So far, the biggest problem with Net Neutrality is that those who want it don't define what they mean by it first. Should VOIP packets be delivered quicker? I think so. I don't mind if my email is delayed for several seconds.
I don't want complete packet neutrality, I just want all providers to use the same sensible transmission configurations.
Comcast has its own very expensive and poor quality VOIP. Comcast should not be allowed to delay the packets carrying the much superior free Skype VOIP calls.
Sure, you will see only skin pores and little hairs because your room won't be large enough to be sufficiently far away to see an entire image.
Humans have lost control of human development.
on
33 MegaPixel TV in 2015
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Technology is advancing far faster than the understanding humans have of themselves. I watch my NTSC 320 x 240 maximum resolution TV and usually feel that the resolution is higher than it needs to be considering that the low thought content of the TV show.
All of that merely serves to draw attention away from the fact that Firefox development costing $20,000,000 per year does not seem to produce faster results than Firefox developed by volunteers. There seems to be gross mismanagement, and maybe that is one reason why Winifred Mitchell Baker was replaced as CEO.
I don't know what is worse, a blog spam blog Slashvertisement, a huge number of comments by people who have no interest in the subject, or moderators who moderate up off topic comments.
You said, "Fixing security bugs on a stable branch (which doesn't allow major architecture changes) without breaking functionality is often very difficult."
Most of the bugs that were fixed were bugs in the sense that someone made a coding error that caused a memory leak. Once the problem was made obvious, fixing was easy. This was after
As I write this, 7 windows of Firefox are taking 40% CPU, for doing nothing. The CPU hogging bug was reported 6 years ago, and resulted in the bug report marked as invalid, with a complete refusal to do any trouble shooting.
Very serious shortcomings in features, like the fact that Firefox can't be made completely portable and the session restore often doesn't restore all tabs, have been ignored.
Many of the "advances" in Firefox were documents that indicate how to make Firefox operate the way it should, blaming crashes on plugins, for example.
Of course I know what you said. So, by your calculations, there are more than 50 programmers? The question remains the same. I saw very little come out of Mozilla Foundation in 2006 and 2007. There were few or no feature updates. They fixed some bad memory hogging and CPU hogging bugs, after bug-check software companies like Coverity showed them the bugs were there. They complained loudly if a bug was reported to them without information that would make finding the bug easy; they made it clear they don't do the difficult kinds of troubleshooting, just the easy kinds.
The big result of 2007 was deciding to take less responsibility, and resulted in disconnecting from Thunderbird development, and Thunderbird developers leaving.
I didn't see anything that would indicate more than 50 programmers worked 2 years.
Maybe this would be a more useful question. In 2006, Mozilla Foundation spent $20,000,000. That's enough for 200 programmers each earning $100,000 per year. Yet in 2006, there were only a few somewhat minor updates to Firefox and Thunderbird. Where is the money going?
Another thing: I hope some Slashdot reader can convince me that it is possible to do things without having the necessary qualifications, because, if that is true, I plan to be a male supermodel.
I think this should be considered an honest disagreement. I think that someone with no technical knowledge cannot reliably run a technical company. Other people think differently.
Sure someone who knows business can do business things. The key word is "reliably". Eventually something happens that requires technical knowledge, and a manager who doesn't have it will need to depend on the advice of others, who may be thinking of their own paychecks, or company politics, or not thinking at all.
I think that Firefox development has been miserably slow, considering the enormous amounts of money spent ($20 million in 2006).
Rakishi, calling someone an idiot is just an expression of anger, and not a real reply.
The question is, "Why isn't the money being spent on Firefox development?" Someone must have plans for the money if it is not being spent. What are those plans?
How could Mozilla Foundation spend so much money and get so little in return? Firefox development has been glacially slow.
While I wouldn't use the word "idiot", the history of Firefox management may fit your explanation, and show why Firefox is not doing better. See the thread The Slashdot story they wouldn't run.
Also, I think that people who work in IT often underestimate their ability to lead, and the amount of work that is required to lead.
As many have said, people don't submit bug reports because only those that
make finding a bug easy are accepted. Other bug reports bring a variety of
abusive or time-wasting replies:
Mozilla Foundation Top 20 Excuses for Not Fixing the Firefox Memory
and CPU Hogging bugs. These are actual excuses given at one time or
another.
Maybe this bug is fixed in the nightly build. [The same memory and CPU
hogging bug has been reported many, many times over a period of six
years.]
Yes, this bug exists, but other things are more important. [The bug
eventually takes 100% of CPU power, and makes Windows XP unusable, even after
Firefox is killed. The bug affects the heaviest users of Firefox.]
Yes, this bug exists, but it is not a common occurrence. [Numerous users
have reported the bug. See the links.]
Works for me. [The bug is complicated to reproduce, so the developers did
a simplified test, which didn't show the bug.]
No one has posted a TalkBack report. [If they had read the bug report,
they would know that there is never a TalkBack report, because the bug crashes
TalkBack, too, or a TalkBack report is not generated. TalkBack does not
generate a report if Firefox is hogging the CPU. TalkBack cannot generate a
report if the bug takes 100% of the CPU time.]
If you would just give us more information, we would fix this bug. [They
didn't bother to reproduce the bug using the detailed information
provided.]
This bug report is a composite of other bugs, so this bug report is
invalid. [The other bugs aren't specified.]
You are using Firefox in a way that would crash any software. [But the
same use does not crash any version of Opera.]
I don't like the way you worded your bug report. [So, he didn't read it or
think about it.]
You should run a debugger and find what causes this problem yourself.
[Then when you have done most of the work, tell us what causes the problem,
and we may fix it.]
Many bugs that are filed aren't important to 99.99% of the users.
If you are saying bad things about Mozilla and Firefox, you must be
trolling. [They say this even though Firefox and Mozilla instability is
beginning to be reported in media such as Information Week. See the links to
magazine articles in this Slashdot comment: Firefox is the most unstable program in common
use.]
Your problem is probably caused by using extensions. [These are extensions
advertised on the Firefox and Mozilla web site, and recommended.]
Your problem is probably caused by a corrupt profile. [The same bug has
been reported many times over a period of five years. One of the reports
discusses an extensive test in both Linux and Windows that used a completely
clean installation of the operating systems, not just a clean profile. The CPU
hogging bug and instability was just as severe.]
If you are technically knowledgeable, you can spend several hours (or
days) trying to discover the problem: Standard diagnostic - Firefox.
[Firefox has "Standard Diagnostics". It has become accepted that some users
will have severe problems. !!! ]
I won't actually read the (many) bug reports, but I will give you some
complicated technical speculation. [This pretends to be helpful but, on
investigation, is shown to have nothing to do with the bugs.]
It's understandable that Firefox developers become defensive when users
report so many problems.
To spend smart developers' time going over reports of bugs generated by
analysis tools would be a waste. [There have been 3 analysis tools recently
used to find Firefox bugs, and many have been found: 1) A special tool
designed by a Firefox developer. 2) Software by Coverity. 3) Klocwork's
K7.]
Your bug report was not specific enough. [Numerous conditions were listed
which provide reliable ways to r
Here is a Slashdot story submission that helps explain why corporations have
not adopted Firefox. The submission was rejected: "008-01-09 02:36:24 Mozilla gets a
new CEO (Features,Mozilla) (rejected)".
Many people depend on Slashdot to help them learn about important events in computing. But this event hasn't been covered, and apparently is being ignored: It appears that Firefox does not have more market share because Firefox development has been very poorly managed.
Firefox is now partly a profit-making effort. There has been considerable
discussion about the possibility of Firefox issuing stock and becoming a public corporation.
Firefox made a profit of $47,000,000 on revenues of $67,000,000 in
2006.
That enormous profit percentage that raises a question: Why did Firefox take in
$67 million, but only spend $20 million? What is happening with the rest of the money?
Firefox development has been glacially slow. For example, in 6 years the CPU hogging and memory hogging bugs are still not fixed (although there has been considerable improvement).Thunderbird development has been abandoned. Opera is able to restore sessions, but the Firefox session restore feature throws away URLs if response is slow. Why is that, when millions of dollars are spent on development each year?
Firefox makes money when people use it to visit ads. Google pays because Firefox uses Google as the default search engine. It seems likely that a profit-making Firefox will eventually prevent add-ons like AdBlock Plus that stop the display of ads which many users find annoying.
The former CEO, Winifred Mitchell Baker, has no technical knowledge. She is a lawyer. She took the job when no one thought there was money in development of Netscape/Firebird that became Firefox.
Will the new CEO manage better? Or will Firefox development begin to be unfriendly to the user so that it will make money?
I wonder how many Sun Microsystems employees ever got Sun
JavaStations, which was Sun's entry in the Network Computer baloney?
From the Wikipedia article: "Production models comprised: *
JavaStation-1 (part number JJ-xx), codenamed Mr. Coffee: based on a 110 MHz
MicroSPARC IIe CPU,..."
"Network Computers" were computers for other people, not the people
who were talking: "There would only be rudimentary software and memory on
the Network Computer. Most software and serious memory would be out there on
the Net where it could be easily maintained. The system would run on Java and
use Oracle databases."
It seems to be some kind of shared craziness. "Marketing" people get
excited about something they think they understand, and they pay magazines and
newspapers to run stories. "No In-House Data Centers" and "Saas" is part of
the same "Network Computer" nonsense, recycled.
I was commenting on the weirdness of the article referenced by Slashdot:
""Did I just say 0 data centers? Yes! Our goal is to reduce our entire data center presence by 2015," writes Brian, who says the goal will be to reduce data center square footage by 50 percent by 2013,..."
How is this news? Everyone in the world is doing the same thing.
More of what everyone is doing:
"The project consolidated 2,200 servers into 1,000 energy-efficient servers and reduced the number of storage devices from 738 to 225. Compute capacity grew by 273 percent, storage capacity increased by 373 percent, and power usage plunged from 2.2 megawatts to 560 kW."
The whole article is reminiscent of the huge "Net PC" publicity perhaps 8 years ago. After all the writing, nothing unusual happened.
It seems as though Sun's publicity if driven by people with no technical knowledge, and no interest in technical knowledge. "Saas" is a big thing with non-technical people now:
"... followed by a two-year process of shifting Sun's IT operations to a software as a service (SaaS) model."
Do you really think that Sun will switch every employee to having all software they use on some remote computer? And in 2 years? "Saas" seems to be big in the minds of non-technical people, apparently because they can understand it with no thinking.
I'm guessing this is not connected with helping the user. Maybe they want to organize your email messages so that they can calculate the conversations more efficiently and serve ads that are more effective.
Yahoo played so many tricks that I learned to stay away from it; I haven't seen Yahoo in years.
Now I just visited the Yahoo web site. As I write this it says, "Pulse - What Yahoos Are Into". That's typical of Yahoo's respect for it's customers. A "yahoo" is "an uncultivated or boorish person".
The OLPC initiative is a very good idea.
on
Negroponte vs Intel
·
· Score: 1
The OLPC idea needs perhaps 5 or 10 years to mature, in my opinion. After
that, when every country in the world realizes how much computers help grow
social strength, the market will be far larger and well-defined, and
commercial efforts will be very welcome.
The OLPC idea is founded on these understandings: 1) That students
will be far more interested in school if they have a way of accessing the
world's information, especially where books are not easily available. 2) That
students can teach themselves. 3) That computers are fascinating and provide
an incentive to learn. 4) That one or two people in a community who are
especially good at teaching themselves may provide leadership that helps the
entire community grow.
If a foolish entry like Intel's competes, that may kill the entire
OLPC experiment. The entire good idea could become discredited or delayed many
years.
Intel has in the past been amazingly bad at producing items for users.
Until 1991, Intel had a Consumer Products Division that was extremely badly
managed. Can it be wise that Intel has decided to go into the low-cost,
commodity consumer business, when Intel has always failed at that business?
Given Intel's past history and core competency, can Intel become a strong
competitor with Mattel?
If Intel wants to compete, it should offer Mr. Negroponte cheaper
processors to compete with the AMD processors used now. Producing processors
is what Intel does very well, apparently in spite of top management.
Intel, apparently, never wavered from its position that it was in
competition with OLPC. Intel tried to kill the program before it got fully
started; that's how it appears to the public. Internal attempts at spin
control at Intel don't change the public perception that Intel has been, and
intends to continue to be, destructive.
Many people seem to think that the underlying problem is that Intel
CEO Paul Otellini has extremely poor social skills. It seems to me that the
OLPC issue could eventually bring such an accumulation of bad press to Intel
that the Intel board fires Otellini.
Certainly Otellini's handling of the One Laptop Per Child initiative
could not have been worse. It was as though he said to himself, "How can I
get billions of dollars worth of free publicity for Intel, all negative?"
Intel's actions have created the impression that Intel wants to kill
acceptance of the OLPC so that it can kill the OLPC project and then raise
prices on its own products.
Intel marketing should possibly be called Intel "marketing" because it
is often propelled by utterly foolish ideas. One example is the Intel
trademark "Viiv", which was a bad idea even if people could pronounce it. See, for one example,
the article Intel admits defeat with Viiv.
There is a simple solution: Boot from the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows (UBCD4Win), and run a scan on all the boot sectors of all hard drives. Since the original, possibly infected, operating system and hard drives are not in control, the rootkit has no effect.
I should have said, "internal release on the corporate intranet" My Slashdot comments are often written quickly. There may be errors in editing.
The "internal release" seemed to me to be from someone who was intentionally saying something he knew to be not the full truth. To me it seemed to be disrespectful toward the reader's intelligence.
I think the OLPC idea needs perhaps 5 or 10 years to mature. After that, when every country in the world realizes how much computers help grow social strength, the market will be far larger, and commercial efforts will be very welcome.
On the other hand, if a foolish entry like Intel's is competing, from a company that has been in the past amazingly bad at producing items for users, the entire good idea could become discredited or delayed many years.
If Intel wants to compete, it should offer Mr. Negroponte cheaper processors. Producing processors is Intel's competency, something it does very well, and apparently in spite of top management.
It seems to me that this issue could eventually bring such bad press to Intel that the Intel board fires CEO Otellini.
Those who doubt that other companies also have marketing departments that are detached from reality can order an Intel Bunny People doll bag to carry their Intel Bunny People(tm) dolls.
Slashdot Mirror
So far, the biggest problem with Net Neutrality is that those who want it don't define what they mean by it first. Should VOIP packets be delivered quicker? I think so. I don't mind if my email is delayed for several seconds.
I don't want complete packet neutrality, I just want all providers to use the same sensible transmission configurations.
Comcast has its own very expensive and poor quality VOIP. Comcast should not be allowed to delay the packets carrying the much superior free Skype VOIP calls.
Sure, you will see only skin pores and little hairs because your room won't be large enough to be sufficiently far away to see an entire image.
Technology is advancing far faster than the understanding humans have of themselves. I watch my NTSC 320 x 240 maximum resolution TV and usually feel that the resolution is higher than it needs to be considering that the low thought content of the TV show.
All of that merely serves to draw attention away from the fact that Firefox development costing $20,000,000 per year does not seem to produce faster results than Firefox developed by volunteers. There seems to be gross mismanagement, and maybe that is one reason why Winifred Mitchell Baker was replaced as CEO.
Avoid blog spam. Read the actual news release: U of M Researchers Create Beating Heart in Laboratory.
I don't know what is worse, a blog spam blog Slashvertisement, a huge number of comments by people who have no interest in the subject, or moderators who moderate up off topic comments.
Avoid blog spam. Read the actual news release: U of M Researchers Create Beating Heart in Laboratory.
You said, "Fixing security bugs on a stable branch (which doesn't allow major architecture changes) without breaking functionality is often very difficult."
Most of the bugs that were fixed were bugs in the sense that someone made a coding error that caused a memory leak. Once the problem was made obvious, fixing was easy. This was after
As I write this, 7 windows of Firefox are taking 40% CPU, for doing nothing. The CPU hogging bug was reported 6 years ago, and resulted in the bug report marked as invalid, with a complete refusal to do any trouble shooting.
Very serious shortcomings in features, like the fact that Firefox can't be made completely portable and the session restore often doesn't restore all tabs, have been ignored.
Many of the "advances" in Firefox were documents that indicate how to make Firefox operate the way it should, blaming crashes on plugins, for example.
Of course I know what you said. So, by your calculations, there are more than 50 programmers? The question remains the same. I saw very little come out of Mozilla Foundation in 2006 and 2007. There were few or no feature updates. They fixed some bad memory hogging and CPU hogging bugs, after bug-check software companies like Coverity showed them the bugs were there. They complained loudly if a bug was reported to them without information that would make finding the bug easy; they made it clear they don't do the difficult kinds of troubleshooting, just the easy kinds.
The big result of 2007 was deciding to take less responsibility, and resulted in disconnecting from Thunderbird development, and Thunderbird developers leaving.
I didn't see anything that would indicate more than 50 programmers worked 2 years.
Maybe this would be a more useful question. In 2006, Mozilla Foundation spent $20,000,000. That's enough for 200 programmers each earning $100,000 per year. Yet in 2006, there were only a few somewhat minor updates to Firefox and Thunderbird. Where is the money going?
Opera is better except that there is no way to stop the moving ads that are so annoying. AdBlock Plus Firefox extension is excellent for that.
Another thing: I hope some Slashdot reader can convince me that it is possible to do things without having the necessary qualifications, because, if that is true, I plan to be a male supermodel.
I think this should be considered an honest disagreement. I think that someone with no technical knowledge cannot reliably run a technical company. Other people think differently.
Sure someone who knows business can do business things. The key word is "reliably". Eventually something happens that requires technical knowledge, and a manager who doesn't have it will need to depend on the advice of others, who may be thinking of their own paychecks, or company politics, or not thinking at all.
I think that Firefox development has been miserably slow, considering the enormous amounts of money spent ($20 million in 2006).
Rakishi, calling someone an idiot is just an expression of anger, and not a real reply.
The question is, "Why isn't the money being spent on Firefox development?" Someone must have plans for the money if it is not being spent. What are those plans?
How could Mozilla Foundation spend so much money and get so little in return? Firefox development has been glacially slow.
"Companies headed by idiots don't last."
While I wouldn't use the word "idiot", the history of Firefox management may fit your explanation, and show why Firefox is not doing better. See the thread The Slashdot story they wouldn't run.
Also, I think that people who work in IT often underestimate their ability to lead, and the amount of work that is required to lead.
Mozilla Foundation Top 20 Excuses for Not Fixing the Firefox Memory and CPU Hogging bugs. These are actual excuses given at one time or another.
Here is a Slashdot story submission that helps explain why corporations have not adopted Firefox. The submission was rejected: "008-01-09 02:36:24 Mozilla gets a new CEO (Features,Mozilla) (rejected)".
Many people depend on Slashdot to help them learn about important events in computing. But this event hasn't been covered, and apparently is being ignored: It appears that Firefox does not have more market share because Firefox development has been very poorly managed.
Here is the Slashdot story submission:
Winifred Mitchell Baker has given up her position as CEO of Mozilla.
Firefox is now partly a profit-making effort. There has been considerable discussion about the possibility of Firefox issuing stock and becoming a public corporation. Firefox made a profit of $47,000,000 on revenues of $67,000,000 in 2006.
That enormous profit percentage that raises a question: Why did Firefox take in $67 million, but only spend $20 million? What is happening with the rest of the money?
Firefox development has been glacially slow. For example, in 6 years the CPU hogging and memory hogging bugs are still not fixed (although there has been considerable improvement).Thunderbird development has been abandoned. Opera is able to restore sessions, but the Firefox session restore feature throws away URLs if response is slow. Why is that, when millions of dollars are spent on development each year?
Firefox makes money when people use it to visit ads. Google pays because Firefox uses Google as the default search engine. It seems likely that a profit-making Firefox will eventually prevent add-ons like AdBlock Plus that stop the display of ads which many users find annoying.
The former CEO, Winifred Mitchell Baker, has no technical knowledge. She is a lawyer. She took the job when no one thought there was money in development of Netscape/Firebird that became Firefox.
Will the new CEO manage better? Or will Firefox development begin to be unfriendly to the user so that it will make money?
I wonder how many Sun Microsystems employees ever got Sun JavaStations, which was Sun's entry in the Network Computer baloney?
..."
From the Wikipedia article: "Production models comprised: * JavaStation-1 (part number JJ-xx), codenamed Mr. Coffee: based on a 110 MHz MicroSPARC IIe CPU,
Larry Ellison of Oracle started it: Larry Ellison and the Network Computer that Wasn't. (It was 13 years ago, not 8, as I said earlier.)
"Network Computers" were computers for other people, not the people who were talking: "There would only be rudimentary software and memory on the Network Computer. Most software and serious memory would be out there on the Net where it could be easily maintained. The system would run on Java and use Oracle databases."
It seems to be some kind of shared craziness. "Marketing" people get excited about something they think they understand, and they pay magazines and newspapers to run stories. "No In-House Data Centers" and "Saas" is part of the same "Network Computer" nonsense, recycled.
I was commenting on the weirdness of the article referenced by Slashdot:
..."
""Did I just say 0 data centers? Yes! Our goal is to reduce our entire data center presence by 2015," writes Brian, who says the goal will be to reduce data center square footage by 50 percent by 2013,
How is this news? Everyone in the world is doing the same thing.
More of what everyone is doing:
"The project consolidated 2,200 servers into 1,000 energy-efficient servers and reduced the number of storage devices from 738 to 225. Compute capacity grew by 273 percent, storage capacity increased by 373 percent, and power usage plunged from 2.2 megawatts to 560 kW."
The whole article is reminiscent of the huge "Net PC" publicity perhaps 8 years ago. After all the writing, nothing unusual happened.
It seems as though Sun's publicity if driven by people with no technical knowledge, and no interest in technical knowledge. "Saas" is a big thing with non-technical people now: "... followed by a two-year process of shifting Sun's IT operations to a software as a service (SaaS) model."
Do you really think that Sun will switch every employee to having all software they use on some remote computer? And in 2 years? "Saas" seems to be big in the minds of non-technical people, apparently because they can understand it with no thinking.
Another initiative from Sun: We would soon all have Net PCs.
"... upgrading to Vista." Grammatical error: Should be "downgrading".
I'm guessing this is not connected with helping the user. Maybe they want to organize your email messages so that they can calculate the conversations more efficiently and serve ads that are more effective.
Yahoo played so many tricks that I learned to stay away from it; I haven't seen Yahoo in years.
Now I just visited the Yahoo web site. As I write this it says, "Pulse - What Yahoos Are Into". That's typical of Yahoo's respect for it's customers. A "yahoo" is "an uncultivated or boorish person".
The OLPC idea needs perhaps 5 or 10 years to mature, in my opinion. After that, when every country in the world realizes how much computers help grow social strength, the market will be far larger and well-defined, and commercial efforts will be very welcome.
The OLPC idea is founded on these understandings: 1) That students will be far more interested in school if they have a way of accessing the world's information, especially where books are not easily available. 2) That students can teach themselves. 3) That computers are fascinating and provide an incentive to learn. 4) That one or two people in a community who are especially good at teaching themselves may provide leadership that helps the entire community grow.
If a foolish entry like Intel's competes, that may kill the entire OLPC experiment. The entire good idea could become discredited or delayed many years.
Intel has in the past been amazingly bad at producing items for users. Until 1991, Intel had a Consumer Products Division that was extremely badly managed. Can it be wise that Intel has decided to go into the low-cost, commodity consumer business, when Intel has always failed at that business? Given Intel's past history and core competency, can Intel become a strong competitor with Mattel?
If Intel wants to compete, it should offer Mr. Negroponte cheaper processors to compete with the AMD processors used now. Producing processors is what Intel does very well, apparently in spite of top management.
Intel, apparently, never wavered from its position that it was in competition with OLPC. Intel tried to kill the program before it got fully started; that's how it appears to the public. Internal attempts at spin control at Intel don't change the public perception that Intel has been, and intends to continue to be, destructive.
Many people seem to think that the underlying problem is that Intel CEO Paul Otellini has extremely poor social skills. It seems to me that the OLPC issue could eventually bring such an accumulation of bad press to Intel that the Intel board fires Otellini.
Certainly Otellini's handling of the One Laptop Per Child initiative could not have been worse. It was as though he said to himself, "How can I get billions of dollars worth of free publicity for Intel, all negative?" Intel's actions have created the impression that Intel wants to kill acceptance of the OLPC so that it can kill the OLPC project and then raise prices on its own products.
Intel marketing should possibly be called Intel "marketing" because it is often propelled by utterly foolish ideas. One example is the Intel trademark "Viiv", which was a bad idea even if people could pronounce it. See, for one example, the article Intel admits defeat with Viiv.
There is a simple solution: Boot from the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows (UBCD4Win), and run a scan on all the boot sectors of all hard drives. Since the original, possibly infected, operating system and hard drives are not in control, the rootkit has no effect.
I should have said, "internal release on the corporate intranet" My Slashdot comments are often written quickly. There may be errors in editing.
The "internal release" seemed to me to be from someone who was intentionally saying something he knew to be not the full truth. To me it seemed to be disrespectful toward the reader's intelligence.
I think the OLPC idea needs perhaps 5 or 10 years to mature. After that, when every country in the world realizes how much computers help grow social strength, the market will be far larger, and commercial efforts will be very welcome.
On the other hand, if a foolish entry like Intel's is competing, from a company that has been in the past amazingly bad at producing items for users, the entire good idea could become discredited or delayed many years.
If Intel wants to compete, it should offer Mr. Negroponte cheaper processors. Producing processors is Intel's competency, something it does very well, and apparently in spite of top management.
It seems to me that this issue could eventually bring such bad press to Intel that the Intel board fires CEO Otellini.
Those who doubt that other companies also have marketing departments that are detached from reality can order an Intel Bunny People doll bag to carry their Intel Bunny People(tm) dolls.