Exposing some new APIs via Javascript isn't black magic. Phone, SMS, Camera, WebRTC, WebGL, all Javascript APIs that exist and can be tested today and have been in the works for a year or more. All the hardware access you would want is available in Javascript (for sufficiently authorized apps, obviously).
Writing a Spotify client as an OpenWebApp in pure-javascript is quite possible today. Preferably using something like Opus for audio, of course.
Why is it so hard to have decent spam filters for usenet? Seems like email has been solving this problem nicely for years and the News servers never copied any of it.
We hold an Article V convention, by having a supermajority of state legislatures (again) call for one. We were just a few states away in the early '80s, calling for a balanced budget amendment. At the convention, representatives would propose amendments (repeal 17, for instance) and those that made it through would go to a national vote.
There was actually a known-bug [1] on addons.mozilla.org that had search results for Thunderbird extensions returning a mix of (seemingly)Firefox and Thunderbird extensions. I believe this is the bug he was talking about. It was opened a year and a half ago.
The *new* addons site was rewritten and launched a few months back, and I don't know if it has this bug still.
[1] "Bug 325840 - Mozilla extensions that also "support" Thunderbird overwhelm real TB extensions"
That is only until Dumbledore dies, then all those who have been told the secret can repeat it. Mad Eye set spells on the house to make Snape not repeat it despite this.
An alternate answer is that, since Snape was a good guy all along, and the a trust-oriented charm like that would not be one Valdermort studied (Dumbledore talks about his indifference to general knowledge that did not directly serve his purpose), he could have concealed it or avoided the subject and gotten away... Bit of a stretch, seeing as the other death eaters could have brought it up in conversation...
Or, for that matter, why dementors could 'see' the three of them (I am thinking of when they were in hogsmead and they had the goat/stag cover-up) when they were under a cloak that was suppose to be make them so *completely* invisible. That seemed like a contradiction in the book, didn't it?
By the time Snape kills Dumbledore, the wand had already changed masters. Snape would have had to disarm/defeat Draco to have earned it at that point (the wand having transfered from Dumbledore to Draco only a few minutes earlier, when Draco disarmed him).
Check out apple's upcoming
XAR file format (released for download at opendarwin, but the site is down). The format 1. keeps metadata about the files in a separate file, so you can know about the file without uncompressing it. and 2. compresses each file separately.
The $65 increase has nothing to do with Windows. Windows was planned as an option since Fall (note the SD card slot, and Negroponte's reasoning for adding it). The price increase has to do with production, upping the processor (along with L1/L2 cache), ram, and flash memory on the board.
The advantage of widespread email encryption is that when most/all of your contacts encrypt your email by default, you can start marking plain text email as more likely being spam. Or the entire class of emails viruses that mail everyone in your contact list goes away... Or you could realize that personal information is arbitrarily easy to read because of email, and that using encryption to secure private communication from the world should be a brain dead simple decision.
which are devices that hardly fit the description of "rugged"..
Have you actually used one? Like, at all? The machines are quite "rugged". Or were you just making a baseless claim?
As for why not desktop machines? Power requirements and portability are two of the reasons.
You would be able to do that with this laptop, and the OLPC laptop. The "hacking locks" they put in place are meant to be disabled by the user if they want. They just want you to be smart enough to realize what you are doing when you say "no thanks, I'll take care of security myself."
I imagine many version of the OS will come up and this will be perfectly easy to do, even as a child receiving this machine. Choice, of course, is a good thing. There is a project to put Minix 3 on it, and Plan9 had a Google Summer of Code idea to put their OS on it, which would be pretty awesome. Not to mention Windows is said to be released for it (a Window mobile/ce-based version). I've even heard mumblings about putting a Gentoo-based 'core' in place of Fedora, but leave all the userland software in place.
OLPC does not want to sell the XO to the general public for a couple reasons:
1. 10 million customers takes a lot more work, and a lot more time, than 10 customers (that buying in quanities of >= 1million). 2. Selling to governments in bulk gets the laptops to a *lot* of kids fast. This is the goal, one laptop per child. 3. They have *always* said they would have a general consumer version produced (this announcement) 4. The UPS truck mentality. If the XO is *ONLY* given to children, then whenever you see it (either in Lybia or NYC), it better be in the hands of a child. No one steals UPS/USPS trucks, because they have a very specific and singular purpose and are easily recognized. Any XO-like machine that is sold to an adult (or the general consumer) must be visually different than the XO to be able to build this stigma.
Not if they're public domain, which applies just as much to digital versions.
The biggest cost of textbooks for countries interested in the OLPC (Mexico is the example I heard), is printing the hardcopy in sufficient quantity, not getting the material available for the book. A digital version makes replications costs near 0.
Beyond that, computers require a lot of maintenance.
Modern computers, yes. But they have things like moving parts (fans, harddrives) and high heat output... And Windows. All things OLPC does not
I believe the current estimate for the TCO of an OLPC laptop is $1000.
That figure is almost surely from olpcnews.com... A site that exxagerated and dreamed up most of the figures used in the calculation. There is no reason to believe the figure they produced.
And you have to get one for every person, unlike books, where you only need to get enough to share around.
True. But with 1 laptop, you have, essentially intinite literature resources available to you. The entirety of Project Gutenberg, among others. A single book is only a single book.
Beyond that, computers require a lot of maintenance.
True. A book will last longer. But again, the advantages of a digital library that last for 5 years(roughly the expected lifetime of the laptop) is greater than a single book that lasts 50.
It has a dual-mode screen. Color, and B&W. In Black and White mode, it is 200dpi. No one else (in the mainstream) has this style display because it was made, from scratch, for the OLPC.
There is a wikiarticle describing it's specs available.
The laptop hardware is made to be pretty rugged, specifically there are no internal moving parts. Only thing that move are (1)The monitor joint (2) the keyboard's keys (3) the 'bunny ear' wireless antennae.
As for protecting the LCD? Well, the plastic casing is slightly thicker than on standard laptops (2 MM, I think) and should give it a better resistance to bumps and drops. But it is important to note how well these laptops have traditionally been taken care of. Nicholas Negroponte (the MIT professor from the Media Lab that is heading the OLPC) has repeatedly told stories of how these laptops are often the brightest source of light in the house, and treated as if they were priceless.
American children may take laptops for granted, thinking their parents will simply replace it if it broke. This does not seem to be the case in the target countries of the OLPC
One thing I was wondering while watching the video is that it seems there is no way to open a terminal. I agree that the interface MUST be dumbed down a lot but I am also completely sure that there MUST be a terminal in order to access more "complex" things in the computer
There is a terminal activity. It does not, by default, have a frame icon (bottom left row of icons). It is opened with a key combination.
A terminal and a python enabled system would be enough (IMHO).
Which is also included An activity's UI, Sugar itself, etc, is all written in Python and is the 'blessed language' for development on the OLPC. Backend code (Abiword, Gecko) are obviously not Python, though.
As of a few weeks ago, the OLPC project isn't using LinuxBIOS anymore, they have moved to OpenFirmware from Sun, which was recently open sourced. Sorry to burst the bubble.
There are "A-test" out in circulation. About 500 in the world. B-test boards are pretty rare (relatively) and are mostly in the lab still. The full laptops betas (case, display, etc) are being assembled for the first time this month.
The A-test board is likely what LinuxBIOS has, because b-test and the new systems are using an OpenFirmware-based solution.
A late stage beta system (full display, case and hardware) is being built as we speak. The first 1000 machines will be in hands of developers, test countries and the like before the end of the month.
Extra bonus points for mentioning that Microsoft sold the stock not long after the investment for a profit. The deal was entirely symbolic outside the pantent dispute resolution that you mentioned.
Also, the Office and IE applications were part of the same dispute. IE as the default browser, even, was also decided in this whole mess. It was a (I believe) 5 year agreement to keep supporting Office and other applications on the Mac platform which has since ended and been renewed in spirit by the Mac BU publicly at a previous WWDC. It is not often realized that Microsoft is one of Apple's closest, largest and most successful third-party developers, and both benefit greatly from the relationship. The light-hearted jabbing the Steve Jobs does makes it appear otherwise to those not entirely in-the-know.
Slashdot Mirror
https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI
Exposing some new APIs via Javascript isn't black magic. Phone, SMS, Camera, WebRTC, WebGL, all Javascript APIs that exist and can be tested today and have been in the works for a year or more. All the hardware access you would want is available in Javascript (for sufficiently authorized apps, obviously).
Writing a Spotify client as an OpenWebApp in pure-javascript is quite possible today. Preferably using something like Opus for audio, of course.
Why is it so hard to have decent spam filters for usenet? Seems like email has been solving this problem nicely for years and the News servers never copied any of it.
We hold an Article V convention, by having a supermajority of state legislatures (again) call for one. We were just a few states away in the early '80s, calling for a balanced budget amendment. At the convention, representatives would
propose amendments (repeal 17, for instance) and those that made it through would go to a national vote.
nu uh!
(its funny. Laugh.)
There was actually a known-bug [1] on addons.mozilla.org that had search results for Thunderbird extensions returning a mix of (seemingly)Firefox and Thunderbird extensions. I believe this is the bug he was talking about. It was opened a year and a half ago.
The *new* addons site was rewritten and launched a few months back, and I don't know if it has this bug still.
[1] "Bug 325840 - Mozilla extensions that also "support" Thunderbird overwhelm real TB extensions"
That is only until Dumbledore dies, then all those who have been told the secret can repeat it. Mad Eye set spells on the house to make Snape not repeat it despite this.
An alternate answer is that, since Snape was a good guy all along, and the a trust-oriented charm like that would not be one Valdermort studied (Dumbledore talks about his indifference to general knowledge that did not directly serve his purpose), he could have concealed it or avoided the subject and gotten away... Bit of a stretch, seeing as the other death eaters could have brought it up in conversation...
Or, for that matter, why dementors could 'see' the three of them (I am thinking of when they were in hogsmead and they had the goat/stag cover-up) when they were under a cloak that was suppose to be make them so *completely* invisible. That seemed like a contradiction in the book, didn't it?
By the time Snape kills Dumbledore, the wand had already changed masters. Snape would have had to disarm/defeat Draco to have earned it at that point (the wand having transfered from Dumbledore to Draco only a few minutes earlier, when Draco disarmed him).
The Keynote last January had Jobs talking about using a Yahoo IMAP account (and now gmail, I think) so that you can get Push E-mail.
Look at your keyboard. There is a reason it is called the Q-W-E-R-T-Y layout.
Check out apple's upcoming XAR file format (released for download at opendarwin, but the site is down). The format 1. keeps metadata about the files in a separate file, so you can know about the file without uncompressing it. and 2. compresses each file separately.
The $65 increase has nothing to do with Windows. Windows was planned as an option since Fall (note the SD card slot, and Negroponte's reasoning for adding it). The price increase has to do with production, upping the processor (along with L1/L2 cache), ram, and flash memory on the board.
The advantage of widespread email encryption is that when most/all of your contacts encrypt your email by default, you can start marking plain text email as more likely being spam. Or the entire class of emails viruses that mail everyone in your contact list goes away... Or you could realize that personal information is arbitrarily easy to read because of email, and that using encryption to secure private communication from the world should be a brain dead simple decision.
which are devices that hardly fit the description of "rugged"..
Have you actually used one? Like, at all? The machines are quite "rugged". Or were you just making a baseless claim?
As for why not desktop machines? Power requirements and portability are two of the reasons.
You would be able to do that with this laptop, and the OLPC laptop. The "hacking locks" they put in place are meant to be disabled by the user if they want. They just want you to be smart enough to realize what you are doing when you say "no thanks, I'll take care of security myself."
I imagine many version of the OS will come up and this will be perfectly easy to do, even as a child receiving this machine. Choice, of course, is a good thing. There is a project to put Minix 3 on it, and Plan9 had a Google Summer of Code idea to put their OS on it, which would be pretty awesome. Not to mention Windows is said to be released for it (a Window mobile/ce-based version). I've even heard mumblings about putting a Gentoo-based 'core' in place of Fedora, but leave all the userland software in place.
OLPC does not want to sell the XO to the general public for a couple reasons:
1. 10 million customers takes a lot more work, and a lot more time, than 10 customers (that buying in quanities of >= 1million).
2. Selling to governments in bulk gets the laptops to a *lot* of kids fast. This is the goal, one laptop per child.
3. They have *always* said they would have a general consumer version produced (this announcement)
4. The UPS truck mentality. If the XO is *ONLY* given to children, then whenever you see it (either in Lybia or NYC), it better be in the hands of a child. No one steals UPS/USPS trucks, because they have a very specific and singular purpose and are easily recognized. Any XO-like machine that is sold to an adult (or the general consumer) must be visually different than the XO to be able to build this stigma.
Not if they're public domain, which applies just as much to digital versions.
The biggest cost of textbooks for countries interested in the OLPC (Mexico is the example I heard), is printing the hardcopy in sufficient quantity, not getting the material available for the book. A digital version makes replications costs near 0.
Beyond that, computers require a lot of maintenance.
Modern computers, yes. But they have things like moving parts (fans, harddrives) and high heat output... And Windows. All things OLPC does not
I believe the current estimate for the TCO of an OLPC laptop is $1000.
That figure is almost surely from olpcnews.com... A site that exxagerated and dreamed up most of the figures used in the calculation. There is no reason to believe the figure they produced.
And you have to get one for every person, unlike books, where you only need to get enough to share around.
True. But with 1 laptop, you have, essentially intinite literature resources available to you. The entirety of Project Gutenberg, among others. A single book is only a single book.
Beyond that, computers require a lot of maintenance.
True. A book will last longer. But again, the advantages of a digital library that last for 5 years(roughly the expected lifetime of the laptop) is greater than a single book that lasts 50.
It has a dual-mode screen. Color, and B&W. In Black and White mode, it is 200dpi. No one else (in the mainstream) has this style display because it was made, from scratch, for the OLPC. There is a wikiarticle describing it's specs available.
The laptop hardware is made to be pretty rugged, specifically there are no internal moving parts. Only thing that move are (1)The monitor joint (2) the keyboard's keys (3) the 'bunny ear' wireless antennae.
As for protecting the LCD? Well, the plastic casing is slightly thicker than on standard laptops (2 MM, I think) and should give it a better resistance to bumps and drops. But it is important to note how well these laptops have traditionally been taken care of. Nicholas Negroponte (the MIT professor from the Media Lab that is heading the OLPC) has repeatedly told stories of how these laptops are often the brightest source of light in the house, and treated as if they were priceless.
American children may take laptops for granted, thinking their parents will simply replace it if it broke. This does not seem to be the case in the target countries of the OLPC
There is a terminal activity. It does not, by default, have a frame icon (bottom left row of icons). It is opened with a key combination.
A terminal and a python enabled system would be enough (IMHO).
Which is also included An activity's UI, Sugar itself, etc, is all written in Python and is the 'blessed language' for development on the OLPC. Backend code (Abiword, Gecko) are obviously not Python, though.
As of a few weeks ago, the OLPC project isn't using LinuxBIOS anymore, they have moved to OpenFirmware from Sun, which was recently open sourced. Sorry to burst the bubble.
There are "A-test" out in circulation. About 500 in the world. B-test boards are pretty rare (relatively) and are mostly in the lab still. The full laptops betas (case, display, etc) are being assembled for the first time this month.
The A-test board is likely what LinuxBIOS has, because b-test and the new systems are using an OpenFirmware-based solution.
A late stage beta system (full display, case and hardware) is being built as we speak. The first 1000 machines will be in hands of developers, test countries and the like before the end of the month.
How about the Motofone? No linux, but exactly what you want. Cheap, reliable and has an e-ink display to boot.
Extra bonus points for mentioning that Microsoft sold the stock not long after the investment for a profit. The deal was entirely symbolic outside the pantent dispute resolution that you mentioned.
Also, the Office and IE applications were part of the same dispute. IE as the default browser, even, was also decided in this whole mess. It was a (I believe) 5 year agreement to keep supporting Office and other applications on the Mac platform which has since ended and been renewed in spirit by the Mac BU publicly at a previous WWDC. It is not often realized that Microsoft is one of Apple's closest, largest and most successful third-party developers, and both benefit greatly from the relationship. The light-hearted jabbing the Steve Jobs does makes it appear otherwise to those not entirely in-the-know.