why is everybody so excited about getting rid of spinning media?
Because the spinning media is what makes my modern Dual Core computer feel as sluggish as an old Windows98 laptop. Access time on HDD is basically the single largest bottleneck current day computers have when it comes to responsiveness. It just doesn't matter how fast your CPU and GPU are when they are both idling waiting for the HDD to catch up.
I know I'll be keeping my movies and files handy right here, thanks.
Streaming a DVD quality movies already works quite fine with a basic 2mbit connection, now uploading it will be a bit troublesome and I don't think it is that easy to get 1TB of online storage for cheap, but at least in principle, it makes perfect sense to have stuff stored in the "cloud" and only cached on your drive. Not because buzzwords are cool, but simply because you want to access your data from different devices anyway, so having a central server instead of manually copying stuff around is a lot more comfortable. It can of course also acts as backup and version control.
Now moving your apps into the cloud is a complete different thing and I wouldn't recommend it for most things, but storage has been non-local on a file server in every larger network already anyway, not a big jump to scale good practices to the Internet.
You can use them all you want.. it doesnt help even if you originally had 100 million polygons but culled that set down to only 1 million polygons and sent them to the renderer.
What exactly stops you from culling down further? If you don't even have a million pixels on the screen, whats the point of throwing millions of polygons to the screen?
It isn't a community developed distro, they accept outside help but the direction of the distro is set entirely by Shuttleworth
Which is a good thing, as the community is pretty much incapable to fix anything that would divert from the "standard" way of doing things. They want what they are used to and most of the time what they are used to is the ugly and complicated way to do things.
Just look at what happened when he moved the buttons to the left and the community protested. Did he care?
So you want people that are to stupid to type a single line into their terminal to call gconftool to change that stuff back to design your OS? The button order is a 100% total complete non-issue for anybody who has a little bit of a clue.
Not at all, the left side buttons are part of his plan to copy OSX.
Probably, but there are worse things to copy.
Shuttleworth talks about the contributions of others but doesn't use the word 'linux' once on the Ubuntu home page.
Linux is only a tiny part of the whole system, no need to plaster its name all around and create confusion. Don't you remember the "My Linux 6.0 is broken" posts from people who couldn't tell the difference between Linux and their Distribution? Beside, it is not like they hide it, its right there on their About page.
All game engines have a renderer behind them, by it OpenGL, DirectX, etc... these API's do not reduce detail/etc.
So what? That doesn't stop you from using space partitioning, LODs or other tricks. You simply don't need a million polygons to render a round sphere, a geometry shader can do that for you. It would sure be nice if you could, but if given the choice of implementing LOD or throwing away all your graphics hardware and software and doing it all over again in raytracing, I think doing LODs will probably be the better answer for quite a while.
We are talking about O(dynamic objects) here, not O(triangles).. which is why many videos of realtime raytracing since 2007 or so have included.. dynamic scenes.. such as the one linked to in this article.. which I guess you didn't watch.
We are talking about games here, not about moving a single object around. Games have hundreds of objects and easily thousands of particles flying around all over the place, they also have vertex shader running the bone deformation on every organic looking thing around and a physics engine crumpling your car. That is quite a different thing then having a tech demo where one object gets moved a little a bit.
One of the advantages of ray tracing is that you don't have to build everything out of triangles; you can have real continuous curves.
Real continuous curves are pretty much useless for gaming, as they are an artificial restriction that really doesn't help much with anything, unless its CAD or you want to fit your game into 64KiB.
It's analogous to the difference between raster and vector graphics.
Vector is only good for low detail stuff like logos, if you want to get photorealism you go with pixels.
Exactly, the thing with DLC is that it comes in so small packages that it is practically impossible for it to do anything meaningful. I don't care if it costs $3, $5 or $10, give me back the old $30 add-ons that actually felt like proper extension of the game and where long enough to actually do something. Most DLC just feels like an additional level, instead of an additional small story arc.
LOD doesnt absolve the scaling problem. Lets say you have a system set up for 25% LOD versions of the geometry, but then double the number of polygons in the geometry.. well you have also doubled up the polygons in the LOD versions as well.
A LOD only needs enough polygons to look good on screen, if you add more detail that isn't visible from a distance, the LODs polygon count doesn't need to increase at all. In practice this basically means that you only need to render polygons larger then a pixel, as anything subpixel is lost anyway, and if you look at the tech specs of a modern GPU you'll see that they can already render more polygons then you have pixels on the screen.
I think the biggest one that you missed is the much higher cost of anti-aliasing.. for rasterizers, anti-aliasing techniques pretty much fall right out of it..
There are post-processing algorithms for faking anti-aliasing, already used in current day console games. Might not look as pretty as real anti-aliasing, but might be a viable trade-off for raytracing.
for rasterizers every doubling of visible geometry doubles the computational resources required.. but for raytracers increasing geometry can almost be shrugged off as inconsequential...
A raytracer is only fast for static scenes, if you have something dynamic and need to update your space partitioning for the raytracer, the whole O(log n) magic kind of falls apart.
A rasterizer would have to deal with each and every triangle in that chandelier.
Or it could just do LOD with a geometry shader on the GPU.
When the polygon counts do get high enough, there will be no looking back.
The problem is that you don't just want high polygon counts, but high polygon counts for dynamic objects. And ray tracing itself has its strength in static objects, as soon as stuff moves and deforms, ray tracing runs into quite a few issues, not necessary unsolvable issues, but that demo was rather lacking in that aspect as the particle system looked like complete garbage compared to todays games.
Or to put it another way: The job of a tech demo is to blow me away, not present something that needs a server farm to run and looks worse then a $200 Xbox360.
Actually, no, the raytracing shown in that demo isn't awesome, it is rather primitive and ugly. You can render shiny spheres with it and static high polygon objects, but basically nothing else.
The stuff that you need to make graphics look good is global illumination and that demo had none of that. Todays games on the other side start to get there, you can already find realtime ambient occlusion in some games, you can get soft shadows and there have been tech demos even showing realtime photon mapping. And of course there is a lot of post-processing trickery like crepuscular rays that make things look good.
At a certain polygon count raytracing may have advantages and for many of the advanced global illumination stuff you also end up tracing rays in one form or the other. But the demo shown demonstrated none of that, it was basically your grandfathers primitive ray tracing. Not exactly impressive by todays gaming standards, especially since it even failed to get basic stuff right, like the particle effects which looking ugly by last-gen standards.
The podcast episode Richard Wrangham - Rediscovering Fire discusses the issue. As far as I remember basically cooking makes food easier to chew and increases its calories. Thus we get more energy, while at the same time saving a lot of time from the chewing.
Still, you go one drinking your deer piss and whatnot... I'll stick with my purified drinking water.
Not all water sources in nature are the same. Just because you can drink the water from a spring, doesn't mean you can also drink the water from the a puddle where a dead dear is floating in.
Most Homo Sapiens cannot safely drink water that hasn't been purified anymore.
Purification is needed isn't because Homo Sapiens can't survive without, but because we have to many people and to little natural grown resources. Some hundred thousand years ago you had far fewer humans and thus could simply go around and search for wild growing food and clean water, if you try that with thousands or millions of people in a rather small area, you quickly have exhausted all natural grown resources.
How is believing in two inconsistent theories of the universe view not the sign of a mental illness?
That's Cognitive dissonance, not mental illness and the human brain is able to work around such lapses in logic for most part quite fine by not analysing every tiny bit of information logically and doing things like confirmation bias and such.
Nope, it's an interesting gimmick, but unless HDR displays enter common use, just a gimmick.
HDR is in large part about post processing, not about reproducing the difference in brightness, as no monitor in the near future will be good enough to say reproduce the massive light from the sun. So there will always be a cut-off, it just might be a bit further out then it is today. Post processing on the other side benefits immediately from HDR.
One thing however missing even with todays displays is just shipping the HDR information in the first place. Tone mapping is something that really should be happening on the client, instead of just receiving the already tone mapped non-HDR information.
Imagine an image not using an integer from 0 to 255 to store color information, but a float. That is basically the core of HDR (in reality it might not be a real float, but just a large integer). This allows you to save the difference between looking in the sun and looking on a white sheet of paper, so instead of both getting the value 255,255,255 (aka white), the paper will end up with a small number and the sun with a really big one, properly recording the different amount of photons each of these throws at you.
In practice, as there are not yet cameras that can directly capture HDR, this effect is achieved by stacking multiple different exposures from a normal camera to reconstruct the higher dynamic range.
What you see on Flickr and in this video under the label "HDR" however is not really HDR. As the video you get is a normal one, clamped to the old range of 0-255, by a process called tone-mapping. This works by analysing the HDR data and then basically giving different brightnesses to different areas of the image, so that no part of the image ends up under- or overexposed. Different tone mapping algorithms will give you different results, so often you won't get to see a more realistic image, but one with overly bright colors and unrealistic contrast.
Millions of people play MMOs without letting them take over their lives.
Millions of people eat peanuts all the time without getting hurt, yet people with Peanut allergy might die from it. People simply are not all the same and while some people might be just fine with MMOs, other might not. And in this case the important part is that NCsoft very likely has the data to actually tell the difference between people that run into issues and people who don't and they decided to just ignore those with addiction issues. If that is the case, is that negligence? I don't know, thats but it certainly isn't exactly a good way to deal with addiction.
Man Ubuntu's cycle runs fast if they are already releasing another version. Is there any particular advantage to having a new OS every half-year (versus Apple's two year cycle or Microsoft's 3-4 year cycle)?
A Microsoft Windows or Apple OSX release is just the OS, a Ubuntu release is the OS *and* basically all the software you'll ever use. Fast release cycles simply means that you will get new software and hardware drivers quickly. On Windows and OSX software and drivers is updated independently from the core, so it doesn't matter if the OS is a few years old.
Now of course not having a separation between OS and normal software is kind of stupid, but thats the way Linux has been for a long long while.
Stop being a "prostitution is no initiation of force therefore it should be legal therefore it is OK" libertard and instead ask "Is it moral in general to pay for prostitutes?"
The proper question would be: "Does making it illegal improve their and everybody else's life?", arguing from morals is something that should belongs into a church, not into law making.
I realise that personal responsibility is out of fashion these days
And that is a good thing, as it is is used far to often to just ignore problems instead of fixing them.
but NCsoft is not responsible for this person playing too much lineage.
NCsoft is directly responsible for that. If there wouldn't be NCsoft he technically simply couldn't play LineageII, it is as simple as that. NCsoft is a necessary link in the causal chain that caused him to play to much of this game, of course there are also other elements that caused him to play to much of the game (easily addicted personality, etc.), but none of that makes the part that NCsoft played in his addiction go away.
Now of course if they are legally liable is a completly different matter, with cigarettes for example we get all those warnings about direct heath risks, but I don't think we get any warnings about potential addiction issues, so it might very well be that addiction is simply an accepted side effect that doesn't need to be warned about in a legal sense. But there is really no question that they share some responsibility for what their game is doing to the people playing it, as they are the ones keeping the servers up and running.
And why exactly shouldn't NCsoft we responsible for their actions or lack their off too?
Assume for a moment that MMORPGs can be addictive for some people and assume further that NCsoft has hard data on that. Then that means that they would knowingly let people run into addiction issues and do nothing about it, quite the opposite, they would happily continue to collect the monthly fee. Isn't that negligence or at least not far off? Especially considering that it would be rather simple to do something about it (present a warning after more then X hours a month, start chat with counsellor, lock account or something else).
If you distribute something that destroys peoples life and you know about that (at 11h/day over 5 years it should be rather obvious), you should at least take some responsibility.
Wikileaks takes documents that are provided to them, often stolen and just throws them up on a website without investigation or reporting.
They do verify that the documents they get are legit before publishing them.
They edited the video of the Apache so it'd fit their worldview.
So first you want investigation and reporting, and when they do it you complain that they didn't just throw the unedited material on their website? Way to go logic. And oh btw. the unedited video has been available the whole time.
Replace the LCD backlight for example, the display hinge or the keyboard or whatever else is broken. You can't take the motherboard apart, but pretty much everything else on the OLPC.
Apparently not. Did you even read the slashdot summary? It links to a site that shows you how to do it.
That's what I called "special training", you are not going to take these things apart without damage unless you already know what to expect. And of course you might need to grab an unusual triwing screwdriver or torx security bit or whatever, which basically serves no other purpose then making disassembly harder.
So, instead they should should make it a huge beast so tiny percentage of users can conveniently open it?
The by far smallest piece of electronic I have is my wrist watch and I can take that apart by simply unscrewing four screws. On a device the size of an Xbox360 there would be tons of room for some proper screws, instead of all those snap-in plastics stuff.
Because that's going to be one huge and heavy laptop.
My OLPC likes to disagree, that thing is easy to open up, in fact so easy that children can do it with a single screwdriver. It also comes with a few additional unused screws in the case, in case you lose some.
The consoles are serviceable - how else do you think the companies' technicians service them?
With special training and equipment. Just look at a disassembly of an Xbox 360 Slim, that thing is way more complex to disassemble then it would need to when properly designed.
Slashdot Mirror
why is everybody so excited about getting rid of spinning media?
Because the spinning media is what makes my modern Dual Core computer feel as sluggish as an old Windows98 laptop. Access time on HDD is basically the single largest bottleneck current day computers have when it comes to responsiveness. It just doesn't matter how fast your CPU and GPU are when they are both idling waiting for the HDD to catch up.
I know I'll be keeping my movies and files handy right here, thanks.
Streaming a DVD quality movies already works quite fine with a basic 2mbit connection, now uploading it will be a bit troublesome and I don't think it is that easy to get 1TB of online storage for cheap, but at least in principle, it makes perfect sense to have stuff stored in the "cloud" and only cached on your drive. Not because buzzwords are cool, but simply because you want to access your data from different devices anyway, so having a central server instead of manually copying stuff around is a lot more comfortable. It can of course also acts as backup and version control.
Now moving your apps into the cloud is a complete different thing and I wouldn't recommend it for most things, but storage has been non-local on a file server in every larger network already anyway, not a big jump to scale good practices to the Internet.
People would then just end up calling it GNU, as GNU Image Processor is to unwieldy, which would lead to plenty of confusion down the line.
You can use them all you want.. it doesnt help even if you originally had 100 million polygons but culled that set down to only 1 million polygons and sent them to the renderer.
What exactly stops you from culling down further? If you don't even have a million pixels on the screen, whats the point of throwing millions of polygons to the screen?
It isn't a community developed distro, they accept outside help but the direction of the distro is set entirely by Shuttleworth
Which is a good thing, as the community is pretty much incapable to fix anything that would divert from the "standard" way of doing things. They want what they are used to and most of the time what they are used to is the ugly and complicated way to do things.
Just look at what happened when he moved the buttons to the left and the community protested. Did he care?
So you want people that are to stupid to type a single line into their terminal to call gconftool to change that stuff back to design your OS? The button order is a 100% total complete non-issue for anybody who has a little bit of a clue.
Not at all, the left side buttons are part of his plan to copy OSX.
Probably, but there are worse things to copy.
Shuttleworth talks about the contributions of others but doesn't use the word 'linux' once on the Ubuntu home page.
Linux is only a tiny part of the whole system, no need to plaster its name all around and create confusion. Don't you remember the "My Linux 6.0 is broken" posts from people who couldn't tell the difference between Linux and their Distribution? Beside, it is not like they hide it, its right there on their About page.
All game engines have a renderer behind them, by it OpenGL, DirectX, etc... these API's do not reduce detail/etc.
So what? That doesn't stop you from using space partitioning, LODs or other tricks. You simply don't need a million polygons to render a round sphere, a geometry shader can do that for you. It would sure be nice if you could, but if given the choice of implementing LOD or throwing away all your graphics hardware and software and doing it all over again in raytracing, I think doing LODs will probably be the better answer for quite a while.
We are talking about O(dynamic objects) here, not O(triangles) .. which is why many videos of realtime raytracing since 2007 or so have included .. dynamic scenes .. such as the one linked to in this article .. which I guess you didn't watch.
We are talking about games here, not about moving a single object around. Games have hundreds of objects and easily thousands of particles flying around all over the place, they also have vertex shader running the bone deformation on every organic looking thing around and a physics engine crumpling your car. That is quite a different thing then having a tech demo where one object gets moved a little a bit.
One of the advantages of ray tracing is that you don't have to build everything out of triangles; you can have real continuous curves.
Real continuous curves are pretty much useless for gaming, as they are an artificial restriction that really doesn't help much with anything, unless its CAD or you want to fit your game into 64KiB.
It's analogous to the difference between raster and vector graphics.
Vector is only good for low detail stuff like logos, if you want to get photorealism you go with pixels.
Exactly, the thing with DLC is that it comes in so small packages that it is practically impossible for it to do anything meaningful. I don't care if it costs $3, $5 or $10, give me back the old $30 add-ons that actually felt like proper extension of the game and where long enough to actually do something. Most DLC just feels like an additional level, instead of an additional small story arc.
LOD doesnt absolve the scaling problem. Lets say you have a system set up for 25% LOD versions of the geometry, but then double the number of polygons in the geometry.. well you have also doubled up the polygons in the LOD versions as well.
A LOD only needs enough polygons to look good on screen, if you add more detail that isn't visible from a distance, the LODs polygon count doesn't need to increase at all. In practice this basically means that you only need to render polygons larger then a pixel, as anything subpixel is lost anyway, and if you look at the tech specs of a modern GPU you'll see that they can already render more polygons then you have pixels on the screen.
I think the biggest one that you missed is the much higher cost of anti-aliasing.. for rasterizers, anti-aliasing techniques pretty much fall right out of it..
There are post-processing algorithms for faking anti-aliasing, already used in current day console games. Might not look as pretty as real anti-aliasing, but might be a viable trade-off for raytracing.
for rasterizers every doubling of visible geometry doubles the computational resources required.. but for raytracers increasing geometry can almost be shrugged off as inconsequential...
A raytracer is only fast for static scenes, if you have something dynamic and need to update your space partitioning for the raytracer, the whole O(log n) magic kind of falls apart.
A rasterizer would have to deal with each and every triangle in that chandelier.
Or it could just do LOD with a geometry shader on the GPU.
When the polygon counts do get high enough, there will be no looking back.
The problem is that you don't just want high polygon counts, but high polygon counts for dynamic objects. And ray tracing itself has its strength in static objects, as soon as stuff moves and deforms, ray tracing runs into quite a few issues, not necessary unsolvable issues, but that demo was rather lacking in that aspect as the particle system looked like complete garbage compared to todays games.
Or to put it another way: The job of a tech demo is to blow me away, not present something that needs a server farm to run and looks worse then a $200 Xbox360.
Everybody agrees that ray tracing is just awesome
Actually, no, the raytracing shown in that demo isn't awesome, it is rather primitive and ugly. You can render shiny spheres with it and static high polygon objects, but basically nothing else.
The stuff that you need to make graphics look good is global illumination and that demo had none of that. Todays games on the other side start to get there, you can already find realtime ambient occlusion in some games, you can get soft shadows and there have been tech demos even showing realtime photon mapping. And of course there is a lot of post-processing trickery like crepuscular rays that make things look good.
At a certain polygon count raytracing may have advantages and for many of the advanced global illumination stuff you also end up tracing rays in one form or the other. But the demo shown demonstrated none of that, it was basically your grandfathers primitive ray tracing. Not exactly impressive by todays gaming standards, especially since it even failed to get basic stuff right, like the particle effects which looking ugly by last-gen standards.
Cite?
The podcast episode Richard Wrangham - Rediscovering Fire discusses the issue. As far as I remember basically cooking makes food easier to chew and increases its calories. Thus we get more energy, while at the same time saving a lot of time from the chewing.
Still, you go one drinking your deer piss and whatnot ... I'll stick with my purified drinking water.
Not all water sources in nature are the same. Just because you can drink the water from a spring, doesn't mean you can also drink the water from the a puddle where a dead dear is floating in.
Most Homo Sapiens cannot safely drink water that hasn't been purified anymore.
Purification is needed isn't because Homo Sapiens can't survive without, but because we have to many people and to little natural grown resources. Some hundred thousand years ago you had far fewer humans and thus could simply go around and search for wild growing food and clean water, if you try that with thousands or millions of people in a rather small area, you quickly have exhausted all natural grown resources.
How is believing in two inconsistent theories of the universe view not the sign of a mental illness?
That's Cognitive dissonance, not mental illness and the human brain is able to work around such lapses in logic for most part quite fine by not analysing every tiny bit of information logically and doing things like confirmation bias and such.
Nope, it's an interesting gimmick, but unless HDR displays enter common use, just a gimmick.
HDR is in large part about post processing, not about reproducing the difference in brightness, as no monitor in the near future will be good enough to say reproduce the massive light from the sun. So there will always be a cut-off, it just might be a bit further out then it is today. Post processing on the other side benefits immediately from HDR.
One thing however missing even with todays displays is just shipping the HDR information in the first place. Tone mapping is something that really should be happening on the client, instead of just receiving the already tone mapped non-HDR information.
Can anyone give a brief rundown on what HDR is?
Imagine an image not using an integer from 0 to 255 to store color information, but a float. That is basically the core of HDR (in reality it might not be a real float, but just a large integer). This allows you to save the difference between looking in the sun and looking on a white sheet of paper, so instead of both getting the value 255,255,255 (aka white), the paper will end up with a small number and the sun with a really big one, properly recording the different amount of photons each of these throws at you.
In practice, as there are not yet cameras that can directly capture HDR, this effect is achieved by stacking multiple different exposures from a normal camera to reconstruct the higher dynamic range.
What you see on Flickr and in this video under the label "HDR" however is not really HDR. As the video you get is a normal one, clamped to the old range of 0-255, by a process called tone-mapping. This works by analysing the HDR data and then basically giving different brightnesses to different areas of the image, so that no part of the image ends up under- or overexposed. Different tone mapping algorithms will give you different results, so often you won't get to see a more realistic image, but one with overly bright colors and unrealistic contrast.
Millions of people play MMOs without letting them take over their lives.
Millions of people eat peanuts all the time without getting hurt, yet people with Peanut allergy might die from it. People simply are not all the same and while some people might be just fine with MMOs, other might not. And in this case the important part is that NCsoft very likely has the data to actually tell the difference between people that run into issues and people who don't and they decided to just ignore those with addiction issues. If that is the case, is that negligence? I don't know, thats but it certainly isn't exactly a good way to deal with addiction.
Man Ubuntu's cycle runs fast if they are already releasing another version. Is there any particular advantage to having a new OS every half-year (versus Apple's two year cycle or Microsoft's 3-4 year cycle)?
A Microsoft Windows or Apple OSX release is just the OS, a Ubuntu release is the OS *and* basically all the software you'll ever use. Fast release cycles simply means that you will get new software and hardware drivers quickly. On Windows and OSX software and drivers is updated independently from the core, so it doesn't matter if the OS is a few years old.
Now of course not having a separation between OS and normal software is kind of stupid, but thats the way Linux has been for a long long while.
Stop being a "prostitution is no initiation of force therefore it should be legal therefore it is OK" libertard and instead ask "Is it moral in general to pay for prostitutes?"
The proper question would be: "Does making it illegal improve their and everybody else's life?", arguing from morals is something that should belongs into a church, not into law making.
I realise that personal responsibility is out of fashion these days
And that is a good thing, as it is is used far to often to just ignore problems instead of fixing them.
but NCsoft is not responsible for this person playing too much lineage.
NCsoft is directly responsible for that. If there wouldn't be NCsoft he technically simply couldn't play LineageII, it is as simple as that. NCsoft is a necessary link in the causal chain that caused him to play to much of this game, of course there are also other elements that caused him to play to much of the game (easily addicted personality, etc.), but none of that makes the part that NCsoft played in his addiction go away.
Now of course if they are legally liable is a completly different matter, with cigarettes for example we get all those warnings about direct heath risks, but I don't think we get any warnings about potential addiction issues, so it might very well be that addiction is simply an accepted side effect that doesn't need to be warned about in a legal sense. But there is really no question that they share some responsibility for what their game is doing to the people playing it, as they are the ones keeping the servers up and running.
And why exactly shouldn't NCsoft we responsible for their actions or lack their off too?
Assume for a moment that MMORPGs can be addictive for some people and assume further that NCsoft has hard data on that. Then that means that they would knowingly let people run into addiction issues and do nothing about it, quite the opposite, they would happily continue to collect the monthly fee. Isn't that negligence or at least not far off? Especially considering that it would be rather simple to do something about it (present a warning after more then X hours a month, start chat with counsellor, lock account or something else).
If you distribute something that destroys peoples life and you know about that (at 11h/day over 5 years it should be rather obvious), you should at least take some responsibility.
Wikileaks takes documents that are provided to them, often stolen and just throws them up on a website without investigation or reporting.
They do verify that the documents they get are legit before publishing them.
They edited the video of the Apache so it'd fit their worldview.
So first you want investigation and reporting, and when they do it you complain that they didn't just throw the unedited material on their website? Way to go logic. And oh btw. the unedited video has been available the whole time.
And what can you do once it is open? Not much.
Replace the LCD backlight for example, the display hinge or the keyboard or whatever else is broken. You can't take the motherboard apart, but pretty much everything else on the OLPC.
Apparently not. Did you even read the slashdot summary? It links to a site that shows you how to do it.
That's what I called "special training", you are not going to take these things apart without damage unless you already know what to expect. And of course you might need to grab an unusual triwing screwdriver or torx security bit or whatever, which basically serves no other purpose then making disassembly harder.
So, instead they should should make it a huge beast so tiny percentage of users can conveniently open it?
The by far smallest piece of electronic I have is my wrist watch and I can take that apart by simply unscrewing four screws. On a device the size of an Xbox360 there would be tons of room for some proper screws, instead of all those snap-in plastics stuff.
Because that's going to be one huge and heavy laptop.
My OLPC likes to disagree, that thing is easy to open up, in fact so easy that children can do it with a single screwdriver. It also comes with a few additional unused screws in the case, in case you lose some.
The consoles are serviceable - how else do you think the companies' technicians service them?
With special training and equipment. Just look at a disassembly of an Xbox 360 Slim, that thing is way more complex to disassemble then it would need to when properly designed.