and little finger tendons! and that's exactly what you need - to stretch out that which you've utterly cramped out and damaged.
the horse-stance itself results in quite seriously elevated heart rate: you're bending your knees and staying there, so you should be breathing deeply and fully. stay there for as long as possible, increase until you get to 5 minutes. you will be surprised: horse stance for 5 minutes is one hell of a long time.
the other one is the yoga position where you sit on the floor, put one leg bent into your crotch and the other straight out, then lean over and grab ankle (or as close as you can get it). with each breath out, go down a little further. DO NOT "shake". if you feel yourself shaking, BACK OFF.
what i do with this yoga position is, rather than stay going down straight is i roll _sideways_ after a while, so that i get more stretch on the insides of my arms and side, which is exactly where you need the circulation increased, to get bloodflow back to your arms and fingers. repeat on the other side but come up SLOWLY - don't just try to jolt yourself out because you _will_ pull a muscle that way, especially at full stretch.
all of these exercises are designed to increase the circulation on the _underside_ of your arms (at the top) as it's here which is actually causing the blood flow to decrease, toxins to build up, tension to happen and damage to occur.
so - yeah. fuck the keyboard - get your health sorted out.
correct. the latest ARM Cortex CPUs for example have 1k of on-board ROM and built-in encryption algorithms. these can be used to utterly lock out anything but "approved" software, and can even be used for tivoisation.
i'm posting again, the exact same thing, because the comments "this will be a failure" seem to be being given very high priority.
ARM CPUs and MIPS CPUs are the most likely CPUs around which hardware platforms will emerge, and it is SIMPLY NOT POSSIBLE to run windows on ARM CPUs.
thus the entire counterargument against the FSF endorsement concept is utterly irrelevant.
the x86 market is so cut-throat and saturated that any manufacturer wishing to create an exciting new product with a higher profit margin simply cannot use an x86 CPU, and that's the end of it.
there are a couple of embedded x86 CPUs - from RDC and XCore86 but they are so far behind (1ghz) that they really do not have enough going for them, *ESPECIALLY* when they are only capable of running Windows XP because the CPUs simply don't have the instruction set compatibility to run Windows 7.
all in all everything points towards the massively-integrated ARM Cortex A8, A9 and upcoming A15 CPUs and towards the ultra-low-cost highly simplistic MIPS CPUs.
so there's utterly different market, utterly different architectures, different hardware, different rules... and different opportunities.
MIPS and ARM CPUs will be the basis of machines which are most likely to be endorsed, simply because of the sheer overwhelming level of integration on ARM CPUs and the dramatic simplicity and lower cost of MIPS CPUs.
To design an x86-based system is insanity: it requires a BIOS for a start (whereas ARM and MIPS systems typically use u-boot, which is GPL licensed) and the BIOS for x86 systems, for backwards-compatibility reasons, is usually proprietary, which INSTANTLY kicks any x86-based system into touch on the FSF endorsement process.
So the issue is actually very simple: you simply don't get windows-compatible systems on the list!
Plus, the moment the system is x86 compatible, you have entered a raging cut-throat market where it is actually incredibly foolish to contemplate entering.
So, actually, manufacturers are desperately looking around for alternatives in order to bolster profit margins; that means ARM and MIPS highly-integrated or low-cost CPUs; that means zero windows OS; that means that _actually_ this whole idea has a much higher chance of success than might at first glance appear to be the case.
whilst "interactive" may be an "awesome" teacher, interactING is an even better one.
the reasons why OLPC are good apply just as well in the first world as they do to the third, but teachers and governments got snotty about the shit colour and features of the XO-1.
you wouldn't think it, given the price of the ippad, but the cost of hardware is dropping like a stone and is far less than the cost of text books which can be out-of-date immediately.
showing someone f=ma on a graph is all very well, but who's going to write the graph program?
i demonstrated kepler's laws and the laws of physics and gravitation to myself by writing an orbital space game on a BBC micro in 1985.
putting a shit ippad or an anduroyyd tablet in front of kids is about as good as slapping a TV in front of them and saying "there! isn't technology great!"
you can hear the sigh of relief a million miles away from the teacher as they think "thank christ for that - now i don't actually have to think how to keep this little fuckers occupied".
so... mmmm, yeah. i'm really impressed with putting proprietary hardware/software in front of kids (that's remote-controlled by apple who might decide to "censor" certain types of "teaching" material) especially the kind of hardware/software that requires reverse-engineering to get the crap off it and regain control of it.
you're making some incredibly dangerous arguments in favour of GM (Genetically Murderous) crops.
if there was a way for Genetically Murderous crops to be contained - and the OP demonstrates that it is not possible to contain Genetically Murderous crops - then you would be correct in your incredibly dangerous arguments.
have you heard about how much difference that cross-breeding of wolves into dogs over millenia _actually_ made to canine DNA?
have a guess at how much difference it made.
it was believed to be 5%, by many scientists.
then they did a better analysis, and it was believed to be only 1%.
then they did a much more comprehensive analysis, and found only recently that the difference in DNA is:
zero percent.
i'll say that again.
the difference was found to be ZERO percent.
cross-breeding does NOT introduce new genes. cross-breeding merely "activates" or "deactivates" existing genes - switches them on or off, according to random selection and the incoming pollen / seed / sperm / etc.
Genetically Murderous DNA changes are completely different: introducing or removing genes that nature has, through evolutionary forces (call it god if you like, i don't care, it's all the same), put there for a reason.
so for you to say "there's nothing to fear because it's all new" is just absolutely fucking stupid of you, and you deserve to die in agony from being poisoned by a Genetically-Murderous crop designed to produce some drug cross-pollenating with some food that you eat, and your gut bacteria adapting that Genetically-Murderous DNA into its own (which has been proven to have happened already with Genetically Murderous Soya) and your gut bacteria continuously pumping out a drug which poisons and eventually kills you.
i'll make the bold statement first: Genetic Modified foods needs to be banned under the Geneva Convention as Biological Weapons.
now we justify that.
we've now seen yet more evidence of what should have been blindingly obvious to absolutely anyone - namely that GM crops are uncontrollable and out-of-control.
the risks associated with cross-pollenation are just... immense. think about it. GM crops are quotes designed quotes to be stronger, better, resistant to X, Y and Z. ordinary evolutionary steps simply cannot keep up: thus, thanks to cross-pollenation, "wild" crops - nature's crops - will be displaced.
BT Brinjal in india is a type of plant that has 2,500 indigenous varieties, some of which are vital for medicinal purposes. monsanto has been trying to get a GM variety introduced into india, and there have been riots over it. why? because the indigenous varieties will be unable to survive.
by introducing "patented" crops, a sovereign nation can be "taken over" by threat of not complying with international patent and copyright agreements!
and, god help that nation if the GM crop happens not to do well under certain conditions, such as drought. 20 years ago, i heard a story (no GM crops involved) where US-derived corn was introduced into an african country where the indigenous corn had as little as a 15% yield. within three to five years, the massive yields of the US-derived corn, introduced under some stupid NGO programme, had replaced the native corn.
and then there was a drought.
nobody had any food. the US-derived corn was incapable of growing without good irrigation, whereas it turned out that the indigenous corn comprised some ten to fifteen different genetic varieties - hence the reason for the poor yield. yet of those ten to fifteen different genetic varieties, some were good at growing in flood conditions, some in drought, some were more resistant than others to local pests...
it was years before the food supply was re-established.
now amplify that effect - that risk - with GM food substances.
so it's not a joke: the introduction of Genetic Modified food substances is insanely dangerous, and should be banned outright, world-wide, before it's too late.
ahh, the summary is wrong both from a W3C DOM standards perspective, because java is listed as the 2nd language supported by the W3C. the summary is wrong from a second perspective in that language bindings to HTML5-compliant web browser engines such as XulRunner and WebKit have been available for years. if Microsoft actually intend also to follow the HTML5 process properly, then it can be said that MSHTML, through its COM interface, also offers other language alternatives for decades rather than just years.
now it's a sad fact that nobody really *knows* that you can get at HTML5-compliant web browser engines and use DOM functions (3000+) and access DOM properties (20,000+) through XPCOM, or Glib/Gobject or COM, but it's perfectly possible. the best demonstration of this at its most extreme limit, taking advantage of absolutely all HTML5 W3C DOM features, is the http://pyjs.org/ pyjamas project, which abstracts the differences between these three major web browser engine types (XulRunner, Webkit and MSHTML aka Trident) and presents a single uniform API. on top this uniform API, normalising the discrepancies between the three engine types, an entire Desktop GUI Widget Set API has been created.
so the statement that there is "one HTML5 language: javascript" is just nonsense. for further examples of accessing HTML5 DOM using python, some of which will lead through to links to Ruby accessing HTML5 DOM such as AppCelerator, see http://wiki.python.org/moin/WebBrowserProgramming
you might want to give serious consideration to creating an application that uses the web engine itself, directly, rather than relies on the broken-ness of the web browser "applications".
in this way, you can set up an application (ruby-gtk+ app) where you will be able to have your *own* menubar at the top - not the stupid web browser's one; on it, you would have a "Print" option which went and accessed the DOM model's "innerHTML", and you passed it to a *decent* printing system under *your* control, using whatever printing methodology is accessible to you via ruby, running on the user's machine.
or python, if you prefer.
this type of methodology seems to have been entirely forgotten about, as people scramble for conversion of complex apps to "entirely web-based" because they were convinced that "web 2.0 is Good and is God", and then run head-long into exactly the difficulties you're encountering, by which time it's too late.
advice: bypass the web browser as a de-facto application, and create your own application still using the incredible power of web browser *engines*.
http://trac.xbmc.org/ticket/8971 adds support to use librtmp which supports RTMPE including SWF Verification and Adobe's so-called "Secure" Token authentication.
it's worth repeating that there is absolutely zero security of any kind in Adobe Flash RTMPE. everything can be obtained publicly; or is "magic constants", or is simply a complex chain of algorithms, the result of which is merely an increase in CPU usage, heat generated and money wasted, along with the dangerous illusion of security.
one of the key reasons why the chinese don't need a large intelligence agency is because their entire population is actually their intelligence agency, having been trained from a very young age to memorise vast amounts of information - for example, the 10,000 or so chinese characters.
tony buzan's memetic learning techniques were the first popularly re-published discovery of the greek "mnemonic" memorisation techniques, and he adapted them to get you to focus on the use of the five senses and "familiar" or powerful emotive things, such as "home" or "naked person" or "funny picture" as "hooks" on which to hang the sequence to memorise.
the use of such "hooks" was well-known in medieval times. if you look closely at the top and bottom of the bayeux tapestry, there's a continuous but very small row of naked people in various sexual poses and performing various acts. the idea is that if you want to memorise the battle of hastings, and what happened, you get yourself all worked up "wha-heey!!" and _then_ you look at the pictures of the battle, and the pictures sink in.
daniel tennet, aka "brainman" has also developed a similar sort of technique, focussing specifically on helping people to memorise languages. daniel is approaching this from a different angle from tony buzan, however: optimising the actual language learning process.
tony's technique of "hooking" first gets you to associate numbers with familiar or exciting things. for example, the number 1 could be "red post box". the number 2 looks like a swan. 4 a sail-boat etc. etc. but you can equally as well use what works best for you (kinesthetics) - smells, movements, touch etc. it's _entirely_ up to you to use the right "hooks" which are appropriate for _you_.
so, you now have your "hooks". to memorise things by numbers, let's say the number sequence 412, you imagine a sail-boat on a lake, and it goes past a red postbox, and there's a huuuge white swan sitting on top of it. voila, you have just memorised the sequence 412. this technique of picture/thought association gives you the ability to memorise absolutely huge sequences which you otherwise thought you were incapable of.
so, if you were to use tony's technique, you would look at the character in one of two ways:
1) see what the picture reminds you of (for example, tree is blindingly obvious: it looks like a tree) and then "hook" that in, in some imaginative way, with the actual object (as other people have suggested here)
2) decompile the character by brush-strokes, both the sequence of the strokes (which is critically important for chinese calligraphy) and the direction, length and position, and assign each stroke's direction and position a numerical (or other sequence). you then cross-reference that numerical sequence against the "hooks". you also cross-reference the actual meaning at the beginning of the sequence, again in some imaginative way.
by recalling the pictures / hooks, one after the other, you can turn them back into numbers. you then turn the numbers back into brush strokes: voila, you have your chinese character.
it's a lot of initial work, setting up the "hooks" that are appropriate and creating the mnemonic interpretation, but if you're serious, you'll do it.
all that having been said: it would be much much easier to do sanskrit. if you look closely at the written form of sanskrit, you'll notice that the actual written language - the brush strokes - are a _phonetic key_ to the pronounciation! a vertical line means "plosive" (as in - you're going to close your mouth in some fashion). a horizontal line means "make your voice-box resonate". a slash on top going top-left to bottom-right means "close mouth" and a slash on top going bottom-left to top-right means "open mouth", thus you get "taaah" and "aaahht" respectively when combined with the horizontal and vertical lines. various curly-bits mean "do different things with tongue" and thus you get "kuhh", "puhh", "tuhh", "buhh" or "aabh", "aaakh", "aahhp" if the dia
i bet all this cloud nonsense is enterprise hardware companies trying to push higher margin products and no real trend that anyone is doing. the numbers just don't work out
they will, once ARM cortex N goes multi-core (and, importantly from merely a psychological perspective, goes 64-bit).
providing "real" ARM 1ghz dual-core CPUs in a "cloud" where you can fit 2 to an SO-DIMM back-to-back with the actual memory, 1gb each, 20 of which will fit into a 1U rack-mount and still only consume 40 watts of power each, where you can fit 16 1U into a rack, and thus get 1280ghz of CPU power in a single rack - and that's a _low_ estimate.
the performance per watt and the performance per cubic metre figures are just through the _roof_ compared to x86 processors, and the only thing that's really stopping this from happening right now is because people don't believe that an ARM processor could ever be "good enough".
well, with the redesign of the Cortex ARMs, and the geometry dropping like mad, that's set to change.
whenever attempting to get FreeNX working, i've found it to be a total bitch, client-side as well as server-side. by contrast, rdesktop or any other RDP client, client-side and xrdp server-side (which is purely a matter of apt-get install xrdp on debian-based distributions) is so simple to install that a monkey could do it. demo of a monkey (myself) doing exactly that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbsydsar5Pk
hey, can we ask you a favour? given the likelihood of you being able to post on slashdot should you die of radiation-related disease, could you please put a webcam in your apartment, so that if you die everyone can know that they shouldn't live 20 ft away from celltowers that transmit up to 2 watts peak to anything up to 2,000 users, simultaneously? consider your potential death by proximity to around ooo 4kW microwave radiation to be a public service.
the problem is that the rare earth metals on which the nice bright colours rely are migrating to the edges of their cells, on panel sizes of greater than 10cm x 10cm (hence why they can be successfully used in small products like cellphones, where the lifetime of the product is expected to be short).
i've heard of this kind of problem before (a 10cm x 10cm limit) on an unrelated product so it is quite likely that there is a quantum phase transition effect which has not been a) understood b) scientifically properly investigated.
the thing is, rare earth metals were picked because they're supposed to be utterly inert! they're not supposed to move! but it looks like somebody was completely wrong on that, and it hints at some extremely interesting scientific quantum mechanics breakthrough, if only someone could actually work out what the hell it all means.
but basically, it means that the core problem which OLED engineers have been trying to work around (and haven't told you about, because they don't understand it themselves, and it's Not Your Problem Anyway) hasn't been solved in several years, and until it is, OLED technology won't be viable, unless you're happy to pay for a product with a lifetime of about 1,000 hours.
Every time I'm presented with a formula I'm doing mental tricks plugging in values for X & Y trying to visualize it. Computers could help here.
then you want the KDE EDU packages, which include about 2 or 3 x/y mathematical graphing applications.
i just put some kids in front of the kde edu packages when they and their mum came to visit. couldn't get the daughter off my computer: she played with KStars, we looked for constellations; she played with KTurtle, blopping big red lines over the screen; she guessed the capital cities and flags of some nations for about 2 minutes, but her eyes lit up when she saw the chemistry program, because she had been asking her mum for a periodic table chart for ages, to help her with her chemistry lessons.
the tools are there, but they're by no means "complete". they complement existing science and other educational courses in patchy and sporadic areas, and could do with a lot more. but - that's the thing about free software: people don't know it exists, because there's no money spent on advertising it, because it's free, and the people who wrote it don't charge for it, don't make any money, so don't receive any money to pay for advertising...
i have a friend who, when his kids asked him "can we av a computer daaad", went up into the loft, got out the TRS80 and a stack of byte magazines. the kids looked at him in this funny way, but they managed to get the machine working, chewed their way through the programs, and actually had fun with it.
he then promised them that their next computer (and this was only three years ago) would be a Pentium II.
my first application i ever saw was a 5 line PET Commodore 3032 BASIC program: for i = 1 to 40 print tab(i), i next i 50 goto 10. it scrolled numbers across the screen; i understood it instantly, and have never looked back. i was eight years old, and i was writing my own games within a year, moving @ and * symbols around the screen and firing "." symbols - three kids smashing down keys and jamming the other kids because the keyboard matrix on the Commodore PET wasn't smart enough to detect all the keys we were holding down, simultaneously, trying to blast each other to bits with fullstops.
with only an 8mhz CPU, 32k of memory, a 40x25 screen and BASIC to play with, there were no "expectations" of fanciness, fonts or even graphics to get in the way. the learning curve was quick and dirty, and there were no frills to overwhelm you.
but, most importantly, there wasn't a ton of software ready-made to "spoon-feed" you.
computer education is no longer education. at a British Computing Institute talk i attended, someone there made this brilliant analogy. he said that to parents, he asks them a simple question:
"computing is no longer taught in schools (parents look quizzical), they are simply 'trained' (parents look like they vaguely get it). if this was sex instead of computing that was taught in schools, would you prefer that your kids have sex _education_ or sex _training_? (parents finally get it)".
putting kids in front of microsoft products does them absolutely no service at all. it's why the OLPC project was created, to emphasise the goal of _educating_ kids about computers, rather than _training_ them to merely _use_ computers.
no, dummy, it's not flamebait. _think_ for a second before pressing that -1 moderation. without sovereignty, countries such as the U.S. will think it's ok to walk into Iceland to extradite people, just because someone in the U.S. wants to sue someone based in Iceland.
The primary issue that this raises is that of Sovereignty: the absolute inviolate right of a Nation to enact its own laws within its own borders.
It is essential that Sovereignty be restored, world-wide. That means that the United States must cease and desist from interfering in and initiating interference in other countries. Such as by terminating the one-way "extradition treaty" which has been abused so badly. Such as by not committing crimes by invading foreign countries without good justification or even any evidence, on "pre-emptive" pretexts.
um.... why is there an assumption that it is only china that "cannot be trusted"??
why is it assumed that there is not a hardware spying bug in Pentium Processors, one which would, being quotes A well installed microcode bug [which] will be almost impossible to detect. quotes
ehn?
and before thinking that "this is crazy, a U.S. firm wouldn't possibly do that" bear in mind that i've already had some experience of receiving a very weird series of SPAM messages, following which my machine started acting very very weird.
my guess is that simply by receiving that SPAM message, there was encoded within it some power-fluctuations or signal fluctuations which the CPU could pick up and "activate" whatever it was that was wanted to be activated by whomever it was that sent the SPAM message.
i'm not saying who it was that sent the SPAM - except that it wasn't from a U.S. organisation.
now, again, before you dumb fuckers with "Troll Trigger Happy" fingers go "this guys fucking nuts let's get rid of him with a Troll moderation", think about this: if i was saying "I heard that China attacked some guy's computer, he's a friend of mine in China", you'd put "Informative" or "Interesting" +1, right? THINK impartially - unlike the last time i mentioned something like this - "is this guy out to deliberately cause trouble and DELIBERATELY bait people (definition of Troll)" or "is this guy mentioning something controversial, from his own direct experience, just like all the other people in the world who report all their personal and directly experienced controversial stories"?
Slashdot Mirror
i know this is going to sound strange - you asked one question but get an answer to another, but the root cause of the problem isn't the keyboard, it's the fact that you're hunched over it, tensed up, locking out the blood supply from your arms and screwing up your hands.
to fix that, you should AT LEAST be doing the overarm stretch: stick hand straight up, bend elbow so that hand goes behind head with elbow still up in air, then take other hand onto elbow, pull and lean geeeently sideways so that entire side stretches
you should also be doing "horse stance" from tai-ji, which is really quite complex to describe, but imagine that you're sat on a horse: your legs are apart, knees bent, and hands outstretched imagine holding reins _but_, the actual tai-ji "horse stance" has some quite complex and specific positions and purpose. the primary purpose is to stretch tendons on the *underside* of your arms and in fingers (forearms as well) as well as elevating the heart-rate.
so, you have to push your elbows outwards so that your upper arms are 45 degrees from vertical, but forearms are absolutely horizontal. hands you have to imagine that you are holding two basket-balls, one in each, palms down but slightly elevated a fraction, fingers splayed as far wide as you can go.
get it right and you should feel loots of tendons stretching under your armpits, at your elbow-forearm _and_ wrists _and_ the thumb and little finger tendons! and that's exactly what you need - to stretch out that which you've utterly cramped out and damaged.
the horse-stance itself results in quite seriously elevated heart rate: you're bending your knees and staying there, so you should be breathing deeply and fully. stay there for as long as possible, increase until you get to 5 minutes. you will be surprised: horse stance for 5 minutes is one hell of a long time.
the other one is the yoga position where you sit on the floor, put one leg bent into your crotch and the other straight out, then lean over and grab ankle (or as close as you can get it). with each breath out, go down a little further. DO NOT "shake". if you feel yourself shaking, BACK OFF.
what i do with this yoga position is, rather than stay going down straight is i roll _sideways_ after a while, so that i get more stretch on the insides of my arms and side, which is exactly where you need the circulation increased, to get bloodflow back to your arms and fingers. repeat on the other side but come up SLOWLY - don't just try to jolt yourself out because you _will_ pull a muscle that way, especially at full stretch.
all of these exercises are designed to increase the circulation on the _underside_ of your arms (at the top) as it's here which is actually causing the blood flow to decrease, toxins to build up, tension to happen and damage to occur.
so - yeah. fuck the keyboard - get your health sorted out.
well then, we just better have a few more large wars, that'll kill off lots of the planetary population - problem solved, right? riiiight...
correct. the latest ARM Cortex CPUs for example have 1k of on-board ROM and built-in encryption algorithms. these can be used to utterly lock out anything but "approved" software, and can even be used for tivoisation.
i'm posting again, the exact same thing, because the comments "this will be a failure" seem to be being given very high priority.
ARM CPUs and MIPS CPUs are the most likely CPUs around which hardware platforms will emerge, and it is SIMPLY NOT POSSIBLE to run windows on ARM CPUs.
thus the entire counterargument against the FSF endorsement concept is utterly irrelevant.
the x86 market is so cut-throat and saturated that any manufacturer wishing to create an exciting new product with a higher profit margin simply cannot use an x86 CPU, and that's the end of it.
there are a couple of embedded x86 CPUs - from RDC and XCore86 but they are so far behind (1ghz) that they really do not have enough going for them, *ESPECIALLY* when they are only capable of running Windows XP because the CPUs simply don't have the instruction set compatibility to run Windows 7.
all in all everything points towards the massively-integrated ARM Cortex A8, A9 and upcoming A15 CPUs and towards the ultra-low-cost highly simplistic MIPS CPUs.
so there's utterly different market, utterly different architectures, different hardware, different rules... and different opportunities.
MIPS and ARM CPUs will be the basis of machines which are most likely to be endorsed, simply because of the sheer overwhelming level of integration on ARM CPUs and the dramatic simplicity and lower cost of MIPS CPUs.
To design an x86-based system is insanity: it requires a BIOS for a start (whereas ARM and MIPS systems typically use u-boot, which is GPL licensed) and the BIOS for x86 systems, for backwards-compatibility reasons, is usually proprietary, which INSTANTLY kicks any x86-based system into touch on the FSF endorsement process.
So the issue is actually very simple: you simply don't get windows-compatible systems on the list!
Plus, the moment the system is x86 compatible, you have entered a raging cut-throat market where it is actually incredibly foolish to contemplate entering.
So, actually, manufacturers are desperately looking around for alternatives in order to bolster profit margins; that means ARM and MIPS highly-integrated or low-cost CPUs; that means zero windows OS; that means that _actually_ this whole idea has a much higher chance of success than might at first glance appear to be the case.
whilst "interactive" may be an "awesome" teacher, interactING is an even better one.
the reasons why OLPC are good apply just as well in the first world as they do to the third, but teachers and governments got snotty about the shit colour and features of the XO-1.
you wouldn't think it, given the price of the ippad, but the cost of hardware is dropping like a stone and is far less than the cost of text books which can be out-of-date immediately.
showing someone f=ma on a graph is all very well, but who's going to write the graph program?
i demonstrated kepler's laws and the laws of physics and gravitation to myself by writing an orbital space game on a BBC micro in 1985.
putting a shit ippad or an anduroyyd tablet in front of kids is about as good as slapping a TV in front of them and saying "there! isn't technology great!"
you can hear the sigh of relief a million miles away from the teacher as they think "thank christ for that - now i don't actually have to think how to keep this little fuckers occupied".
so... mmmm, yeah. i'm really impressed with putting proprietary hardware/software in front of kids (that's remote-controlled by apple who might decide to "censor" certain types of "teaching" material) especially the kind of hardware/software that requires reverse-engineering to get the crap off it and regain control of it.
you're making some incredibly dangerous arguments in favour of GM (Genetically Murderous) crops.
if there was a way for Genetically Murderous crops to be contained - and the OP demonstrates that it is not possible to contain Genetically Murderous crops - then you would be correct in your incredibly dangerous arguments.
have you heard about how much difference that cross-breeding of wolves into dogs over millenia _actually_ made to canine DNA?
have a guess at how much difference it made.
it was believed to be 5%, by many scientists.
then they did a better analysis, and it was believed to be only 1%.
then they did a much more comprehensive analysis, and found only recently that the difference in DNA is:
zero percent.
i'll say that again.
the difference was found to be ZERO percent.
cross-breeding does NOT introduce new genes. cross-breeding merely "activates" or "deactivates" existing genes - switches them on or off, according to random selection and the incoming pollen / seed / sperm / etc.
Genetically Murderous DNA changes are completely different: introducing or removing genes that nature has, through evolutionary forces (call it god if you like, i don't care, it's all the same), put there for a reason.
so for you to say "there's nothing to fear because it's all new" is just absolutely fucking stupid of you, and you deserve to die in agony from being poisoned by a Genetically-Murderous crop designed to produce some drug cross-pollenating with some food that you eat, and your gut bacteria adapting that Genetically-Murderous DNA into its own (which has been proven to have happened already with Genetically Murderous Soya) and your gut bacteria continuously pumping out a drug which poisons and eventually kills you.
i'll make the bold statement first: Genetic Modified foods needs to be banned under the Geneva Convention as Biological Weapons.
now we justify that.
we've now seen yet more evidence of what should have been blindingly obvious to absolutely anyone - namely that GM crops are uncontrollable and out-of-control.
the risks associated with cross-pollenation are just... immense. think about it. GM crops are quotes designed quotes to be stronger, better, resistant to X, Y and Z. ordinary evolutionary steps simply cannot keep up: thus, thanks to cross-pollenation, "wild" crops - nature's crops - will be displaced.
BT Brinjal in india is a type of plant that has 2,500 indigenous varieties, some of which are vital for medicinal purposes. monsanto has been trying to get a GM variety introduced into india, and there have been riots over it. why? because the indigenous varieties will be unable to survive.
by introducing "patented" crops, a sovereign nation can be "taken over" by threat of not complying with international patent and copyright agreements!
and, god help that nation if the GM crop happens not to do well under certain conditions, such as drought. 20 years ago, i heard a story (no GM crops involved) where US-derived corn was introduced into an african country where the indigenous corn had as little as a 15% yield. within three to five years, the massive yields of the US-derived corn, introduced under some stupid NGO programme, had replaced the native corn.
and then there was a drought.
nobody had any food. the US-derived corn was incapable of growing without good irrigation, whereas it turned out that the indigenous corn comprised some ten to fifteen different genetic varieties - hence the reason for the poor yield. yet of those ten to fifteen different genetic varieties, some were good at growing in flood conditions, some in drought, some were more resistant than others to local pests...
it was years before the food supply was re-established.
now amplify that effect - that risk - with GM food substances.
so it's not a joke: the introduction of Genetic Modified food substances is insanely dangerous, and should be banned outright, world-wide, before it's too late.
you've been warned.
ahh, the summary is wrong both from a W3C DOM standards perspective, because java is listed as the 2nd language supported by the W3C. the summary is wrong from a second perspective in that language bindings to HTML5-compliant web browser engines such as XulRunner and WebKit have been available for years. if Microsoft actually intend also to follow the HTML5 process properly, then it can be said that MSHTML, through its COM interface, also offers other language alternatives for decades rather than just years.
now it's a sad fact that nobody really *knows* that you can get at HTML5-compliant web browser engines and use DOM functions (3000+) and access DOM properties (20,000+) through XPCOM, or Glib/Gobject or COM, but it's perfectly possible. the best demonstration of this at its most extreme limit, taking advantage of absolutely all HTML5 W3C DOM features, is the http://pyjs.org/ pyjamas project, which abstracts the differences between these three major web browser engine types (XulRunner, Webkit and MSHTML aka Trident) and presents a single uniform API. on top this uniform API, normalising the discrepancies between the three engine types, an entire Desktop GUI Widget Set API has been created.
so the statement that there is "one HTML5 language: javascript" is just nonsense. for further examples of accessing HTML5 DOM using python, some of which will lead through to links to Ruby accessing HTML5 DOM such as AppCelerator, see http://wiki.python.org/moin/WebBrowserProgramming
you might want to give serious consideration to creating an application that uses the web engine itself, directly, rather than relies on the broken-ness of the web browser "applications".
two possibilities for you where you can start: http://wiki.python.org/moin/WebBrowserProgramming if you prefer python, or if you truly prefer ruby, try http://github.com/ppibburr/rbwebkitgtk which is ruby bindings to webkit *including* direct access to the 2,000+ functions of the DOM model.
in this way, you can set up an application (ruby-gtk+ app) where you will be able to have your *own* menubar at the top - not the stupid web browser's one; on it, you would have a "Print" option which went and accessed the DOM model's "innerHTML", and you passed it to a *decent* printing system under *your* control, using whatever printing methodology is accessible to you via ruby, running on the user's machine.
or python, if you prefer.
this type of methodology seems to have been entirely forgotten about, as people scramble for conversion of complex apps to "entirely web-based" because they were convinced that "web 2.0 is Good and is God", and then run head-long into exactly the difficulties you're encountering, by which time it's too late.
advice: bypass the web browser as a de-facto application, and create your own application still using the incredible power of web browser *engines*.
http://trac.xbmc.org/ticket/8971 adds support to use librtmp which supports RTMPE including SWF Verification and Adobe's so-called "Secure" Token authentication.
it's worth repeating that there is absolutely zero security of any kind in Adobe Flash RTMPE. everything can be obtained publicly; or is "magic constants", or is simply a complex chain of algorithms, the result of which is merely an increase in CPU usage, heat generated and money wasted, along with the dangerous illusion of security.
one of the key reasons why the chinese don't need a large intelligence agency is because their entire population is actually their intelligence agency, having been trained from a very young age to memorise vast amounts of information - for example, the 10,000 or so chinese characters.
tony buzan's memetic learning techniques were the first popularly re-published discovery of the greek "mnemonic" memorisation techniques, and he adapted them to get you to focus on the use of the five senses and "familiar" or powerful emotive things, such as "home" or "naked person" or "funny picture" as "hooks" on which to hang the sequence to memorise.
the use of such "hooks" was well-known in medieval times. if you look closely at the top and bottom of the bayeux tapestry, there's a continuous but very small row of naked people in various sexual poses and performing various acts. the idea is that if you want to memorise the battle of hastings, and what happened, you get yourself all worked up "wha-heey!!" and _then_ you look at the pictures of the battle, and the pictures sink in.
daniel tennet, aka "brainman" has also developed a similar sort of technique, focussing specifically on helping people to memorise languages. daniel is approaching this from a different angle from tony buzan, however: optimising the actual language learning process.
tony's technique of "hooking" first gets you to associate numbers with familiar or exciting things. for example, the number 1 could be "red post box". the number 2 looks like a swan. 4 a sail-boat etc. etc. but you can equally as well use what works best for you (kinesthetics) - smells, movements, touch etc. it's _entirely_ up to you to use the right "hooks" which are appropriate for _you_.
so, you now have your "hooks". to memorise things by numbers, let's say the number sequence 412, you imagine a sail-boat on a lake, and it goes past a red postbox, and there's a huuuge white swan sitting on top of it. voila, you have just memorised the sequence 412. this technique of picture/thought association gives you the ability to memorise absolutely huge sequences which you otherwise thought you were incapable of.
so, if you were to use tony's technique, you would look at the character in one of two ways:
1) see what the picture reminds you of (for example, tree is blindingly obvious: it looks like a tree) and then "hook" that in, in some imaginative way, with the actual object (as other people have suggested here)
2) decompile the character by brush-strokes, both the sequence of the strokes (which is critically important for chinese calligraphy) and the direction, length and position, and assign each stroke's direction and position a numerical (or other sequence). you then cross-reference that numerical sequence against the "hooks". you also cross-reference the actual meaning at the beginning of the sequence, again in some imaginative way.
by recalling the pictures / hooks, one after the other, you can turn them back into numbers. you then turn the numbers back into brush strokes: voila, you have your chinese character.
it's a lot of initial work, setting up the "hooks" that are appropriate and creating the mnemonic interpretation, but if you're serious, you'll do it.
all that having been said: it would be much much easier to do sanskrit. if you look closely at the written form of sanskrit, you'll notice that the actual written language - the brush strokes - are a _phonetic key_ to the pronounciation! a vertical line means "plosive" (as in - you're going to close your mouth in some fashion). a horizontal line means "make your voice-box resonate". a slash on top going top-left to bottom-right means "close mouth" and a slash on top going bottom-left to top-right means "open mouth", thus you get "taaah" and "aaahht" respectively when combined with the horizontal and vertical lines. various curly-bits mean "do different things with tongue" and thus you get "kuhh", "puhh", "tuhh", "buhh" or "aabh", "aaakh", "aahhp" if the dia
http://alwaysinnovating.com/ touchbook. removable keyboard has an extra battery, just to make the $100 pricetag for that extra bit worthwhile.
it's an innovative "new" concept, that has been shipping for several months, in the form of the http://alwaysinnovating.com/ touchbook
i bet all this cloud nonsense is enterprise hardware companies trying to push higher margin products and no real trend that anyone is doing. the numbers just don't work out
they will, once ARM cortex N goes multi-core (and, importantly from merely a psychological perspective, goes 64-bit).
providing "real" ARM 1ghz dual-core CPUs in a "cloud" where you can fit 2 to an SO-DIMM back-to-back with the actual memory, 1gb each, 20 of which will fit into a 1U rack-mount and still only consume 40 watts of power each, where you can fit 16 1U into a rack, and thus get 1280ghz of CPU power in a single rack - and that's a _low_ estimate.
the performance per watt and the performance per cubic metre figures are just through the _roof_ compared to x86 processors, and the only thing that's really stopping this from happening right now is because people don't believe that an ARM processor could ever be "good enough".
well, with the redesign of the Cortex ARMs, and the geometry dropping like mad, that's set to change.
dude, my clod-hoppers totally stomped your windows network routers, duuude.
whenever attempting to get FreeNX working, i've found it to be a total bitch, client-side as well as server-side. by contrast, rdesktop or any other RDP client, client-side and xrdp server-side (which is purely a matter of apt-get install xrdp on debian-based distributions) is so simple to install that a monkey could do it. demo of a monkey (myself) doing exactly that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbsydsar5Pk
hey, can we ask you a favour? given the likelihood of you being able to post on slashdot should you die of radiation-related disease, could you please put a webcam in your apartment, so that if you die everyone can know that they shouldn't live 20 ft away from celltowers that transmit up to 2 watts peak to anything up to 2,000 users, simultaneously? consider your potential death by proximity to around ooo 4kW microwave radiation to be a public service.
the problem is that the rare earth metals on which the nice bright colours rely are migrating to the edges of their cells, on panel sizes of greater than 10cm x 10cm (hence why they can be successfully used in small products like cellphones, where the lifetime of the product is expected to be short).
i've heard of this kind of problem before (a 10cm x 10cm limit) on an unrelated product so it is quite likely that there is a quantum phase transition effect which has not been a) understood b) scientifically properly investigated.
the thing is, rare earth metals were picked because they're supposed to be utterly inert! they're not supposed to move! but it looks like somebody was completely wrong on that, and it hints at some extremely interesting scientific quantum mechanics breakthrough, if only someone could actually work out what the hell it all means.
but basically, it means that the core problem which OLED engineers have been trying to work around (and haven't told you about, because they don't understand it themselves, and it's Not Your Problem Anyway) hasn't been solved in several years, and until it is, OLED technology won't be viable, unless you're happy to pay for a product with a lifetime of about 1,000 hours.
Every time I'm presented with a formula I'm doing mental tricks plugging in values for X & Y trying to visualize it. Computers could help here.
then you want the KDE EDU packages, which include about 2 or 3 x/y mathematical graphing applications.
i just put some kids in front of the kde edu packages when they and their mum came to visit. couldn't get the daughter off my computer: she played with KStars, we looked for constellations; she played with KTurtle, blopping big red lines over the screen; she guessed the capital cities and flags of some nations for about 2 minutes, but her eyes lit up when she saw the chemistry program, because she had been asking her mum for a periodic table chart for ages, to help her with her chemistry lessons.
the tools are there, but they're by no means "complete". they complement existing science and other educational courses in patchy and sporadic areas, and could do with a lot more. but - that's the thing about free software: people don't know it exists, because there's no money spent on advertising it, because it's free, and the people who wrote it don't charge for it, don't make any money, so don't receive any money to pay for advertising...
i have a friend who, when his kids asked him "can we av a computer daaad", went up into the loft, got out the TRS80 and a stack of byte magazines. the kids looked at him in this funny way, but they managed to get the machine working, chewed their way through the programs, and actually had fun with it.
he then promised them that their next computer (and this was only three years ago) would be a Pentium II.
my first application i ever saw was a 5 line PET Commodore 3032 BASIC program: for i = 1 to 40 print tab(i), i next i 50 goto 10. it scrolled numbers across the screen; i understood it instantly, and have never looked back. i was eight years old, and i was writing my own games within a year, moving @ and * symbols around the screen and firing "." symbols - three kids smashing down keys and jamming the other kids because the keyboard matrix on the Commodore PET wasn't smart enough to detect all the keys we were holding down, simultaneously, trying to blast each other to bits with fullstops.
with only an 8mhz CPU, 32k of memory, a 40x25 screen and BASIC to play with, there were no "expectations" of fanciness, fonts or even graphics to get in the way. the learning curve was quick and dirty, and there were no frills to overwhelm you.
but, most importantly, there wasn't a ton of software ready-made to "spoon-feed" you.
computer education is no longer education. at a British Computing Institute talk i attended, someone there made this brilliant analogy. he said that to parents, he asks them a simple question:
"computing is no longer taught in schools (parents look quizzical), they are simply 'trained' (parents look like they vaguely get it). if this was sex instead of computing that was taught in schools, would you prefer that your kids have sex _education_ or sex _training_? (parents finally get it)".
putting kids in front of microsoft products does them absolutely no service at all. it's why the OLPC project was created, to emphasise the goal of _educating_ kids about computers, rather than _training_ them to merely _use_ computers.
no, dummy, it's not flamebait. _think_ for a second before pressing that -1 moderation. without sovereignty, countries such as the U.S. will think it's ok to walk into Iceland to extradite people, just because someone in the U.S. wants to sue someone based in Iceland.
Sovereignty is IMPORTANT.
The primary issue that this raises is that of Sovereignty: the absolute inviolate right of a Nation to enact its own laws within its own borders.
It is essential that Sovereignty be restored, world-wide. That means that the United States must cease and desist from interfering in and initiating interference in other countries. Such as by terminating the one-way "extradition treaty" which has been abused so badly. Such as by not committing crimes by invading foreign countries without good justification or even any evidence, on "pre-emptive" pretexts.
that's already happened :)
um.... why is there an assumption that it is only china that "cannot be trusted"??
why is it assumed that there is not a hardware spying bug in Pentium Processors, one which would, being quotes A well installed microcode bug [which] will be almost impossible to detect. quotes
ehn?
and before thinking that "this is crazy, a U.S. firm wouldn't possibly do that" bear in mind that i've already had some experience of receiving a very weird series of SPAM messages, following which my machine started acting very very weird.
my guess is that simply by receiving that SPAM message, there was encoded within it some power-fluctuations or signal fluctuations which the CPU could pick up and "activate" whatever it was that was wanted to be activated by whomever it was that sent the SPAM message.
i'm not saying who it was that sent the SPAM - except that it wasn't from a U.S. organisation.
now, again, before you dumb fuckers with "Troll Trigger Happy" fingers go "this guys fucking nuts let's get rid of him with a Troll moderation", think about this: if i was saying "I heard that China attacked some guy's computer, he's a friend of mine in China", you'd put "Informative" or "Interesting" +1, right? THINK impartially - unlike the last time i mentioned something like this - "is this guy out to deliberately cause trouble and DELIBERATELY bait people (definition of Troll)" or "is this guy mentioning something controversial, from his own direct experience, just like all the other people in the world who report all their personal and directly experienced controversial stories"?