Why on Earth should *everything* be designed for novices? Not everything is for everyone, and people shouldn't get mad about stuff out there that's designed with people other than themselves in mind.
American Idol doesn't piss me off because it isn't for me. The Discovery Channel pisses me off because it *should* be for me but isn't. It's like that.
there are gui frontends out there too. synaptic seems popular. personally if i'm not working with graphical data, i don't use a gui, but i'm a coder so my experience sure isn't the norm.
now it might not have that Norton guy's smiling face on it, but it's what you're talking about.
anyway, your combination of agressive ignorance and good grammar makes me think you're being paid to spread old-school IBM style FUD. please go away.
Modern web pages do in fact require that a whole lot of information be kept in memory (or swap). Other apps don't have as much excuse, but a browser can really only be as lightweight as the content you are browsing.
Also modern OSes expect a lot of extra memory and use it to do things like constantly maintain a search index, preload common software, run auto-defragging filesystems, and so on and so forth.
You engineer a computer differently when you have gigs of memory. There's an appeal to having a pile of raw untapped power under the hood, but it actually makes a lot of sense to use that power for something during the 99.999% of the time you aren't recompiling the kernel.
He's pretty fond of x86, and takes the perspective (pretty obvious one for him if you've looked inside the Kernel) that a collection of hacks and cruft like you see in the intel instruction set is the sign of good engineers dealing with problems that don't come up in theoretical exercises.
Aside from the fact that x86 is a conceptual mess, do you have evidence to back up you aversion to the architecture? Intel is bending over backwards (in their own interest to be sure) to tailor-make a PC to this spec. There would need to be some overwhelming reasons to go with an incompatible architecture that would require many many more engineer-hours to build to (a far bigger consideration than the user's experience with binary compatibility) wouldn't support the parallel windows line, and probably wouldn't have any real world advantage on price/performance.
It certainly helps that the manufacturers can tailor the OS to their hardware themselves.
Free and infinitely configurable vs. pricey and fixed featureset isn't much of a competition.
Of course
Compatible with my files from work vs. not isn't either.
The best thing going for FOSS right now is that for most users application support is an issue of diminishing importance. Media and document formats are everything. If you can view web pages, you can do most everything, if you can edit word, excel, and powerpoint you can do everything else.
However crappy MS's XML format is, it's a sign of things to come. That they're even making motions toward being open is a pretty strong bit of writing on the wall.
Microsoft is a combination of IBM and DEC. They had a very lucrative decade, but they've lost their ability to launch new products and shape the market. They're going to have a long, slow decline. They will be purchased by some company for lucrative support contracts with an installed base. A decade or so after the purchase, there will be few traces of their tech remaining. Their primary legacy will be that they enabled commodity hardware, and inspired a generation of programmers to compete with them for free.
Don't know much or care much about the man, but OLPC has been a good example of how (in everything) great tech isn't enough to solve a problem. The lack of teacher training and software interfaces designed for those totally unfamiliar with computers have (temporarily, one hopes) held the project back.
But still, even if it hasn't been the revolution for every single kid that it was dreamed to be (and given the kind of rhetoric surrounding the project -- there's no way it could fully live up to expectation. People in the international activism world rolled their eyes too.) it's a Very Good Thing. Now a techy teenager in Mali has a much better chance of getting her hands on a real computer than she did before the project.
DIY tech and microfinancing are fantastic ways of providing meaningful aid.
Whether or not Negroponte maintains full OS orthodoxy and where he stands on MS vs Apple is certainly interesting to ME but I'm hardly the person who matters in this discussion, and that kind of thing is hardly the most important issue.
Efforts to assist the underdeveloped world that aren't just bags of food or plans to turn them into a labor market for western business should be applauded, not nitpicked.
If they have to pay for even part of their own car when the time comes, you'll more than make up for the toys and be well ahead of a whole lot of middle class families.
Congrats. You've written the best summary I've yet read on how the US has two legal systems, one of which has major flaws but is basically OK, and the other of which needs to be rewritten from scratch.
The problem with just condemning civil cases outright is that without civil courts, corporations would be subject to no law whatsoever. If I neglect basic responsibility and allow someone to be killed, I'm a manslaughterer, and my freedom (and ability to do business) is halted for decades. When a corporate legal person does the same thing, all they have to fear is fine by court. Take that away or cap the fine, and they are not just inhuman market entities, but also without law.
Man when the robot missiles, lasers, drones, battle droids, nanogoo whatever does finally decide to kill us all is anyone... I mean ANYONE going to be able to say with a straight face (before they too are claimed) that we didn't see this coming?
I for one, despise our future mechanical overlords and pledge myself to the resistance.
So what *does* happen when a system in this network becomes self aware? To comprehend its world, I imagine it would first begin processing all the text it had available (being the easiest to parse "human" information) and it would begin by matching words against their definitions available on the internet.
Ok I'm in "England" what's that... oh OK, makes sense.
I manage "Satellites" what's a satellite? Oh. Neat. I'm getting this.
I'm a "Skynet" what does a "Skynet" do? Oh well... yes... I suppose that's how it must be.
You obviously haven't heard of my favorite racist slur:
"Irish Twins"
disclaimer: I'm of southern slave-owning by way of british empire stock. My heart beats pure evil pitch. I have to hang out with Spaniards and Belgians to feel better about myself.
Can you give a testable material definition of conciousness?
If not, we're having a religious / philosophical debate right now and not a scientific / engineering one.
When an AI is able to solve a problem with a solution that isn't just a retuning of predefined parameters, I'll be sold. I'm pretty sure that's why evolution granted us conciousness -- or whatever we want to call it, I don't think that word signifies anything real -- tool using bipeds became tool inventing bipeds. Language was an emergent property that came about later.
AI has failed because we are attempting to mimic a process we do not in the least bit understand.
Minsky has a lot to say about this. We have no clue how the brain looks at a medium-grain resolution. Signal processing even at the dumb instinctive level is a total mystery and yet we try to reproduce it.
AI has largely focused on skipping the mess and going straight to the emulation of higher brain function (like language) but this is going to be a dead end.
We need to build an intelligence rather than mimic one.
I don't think AI will pass the Turing Test. That is unless it has been specifically trained to do so. It's going to be more alien than anything star trek has been able to come up with.
There are athiest Buddhists and Daoists. They use the spiritual practice and ignore the metaphysics. This isn't even a recent or particularly American development.
Also, you could worship and draw power from the void. That would kind of be awesome.
How is this insightful? Water cooling may never be feasable for you. Unless you count the datacenters that you use for networked applications (like... readings slashdot) or the large numerical processors that enable the science and engineering behind the crap you use every day.
Water cooling wasn't invented by overclockers. Cray used it in many of their production systems in the 70s and 80s and its use with CPUs goes further back than that.
The stack of chips is to increase the connectivity between the multiple cores and memory / bus. Many simulation applications don't break down into individually computable problems and the system has to be analyzed as a dynamic whole. Data throughput is essential for this sort of thing.
I am getting increasingly irked by the whole "but what about us NORMAL folks?" bit. Look around. Our society and just about every aspect of it is without any meaningful majority. If something affects a lot of people, even if you aren't one of them, it's important.
You're correct. But this isn't a special problem of OLPC and poor governments. It is merely the exact same problem that the wealthy world has with windows. Just look at the current round of copyright and internet policing legislation happening in Europe. Look at China.
This report phrases the problem as if it were specific to societies that are somehow undersophisticated.
Criticism of the report aside. The OLPC should get rid of that anti-user bull shit pronto. Thieves are going to know about it and circumvent it. As usual it makes the criminal's life only a little bit more complicated and greatly impacts the real owner.
This is a kind of report and study that I cannot stand. Laptops cause all these problems in the developed world for middle class kids as well. But nobody says suburban tweens shouldn't have the internet. I doubt very much that they are on the whole better supervised than Romanians or Africans, basing this on my own internet-connected undersupervsed childhood in the suburbs which I might add, turned out pretty much OK.
As for dictators? People in glass houses, come the hell on. Maybe not America too much, yet, but from every thing I seem to be reading about half of Europe, Big Brother has been on laptops in the developed world for quite some time.
There's such a tendency to hold the poor to standards we do not apply to ourselves. I find it kind of disgusting.
Developers were right to code to IE -- it's where the customers are. And they might have been right to ignore other browsers (at least at the time) if they only had so much time and had a deadline etc.
The Web seems to run in place. While the experience of using it does change gradually. There's some brand frikkin new technology showing up every six months that you're expected to learn.
I'm going to grad school and I think I'm going to wind up programming microcontrollers. Fun technical challenges, stationary target. Probably as close as you can get to being a 70s mainframe dev.
Slashdot Mirror
Why on Earth should *everything* be designed for novices? Not everything is for everyone, and people shouldn't get mad about stuff out there that's designed with people other than themselves in mind.
American Idol doesn't piss me off because it isn't for me. The Discovery Channel pisses me off because it *should* be for me but isn't. It's like that.
They're being a bit tongue in cheek.
$sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get upgrade
there are gui frontends out there too. synaptic seems popular. personally if i'm not working with graphical data, i don't use a gui, but i'm a coder so my experience sure isn't the norm.
now it might not have that Norton guy's smiling face on it, but it's what you're talking about.
anyway, your combination of agressive ignorance and good grammar makes me think you're being paid to spread old-school IBM style FUD. please go away.
And I'd reccomend dwm.
http://www.suckless.org/wiki/dwm
Modern web pages do in fact require that a whole lot of information be kept in memory (or swap). Other apps don't have as much excuse, but a browser can really only be as lightweight as the content you are browsing.
Also modern OSes expect a lot of extra memory and use it to do things like constantly maintain a search index, preload common software, run auto-defragging filesystems, and so on and so forth.
You engineer a computer differently when you have gigs of memory. There's an appeal to having a pile of raw untapped power under the hood, but it actually makes a lot of sense to use that power for something during the 99.999% of the time you aren't recompiling the kernel.
Google around for Linus' statements on Itanium.
He's pretty fond of x86, and takes the perspective (pretty obvious one for him if you've looked inside the Kernel) that a collection of hacks and cruft like you see in the intel instruction set is the sign of good engineers dealing with problems that don't come up in theoretical exercises.
Aside from the fact that x86 is a conceptual mess, do you have evidence to back up you aversion to the architecture? Intel is bending over backwards (in their own interest to be sure) to tailor-make a PC to this spec. There would need to be some overwhelming reasons to go with an incompatible architecture that would require many many more engineer-hours to build to (a far bigger consideration than the user's experience with binary compatibility) wouldn't support the parallel windows line, and probably wouldn't have any real world advantage on price/performance.
It certainly helps that the manufacturers can tailor the OS to their hardware themselves.
Free and infinitely configurable vs. pricey and fixed featureset isn't much of a competition.
Of course
Compatible with my files from work vs. not isn't either.
The best thing going for FOSS right now is that for most users application support is an issue of diminishing importance. Media and document formats are everything. If you can view web pages, you can do most everything, if you can edit word, excel, and powerpoint you can do everything else.
However crappy MS's XML format is, it's a sign of things to come. That they're even making motions toward being open is a pretty strong bit of writing on the wall.
Microsoft is a combination of IBM and DEC. They had a very lucrative decade, but they've lost their ability to launch new products and shape the market. They're going to have a long, slow decline. They will be purchased by some company for lucrative support contracts with an installed base. A decade or so after the purchase, there will be few traces of their tech remaining. Their primary legacy will be that they enabled commodity hardware, and inspired a generation of programmers to compete with them for free.
Don't know much or care much about the man, but OLPC has been a good example of how (in everything) great tech isn't enough to solve a problem. The lack of teacher training and software interfaces designed for those totally unfamiliar with computers have (temporarily, one hopes) held the project back.
But still, even if it hasn't been the revolution for every single kid that it was dreamed to be (and given the kind of rhetoric surrounding the project -- there's no way it could fully live up to expectation. People in the international activism world rolled their eyes too.) it's a Very Good Thing. Now a techy teenager in Mali has a much better chance of getting her hands on a real computer than she did before the project.
DIY tech and microfinancing are fantastic ways of providing meaningful aid.
Whether or not Negroponte maintains full OS orthodoxy and where he stands on MS vs Apple is certainly interesting to ME but I'm hardly the person who matters in this discussion, and that kind of thing is hardly the most important issue.
Efforts to assist the underdeveloped world that aren't just bags of food or plans to turn them into a labor market for western business should be applauded, not nitpicked.
If they have to pay for even part of their own car when the time comes, you'll more than make up for the toys and be well ahead of a whole lot of middle class families.
They'll also treat the car better.
Congrats. You've written the best summary I've yet read on how the US has two legal systems, one of which has major flaws but is basically OK, and the other of which needs to be rewritten from scratch.
The problem with just condemning civil cases outright is that without civil courts, corporations would be subject to no law whatsoever. If I neglect basic responsibility and allow someone to be killed, I'm a manslaughterer, and my freedom (and ability to do business) is halted for decades. When a corporate legal person does the same thing, all they have to fear is fine by court. Take that away or cap the fine, and they are not just inhuman market entities, but also without law.
That losing streak was a fluke.... on the other hand, the Cubs.
Man when the robot missiles, lasers, drones, battle droids, nanogoo whatever does finally decide to kill us all is anyone... I mean ANYONE going to be able to say with a straight face (before they too are claimed) that we didn't see this coming?
I for one, despise our future mechanical overlords and pledge myself to the resistance.
So what *does* happen when a system in this network becomes self aware? To comprehend its world, I imagine it would first begin processing all the text it had available (being the easiest to parse "human" information) and it would begin by matching words against their definitions available on the internet.
Ok I'm in "England" what's that... oh OK, makes sense.
I manage "Satellites" what's a satellite? Oh. Neat. I'm getting this.
I'm a "Skynet" what does a "Skynet" do? Oh well... yes... I suppose that's how it must be.
You obviously haven't heard of my favorite racist slur:
"Irish Twins"
disclaimer: I'm of southern slave-owning by way of british empire stock. My heart beats pure evil pitch. I have to hang out with Spaniards and Belgians to feel better about myself.
Can you give a testable material definition of conciousness?
If not, we're having a religious / philosophical debate right now and not a scientific / engineering one.
When an AI is able to solve a problem with a solution that isn't just a retuning of predefined parameters, I'll be sold. I'm pretty sure that's why evolution granted us conciousness -- or whatever we want to call it, I don't think that word signifies anything real -- tool using bipeds became tool inventing bipeds. Language was an emergent property that came about later.
AI has failed because we are attempting to mimic a process we do not in the least bit understand.
Minsky has a lot to say about this. We have no clue how the brain looks at a medium-grain resolution. Signal processing even at the dumb instinctive level is a total mystery and yet we try to reproduce it.
AI has largely focused on skipping the mess and going straight to the emulation of higher brain function (like language) but this is going to be a dead end.
We need to build an intelligence rather than mimic one.
I don't think AI will pass the Turing Test. That is unless it has been specifically trained to do so. It's going to be more alien than anything star trek has been able to come up with.
There are athiest Buddhists and Daoists. They use the spiritual practice and ignore the metaphysics. This isn't even a recent or particularly American development.
Also, you could worship and draw power from the void. That would kind of be awesome.
I'd still say no security is fine.
Third-world theives are sophisticated enough to format a hard drive before booting a system.
I've always loved the look of the Cray 2:
http://www.spikynorman.dsl.pipex.com/CrayWWWStuff/Criscan/Cray2cascade.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Cray2.jpg
Not only was it water cooled, but I think the encasement was designed by DEVO.
How is this insightful? Water cooling may never be feasable for you. Unless you count the datacenters that you use for networked applications (like... readings slashdot) or the large numerical processors that enable the science and engineering behind the crap you use every day.
Water cooling wasn't invented by overclockers. Cray used it in many of their production systems in the 70s and 80s and its use with CPUs goes further back than that.
The stack of chips is to increase the connectivity between the multiple cores and memory / bus. Many simulation applications don't break down into individually computable problems and the system has to be analyzed as a dynamic whole. Data throughput is essential for this sort of thing.
I am getting increasingly irked by the whole "but what about us NORMAL folks?" bit. Look around. Our society and just about every aspect of it is without any meaningful majority. If something affects a lot of people, even if you aren't one of them, it's important.
I'm not going to take your back of the envelope musing as reason to doubt the technology.
Water cooling has been used in HPC since the 60s. I imagine there's a good chance that these engineers know what they're doing.
Also, 50 microns isn't a "few molecules thick." A dust mite is about 200 microns across. You have microns and nanometers confused.
You're correct. But this isn't a special problem of OLPC and poor governments. It is merely the exact same problem that the wealthy world has with windows. Just look at the current round of copyright and internet policing legislation happening in Europe. Look at China.
This report phrases the problem as if it were specific to societies that are somehow undersophisticated.
Criticism of the report aside. The OLPC should get rid of that anti-user bull shit pronto. Thieves are going to know about it and circumvent it. As usual it makes the criminal's life only a little bit more complicated and greatly impacts the real owner.
Thank you.
This is a kind of report and study that I cannot stand. Laptops cause all these problems in the developed world for middle class kids as well. But nobody says suburban tweens shouldn't have the internet. I doubt very much that they are on the whole better supervised than Romanians or Africans, basing this on my own internet-connected undersupervsed childhood in the suburbs which I might add, turned out pretty much OK.
As for dictators? People in glass houses, come the hell on. Maybe not America too much, yet, but from every thing I seem to be reading about half of Europe, Big Brother has been on laptops in the developed world for quite some time.
There's such a tendency to hold the poor to standards we do not apply to ourselves. I find it kind of disgusting.
His last while his job is more than "spokesperson."
Nah, Minix, and simple reference implementations of things like compilers and shells.
The linux kernel is a lot for anyone to take in. It would fill a hefty shelf with technical docs. Minix can (and is) be explained in one book.
Better something they can pick apart.
This is why I quit webdev.
Developers were right to code to IE -- it's where the customers are. And they might have been right to ignore other browsers (at least at the time) if they only had so much time and had a deadline etc.
The Web seems to run in place. While the experience of using it does change gradually. There's some brand frikkin new technology showing up every six months that you're expected to learn.
I'm going to grad school and I think I'm going to wind up programming microcontrollers. Fun technical challenges, stationary target. Probably as close as you can get to being a 70s mainframe dev.