"There are also three programming environments of different degrees of sophistication. Incredibly, one keystroke reveals the underlying code of almost any XO program or any Web page. Students can not only study how their favorite programs have been written, but even experiment by making changes. (If they make a mess of things, they can restore the original.)"
OK, you were asking for open hardware, but still I think that is pretty amazing.
The XO weighs over 3 pounds and is worse in every techinical respect (processor, memory, hard disk space, drives, etc).
RTA!
6-24 hours(!!!) of run-time
The XO's battery is good for 2000 charges and costs $10
The XO has a 200 DPI daylight visible screen(!!!)
It can run on a 1' square, $12 solar panel
Spill-proof keyboard
Just like the article says, this laptop has many significant advantages - not just over your $350 Compaq, but over my $3000 Thinkpad. I would really like to get one of these for my 9 year old - and I have no doubt my wife and probably myself would be stealing it often!
I think the most prevalant example of irrationality in modern western society is advertising. Make people feel good while saying the name of your product and they will buy it, whether or not they need it. The fact is we just aren't wired quite right.
As a software engineer, my question is why electric guitars even *need* to be in tune? Just pump out whatever frequency that string is *supposed* to play to the amp. Then "tuning" consists simply of finding the resonant frequency of each string (whatever it may be), then applying the right tweaking digitally.
Meh. This is a good example of social sciences run amok. You do some interesting little study, but then try to apply it to everything in the world. Here are some reasons why the analogy between parallel programming languages and choosing a flavor of jam (yeah, that's what the study was about) might not hold:
Jams are functionally equivalent; the choice is inconsequential. This is far from the case with programming languages, which have meaningful differences.
Programming languages solve important problems, so a choice will be made. You can't just give up on the whole idea and walk away as with specialty jams.
There are so many different aspects of a language, you can have a great number of them, yet they can all be very different from each other.
Significant resources are devoted to developing and choosing parallel languages. This greatly increases the number of choices that can be evaluated. Consider how much time you spend shopping for the right car vs. a jar of jam.
Now would be a terrible time to stop developing parallel languages, because the problem is just now coming to the forefront with the limits of single-core performance pushing back and multi-cores taking over. I'm suspect the parallel programing paradigm of the next 40 years hasn't been invented yet, and I'm almost certain it hasn't yet been popularized. So I say, let a hundred flowers bloom.
Webmail addresses the core causes of spam. It centralizes email, making it possible for providers to use statistical techniques to identify bulk senders and bulk messages (spam). It also centralizes email hosting so that more accounts are covered by higher-end spam filtering with dedicated administrators. It is no coincidence that gmail, yahoo mail, and hotmail provide better spam filtering than your average mom-and-pop isp, or end-user filter.
As for SMTP, when the majority of mail across the Internet is only exchanged among a few providers, the impossibility of moving beyond established mail protocols becomes much more feasible. If one gmail user sends mail to another, there is no real need for SMTP/POP/IMAP at all. Even today, if both end users access gmail using ssl, the email could easily never traverse the public Internet unencrypted, with all authentication handled by protocols not specific to mail. When Microsoft and Google are exchanging millions of emails between them, it is entirely feasible for them to special-case some protocol more efficient than SMTP. The point is, most of the hops traversed by each email using webmail are http, not email protocols. That marginalizes them and provides the only currently likely path of eliminating them for most emails.
You still see IPv6 as the future? I think not. It's been around long enough and didn't catch on.
As for IPv4 being the most perfect telecommunications protocol ever devised, I think it is. At least, there really are no challengers, since nothing else has ever achieved such massive deployment. That in itself is the biggest testament to IPv4.
So what changes are coming down the pike? Policy-wise, I do think there's a risk of national firewalls proliferating around the world, in fact I suspect they already exist in a sense, though for monitoring rather than filtering. I don't foresee any big sudden crackdowns in the West, rather a gradual erosion of privacy and consumer rights that may lead to the same place. Technology-wise, I think everything will just be natural extensions to today's Internet for the forseeable future. SMTP is often criticised as the weakest point in most users' Internet experience, but webmail is undercutting it (and effectively addressing SPAM).
I'm not sure what you mean, but I think it's about 10 years too late to accuse ARPAnet / Internet of poor planning. It already worked. It filled the earth with the first ubiquitous data backbone. I wouldn't be very surprised if it's still called "The Internet" 500 years from now.
I wasted hours trying to be able to develop java software for my PocketPC, and never did get it to work decently. There's no JRE preinstalled, no freely available JRE available for download, and to target a device you need some sort of device profile - which I never found for a plain old PocketPC! I ended up with IBM's J9 runtime, which I realized is designed for OEM's to preinstall on cellphones, and a big headache to get working on a PocketPC. After all that, it doesn't support Swing (or even AWT) anyways! There's a confusing alphabet soup of device types (CLDC?) and no matter what you do, all applications are forced into a cellphone template (MIDlets).
Long story short, I thought Java would be perfect for developing an app I could run on the desktop or PocketPC; instead it is a nightmare. I ended up writing my app on PerlCE, a port of perl to the PocketPC. Works for me, but it's nothing you could redistribute and has plenty of rough edges. In fact it turned out as a command-line app which wasn't really what I set out to accomplish.
Actually, PocketPC's in general are really going down the tubes. All the software Windows Mobile 5 is awful, unstable, and simplistic. It's so unstable as to be almost unusable. I think everybody at HP and Microsoft has moved on to smartphones, the PocketPC has a strong odor of decomposition about it. Sucks for those of us whose workplaces disallow cellphones.
The question isn't really whether whoever gets the spectrum is evil, but rather how well their interests align with those of the user base (you and me). Google is in a rather special situation because 1) they are not a network provider (like Verizon and Comcast, whose goal is maximize revenue from - yet minimize investment in - infrastructure), yet 2) google is not a normal content provider, either - mainly they provide links to other content, since their main product is advertising. What this means is that google has a unique business interest in encouraging new services - especially data services - that (i.e.) Verizon does not.
Here's the best paragraph from the article:
Will Google buy the spectrum? They certainly have enough spare cash to do so. If they do, it seems unlikely that they would operate the network themselves since it's a long way away from their core business. Instead, they would be likely to sublicense it to other players with the four conditions they originally hoped the FCC would impose [ensuring open services and open networks].
If this were to happen, I think it would be a good example of the free market working as intended. US cellphone companies are destroying much of the value of the spectrum they control in order to serve their own narrow interests (e.g. charging hundreds of dollars per megabyte for SMS messages). Since google's business model provides more value to more people, google has more cash on hand to win the bandwidth auction. With any luck this could all work out just right.
You know, I don't think I have any sympathy for the upset gamers on campus networks.
I don't know about sympathy, but it does sound like the university network is inadequate. I'd hate to see these admins in charge at FedEx... "there's just too darn many packages this Christmas, and most of them aren't important business documents anyways. I know, let's just throw out anything in wrapping paper and ribbons!"
four years worth of recon (TFA gave that as a time period for pre-strike operations) ought to give the terrorist enough information to know where these "random points" are.
If you haven't identified your vulnerabilities, randomization will not solve that problem for you, and nobody is saying it will. If that were true, randomization would be the silver bullet, which it is not. Does setting a strong password on your computer mean you're safe from all attacks? Of course not. Does that mean weak (non-random) passwords are fine? Of course not.
the MP4 files that iTunes sells are not an Apple proprietary format? It's the codec developed to replace MP3. It was developed by the same freaking people who developed MP3
Why don't they just offer mp3's then? A lot more people would want mp3's because they work with everything.
I just hope the emphasis remains on a scheduler that "does the right thing" instead of requiring manual specification of these things to get acceptable performance for most situations. (I'm sure there are cases where manually pegging particular processes to particular CPUs is a good thing, but I can't think of any offhand).
I've used Linux systems for years with no swap enabled, such as the laptop I'm currently on.
free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 3631056 1649840 1981216 0 96240 1264372
-/+ buffers/cache: 289228 3341828
Swap: 0 0 0
Mostly all swap does anymore is make the system run extremely slow when a berzerk application tries to allocate gigabytes of space. Granted, swap probably also spares a few megabytes of RAM for stuff that's loaded but never accessed - but I don't think that amount is substantial.
From a customer viewpoint, I like Vonage because it's cheaper than a local phone, but I can't say I've seen any particular improvement in the service for the three years that I've been a customer. It works fine. There are some features, such as separate voicemail boxes for family members, which I've waited in vain for all along. Instead they introduced speech-to-text but are charging extra for it. Totally automated services like that ought to be free add-ons to differentiate themselves from "old-fashioned" telephone and nickle-and-diming cellphone companies. I'm not sure what their long-term plan is. Simply bridging between the Internet and POTS can't be all that hard.
Re:Read between the lines
on
Halo 3 Review
·
· Score: 1
That would be the point of view of Xbox 360 owners only, correct?
Not if Halo 3 causes a surge in XBox 360 sales. My guess is it will.
Slashdot Mirror
"There are also three programming environments of different degrees of sophistication. Incredibly, one keystroke reveals the underlying code of almost any XO program or any Web page. Students can not only study how their favorite programs have been written, but even experiment by making changes. (If they make a mess of things, they can restore the original.)" OK, you were asking for open hardware, but still I think that is pretty amazing.
- 6-24 hours(!!!) of run-time
- The XO's battery is good for 2000 charges and costs $10
- The XO has a 200 DPI daylight visible screen(!!!)
- It can run on a 1' square, $12 solar panel
- Spill-proof keyboard
Just like the article says, this laptop has many significant advantages - not just over your $350 Compaq, but over my $3000 Thinkpad. I would really like to get one of these for my 9 year old - and I have no doubt my wife and probably myself would be stealing it often!I think the most prevalant example of irrationality in modern western society is advertising. Make people feel good while saying the name of your product and they will buy it, whether or not they need it. The fact is we just aren't wired quite right.
The kids are a problem. I've been thinking about each user his/her own VM, but they like to play games which don't work well in a VM.
Wow, you really have your users trained if they're buying you lunch for recovering the files you erased.
As a software engineer, my question is why electric guitars even *need* to be in tune? Just pump out whatever frequency that string is *supposed* to play to the amp. Then "tuning" consists simply of finding the resonant frequency of each string (whatever it may be), then applying the right tweaking digitally.
If this system is fast enough, it could re-tune between each strum so you can play an entire song on nothing but open chords!
Sooty air will block that nasty light pollution. Any light pollution more than just a couple miles from the observatory will be rendered harmless!
- Jams are functionally equivalent; the choice is inconsequential. This is far from the case with programming languages, which have meaningful differences.
- Programming languages solve important problems, so a choice will be made. You can't just give up on the whole idea and walk away as with specialty jams.
- There are so many different aspects of a language, you can have a great number of them, yet they can all be very different from each other.
- Significant resources are devoted to developing and choosing parallel languages. This greatly increases the number of choices that can be evaluated. Consider how much time you spend shopping for the right car vs. a jar of jam.
Now would be a terrible time to stop developing parallel languages, because the problem is just now coming to the forefront with the limits of single-core performance pushing back and multi-cores taking over. I'm suspect the parallel programing paradigm of the next 40 years hasn't been invented yet, and I'm almost certain it hasn't yet been popularized. So I say, let a hundred flowers bloom.As for SMTP, when the majority of mail across the Internet is only exchanged among a few providers, the impossibility of moving beyond established mail protocols becomes much more feasible. If one gmail user sends mail to another, there is no real need for SMTP/POP/IMAP at all. Even today, if both end users access gmail using ssl, the email could easily never traverse the public Internet unencrypted, with all authentication handled by protocols not specific to mail. When Microsoft and Google are exchanging millions of emails between them, it is entirely feasible for them to special-case some protocol more efficient than SMTP. The point is, most of the hops traversed by each email using webmail are http, not email protocols. That marginalizes them and provides the only currently likely path of eliminating them for most emails.
As for IPv4 being the most perfect telecommunications protocol ever devised, I think it is. At least, there really are no challengers, since nothing else has ever achieved such massive deployment. That in itself is the biggest testament to IPv4.
So what changes are coming down the pike? Policy-wise, I do think there's a risk of national firewalls proliferating around the world, in fact I suspect they already exist in a sense, though for monitoring rather than filtering. I don't foresee any big sudden crackdowns in the West, rather a gradual erosion of privacy and consumer rights that may lead to the same place. Technology-wise, I think everything will just be natural extensions to today's Internet for the forseeable future. SMTP is often criticised as the weakest point in most users' Internet experience, but webmail is undercutting it (and effectively addressing SPAM).
I'm not sure what you mean, but I think it's about 10 years too late to accuse ARPAnet / Internet of poor planning. It already worked. It filled the earth with the first ubiquitous data backbone. I wouldn't be very surprised if it's still called "The Internet" 500 years from now.
Long story short, I thought Java would be perfect for developing an app I could run on the desktop or PocketPC; instead it is a nightmare. I ended up writing my app on PerlCE, a port of perl to the PocketPC. Works for me, but it's nothing you could redistribute and has plenty of rough edges. In fact it turned out as a command-line app which wasn't really what I set out to accomplish.
Actually, PocketPC's in general are really going down the tubes. All the software Windows Mobile 5 is awful, unstable, and simplistic. It's so unstable as to be almost unusable. I think everybody at HP and Microsoft has moved on to smartphones, the PocketPC has a strong odor of decomposition about it. Sucks for those of us whose workplaces disallow cellphones.
I can't afford 1 pound, that's like $20 dollars now!! :)
Here's the best paragraph from the article:
If this were to happen, I think it would be a good example of the free market working as intended. US cellphone companies are destroying much of the value of the spectrum they control in order to serve their own narrow interests (e.g. charging hundreds of dollars per megabyte for SMS messages). Since google's business model provides more value to more people, google has more cash on hand to win the bandwidth auction. With any luck this could all work out just right.KITT was indestructible, dummy!
I just hope the emphasis remains on a scheduler that "does the right thing" instead of requiring manual specification of these things to get acceptable performance for most situations. (I'm sure there are cases where manually pegging particular processes to particular CPUs is a good thing, but I can't think of any offhand).
I've used Linux systems for years with no swap enabled, such as the laptop I'm currently on. free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 3631056 1649840 1981216 0 96240 1264372 -/+ buffers/cache: 289228 3341828 Swap: 0 0 0 Mostly all swap does anymore is make the system run extremely slow when a berzerk application tries to allocate gigabytes of space. Granted, swap probably also spares a few megabytes of RAM for stuff that's loaded but never accessed - but I don't think that amount is substantial.
From a customer viewpoint, I like Vonage because it's cheaper than a local phone, but I can't say I've seen any particular improvement in the service for the three years that I've been a customer. It works fine. There are some features, such as separate voicemail boxes for family members, which I've waited in vain for all along. Instead they introduced speech-to-text but are charging extra for it. Totally automated services like that ought to be free add-ons to differentiate themselves from "old-fashioned" telephone and nickle-and-diming cellphone companies. I'm not sure what their long-term plan is. Simply bridging between the Internet and POTS can't be all that hard.