You are so right! Because the US of A stopped building reactors (thanks to those "libs, enviro-whackos, and "intellectuals"), all research and possible profitability stopped at that point.
I sure hope you were trying to be funny or annoying. I'd hate to think you really believe what you say. Either way it sure sounds funny.
The average American will whine endlessly about the dangers of nuclear power and cower under the nearest rock at first mention of "radioactive". Never mind the far worse environmental contamination caused by coal and oil power plants; nuclear is the boogeyman and white-bread Americans won't go near it.
It can be made safe with enough money in R&D. Just compare the old reactor designs with the recent ones, like breeders. The argument that nuclear energy can't be called safe reminds me of the old electricity argument with AC vs DC. It CAN be made safe, it just needs engineering.
I believe the point is that it can be made safer, but never totally safe. Your own point about AC vs DC supports this idea. Yes, electricity is used every day by about a bajillion people (it's a technical term)). The VAST majority of them use it safely, but every day somebody, somewhere does something stupid and gets themselves fried. Electricity is far, far safer than it was, but it is still dangerous in the hands of imperfect humans. Humans make mistakes. Some people think this doesn't apply to them, but they are mistaken.
The difference between a dude who stands in his hot tub to work on the filter pump and the guy who spills soda on the reactor control panel, is that hot tub boy only kills himself and at most a few of his friends.
For the record, I am in favor of nuclear energy (Go Isotopes!), but let's not kid ourselves about it being TOTALLY safe.
Oddly enough, it's when we think something is totally safe that we are most likely to screw up.
The delicious irony of it all is that Gwinnett is now the most ethnically diverse region of the state due to immigration...
This is one of my favorite things about Gwinnett. I have friends on my street from Nigeria, Liberia, China, Mexico, Korea and India (and there are only about 20 houses on our street). We have a very close knit neighborhood and my kids get play with kids with very diverse backgrounds.
I work in the city of Atlanta and we hear a lot about "diversity". Their definition of "diversity" is African Americans working with Caucasian Americans. Pretty narrow view of diversity in my book...
My understanding is that you use different resolutions of the photo. The original photo is obviously the highest res you can have, but you can make successively lower res copies. More or less just bring up a a higher res version when the user clicks.
I saw this demoed at the Atlanta Code Camp back in March. Very cool to watch.
Aehgts, they have a special bench for people like you...:-)
To avoid being totally off-topic, let me say that copying Office 2007 is not the swiftest move in the universe. I don't hate Microsoft the way MOST people around here do, but for the life of me I can't explain why they changed the UI so much for Office 2007. Stuff I've known how to do since the 1980s in Word and Excel are suddenly difficult to do. I assume the functions are still there, I just can't bloody find them.
And now there is a version of Open Office that copies THAT?
To badly paraphrase Qui Gon or Calgon or Obi Wan or Obadiah or whatever, "Who's the bigger fool? The Fool or the fool that follows the fool. How about the fool that follows that fool? Or the dude who just follows along not really knowing who he's following? No foolin. Who's up for foos ball?"
Yeah, there the ones who in places like Kansas get themselves elected to school boards to do exactly that already and have been doing so for decades.
So, if the FEDERAL government were to mandate the kind of books you object to in Kansas, you'd be cool with it because it was the federal government that did so and ALL the schools in the country were using the same book?
Yes, I know your answer to that question is "no", but you are assuming the federal government will write books you agree with. What if they don't?
My point is that once you hand the power to the government to write the textbooks and mandate that all schools in the country will use them, you will have a very hard time taking it back if they choose to write books you don't like.
Although I agree wholeheartedly that our current system is lightyears from optimal (or in some cases, functional) at least now you have the option of getting the heck out of Kansas if you don't like their textbooks. It may be difficult, but there is no LAW stopping you from doing so. At least I don't think there is, but then I've never tried to leave Kansas (or enter Kansas for that matter).
Your point about curricula is valid, but there is a big difference in mandating curricula and having official text books.
Government written and mandated textbooks sound pretty scary to me... Is it for an actual reason or just the usual nonsense paranoia where we have to hate/fear anything that the government does without any rational reason to do so?
Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean the government isn't brainwashing you via their "official" textbooks.
Also, the "low-cost displays manufactured for portable DVD players" bit worries me some, since those displays don't have a particularly high pixel density. Who wants a 7, 8, 9" screen to read from that's only ~720x480? Yeah, it'll work, but it'll be far from ideal.
Here's there new slogan: "OLPC: Blinding Children Around The World".
This doesn't sound like a conspiracy with Microsoft, this sounds like a conspiracy with the OPTOMETRISTS UNION!
Hmm. Are you sure you want the government writing the textbooks?
Currently local governments (or at least state governments in some cases) SELECT the textbooks, but there are options. There isn't that much competition, but in this case ANY competition is a good thing. Government written and mandated textbooks sound pretty scary to me...
or Bush's... whichever option is worth more karma.
Nah, man, you want KARMA around here you have to say it was Micro$oft's fault because Bill Gates is in league with the Devil and Bush. Assuming any of them actually exist and this isn't just one big FREAKIN' simulation.
Is there an iPhone with Barcode Scanner? I believe that was one of his requirements. Also you can't begin to compare an iPhone to a Symbol device for sheer survivability. Kind of like comparing a Soviet Tank and an Italian sportscar. They both are good at what they do, but what they do is very different...
For a consumer device, the iPhone is the gold standard. Of course you have to lay out more gold than I as a consumer am willing to part with, but that's just me... From a purely tech perspective it's very nice.
I wonder which model Symbol you are using? We develop apps with Compact Framework on Dell and HP devices all the time and have not experienced what you describe. We also use SQL CE as the database. We have roughly 1300 devices in the field and no speed complaints. We do NOT have barcode scanners on these devices, and that may be a key difference. We use the 2.0 version of the framework.
I've found C# on the devices to be no problem at all. Another post mentioned that they too used the barcode scanner and that they had to write c code to handle it and then pInvoke it. I wonder if the scanner might have been what slowed you down?
Finally, on your (b) item: are you talking about the emulator or Visual Studio itself? I find it is definitely faster to debug directly on the device. The emulator can be pretty slow.
He doesn't even advocate putting XP on the devices. Well at the end of the post he says he doesn't think they should put XP on them, but early on it really, really sounds like he thinks they should.
My experience with children has been that they have no problem with Windows. Or Mac. Or Linux. I appreciate the idea of creating software "designed with children and the classroom in mind" but what does that even mean? I've looked at Sugar and it is interesting, but I fail to see it as revolutionary. It is different, but I've seen no studies or research to show that it is any better than a standard GUI.
I suspect this whole venture will go down in the history books as a footnote about an interesting educational method that was tried and rejected. I don't think it really matters whether it is Gnu/Linux, Windows, OSX, or a Commodore 64. The TECHNICAL questions about hardware and software aren't the most important questions here. The EDUCATIONAL questions are, but they have been ignored in favor of technical questions. That was the primary focus of the article.
"The cost of developing it aside, what is the problem with having the ideas "presented in an entirely new graphical paradigm," when you're giving the machines to communities in which the per capita rate of computer ownership is practically nil?"
He wasn't talking about the problem of getting people to accept the interface.
I believe his point was that with the OLPC's limited resources they pretty much managed to do nothing BUT get the "entirely new graphical paradigm" MOSTLY working. Not much of educational value was produced, unless you really do believe that this hardware, OS and UI have mythic powers akin to the monolith in 2001...
It would be kind of like starting a transportation project and as a first priority deciding that you didn't want to use any wheels because they seem old fashioned. Sure you might come up with a fantastic mag-lev train for a handful of people, but was that the mission or was enabling the greatest number of people to get from point a to point b?
If there is indeed value in putting computing devices in the hands of children, then time becomes a paramount factor. The time it takes to truly innovate a "new paradigm", learn to use it effectively, and then produce the software that rides on top of it and makes it worth having done in the first place... is longer than it takes a child to grow up... That means deferring the supposed value of the project to a later generation.
The project of getting devices to children who can gain value from them should be a separate project that is NOT dependent upon the "new graphical paradigm" project. By all means pursue the second project, but don't block the first project while you do it.
Of course this whole argument begs the question of how much real value the devices would actually bring to the children's education. So far I have heard ZERO arguments for the project based on verifiable research. I've also heard ZERO arguments against the project based on verifiable research.
The more free beer I drink the more free my speech becomes.
FYI, my comment about the EVDO pertained to the Kindle. If he was talking about the content and not the hardware, then I agree that un-emcumbered by DRM is better. My beef with DRM is not that I really want the right to alter some author's work and re-distribute it (which is the free-speech-ish argument's goal, right? otherwise you really aren't gaining more than free beer), but rather that DRM doesn't stop a determined pirate and only succeeds in annoying legitimate users.
I believe that our copyright system is out of whack (thanks largely to Disney) in the amount of time it allows the copyright holder to control a work, but I do believe that the system itself is a good thing. I don't see why the person who works to produce a book should be unable to control that work at least for a period of time. If they CHOOSE to release under a permissive license, then that's fine, but if not then that's fine too.
Again, if your only reason for wanting "free" books is so that you don't have to pay for them, then you are really just asking for free beer.
So... you want a small, handeld computer with built in EVDO data cell service that sports a nifty e-ink screen and you want it for free. I'm rather certain people would "figure out how to make it useful" if it were free. I don't see how it can be manufactured, shipped, marketed and distributed for free. Kind of like a pyramid scheme without the pyramid...
"There are many "pragmatists" who say that it doesn't matter what runs on the device. To those people I submit, you are mistaken."
Oh. Thanks for clearing that up.
1) Is it really charity at all if the children's country pays for the hardware? Granted the software is given freely, but that begs the question why must the software be free, but not the hardware?
2) If we accept that one of the greatest benefits to the children is that they can modify the software, then why do we not expect them to be equally able to modify the hardware?
3) Do we expect a greater percentage of these children to have an interest in engineering than the children in countries such as the US? If not, then what percentage of the children do we expect to benefit from the ability to modify the software? If so, then why do we expect this to be true?
4) Do we believe that our greatest goal should be to primarily serve the percentage of children who will benefit from the ability to modify the operating system? If so, then what of the percentage who will NOT benefit from this ability? Is engineering the only human endeavour worthy of this charity?
5) Which is more important: providing the children with access to books they would otherwise not be able to access, or reducing or eliminating the ability of publishers to profit from textbooks? If the former is the goal, then does it matter whether the books are free (as in liberte) or not? If the latter, does it matter whether or not the children gain access to books?
6) How likely is it that Sugar or Gnu/Linux will displace MS Windows outside this market? Is Sugar appropriate for other uses? If not, does the OLPC allow the child to exit to basic Gnu/Linux? In other words, will the use of Sugar be applicable outside the education venue? If either a) Windows will not be displaced or b) Gnu/Linux will displace Windows, but NOT running Sugar, then will it be a disservice to the children to teach them an interface no one else is using and that will NOT be something they will encounter in the workplace? Will this further prove a negative mark if they wish to pursue a career in a country that did NOT utilize the OLPC devices?
I am a fan of the CONCEPT of the OLPC project. I am not convinced that it has been handled well. I am skeptical of the motivation of some of the participants. Either the education of the children and enabling them to compete in a world marketplace is the first priority of the project or furthering the philosophy of F/OSS is of first priority. I believe there are two camps in the group who prioritize those two goals differently. I also suspect that the countries who are purchasing the devices may have their own opinion about which is more important.
How much difference is there between the OLPC project saying, "You may have our software to improve your lives, but you must accept our F/OSS philosophy (and pay us for the hardware)" and a church who runs a mission and says "You may eat our food, but you must accept our beliefs"? If you believe there is a difference, please explain why one form of charity with philosophical strings is better than the other?
Slashdot Mirror
Write add-ons for the major free browsers (Mozilla, Webkit, ...) that implement the Stallman's solution.
The vortigaunts from Half-Life 2 comes to mind.
We have heard the words of The Stallman and his talk of The Free Source. The Vortiaguants praise The Stallman for the work he has done. He...
Honestly, that's about the point when I shoot the friendly Vorgtiguant. (Not, dissing The Stallman, making a HL2 reference.)
You are so right! Because the US of A stopped building reactors (thanks to those "libs, enviro-whackos, and "intellectuals"), all research and possible profitability stopped at that point.
I sure hope you were trying to be funny or annoying. I'd hate to think you really believe what you say. Either way it sure sounds funny.
The average American will whine endlessly about the dangers of nuclear power and cower under the nearest rock at first mention of "radioactive". Never mind the far worse environmental contamination caused by coal and oil power plants; nuclear is the boogeyman and white-bread Americans won't go near it.
Thank you, Mister Burns.I believe the point is that it can be made safer, but never totally safe. Your own point about AC vs DC supports this idea. Yes, electricity is used every day by about a bajillion people (it's a technical term)). The VAST majority of them use it safely, but every day somebody, somewhere does something stupid and gets themselves fried. Electricity is far, far safer than it was, but it is still dangerous in the hands of imperfect humans. Humans make mistakes. Some people think this doesn't apply to them, but they are mistaken.
The difference between a dude who stands in his hot tub to work on the filter pump and the guy who spills soda on the reactor control panel, is that hot tub boy only kills himself and at most a few of his friends.
For the record, I am in favor of nuclear energy (Go Isotopes!), but let's not kid ourselves about it being TOTALLY safe.
Oddly enough, it's when we think something is totally safe that we are most likely to screw up.
The delicious irony of it all is that Gwinnett is now the most ethnically diverse region of the state due to immigration...
This is one of my favorite things about Gwinnett. I have friends on my street from Nigeria, Liberia, China, Mexico, Korea and India (and there are only about 20 houses on our street). We have a very close knit neighborhood and my kids get play with kids with very diverse backgrounds.
I work in the city of Atlanta and we hear a lot about "diversity". Their definition of "diversity" is African Americans working with Caucasian Americans. Pretty narrow view of diversity in my book...
My understanding is that you use different resolutions of the photo. The original photo is obviously the highest res you can have, but you can make successively lower res copies. More or less just bring up a a higher res version when the user clicks.
I saw this demoed at the Atlanta Code Camp back in March. Very cool to watch.
Aehgts, they have a special bench for people like you... :-)
To avoid being totally off-topic, let me say that copying Office 2007 is not the swiftest move in the universe. I don't hate Microsoft the way MOST people around here do, but for the life of me I can't explain why they changed the UI so much for Office 2007. Stuff I've known how to do since the 1980s in Word and Excel are suddenly difficult to do. I assume the functions are still there, I just can't bloody find them.
And now there is a version of Open Office that copies THAT?
To badly paraphrase Qui Gon or Calgon or Obi Wan or Obadiah or whatever, "Who's the bigger fool? The Fool or the fool that follows the fool. How about the fool that follows that fool? Or the dude who just follows along not really knowing who he's following? No foolin. Who's up for foos ball?"
So, if the FEDERAL government were to mandate the kind of books you object to in Kansas, you'd be cool with it because it was the federal government that did so and ALL the schools in the country were using the same book?
Yes, I know your answer to that question is "no", but you are assuming the federal government will write books you agree with. What if they don't?
My point is that once you hand the power to the government to write the textbooks and mandate that all schools in the country will use them, you will have a very hard time taking it back if they choose to write books you don't like.
Although I agree wholeheartedly that our current system is lightyears from optimal (or in some cases, functional) at least now you have the option of getting the heck out of Kansas if you don't like their textbooks. It may be difficult, but there is no LAW stopping you from doing so. At least I don't think there is, but then I've never tried to leave Kansas (or enter Kansas for that matter).
Your point about curricula is valid, but there is a big difference in mandating curricula and having official text books.
Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean the government isn't brainwashing you via their "official" textbooks.
Be careful what you ask for.
Here's there new slogan: "OLPC: Blinding Children Around The World".
This doesn't sound like a conspiracy with Microsoft, this sounds like a conspiracy with the OPTOMETRISTS UNION!
Hmm. Are you sure you want the government writing the textbooks?
Currently local governments (or at least state governments in some cases) SELECT the textbooks, but there are options. There isn't that much competition, but in this case ANY competition is a good thing. Government written and mandated textbooks sound pretty scary to me...
Nah, man, you want KARMA around here you have to say it was Micro$oft's fault because Bill Gates is in league with the Devil and Bush. Assuming any of them actually exist and this isn't just one big FREAKIN' simulation.
Is there an iPhone with Barcode Scanner? I believe that was one of his requirements. Also you can't begin to compare an iPhone to a Symbol device for sheer survivability. Kind of like comparing a Soviet Tank and an Italian sportscar. They both are good at what they do, but what they do is very different...
For a consumer device, the iPhone is the gold standard. Of course you have to lay out more gold than I as a consumer am willing to part with, but that's just me... From a purely tech perspective it's very nice.
I wonder which model Symbol you are using? We develop apps with Compact Framework on Dell and HP devices all the time and have not experienced what you describe. We also use SQL CE as the database. We have roughly 1300 devices in the field and no speed complaints. We do NOT have barcode scanners on these devices, and that may be a key difference. We use the 2.0 version of the framework.
I've found C# on the devices to be no problem at all. Another post mentioned that they too used the barcode scanner and that they had to write c code to handle it and then pInvoke it. I wonder if the scanner might have been what slowed you down?
Finally, on your (b) item: are you talking about the emulator or Visual Studio itself? I find it is definitely faster to debug directly on the device. The emulator can be pretty slow.
The guy is NOT a shill.
He doesn't even advocate putting XP on the devices. Well at the end of the post he says he doesn't think they should put XP on them, but early on it really, really sounds like he thinks they should.
My experience with children has been that they have no problem with Windows. Or Mac. Or Linux. I appreciate the idea of creating software "designed with children and the classroom in mind" but what does that even mean? I've looked at Sugar and it is interesting, but I fail to see it as revolutionary. It is different, but I've seen no studies or research to show that it is any better than a standard GUI.
I suspect this whole venture will go down in the history books as a footnote about an interesting educational method that was tried and rejected. I don't think it really matters whether it is Gnu/Linux, Windows, OSX, or a Commodore 64. The TECHNICAL questions about hardware and software aren't the most important questions here. The EDUCATIONAL questions are, but they have been ignored in favor of technical questions. That was the primary focus of the article.
"The cost of developing it aside, what is the problem with having the ideas "presented in an entirely new graphical paradigm," when you're giving the machines to communities in which the per capita rate of computer ownership is practically nil?"
He wasn't talking about the problem of getting people to accept the interface.
I believe his point was that with the OLPC's limited resources they pretty much managed to do nothing BUT get the "entirely new graphical paradigm" MOSTLY working. Not much of educational value was produced, unless you really do believe that this hardware, OS and UI have mythic powers akin to the monolith in 2001...
It would be kind of like starting a transportation project and as a first priority deciding that you didn't want to use any wheels because they seem old fashioned. Sure you might come up with a fantastic mag-lev train for a handful of people, but was that the mission or was enabling the greatest number of people to get from point a to point b?
If there is indeed value in putting computing devices in the hands of children, then time becomes a paramount factor. The time it takes to truly innovate a "new paradigm", learn to use it effectively, and then produce the software that rides on top of it and makes it worth having done in the first place... is longer than it takes a child to grow up... That means deferring the supposed value of the project to a later generation.
The project of getting devices to children who can gain value from them should be a separate project that is NOT dependent upon the "new graphical paradigm" project. By all means pursue the second project, but don't block the first project while you do it.
Of course this whole argument begs the question of how much real value the devices would actually bring to the children's education. So far I have heard ZERO arguments for the project based on verifiable research. I've also heard ZERO arguments against the project based on verifiable research.
The more free beer I drink the more free my speech becomes.
FYI, my comment about the EVDO pertained to the Kindle. If he was talking about the content and not the hardware, then I agree that un-emcumbered by DRM is better. My beef with DRM is not that I really want the right to alter some author's work and re-distribute it (which is the free-speech-ish argument's goal, right? otherwise you really aren't gaining more than free beer), but rather that DRM doesn't stop a determined pirate and only succeeds in annoying legitimate users.
I believe that our copyright system is out of whack (thanks largely to Disney) in the amount of time it allows the copyright holder to control a work, but I do believe that the system itself is a good thing. I don't see why the person who works to produce a book should be unable to control that work at least for a period of time. If they CHOOSE to release under a permissive license, then that's fine, but if not then that's fine too.
Again, if your only reason for wanting "free" books is so that you don't have to pay for them, then you are really just asking for free beer.
So... you want a small, handeld computer with built in EVDO data cell service that sports a nifty e-ink screen and you want it for free. I'm rather certain people would "figure out how to make it useful" if it were free. I don't see how it can be manufactured, shipped, marketed and distributed for free. Kind of like a pyramid scheme without the pyramid...
Somes days I just LOVE my spiffy Kindle! It makes puppies smile and rainbows sing!
Other days I just don't see the point. I mean why even bother reading ANYTHING? We're all just going to die eventually anyway.
XP Retail and XP - OEM wish to continue sales after June 30.
Allow or Deny?
You use JOKE on SLASHDOT.
SLASHDOT doesn't understand JOKE.
A HUMORLESS MODERATOR attacks! A HUMORLESS MODERATOR does 1 (Offtopic) damage.
You are in a room. You are alone. You are so very alone. Obvious exits: COMPUTER, DOOR, SLEEPING PILLS AND JOSE CUERVO.
"There are many "pragmatists" who say that it doesn't matter what runs on the device. To those people I submit, you are mistaken." Oh. Thanks for clearing that up.
And yet if you believe in freedom, then why do you have the right to tell him what his is or isn't free to do?
1) Is it really charity at all if the children's country pays for the hardware? Granted the software is given freely, but that begs the question why must the software be free, but not the hardware?
2) If we accept that one of the greatest benefits to the children is that they can modify the software, then why do we not expect them to be equally able to modify the hardware?
3) Do we expect a greater percentage of these children to have an interest in engineering than the children in countries such as the US? If not, then what percentage of the children do we expect to benefit from the ability to modify the software? If so, then why do we expect this to be true?
4) Do we believe that our greatest goal should be to primarily serve the percentage of children who will benefit from the ability to modify the operating system? If so, then what of the percentage who will NOT benefit from this ability? Is engineering the only human endeavour worthy of this charity?
5) Which is more important: providing the children with access to books they would otherwise not be able to access, or reducing or eliminating the ability of publishers to profit from textbooks? If the former is the goal, then does it matter whether the books are free (as in liberte) or not? If the latter, does it matter whether or not the children gain access to books?
6) How likely is it that Sugar or Gnu/Linux will displace MS Windows outside this market? Is Sugar appropriate for other uses? If not, does the OLPC allow the child to exit to basic Gnu/Linux? In other words, will the use of Sugar be applicable outside the education venue? If either a) Windows will not be displaced or b) Gnu/Linux will displace Windows, but NOT running Sugar, then will it be a disservice to the children to teach them an interface no one else is using and that will NOT be something they will encounter in the workplace? Will this further prove a negative mark if they wish to pursue a career in a country that did NOT utilize the OLPC devices?
I am a fan of the CONCEPT of the OLPC project. I am not convinced that it has been handled well. I am skeptical of the motivation of some of the participants. Either the education of the children and enabling them to compete in a world marketplace is the first priority of the project or furthering the philosophy of F/OSS is of first priority. I believe there are two camps in the group who prioritize those two goals differently. I also suspect that the countries who are purchasing the devices may have their own opinion about which is more important.
How much difference is there between the OLPC project saying, "You may have our software to improve your lives, but you must accept our F/OSS philosophy (and pay us for the hardware)" and a church who runs a mission and says "You may eat our food, but you must accept our beliefs"? If you believe there is a difference, please explain why one form of charity with philosophical strings is better than the other?
Dirk? Is that you???