Thumbprints have the disadvantage that you leave them all over the place anywhere you go, which makes them pretty easy to fake and not a very good password replacement. They of course can work in some cases, but are horrible in others.
cards for verification like the hospital I used to work at?
The problem is:
1) nobody owns them 2) no webpage or browser out there supports it
Classic chicken&egg situation. If Microsoft or Apple would step up and push them, such stuff might have a chance, but without a large party backing it up, I don't have much hope for the near future. The good thing of course is that cost shouldn't be much of an issue if such things ever enter mass production and if such a security token would come with a USB plug it could work across many different OSs and hardware platforms. If Microsoft and Apple fail, there is still a chance that some government near you will do the pushing, talk about digital signatures for every citizen have been going on in some countries.
This is the best thing about Sugar for the long run.
Absolutely agree, however at the moment Sugar is still quite a bit away from that goal. One big issue I have with Sugar is that it basically implements another OS on top of Linux, which means you don't move a step closer to the 'real thing', but pretty much get another layer of abstraction in between you an the code. This becomes especially an issue since Sugar doesn't have support for classical files or directory hierarchies, which in turn means that you can neither develop nor inspect Sugar apps with normal Sugar tools. Its certainly not an unfixable problem, but still very ugly one.
When it comes to solving problems, nothing beats hard work
So you suggest we improve food production by hard work instead of by technology? Sorry, but that just doesn't cut. Technology is what drives progress on a large scale, hard work only work on a small individual scale, on the large scale its pretty much lost, unless its invested in building new technology.
If I design a replacement for me, then I become redundant. I die.
Death has a meaning for a human because your accumulated knowledge and experience gets lost when you die. An AI on the other side can just take all his knowledge and copy it to the next generation, by which the concept of death becomes a pretty meaningless one.
As for the core distribution with sub-distributions... how about Debian with the sub-distributions Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu and all the others?
As far as I know, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu and Edubuntu are proper sub-distributions of Ubuntu, in that only the default apps are different but the repositories are the same, so thats fine. Debian on the other side is a different beast, while Ubuntu is a fork of Debian, it is incompatible with it. Ubuntu isn't Debian with a different default install, its a different distro entirely. The repository trees are completly different and trying to install a Debian package on Ubuntu can result in all kinds of fun stuff. There is of course still a lot of overlap, so sometimes that might work, but its not something that is supported or recommend. In the very early days of Ubuntu you actually could take a Debian, add Ubuntu repositories and do a 'dist-upgrade' to convert a Debian box to a Ubuntu one, but today thats not something that would work very well and the difference between the distros will only grow over time and thats exactly the problem.
One of the problem is that what comes with most hardware is far more then just a driver, its a complete software framework to actually use the thing, i.e. you by a camera, you get a graphics app, you buy a joystick or a keyboard, you get a tool to remap your buttons and program macros, you buy a printer and you get a tool for page layout, you buy a harddrive, you get backup software and so on.
Half the time it is useless crap, but the other half of the time its more or less essential to use all the functions that a piece of hardware provides. As long as they sell not just hardware, but also the software to use it, real Linux support will be quite troublesome.
And by the time they are done, the hardware is already obsolete. If you want to use your shiny new hardware today, not a year down the road, you simply can't replace proper support from the hardware manufacturer.
When it comes to KDE vs Gnome or similar software issues you really don't want yet another distribution. What you want is a different set of default packages and maybe a few changes in the default configuration, so that you can burn it to CD an install it easily without much fuss. A whole new distribution on the other side wouldn't just give you KDE instead of Gnome, it would also give you rpm instead of apt and Lilo instead of Grub and a heapload of other weird compatibility issues for no good reason.
I think one of the big issues today is that the way distributions deal with software packages is just to inflexible, quite frequently you can't even install multiple versions of the same piece of software, you can only install that piece that your distributor considered 'good enough' and when that doesn't fit you are out of luck and in for a bunch of manual compilation by passing all of what your distribution tried to provide.
I really wouldn't mind if things on the core distribution would get a little bit more standardized and flexible so that you could build new sub-distributions without completly throwing away the framework that the parent distribution provides.
The weight doesn't matter much when you carry it around in a bag, but it matters quite a lot when you want to hold it in your hand for longer periods of time (i.e. read a book on it) and 1.5kg is pretty much the upper end for that use and any gram less would be more then welcome.
The point of authentication is to get accountability, not to get instant filtering. If a spammer is using a fake certificate, that certificate can be blacklisted. If some company isn't checking for fake date, certificates by that company can be blacklisted. If random joe is sending me good mail, I could white list him. If random-mail-provider.com is doing good at stopping fake accounts, I could whitelist them as well. And when you would send your twin mail via a good email provider it would arrive just fine.
Today you have the issue that you can't really do much, because you can't tell where a mail did come from. Most of the data in the headers is completly fakable and useless, and yet they get used a lot for mail filtering because its the only data we have.
There are advantages to thinking of (and addressing) spam as a social problem rather than a technological problem.
The problem with spam is that there is no accountability. If you can't find the guy who sends the mail, you can't punish him, therefore you must solve the technical problem of no accountability before you can deal with the actual spammer by law or other social means.
Those fake phising mails really don't do anything to fight spam, they might be good for educating users, but they don't stop spam, since its not normal users who send spam.
If you still believe Ruby is more OOP than Python, could you point out either (1) another example, or (2) why you disagree with my thinking?
The difference is that Ruby is OOP from the start and through and through, while Python get stuff patched in a little bit at a time with every new version. See Pythons print-statement vs Ruby puts for example.
OOP aside, another difference worth mentioning between Ruby and Python is that in Ruby the () for function calls are optional. So [].length works just as well as [].length().
Ruby uses explicit 'end' to mark blocks, Python doesn't. Ruby uses OOP for pretty much everything while Python doesn't (i.e. [].length vs len([], [1,2,3].each{|i|...} vs for i in [1,2,3]:). Python follows a philosophy of doing something exactly one way, while Ruby doesn't have a problem allowing multiple ways to accomplish the same thing. Ruby uses $ to mark global variables, @ to mark member variables, Python uses explicit 'self.' to do it.
Overall however they look and feel pretty similar.
I have to correct myself, just did a little test run and indeed, with both power saving option in the config enabled (WiFi switched off, device just idling), it now is lasting for around 10 hours and still has juice left in the battery. Which is quite a bit more then I expected.
But the issue with it taking around 2 seconds to switch from idle-sleeping back to normal is still way to noticeable and glitchy and actual use instead of idling should ruin likely quite a bit more. But 10 hours is still plenty for reading a book on the thing.
Years ago, games were released in a working state and didn't require heaps of patches...
Its not exactly a new thing, it goes back at least a good 15 years, Civ2 had that issue, EF2000 had it and plenty of others and that was even before the Internet got popular, magazin cd did the patch distribution back then.
The really annoying part isn't even the patching, but that they can't make user friendly patches. Clicking 'setup.exe' and waiting till its done is annoying enough, but tracking down patch 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4 and 1.5, having to install them in the right order, making sure that they are for the right language version and making sure that your game is actually at the correct starting patch level (tricky with all those gold, platinum, bargain bin rereleases and add-ons) is really annoying. Add to that patches that require a fresh install and make previous savegames unusable and you are in for a lot of fun. And lets not even start talking about tracking down patches if the original developer went bankrupt or got bought.
Yet, the same people furiously defend Steam as the saviour.
What Steam does different is that it not only restricts your rights, but it also provides a very useful service. Patching PC games was and still is a huge annoyance, installing and patching Armed Assault took me a solid hour and with Stalker its the same thing, finding and installing half a dozen patches is just not fun. Steam doesn't have those problems, since it all runs automatically and thats what people love it for. That it is also a DRM platform is bad, but its something that people hardly notice in normal use, its just when DRM breaks that people notice it and get annoyed and most of the time thats only when they already spend tons of money on DRMed software.
but in black and white outdoor sunlight readable mode,
Black&White mode is unusable in-doors, there just isn't enough light, so its not exactly a practical thing to do most of the time.
in ebook mode without WiFi,
How do you disable WiFi? Its not a thing that happens automatically when you twist the display. When I remember correctly in the default setting WiFi stays even enable when you go in standby.
you get 12 hours on the OLPC while netbooks get below 2 hours with a similar sized battery.
I certainly get nowhere near the 12 hours out of the OLPC.
Fully agree on that, the thing last 3 hours on normal use, thats nothing special, far from it. They still haven't even enabled the power saving stuff in the default configuration and the checkbox for that only made it their in the last release and of course it doesn't exactly work great, since the switching between sleep mode and normal one is very noticable. At least normal standby is now working, but even that took a long long while to implement.
Does the mesh networking actually work in the XO? And the mesh networking, how useful is it anyway?
In the type of setting for which the OLPC was designed for (i.e. school with plenty of OLPCs around), very useful I guess. In the western world on the other side: rather useless, since you have a hard time finding anybody with a OLPC to mesh network and instead just connect to the next best WLAN access point.
And the XO's G1G1 is hardly "poor economy", its that the XO early adopter-types got them the first go-round, so there was no one LEFT in the second.
I think the failure was a simple matter of price, you can today buy a better machine for less money. The $400 was never a competitive price to begin with (for refernce: thats the same one as Sonys PS3 has), but in the first round they didn't have competition, in the second they had plenty. By making the offer time limited and the price twice as high as needed they certainly ruined their chances and gave the competition plenty of room to get solid offerings on the ground.
All that said, ruggedness and sunlight readable screen are great and still something that no other laptop has. But slow development on the software side and complete failure to properly sell the thing to consumers just couldn't lead to a happy ending.
How so? Any discussion with more then two people becomes completly unreadable, because Gmail mashes them all up in a single linear list, all the proper threading gets completly lost and it becomes impossible to figure out who answered whom. It is also impossible to kill subthreads, watch them, ignore them and all that stuff.
Yes, but that is in large part because it was build to have millions of polygons, not to be artistically pleasing. What makes the scene interesting isn't really that it looks good or not, but that it shows graphics that todays 3D hardware simply couldn't render. Its kind of the same with voxels, it doesn't necessary look better, but its different, it allows you to do stuff that you couldn't do with other technology and thats why I think it would be interesting to see a full game build on it and be it just a little showcase demo on Playstation Network.
If you want a tricky example: Try to find a full day of what was shown on TV 20 years ago. You might be able to find a few of the popular shows from back then on DVD, a few of the commercials on Youtube and a few other bits and pieces, but finding the raw footage of everything connected is quite tricky. Such footage does exist, both on private VHS tapes and in archives, but the whole copyright situation on them should get very tricky, so you likely won't find such stuff publically available any time soon and I wouldn't trust a VHS tape to survive till its content enters public domain.
Large parts of any game level are completly static and so are many models, but you are absolutely right, dynamic scenes are a problem and todays games have plenty of them. Which is exactly why I said I would like to see stuff that focuses on the strength of raytracing instead of trying to replicate current games.
I don't doubt that rasterization will dominate computer games for a long while to come, compatibility on multiple platforms alone pretty much guarantees that, all technical benefits aside. However I also think that it might be time to try other rendering algorithms again, after all, we have been stuck for a decade with 3d hardware and while it can do many pretty things there are also plenty of things it just can't do well. And with multicore CPUs getting common and stuff like PS3 cell it might be time for some creativity in that area. Who knows, maybe some space game with gigantic hyper detailed Star Destroyers or whatever would be good to showcase raytracing.
Anyway, my whole complaint about this raytracing thing is simply that research is the stuff that should blow you away and make you go "wow" and not let you go "yeah, nice, I played that last year..."
Wasn't about MUDs, but about console homebrew stuff, i.e. Wiimote, PSP, etc. There are lots of Wikis about that out there, but Wikipedia doesn't accept them as "reliable source".
Slashdot Mirror
Why not use thumbprints
Thumbprints have the disadvantage that you leave them all over the place anywhere you go, which makes them pretty easy to fake and not a very good password replacement. They of course can work in some cases, but are horrible in others.
cards for verification like the hospital I used to work at?
The problem is:
1) nobody owns them
2) no webpage or browser out there supports it
Classic chicken&egg situation. If Microsoft or Apple would step up and push them, such stuff might have a chance, but without a large party backing it up, I don't have much hope for the near future. The good thing of course is that cost shouldn't be much of an issue if such things ever enter mass production and if such a security token would come with a USB plug it could work across many different OSs and hardware platforms. If Microsoft and Apple fail, there is still a chance that some government near you will do the pushing, talk about digital signatures for every citizen have been going on in some countries.
This is the best thing about Sugar for the long run.
Absolutely agree, however at the moment Sugar is still quite a bit away from that goal. One big issue I have with Sugar is that it basically implements another OS on top of Linux, which means you don't move a step closer to the 'real thing', but pretty much get another layer of abstraction in between you an the code. This becomes especially an issue since Sugar doesn't have support for classical files or directory hierarchies, which in turn means that you can neither develop nor inspect Sugar apps with normal Sugar tools. Its certainly not an unfixable problem, but still very ugly one.
When it comes to solving problems, nothing beats hard work
So you suggest we improve food production by hard work instead of by technology? Sorry, but that just doesn't cut. Technology is what drives progress on a large scale, hard work only work on a small individual scale, on the large scale its pretty much lost, unless its invested in building new technology.
If I design a replacement for me, then I become redundant. I die.
Death has a meaning for a human because your accumulated knowledge and experience gets lost when you die. An AI on the other side can just take all his knowledge and copy it to the next generation, by which the concept of death becomes a pretty meaningless one.
As for the core distribution with sub-distributions... how about Debian with the sub-distributions Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu and all the others?
As far as I know, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu and Edubuntu are proper sub-distributions of Ubuntu, in that only the default apps are different but the repositories are the same, so thats fine. Debian on the other side is a different beast, while Ubuntu is a fork of Debian, it is incompatible with it. Ubuntu isn't Debian with a different default install, its a different distro entirely. The repository trees are completly different and trying to install a Debian package on Ubuntu can result in all kinds of fun stuff. There is of course still a lot of overlap, so sometimes that might work, but its not something that is supported or recommend. In the very early days of Ubuntu you actually could take a Debian, add Ubuntu repositories and do a 'dist-upgrade' to convert a Debian box to a Ubuntu one, but today thats not something that would work very well and the difference between the distros will only grow over time and thats exactly the problem.
One of the problem is that what comes with most hardware is far more then just a driver, its a complete software framework to actually use the thing, i.e. you by a camera, you get a graphics app, you buy a joystick or a keyboard, you get a tool to remap your buttons and program macros, you buy a printer and you get a tool for page layout, you buy a harddrive, you get backup software and so on.
Half the time it is useless crap, but the other half of the time its more or less essential to use all the functions that a piece of hardware provides. As long as they sell not just hardware, but also the software to use it, real Linux support will be quite troublesome.
And by the time they are done, the hardware is already obsolete. If you want to use your shiny new hardware today, not a year down the road, you simply can't replace proper support from the hardware manufacturer.
When it comes to KDE vs Gnome or similar software issues you really don't want yet another distribution. What you want is a different set of default packages and maybe a few changes in the default configuration, so that you can burn it to CD an install it easily without much fuss. A whole new distribution on the other side wouldn't just give you KDE instead of Gnome, it would also give you rpm instead of apt and Lilo instead of Grub and a heapload of other weird compatibility issues for no good reason.
I think one of the big issues today is that the way distributions deal with software packages is just to inflexible, quite frequently you can't even install multiple versions of the same piece of software, you can only install that piece that your distributor considered 'good enough' and when that doesn't fit you are out of luck and in for a bunch of manual compilation by passing all of what your distribution tried to provide.
I really wouldn't mind if things on the core distribution would get a little bit more standardized and flexible so that you could build new sub-distributions without completly throwing away the framework that the parent distribution provides.
The weight doesn't matter much when you carry it around in a bag, but it matters quite a lot when you want to hold it in your hand for longer periods of time (i.e. read a book on it) and 1.5kg is pretty much the upper end for that use and any gram less would be more then welcome.
The point of authentication is to get accountability, not to get instant filtering. If a spammer is using a fake certificate, that certificate can be blacklisted. If some company isn't checking for fake date, certificates by that company can be blacklisted. If random joe is sending me good mail, I could white list him. If random-mail-provider.com is doing good at stopping fake accounts, I could whitelist them as well. And when you would send your twin mail via a good email provider it would arrive just fine.
Today you have the issue that you can't really do much, because you can't tell where a mail did come from. Most of the data in the headers is completly fakable and useless, and yet they get used a lot for mail filtering because its the only data we have.
There are advantages to thinking of (and addressing) spam as a social problem rather than a technological problem.
The problem with spam is that there is no accountability. If you can't find the guy who sends the mail, you can't punish him, therefore you must solve the technical problem of no accountability before you can deal with the actual spammer by law or other social means.
Those fake phising mails really don't do anything to fight spam, they might be good for educating users, but they don't stop spam, since its not normal users who send spam.
If you still believe Ruby is more OOP than Python, could you point out either (1) another example, or (2) why you disagree with my thinking?
The difference is that Ruby is OOP from the start and through and through, while Python get stuff patched in a little bit at a time with every new version. See Pythons print-statement vs Ruby puts for example.
OOP aside, another difference worth mentioning between Ruby and Python is that in Ruby the () for function calls are optional. So [].length works just as well as [].length().
Ruby uses explicit 'end' to mark blocks, Python doesn't. Ruby uses OOP for pretty much everything while Python doesn't (i.e. [].length vs len([], [1,2,3].each{|i| ...} vs for i in [1,2,3]:). Python follows a philosophy of doing something exactly one way, while Ruby doesn't have a problem allowing multiple ways to accomplish the same thing. Ruby uses $ to mark global variables, @ to mark member variables, Python uses explicit 'self.' to do it.
Overall however they look and feel pretty similar.
I have to correct myself, just did a little test run and indeed, with both power saving option in the config enabled (WiFi switched off, device just idling), it now is lasting for around 10 hours and still has juice left in the battery. Which is quite a bit more then I expected.
But the issue with it taking around 2 seconds to switch from idle-sleeping back to normal is still way to noticeable and glitchy and actual use instead of idling should ruin likely quite a bit more. But 10 hours is still plenty for reading a book on the thing.
G1G1 was a special time limited, was USA only and cost twice as much as a normal OLPC. Not exactly an 'open door'.
Years ago, games were released in a working state and didn't require heaps of patches...
Its not exactly a new thing, it goes back at least a good 15 years, Civ2 had that issue, EF2000 had it and plenty of others and that was even before the Internet got popular, magazin cd did the patch distribution back then.
The really annoying part isn't even the patching, but that they can't make user friendly patches. Clicking 'setup.exe' and waiting till its done is annoying enough, but tracking down patch 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4 and 1.5, having to install them in the right order, making sure that they are for the right language version and making sure that your game is actually at the correct starting patch level (tricky with all those gold, platinum, bargain bin rereleases and add-ons) is really annoying. Add to that patches that require a fresh install and make previous savegames unusable and you are in for a lot of fun. And lets not even start talking about tracking down patches if the original developer went bankrupt or got bought.
No wonder that people actually like Steam.
Yet, the same people furiously defend Steam as the saviour.
What Steam does different is that it not only restricts your rights, but it also provides a very useful service. Patching PC games was and still is a huge annoyance, installing and patching Armed Assault took me a solid hour and with Stalker its the same thing, finding and installing half a dozen patches is just not fun. Steam doesn't have those problems, since it all runs automatically and thats what people love it for. That it is also a DRM platform is bad, but its something that people hardly notice in normal use, its just when DRM breaks that people notice it and get annoyed and most of the time thats only when they already spend tons of money on DRMed software.
That's just not true.
I speak from real life experience.
but in black and white outdoor sunlight readable mode,
Black&White mode is unusable in-doors, there just isn't enough light, so its not exactly a practical thing to do most of the time.
in ebook mode without WiFi,
How do you disable WiFi? Its not a thing that happens automatically when you twist the display. When I remember correctly in the default setting WiFi stays even enable when you go in standby.
you get 12 hours on the OLPC while netbooks get below 2 hours with a similar sized battery.
I certainly get nowhere near the 12 hours out of the OLPC.
but its not really lower power than netbooks.
Fully agree on that, the thing last 3 hours on normal use, thats nothing special, far from it. They still haven't even enabled the power saving stuff in the default configuration and the checkbox for that only made it their in the last release and of course it doesn't exactly work great, since the switching between sleep mode and normal one is very noticable. At least normal standby is now working, but even that took a long long while to implement.
Does the mesh networking actually work in the XO? And the mesh networking, how useful is it anyway?
In the type of setting for which the OLPC was designed for (i.e. school with plenty of OLPCs around), very useful I guess. In the western world on the other side: rather useless, since you have a hard time finding anybody with a OLPC to mesh network and instead just connect to the next best WLAN access point.
And the XO's G1G1 is hardly "poor economy", its that the XO early adopter-types got them the first go-round, so there was no one LEFT in the second.
I think the failure was a simple matter of price, you can today buy a better machine for less money. The $400 was never a competitive price to begin with (for refernce: thats the same one as Sonys PS3 has), but in the first round they didn't have competition, in the second they had plenty. By making the offer time limited and the price twice as high as needed they certainly ruined their chances and gave the competition plenty of room to get solid offerings on the ground.
All that said, ruggedness and sunlight readable screen are great and still something that no other laptop has. But slow development on the software side and complete failure to properly sell the thing to consumers just couldn't lead to a happy ending.
How so? Any discussion with more then two people becomes completly unreadable, because Gmail mashes them all up in a single linear list, all the proper threading gets completly lost and it becomes impossible to figure out who answered whom. It is also impossible to kill subthreads, watch them, ignore them and all that stuff.
Only for very linear one dimensional definitions of 'thread'. High traffic mailing lists are pretty much unreadable in Gmail.
Yes, but that is in large part because it was build to have millions of polygons, not to be artistically pleasing. What makes the scene interesting isn't really that it looks good or not, but that it shows graphics that todays 3D hardware simply couldn't render. Its kind of the same with voxels, it doesn't necessary look better, but its different, it allows you to do stuff that you couldn't do with other technology and thats why I think it would be interesting to see a full game build on it and be it just a little showcase demo on Playstation Network.
Like what?
If you want a tricky example: Try to find a full day of what was shown on TV 20 years ago. You might be able to find a few of the popular shows from back then on DVD, a few of the commercials on Youtube and a few other bits and pieces, but finding the raw footage of everything connected is quite tricky. Such footage does exist, both on private VHS tapes and in archives, but the whole copyright situation on them should get very tricky, so you likely won't find such stuff publically available any time soon and I wouldn't trust a VHS tape to survive till its content enters public domain.
Large parts of any game level are completly static and so are many models, but you are absolutely right, dynamic scenes are a problem and todays games have plenty of them. Which is exactly why I said I would like to see stuff that focuses on the strength of raytracing instead of trying to replicate current games.
I don't doubt that rasterization will dominate computer games for a long while to come, compatibility on multiple platforms alone pretty much guarantees that, all technical benefits aside. However I also think that it might be time to try other rendering algorithms again, after all, we have been stuck for a decade with 3d hardware and while it can do many pretty things there are also plenty of things it just can't do well. And with multicore CPUs getting common and stuff like PS3 cell it might be time for some creativity in that area. Who knows, maybe some space game with gigantic hyper detailed Star Destroyers or whatever would be good to showcase raytracing.
Anyway, my whole complaint about this raytracing thing is simply that research is the stuff that should blow you away and make you go "wow" and not let you go "yeah, nice, I played that last year..."
Wasn't about MUDs, but about console homebrew stuff, i.e. Wiimote, PSP, etc. There are lots of Wikis about that out there, but Wikipedia doesn't accept them as "reliable source".