The UK is half "Europe" and half "America Jr." They track the US much more closely than the rest of Europe (if you hadn't noticed through the whole Iraq issue).
A nuke or two going off in the US would be terrible. But let's be glad we don't face annihilation today like we did during the cold war. Think about it, at the time there was a real risk of humanity being set back a thousand years, or according to some theories even disappearing. Terrorism is nothing next to that. They have nothing like the numbers of weapons or delivery systems to do what we or the Russians could do. India and Pakistan doesn't have them, and N. Korea doesn't have them. People just aren't comfortable without a certain amount of upset, and they enlarge or shrink whatever troubles they face to fill that void.
"A StringItem or ImageItem in BUTTON mode can be used to create a button-based user interface"
What platforms have you tried that on? It doesn't work on my PocketPC running IBM's J9 runtime, much to my disappointment. The button mode seems to be ignored entirely.
Sure there are workarounds. "Write once run anywhere" sounded good, "roll your own widget set," not so good.
Who cares whether it runs OS-X on it or not? Since it's locked down, it really doesn't matter what it's like to develop for - there will be no 3rd party apps.
Going on a tangent here, but I've been extremely frustrated by the failure of Java to provide a write-once-run-anywhere environment for PDAs. Turns out J2ME doesn't even support AWT, you must use a completely separate GUI API (MIDP), which is a pathetic piece of junk. Imagine a widget set without buttons!
Smartphones and PDAs are so frustrating, all that cool hardware and so little access to it.
Catch-22. If the content is not tied to a media (or is it the other way around), then that media will not likely be popular enough to become affordable.
They can dump both HD-DVD *and* Blu-Ray, for all I care, and movies in general. Just give me a reliable, high-capacity, cheap removable storage for my own data. Coupling the storage media with the content just turns it into a food fight between huge companies, and makes it ten times harder to move from one format to a superior one.
Not at all. SEI has no problem with bugs, so long as you follow an elaborate process to fix them, track them, and reconsider the process that lead to them. It's very process- rather than outcome-oriented.
Anyway, the shuttle flight control is only 420,000 lines of code (plus another 1.5M of support code). Nothing to sneeze at, but Visa and linux are said to have 50 and 30 million lines of code, respectively. So that's about two orders of magnitude! I'm also willing to bet the flight control software for the Shuttle hasn't changed much over the past 25 years, yet 275 people support it.
Are you proposing that we prevent people from giving water to Pakistanis because they might give some to terrorists?
No, of course not. I'm just saying the inspiration of this project may be diluted when some of the people who receive these laptops for their kids' education decide they'd rather make a quick $150 instead and hawk them. Maybe the OLPC project should make the "giver" and "receiver" laptops look different, so people can distinguish between "hey look at me I donated a laptop to a poor person and got this one as a token" (good), vs "hey look at me, a big shipment of laptops to Africa got diverted and I bought one off the back of a truck" (bad). And beyond that, I just hope people and especially the press have reasonable expectations for this, and realize it still may be doing good even if it doesn't transform all nations into clones of America overnight (which it won't). And to not be shocked if a few of the laptops don't end up being used to educate disadvantaged kids after all.
Everybody thinks this will be a repeat of the mp3 player market - Apple arrives late, but releases a good product with good marketing and becomes a sensation.
Maybe. But phones are not mp3 players. I've heard projections of a billion cellphones to be sold this year. The phones already on the market are already much better designed and marketed than Diamond Multimedia (rest their souls) ever managed with mp3s. There was no mp3 "Razr" on the market when Apple launched the iPod.
The underlying operating system is irrelevent so long as it works
But it doesn't, and it can't. The unsolvable issue for *every* open-source OS is device support and software support. "Works" for a user means they can buy a device and/or software and it will work (without hassle). Hardware developers have mostly spurned open source because they don't want their source open. Windows programs will never run well under Linux (with the release of Vista, Wine is losing more ground than it ever took). Even shockwave and quite a few video codecs don't work.
Linux hasn't failed to take over the world because it needs a microkernel or a different IP stack or whatever, so changing that stuff will never matter much. Mainly it's just because Microsoft is too entrenched.
If PBS were the only source of coffee mugs and book bags, I guess you might have a point.
I think your parent has a point. At some point we're going to see these on ebay, and we'll think, gee, I hope this wasn't one of the ones Pakistan bought to give some kid a future. And you just know there will be a Terrorist captured with one at some point, and it'll be a big story. Any way you look at it, there will be some retrospection on whether the laptops ended up doing what they were "supposed" to do, and somebody will use the word "misguided" to describe the whole effort. I hope they're wrong.
Even VMWare does not make use of the virtualization-specific processor instructions, because they claim they don't help:
32-bit VT works, is not tuned, and won't be officially supported unless it can offer the same performance that users of 32-bit VMs expect. Which probably won't be for another generation or two of VT-like instructions.
At this point, 32-bit VT is about as useful as support for a 387 math coprocessor on a Pentium - in both cases, the overhead of the support wipes out the gains. 64-bit VT is necessary because Intel CPUs need that to run 64-bit guests (and it is tuned such that performance is similar to 64-bit non-VT); 32-bit VT just isn't necessary, unless you have a reason why it should be?
Why do you want 32-bit VT support? In what case is 32-bit VT desirable?
Good luck finding content for that thing though! Could even a high-end gaming PC push that resolution at a decent rate? Is there even a monitor cable with that much bandwidth?
Just archiving that much data is bad enough, and google certainly has experience there. But what about making use of all that imagery? No human can look at that much data, and google's experience indexing the web seems only tangentially related.
Bandwidth being what it is these days, 3GB DVD ISO probably downloads faster than 1GB worth of individual packages for network install, because latency and umptillion requests to server eat a lot more into the latter.
That is an issue. I was a bit disappointed with the FC6 setup.iso that it didn't come preloaded with a mirror list (you have to type one in), and it would be really nice if it would concurrently download several packages from several mirrors, and concurrently download and install packages.
Slashdot Mirror
The UK is half "Europe" and half "America Jr." They track the US much more closely than the rest of Europe (if you hadn't noticed through the whole Iraq issue).
In what way is this not ball lighting? AFAIK, ball lightning exists only as a description and not a specific cause... until now.
A nuke or two going off in the US would be terrible. But let's be glad we don't face annihilation today like we did during the cold war. Think about it, at the time there was a real risk of humanity being set back a thousand years, or according to some theories even disappearing. Terrorism is nothing next to that. They have nothing like the numbers of weapons or delivery systems to do what we or the Russians could do. India and Pakistan doesn't have them, and N. Korea doesn't have them. People just aren't comfortable without a certain amount of upset, and they enlarge or shrink whatever troubles they face to fill that void.
Sure there are workarounds. "Write once run anywhere" sounded good, "roll your own widget set," not so good.
Going on a tangent here, but I've been extremely frustrated by the failure of Java to provide a write-once-run-anywhere environment for PDAs. Turns out J2ME doesn't even support AWT, you must use a completely separate GUI API (MIDP), which is a pathetic piece of junk. Imagine a widget set without buttons!
Smartphones and PDAs are so frustrating, all that cool hardware and so little access to it.
For apple to say that nobody but them will be allowed to write apps because only they can write decent software is the height of arrogance.
They can dump both HD-DVD *and* Blu-Ray, for all I care, and movies in general. Just give me a reliable, high-capacity, cheap removable storage for my own data. Coupling the storage media with the content just turns it into a food fight between huge companies, and makes it ten times harder to move from one format to a superior one.
Not at all. SEI has no problem with bugs, so long as you follow an elaborate process to fix them, track them, and reconsider the process that lead to them. It's very process- rather than outcome-oriented.
Anyway, the shuttle flight control is only 420,000 lines of code (plus another 1.5M of support code). Nothing to sneeze at, but Visa and linux are said to have 50 and 30 million lines of code, respectively. So that's about two orders of magnitude! I'm also willing to bet the flight control software for the Shuttle hasn't changed much over the past 25 years, yet 275 people support it.
Maybe. But phones are not mp3 players. I've heard projections of a billion cellphones to be sold this year. The phones already on the market are already much better designed and marketed than Diamond Multimedia (rest their souls) ever managed with mp3s. There was no mp3 "Razr" on the market when Apple launched the iPod.
Linux hasn't failed to take over the world because it needs a microkernel or a different IP stack or whatever, so changing that stuff will never matter much. Mainly it's just because Microsoft is too entrenched.
And that is why Linux beat BSD. The GPL prevented fragmentation.
I think your parent has a point. At some point we're going to see these on ebay, and we'll think, gee, I hope this wasn't one of the ones Pakistan bought to give some kid a future. And you just know there will be a Terrorist captured with one at some point, and it'll be a big story. Any way you look at it, there will be some retrospection on whether the laptops ended up doing what they were "supposed" to do, and somebody will use the word "misguided" to describe the whole effort. I hope they're wrong.
Interesting idea, though it is rather Fisher-Price in appearance.
Very cool! I'm not sure it counts as "self-replicating" since it doesn't assemble its own "children," but still very cool.
Good luck finding content for that thing though! Could even a high-end gaming PC push that resolution at a decent rate? Is there even a monitor cable with that much bandwidth?
Just archiving that much data is bad enough, and google certainly has experience there. But what about making use of all that imagery? No human can look at that much data, and google's experience indexing the web seems only tangentially related.
Dolls? Humbug. I'll be excited when the 3d printer can print up a working copy of itself. Then we can think about robot overlords.
Maybe SCO should sell bonds against the anticipated damages IBM will be paying once SCO wins the lawsuit... Ha ha ha ha.