This looks promising. It says it encrypts at the kernel level. Does this mean I have to modify the public terminal somehow? That won't fly! Can you tell me more?
Right, good start now finish the thought. How might one set up a password rotation of one time passwords. Is there a canned solution? one that would work on a mac? Hand rolled perl scripts? What's a robust solution.
Could you expand on this. How does one go about setting this up on say a mac?
What I'd really like to skip the PDA. Instead just take a page of say 100 one-time passwords. But how might one set this up? I'm handy with perl but I'd prefer a robust worked out solution.
You nailed it. The key insight of the OLPC was that it needed to be ultra-low power and not rely on a lot of infrastructure. e.g. it's not so easy to run out and buy a USB cable on Nahru.
Thus I always chuckle when I see comparisons to this or that better performing laptop. Of course it's possible to get cheap and faster by going to high power. And you can add more features again by adding power. They were going for cheap and low power.
I think what may have happened here is that windows is now learning to play nice with flash memory and windows CE is presumably learning to play nice with batteries.
The other thing is that the world is moving towards cloud computing. Now while their may not be a cloud available to bushmen in Nairobi. it's not unthinkable that schools might be able to serve apps locally. And MS is building that infrastructure.
So maybe Microsoft is up to the task.
The problem MS will face I suspect is that they lack an agile resizable code base like Linux and Apple have. Windows CE and Windows XP only are simmilar in their look. So this may be a complete blank sheet. Sure XP will run but will it meet the original driver of low power? I suspect not out of the box otherwise it would be Window CE instead.
But MS does have the dowry and an incentive. And the OLPC does need the cash. So it might be a successful arranged marriage. Or maybe it will be one of those Weddings where the groom tosses the bride on the funeral pyre.
The Ogg Vorbis breaths have a few moments in which they can be legitimately smug and shake their rio players at us fools who use Fairplay or Zune, or use that patented MP3 format.
parent says my thoughts exactly, I'd mod up if I had thepoints.
The same argument applies to the plays-for-sure players. Those were sold on two arguments
1) it plays for sure. You are not beholden to apple or a single player maker. You can move it around on your computers. But it turns out you were beholden to one company afterall. The name alone ought to be enough to be false advertising on the players.
2) the players promised you you could buy music to play on the "plays for sure".
the player makers owe you your music as much as the music retailers.
what are you, brain damaged or something? Dictionary: parsimonious adjective unwilling to spend money or use resources; stingy or frugal : parsimonious New Hampshire voters, who have a phobia about taxes. See note at economical .
One of my pet peeves about windows is that they layer the tool bars horizontally by default. They even use a menu bar per window. then they put the widow dock along the bottom along with all sorts of crap. this chews up vertical real estate.
Most of the most poliched linux window managers make the same mistake. It's almost like you have to have virtual windows simply because they mismanage the screen realestate.
DSL linux's default window manager is a notable exception, and is very parsimonious about its use of screen area, presumably because it expected to be used on small screens of older machines.
Apple is better about saving screen real estate, since all windows share a single thin menu bar and the doc can be moved to vertical. Traditionally they use smaller icons and fewer of them so their toolbars usually are single width and thin (some notable exceptions however, like preview.app) Apple even puts the equivalent of tabs on the side of widows rather than the bottom (i.e. the window managers offer sidebars typically).
So perhaps it is not a surprise that apple was an early adopter of widescreen.
In my personal habits, I prefer widescreen because I feel like I can juggle more windows than with a vertical screen. But I get enraged when windows have all sorts of menu crap and tool bars that gobble my vertical screen realestate.
First you are likely wrong. if you compare the specs on the base price of the open pro $900 and the $399 teaser machine you see they are almost identical. So what's happening for $500? mainly the powersupply fans and case. To me that says the teaser comes with some 5 cent powersupply and the cheapest possible motherboard. They don't even offer a video card upgrade for it. Kinda tells you something.
And if you could, then it will cost you even more. The whole point of the comparison was the rock bottom. Otherwise why is $399 even meaningful.
My guess here is that the $399 is just a PR gimmic. If you actually spec it out on their site, the basic model+Leopard+firewire+shipping is over $650 dollars. Whereas you can get a mac mini for under $600 including the shipping. The difference is the mac mini is small, quiet, lower power, and has wifi, blue tooth, optical dolby audio, and software update will work. (The pystar has a bigger faster hard disk and a 15% faster CPU). Personally I think you'd have to be retarded to think the mac was not a better value for a low-end end user, especially due to the software update,noise and power.
So I think that was just a stunt. The real bargain on the site is the openPro which has a bigger power supply and better case permitting it to hold a high end graphics card and quad processor. A nicely specced unit of the openPro would be $1800 for quad 2.6Ghz and an nvidia 8800Gt card, including shipping, Leopard (firewire built in, and USB jacks on the front). This is actually now compartable to the apple powermac quad, which simmilarly speced runs about $2700, with a 10% faster CPU, blue tooth, wireliess, optical audio, and an amazing case design, and relatively quiet operation.
However to be fair, the apple's sweet spot for powermac pricing is at the 8 processor model. That's "only" $500 more. The psystar is not available in an 8 processor.
Your right to privacy on video rental records used to be dictated by what ever agreement you had or lacked. But then Robert Bork was nominated to the supreme court. At that time a reporter obtained his video rental history and published it. The politically charged backlash created a federal law mandating the privacy of those records.
In otherwords, video rental records have a protected status that is federally recognized. it's not the same as most other information about you. it might even be more protected than your credit history!
Now this is a civil suit ($$$) not a prosecution, so that law is only out there saying what the standard of conduct expected of blockbuster is and is not a direct factor in the trial. I would guess that block busters agreements reasonably allow them to share your data with 3rd party business affiliates or for purposes of debt collection. However, I think the expectation is that your records are not public records.
Facebook might be the loosely defined bussiness affiliate, but most people would probably say it's public. And you did not really intend to direct them to share your borrowing records, nor at the time you agreed with facebook to share certain data could you have anticipated that blockbuster would become a bussiness affiliate. They really needed to negotiate that with you.
finally just because you sign a "wavier" does not mean you cannot sue. As I understand it, you can never sign away your right to sue. The wavier simply makes it hard to win.
I note that recently Netflix ran into a problem too. Their supposedly anonymized rental records used in their contest to improve movie selection turns out to have enough information content that clever googling can re-associate names with a large fraction of the people in the data base. (e.g. they mention movies they watched somewhere on the web and this can be correlated). Some group in texas actually did the reverse calculations and showed it worked.
When people say is it ready for the desktop they are talking about a desktop interface for linux where usability, interplatform compatibility and conistency are primal. Linux itself is a tweakfest. Until the UI gets as standardized and bulletproff and seamless as windows or mac it won't happen.
Thus mass market desktop worthiness is almost antithetical to Linux's nature.
But the reverse, Linux on the desktop, where you think of Linux as application running inside a proven desktop is not only possible it exists.
Virtual machines running at nearly full speed are available for mac and windows. The ones i've seen on mac can run the linux unrooted, rooted or even capture Linux windows and treat them as any other application window in the host OS's desktop.
The latter is where you finally arrive at linux on the desktop.
Sure the UI is not highly tweakable. But that's a "good thing". All the other parts of linux you like, all the plugable modules, configuration files, etc... all those are there in their full tweakable glory. So nothing is lost and a lot is gained.
This is how Linux can come to the desktop. It won't be the desktop that hardcore linux users will want neccessarily since for power users it layers on a potentially fragile layer of indirection. But for the mass market desktop it would work.
I forgot the World Downfall chosen!... AND NASA HAS SAID, I HAVE QUITE
BY MICHAEL SAUERBIER
Potsdam - He is the greatest threat our planet: On Sunday, 13 April 2036, the asteroid crosses "Apophis" the orbit. Nevertheless, the probability that we killer lumps from the All true, is 0.2 percent! This is a student from Potsdam calculated.
And doing so, Nico Marquardt (13) the research of NASA corrected! For his disturbing discovery was the small physics genius now for the youth researchers Prize. "The asteroid has left me no rest," says the SiebtklÃssler from Potsdamer Humboldt Gymnasium. "On the Internet, I had high bets on the impact of Apophis was discovered. But NASA is the impact likely only 1 to 45000. I wanted to know how it really is. " With the telescope of the Astrophysical Institute Potsdam Nico was allowed to observe asteroids train. The student: "Then I said Spahn professor at the University of Potsdam, as the attractions of the sun, moon and earth the way of Apophis influence." Astrophysicists had a suitable formula. Nico: "With Professor Landgraf, ESA's satellite control center, I train then recalculated." Frightening picture: "The harvest probability is 1 to 450," said a young astronomer. For comparison: For a lottery-six (without super number), it is at 1 in 14 million.
Nico: "When would the impact force of 98000 Hiroshima bombs freely. Stürben million people, dust would darken the sky, a super-tsunami swamped parts of the earth. " But: "I hope that Apophis nearly vorbeischrammt to us..."
Congress announced today that there's a 1 in 450 chance you will be eligible for social security at retirement.
There's an alanis morriset kind of irony here. If we were just moneys in trees and had not put up the sattelites we would not have magnified our risk a 100 fold.
Given that sort of cosmic irony, I predict it has to hit Hubble.
And speaking of hubble they should have known it had a faulty mirror when they say the stencil on it that said "asteroids in mirror are closer than they appear".
Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all week. Try the veal.
You are right that NASA has not updated it's site since 2006. Here's what they said a while back:
The future for Apophis on Friday, April 13 of 2029 includes an approach to Earth no closer than 29,470 km (18,300 miles, or 5.6 Earth radii from the center, or 4.6 Earth-radii from the surface) over the mid-Atlantic, appearing to the naked eye as a moderately bright point of light moving rapidly across the sky. Depending on its mechanical nature, it could experience shape or spin-state alteration due to tidal forces caused by Earth's gravity field.
This is within the distance of Earth's geosynchronous satellites. However, because Apophis will pass interior to the positions of these satellites at closest approach, in a plane inclined at 40 degrees to the Earth's equator and passing outside the equatorial geosynchronous zone when crossing the equatorial plane, it does not threaten the satellites in that heavily populated region. So what is being claimed here is not so implausible. It is going to pass within the geosynconous orbit distance.
By the way, it passes by the earth in 2027 on friday the 13th. If it hit's it will hit in the pacific ocean. So California may get wet. The energy content is said to be 26,000 Hiroshimas which is not that much but recent calculation suggest is more than enough to darken the earth.
NASA previously estimated the chance "Apophis" the asteroid would strike earth in 2027 was 1 in 45,000. But a german schoolboy, Nico Marquardt, pointed out that NASA overlooked the probability the asteroid would strike one of the 40,000 sattelites orbiting Earth and enter a new solar orbit intersecting Earth in 2036. A german newspaper reports that NASA now concurs the chance this will happen is about 1 in 450. If the 200 billion tonne ball of iridium and iron stikes the planet then it's literally light's out for earth: 800 foot tidal waves followed by an indefinite period of dust cloud covered darkness, not to mention metal vapor in the atmosphere. The original Slashdot discussion was in 2007 when the odds were better. At that time it was known that there was a small risk of a gravitational slingshot dropping it into the 2036 collisional orbit, however, to do so the asteroid had to pass through an improbable 400 meter wide strike zone to be properly deflected, as described in 2006 in Popular Science from 2006. Today's announcement of the new finding is here and here.
Slashdot Mirror
How?
This looks promising. It says it encrypts at the kernel level. Does this mean I have to modify the public terminal somehow? That won't fly!
Can you tell me more?
Right, good start now finish the thought. How might one set up a password rotation of one time passwords. Is there a canned solution? one that would work on a mac? Hand rolled perl scripts? What's a robust solution.
Could you expand on this. How does one go about setting this up on say a mac?
What I'd really like to skip the PDA. Instead just take a page of say 100 one-time passwords. But how might one set this up? I'm handy with perl but I'd prefer a robust worked out solution.
Best, realistic, idea I've heard yet.
can keyloggers capture cut buffers?
You nailed it. The key insight of the OLPC was that it needed to be ultra-low power and not rely on a lot of infrastructure. e.g. it's not so easy to run out and buy a USB cable on Nahru.
Thus I always chuckle when I see comparisons to this or that better performing laptop. Of course it's possible to get cheap and faster by going to high power. And you can add more features again by adding power. They were going for cheap and low power.
I think what may have happened here is that windows is now learning to play nice with flash memory and windows CE is presumably learning to play nice with batteries.
The other thing is that the world is moving towards cloud computing. Now while their may not be a cloud available to bushmen in Nairobi. it's not unthinkable that schools might be able to serve apps locally. And MS is building that infrastructure.
So maybe Microsoft is up to the task.
The problem MS will face I suspect is that they lack an agile resizable code base like Linux and Apple have. Windows CE and Windows XP only are simmilar in their look. So this may be a complete blank sheet. Sure XP will run but will it meet the original driver of low power? I suspect not out of the box otherwise it would be Window CE instead.
But MS does have the dowry and an incentive. And the OLPC does need the cash. So it might be a successful arranged marriage. Or maybe it will be one of those Weddings where the groom tosses the bride on the funeral pyre.
title says it all
The Ogg Vorbis breaths have a few moments in which they can be legitimately smug and shake their rio players at us fools who use Fairplay or Zune, or use that patented MP3 format.
Okay.. times up. Now back to reality.
parent says my thoughts exactly, I'd mod up if I had thepoints.
The same argument applies to the plays-for-sure players. Those were sold on two arguments
1) it plays for sure. You are not beholden to apple or a single player maker. You can move it around on your computers. But it turns out you were beholden to one company afterall. The name alone ought to be enough to be false advertising on the players.
2) the players promised you you could buy music to play on the "plays for sure".
the player makers owe you your music as much as the music retailers.
50% efficiency does not imply $2/gallon.
They have to input pre-processing and heat. They don't say where break-even is. Maybe that's at 90% efficiency.
what are you, brain damaged or something? Dictionary:
parsimonious
adjective
unwilling to spend money or use resources; stingy or frugal : parsimonious New Hampshire voters, who have a phobia about taxes. See note at economical .
Poliched, google it.
One of my pet peeves about windows is that they layer the tool bars horizontally by default. They even use a menu bar per window.
then they put the widow dock along the bottom along with all sorts of crap. this chews up vertical real estate.
Most of the most poliched linux window managers make the same mistake. It's almost like you have to have virtual windows simply because they mismanage the screen realestate.
DSL linux's default window manager is a notable exception, and is very parsimonious about its use of screen area, presumably because it expected to be used on small screens of older machines.
Apple is better about saving screen real estate, since all windows share a single thin menu bar and the doc can be moved to vertical. Traditionally they use smaller icons and fewer of them so their toolbars usually are single width and thin (some notable exceptions however, like preview.app) Apple even puts the equivalent of tabs on the side of widows rather than the bottom (i.e. the window managers offer sidebars typically).
So perhaps it is not a surprise that apple was an early adopter of widescreen.
In my personal habits, I prefer widescreen because I feel like I can juggle more windows than with a vertical screen. But I get enraged when windows have all sorts of menu crap and tool bars that gobble my vertical screen realestate.
First you are likely wrong. if you compare the specs on the base price of the open pro $900 and the $399 teaser machine you see they are almost identical. So what's happening for $500? mainly the powersupply fans and case. To me that says the teaser comes with some 5 cent powersupply and the cheapest possible motherboard. They don't even offer a video card upgrade for it. Kinda tells you something.
And if you could, then it will cost you even more. The whole point of the comparison was the rock bottom. Otherwise why is $399 even meaningful.
My guess here is that the $399 is just a PR gimmic. If you actually spec it out on their site, the basic model+Leopard+firewire+shipping is over $650 dollars. Whereas you can get a mac mini for under $600 including the shipping. The difference is the mac mini is small, quiet, lower power, and has wifi, blue tooth, optical dolby audio, and software update will work. (The pystar has a bigger faster hard disk and a 15% faster CPU). Personally I think you'd have to be retarded to think the mac was not a better value for a low-end end user, especially due to the software update,noise and power.
So I think that was just a stunt. The real bargain on the site is the openPro which has a bigger power supply and better case permitting it to hold a high end graphics card and quad processor. A nicely specced unit of the openPro would be $1800 for quad 2.6Ghz and an nvidia 8800Gt card, including shipping, Leopard (firewire built in, and USB jacks on the front). This is actually now compartable to the apple powermac quad, which simmilarly speced runs about $2700, with a 10% faster CPU, blue tooth, wireliess, optical audio, and an amazing case design, and relatively quiet operation.
However to be fair, the apple's sweet spot for powermac pricing is at the 8 processor model. That's "only" $500 more. The psystar is not available in an 8 processor.
Your right to privacy on video rental records used to be dictated by what ever agreement you had or lacked. But then Robert Bork was nominated to the supreme court. At that time a reporter obtained his video rental history and published it. The politically charged backlash created a federal law mandating the privacy of those records.
In otherwords, video rental records have a protected status that is federally recognized. it's not the same as most other information about you. it might even be more protected than your credit history!
Now this is a civil suit ($$$) not a prosecution, so that law is only out there saying what the standard of conduct expected of blockbuster is and is not a direct factor in the trial. I would guess that block busters agreements reasonably allow them to share your data with 3rd party business affiliates or for purposes of debt collection. However, I think the expectation is that your records are not public records.
Facebook might be the loosely defined bussiness affiliate, but most people would probably say it's public. And you did not really intend to direct them to share your borrowing records, nor at the time you agreed with facebook to share certain data could you have anticipated that blockbuster would become a bussiness affiliate. They really needed to negotiate that with you.
finally just because you sign a "wavier" does not mean you cannot sue. As I understand it, you can never sign away your right to sue. The wavier simply makes it hard to win.
I note that recently Netflix ran into a problem too. Their supposedly anonymized rental records used in their contest to improve movie selection turns out to have enough information content that clever googling can re-associate names with a large fraction of the people in the data base. (e.g. they mention movies they watched somewhere on the web and this can be correlated). Some group in texas actually did the reverse calculations and showed it worked.
When people say is it ready for the desktop they are talking about a desktop interface for linux where usability, interplatform compatibility and conistency are primal. Linux itself is a tweakfest. Until the UI gets as standardized and bulletproff and seamless as windows or mac it won't happen.
Thus mass market desktop worthiness is almost antithetical to Linux's nature.
But the reverse, Linux on the desktop, where you think of Linux as application running inside a proven desktop is not only possible it exists.
Virtual machines running at nearly full speed are available for mac and windows. The ones i've seen on mac can run the linux unrooted, rooted or even capture Linux windows and treat them as any other application window in the host OS's desktop.
The latter is where you finally arrive at linux on the desktop.
Sure the UI is not highly tweakable. But that's a "good thing". All the other parts of linux you like, all the plugable modules, configuration files, etc... all those are there in their full tweakable glory. So nothing is lost and a lot is gained.
This is how Linux can come to the desktop. It won't be the desktop that hardcore linux users will want neccessarily since for power users it layers on a potentially fragile layer of indirection. But for the mass market desktop it would work.
oops make that 2/10ths of a percent
Uh, your chance of perishing in a car crash are not so high as 1/450. 2 tenths of the people on earth are not run over by cars
Here's the (semi hilarious) machine translation.
... AND NASA HAS SAID, I HAVE QUITE
..."
I forgot the World Downfall chosen!
BY MICHAEL SAUERBIER
Potsdam - He is the greatest threat our planet: On Sunday, 13 April 2036, the asteroid crosses "Apophis" the orbit.
Nevertheless, the probability that we killer lumps from the All true, is 0.2 percent! This is a student from Potsdam calculated.
And doing so, Nico Marquardt (13) the research of NASA corrected! For his disturbing discovery was the small physics genius now for the youth researchers Prize.
"The asteroid has left me no rest," says the SiebtklÃssler from Potsdamer Humboldt Gymnasium. "On the Internet, I had high bets on the impact of Apophis was discovered. But NASA is the impact likely only 1 to 45000. I wanted to know how it really is. "
With the telescope of the Astrophysical Institute Potsdam Nico was allowed to observe asteroids train.
The student: "Then I said Spahn professor at the University of Potsdam, as the attractions of the sun, moon and earth the way of Apophis influence." Astrophysicists had a suitable formula.
Nico: "With Professor Landgraf, ESA's satellite control center, I train then recalculated."
Frightening picture: "The harvest probability is 1 to 450," said a young astronomer. For comparison: For a lottery-six (without super number), it is at 1 in 14 million.
Nico: "When would the impact force of 98000 Hiroshima bombs freely. Stürben million people, dust would darken the sky, a super-tsunami swamped parts of the earth. "
But: "I hope that Apophis nearly vorbeischrammt to us
Congress announced today that there's a 1 in 450 chance you will be eligible for social security at retirement.
There's an alanis morriset kind of irony here. If we were just moneys in trees and had not put up the sattelites we would not have magnified our risk a 100 fold.
Given that sort of cosmic irony, I predict it has to hit Hubble.
And speaking of hubble they should have known it had a faulty mirror when they say the stencil on it that said "asteroids in mirror are closer than they appear".
Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all week. Try the veal.
This is within the distance of Earth's geosynchronous satellites. However, because Apophis will pass interior to the positions of these satellites at closest approach, in a plane inclined at 40 degrees to the Earth's equator and passing outside the equatorial geosynchronous zone when crossing the equatorial plane, it does not threaten the satellites in that heavily populated region. So what is being claimed here is not so implausible. It is going to pass within the geosynconous orbit distance.
By the way, it passes by the earth in 2027 on friday the 13th. If it hit's it will hit in the pacific ocean. So California may get wet. The energy content is said to be 26,000 Hiroshimas which is not that much but recent calculation suggest is more than enough to darken the earth.
NASA previously estimated the chance "Apophis" the asteroid would strike earth in 2027 was 1 in 45,000. But a german schoolboy, Nico Marquardt, pointed out that NASA overlooked the probability the asteroid would strike one of the 40,000 sattelites orbiting Earth and enter a new solar orbit intersecting Earth in 2036. A german newspaper reports that NASA now concurs the chance this will happen is about 1 in 450. If the 200 billion tonne ball of iridium and iron stikes the planet then it's literally light's out for earth: 800 foot tidal waves followed by an indefinite period of dust cloud covered darkness, not to mention metal vapor in the atmosphere. The original Slashdot discussion was in 2007 when the odds were better. At that time it was known that there was a small risk of a gravitational slingshot dropping it into the 2036 collisional orbit, however, to do so the asteroid had to pass through an improbable 400 meter wide strike zone to be properly deflected, as described in 2006 in Popular Science from 2006. Today's announcement of the new finding is here and here.