So, short of content I could publish and/or access without Freenet, what am I missing? You miss a distributed datastore, where everybody can donate a bit of diskspace to a pool to which everybody then has access, i.e. no more separation between normal users and those people who own a server. This is a concept that could certainly be better implemented without all the anonymity stuff going on, but it is a very nice side effect of Freenet.
Other then that, where is that free country where you are living in? Since last time I checked pretty much all western governments had several restrictions on your freedom, i.e. I don't think I can even legally watch DVD with Open Source, because there are laws that restrict bypassing CSS. We also have laws against use and creation of hacker tools and plenty of other nasty laws that restrict your freedom.
Besides, the ultmate goal is for "them" to not even know that you're running freenet to begin with, which requires a darknet (and pluggable transports for sneakernet etc.) That is an unachievable goal and it would be better if they just would give up on that completly and focus on other issue, since "they" can have as much control over the ISPs as they like and thus can monitor the traffic and easily tell that 'shitloads of encrypted stuff' very likely equals Freenet. You can't really hide the bandwidth and traffic patterns that Freenet produces and you really shouldn't, since Freenet isn't a fix for a totalitarian government, it is simply an indicator for it. The moment they outlaw Freenet is the moment you can start planing the revolution, since then you have basically lost your right to Free Speech.
Basically all scientific papers you will find on the Internet are two-column PDFs of A4 size, without a A4 size device and plenty of DPI you will have a very hard time to read them, due to their tiny font size.
And even if you do mind swapping the firmware you can use it as eBook reader. The build in image viewer does a decent enough job, you just have to convert your pages first, I have hacked together a few scripts for that.
With a real book, there's something magical about turning pages. In Opera on my OLPC I can hide the scrollbars.
While books might have some nice properties they also have plenty annoying disadvantages. I don't have the freedom to select a font size of my liking, the reading surface isn't flat, getting a book to stay open can get annoying, as soon as I carry around more then one size and weight become an issue, etc.
I for one prefer my OLPC much more, I can select the font size, the screen always stays exactly where I left it, it is always perfectly flat and I even can place it on the table and adjust the angle of the screen to whatever I want without a need for hands to hold it in place, oh and it has a optional backlight too, so I can read in the dark or in low-light conditions.
The only downside of the OLPC is weight, with a weight of a 1000 pages book it simply can get a little uncomfortable to hold unless you rest it somewhere.
The big problem with eBook readers is that they are all to focused on DRM'ing like crazy and on being book-only devices. These days having Internet access is pretty much a must-have, because the Internet is after all the largest collections of text out there, leaving that out on a reading device seems like a big miss.
Have you seen the "low" refresh rates in action? They are not low in the LCD kind of sense, they are low in the "may laser printer is faster then that" kind of sense, i.e. they are measured in seconds, not milliseconds. Moving windows around an a eInk screen would be pretty much impossible, so would watching video and a lot of other stuff.
But anyway, if you want a sunlight readable screen, try to get your hands on a OLPC. That screen might not look as good as eInk stuff, but it gets close and it has none of the disadvantages. Pixel Qi also seems to be working to get that tech into devices other then the OLPC, so maybe we will see something in that direction soon.
But the draw of the ebook reader is eInk. I have pretty much given up on eInk, while it does look nice on static pages, it is completly unusable for anything dynamic. The refresh rates of these things are beyond ridiculous. Which makes them pretty limited when it comes to web browsing and completly unusable for many other things.
With a display like the OLPC you get a lot of the same benefits (high dpi, sunlight readable, long battery life, etc.) without any of the disadvantages, the OLPCs display is fast enough for video, games and everything.
Now the OLPC display isn't without problems, it is 'sunlight readable' in the sense that you really need a bright sun to actually see something without backlight and its color output is a little "mushy". But none of these seem unfixable when you would create a product that isn't focused on being low cost and as far as I can tell Pixel Qi is doing exactly that.
From a eBook reader I expect that it can access the web without issues, with eInk that simply seems impossible.
When you don't have any infrastructure to keep the software you are running up to date or to install securty fixed you are in a pretty shitty position to begin with. This has nothing to do with Firefox3-beta.
The problem is that you can't get thousands of apps stable at the exact same time. You can do it like Debian and wait really really long with a new release, but the you end up with software that is basically ready for a museum and no longer be useful for daily use. Or you can do it Ubunt style and release more often.
I prefer the later, since software doesn't get magically better when rotting in a repository, but it often get better when a new version gets released. And for the few edge cases where it doesn't a current set of libraries makes things much easier to fix then an obsolete one.
The point of a LTS is that you don't update the software across major versions, but limit updates to bug fixes. So if they don't include FF3 now, then they include it never and you are stuck with FF2. With FF3-beta in they can simply upgrade when FF3-final comes along.
Both the keyboard and the screen are inevitably small, which makes typing and reading a challenge. Reading isn't a problem with a 7" screen, since you basically have the same usable width as with a piece of A4/letter paper, in terms of height you of course have to scroll, but that isn't much of an issue. Much more important than size is DPI, but the OLPC has that area with its 200dpi pretty well covered. The only area where screensize can be an issue is if you have dozens of windows floating around, but as long as you maximize them or run in fullscreen you won't really have a problem.
The keyboard on the other side is hard to solve, when they keys aren't even large enough to fit all your fingers on the home row it can get annoying and I wouldn't want to type a lengthy text on that and of course the thing isn't large enough to fit a bigger keyboard in. Maybe its time to dust of IBM's TrackWrite again.
That little bit of Speed Racer I have seen in the trailer looked way over the top in terms of CGI, but on the other side I don't consider that a problem, because it obviously is supposed to be exactly that, it never tried to look real and it is based on a cartoon to begin with. CGI seems simply to be used to get a specific style and I don't mind that, I really liked Sky Captain because of that.
What bothers me much more is when CGI is overused in an otherwise realistic looking movie. King Kong for example was a pretty bad offender in that area. There you have things like a few dozen Brontosaurus running and stacking on top of each other in a stampede and humans running around right in between and if that wouldn't be enough you of course also have some carnivores dinosaurs chasing the humans right trough that ridiculous mess of CGI dino mass. That scene felt like a contest of how many CGI dinos you could stack per cubic meter and not something that would be even remotely believable, not even by already ridiculous Hollywood standard. If they wanted to trash all my suspend of disbelieve they have certainly accomplished that very well.
Oh, and I'd personally like to thank the genius who decided to go with a beta version of Firefox for a long-term support version of an OS... now THAT is how to FAIL. Having a beta in a stable LTS release might seems a bit stupid at first, but the reason the beta is in there is exactly because it is a LTS release. Would they have gone with Firefox2 they would have been stuck with that for many years to come, going with Firefox3-Beta allows them to upgrade to Firefox3 once it comes out (i.e. very soon), so they don't have to worry about supporting obsolete Firefox2 down the road.
That aside, I agree. I would much prefer if all those distros out there would just die or merge together. Luckily that is already slowly happening. A lot of distros these days are Debian based, instead of being just hacked up from scratch.
I ran Linux on my Pentium 90 just fine and I am sure the OLPC can do better then that. There are however two issues, for one, a webbrowser today can need *a lot* of CPU, browsing some of those dynamic AJAX pages is nothing short of painful, sometimes close to impossible even on a much stronger computer then the OLPC and switching to a different browser doesn't help either. The web these days simply requires a ton of CPU when you want to render things as intended by the author. This has nothing to do with Open Source, but just the way people design webpages. And of course Flash only makes things worse and Adobe Flash or Gnash doesn't really fix a thing, stuff is just not designed to operate with low CPU usage.
The other issue is Sugar itself, starting applications in Sugar is mind boggling slow. Even a helloworld takes around 10 seconds, while it is pretty much instantaneous outside of Sugar. As soon as things run there really isn't much of a problem, but startup time is horrible. This is something that of course can be blamed on "OpenSource", but not on "us", since Sugar was created from scratch for the OLPC. However there is certainly a ton of room for optimizations and if those OLPC guys would just sell those things to more people they might actually have a chance to get this fixed (there is currently no way to obtain a OLPC for a reasonable price).
The people observing a user using the product, i.e. neither the user nor the developer.
If you let the user decide you end up with the something as awful as the "Homer Car". What a user needs is quite often simply not the same as what the user wants.
Great, each of those might be something that is wanted by the user. However if you switch them both on you end up with an unusable application, since the moment you move your mouse into the direction of the menu you lose focus. You simply can't combine both.
Now as long as both of these options are in a single application, you might be able to catch that, but what if they are in different application? One application choses 'Mac menus' by default and your window manager uses focus follows mouse by default. The user will have good fun trying to figure out why the menu always disappears when he tries to reach it.
Now this is just an example, but options can always have unintended side effects. And just because option X works and option Y work, that doesn't mean that X and Y work together. Which is the reason why one should try to keep options to a minimum, so that the behavior of the application stays predictable.
That all is of course doesn't mean that all options should be removed, some are important, but one really need to be careful about which to keep and just keeping everything will just lead to a mess.
When you want good usability you have to throw stuff away, completly. Moving the option around doesn't help, because you end up with more code to maintain, side-effects that might break other stuff and a lot of problem. With one option that might not be to hard to solve, but if you have dozens of options interacting with each other it gets trouble some.
All that said, I havn't read the discussion (trac is down) so I don't know if there really is a good use case for having a manually resizable inputbox or if it is just users wanting back the behavior they got used to.
Since track is currently down I can only guess, but I assume it is something like:
Developer: auto-resize makes app behave correctly, you never end up having to grab the mouse again to see your text or scroll around, there is no longer a need to resize manually
User: App behaves different, I want my old behavior back.
Not sure if there are any real use-cases for a manual reside inputbox.
Too many people who think they know better than the end-users, You have it the wrong way around. It are people who try to hard to please the end-user that are causing shitty applications, since instead of solving the problem, they end up providing a billion options from which the user has to build its own application. To get good usability you have to look at the problems and figure out a good way to solve it without needing an option, let things behave correctly by default. And yes, sometimes that will annoy users that got accustomed to the 'old way', but in the long run it is often much better to do it the right way only then to do it via yet another option.
Have a look back at the switch from Gnome1.4 to Gnome2.0, it was painful and a lot of options got removed, it pissed of a ton of users, lead to a fork (that soon died) and was quite a mess. However the cleanup really did improve Gnome in the long run. Since instead of a bazillion option you now have a desktop that behaves correct by default.
I think the main reason to not make it an option is because it is such a tiny obscure detail that you wouldn't even think to look for an option in the first place. And thus adding the option to the GUI would be useless clutter. Good usability is often about removing options and make things behave the right way at default.
How many people ever used ReiserFS? A lot, especially when you have LVM running and want to resize a filesystem online. The stuff you are referring to is completly out of date and was the result of SuSE making ReiserFS the default filesystem back then when it was still brand new and not completly ready for prime time (as easily seen by the lack of proper fsck back then).
It's not like the XO is DRM'ed and you can't install anything else. Actually it is DRM'ed. You can't just install anything you want, you have to first get a developer key to unlock it before you can do so, else it will only allow installation of officially signed OLPC stuff and nothing else.
This wouldn't be a problem if the hardware was open, the company would just be forked and OpenXO would be available to those that want it. The hardware wouldn't even need to be open, it simply needs to be available. As of now there is no way a normal user can buy an XO. The G1G1 was the only way, but that was twice the price and only available for a very short time. I bet there are thousands of people over in Europe who would like one, but can't get one or only at such high prices that it is no longer worth it (Why buy a OLPC for 500 from ebay when you can get a Eee for 300?).
OLPC needs to sell those things commercially, when they don't have the resources to do so themselves they need to partner up with somebody who has to. This whole elitist thing with "only for third world" is getting kind of tiring.
XO can run Flash, both Gnash and the normal closed source one, but it is not fast enough to watch video. That said, this is actually not a problem of the XO itself, since Youtube videos in mplayer work fine, just Flash being a little more CPU hungry then it should be.
The problem with G1G1 wasn't that it brought OLPCs into the hands of consumers, but that it basically was a public beta test for twice the price as a regular OLPC would have cost (especially the beta-test part wasn't made all that clear). This has nothing to do with the hardware itself, which is quite frankly fantastic and in some areas superior to the EeePC.
The problem I have with the OLPC is that they still haven't any announcements or even plans for a regular commercial release of the machines. Give that thing decent warranty, sell it for $250 instead of $400, offer replacement parts and all that stuff and it shouldn't be to hard to please the consumer. I just don't get why they want to make that thing a third-world-only device, when there pretty much isn't anything quite like it in the first-world.
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Other then that, where is that free country where you are living in? Since last time I checked pretty much all western governments had several restrictions on your freedom, i.e. I don't think I can even legally watch DVD with Open Source, because there are laws that restrict bypassing CSS. We also have laws against use and creation of hacker tools and plenty of other nasty laws that restrict your freedom.
Basically all scientific papers you will find on the Internet are two-column PDFs of A4 size, without a A4 size device and plenty of DPI you will have a very hard time to read them, due to their tiny font size.
And even if you do mind swapping the firmware you can use it as eBook reader. The build in image viewer does a decent enough job, you just have to convert your pages first, I have hacked together a few scripts for that.
While books might have some nice properties they also have plenty annoying disadvantages. I don't have the freedom to select a font size of my liking, the reading surface isn't flat, getting a book to stay open can get annoying, as soon as I carry around more then one size and weight become an issue, etc.
I for one prefer my OLPC much more, I can select the font size, the screen always stays exactly where I left it, it is always perfectly flat and I even can place it on the table and adjust the angle of the screen to whatever I want without a need for hands to hold it in place, oh and it has a optional backlight too, so I can read in the dark or in low-light conditions.
The only downside of the OLPC is weight, with a weight of a 1000 pages book it simply can get a little uncomfortable to hold unless you rest it somewhere.
The big problem with eBook readers is that they are all to focused on DRM'ing like crazy and on being book-only devices. These days having Internet access is pretty much a must-have, because the Internet is after all the largest collections of text out there, leaving that out on a reading device seems like a big miss.
Have you seen the "low" refresh rates in action? They are not low in the LCD kind of sense, they are low in the "may laser printer is faster then that" kind of sense, i.e. they are measured in seconds, not milliseconds. Moving windows around an a eInk screen would be pretty much impossible, so would watching video and a lot of other stuff.
But anyway, if you want a sunlight readable screen, try to get your hands on a OLPC. That screen might not look as good as eInk stuff, but it gets close and it has none of the disadvantages. Pixel Qi also seems to be working to get that tech into devices other then the OLPC, so maybe we will see something in that direction soon.
With a display like the OLPC you get a lot of the same benefits (high dpi, sunlight readable, long battery life, etc.) without any of the disadvantages, the OLPCs display is fast enough for video, games and everything.
Now the OLPC display isn't without problems, it is 'sunlight readable' in the sense that you really need a bright sun to actually see something without backlight and its color output is a little "mushy". But none of these seem unfixable when you would create a product that isn't focused on being low cost and as far as I can tell Pixel Qi is doing exactly that.
From a eBook reader I expect that it can access the web without issues, with eInk that simply seems impossible.
When you don't have any infrastructure to keep the software you are running up to date or to install securty fixed you are in a pretty shitty position to begin with. This has nothing to do with Firefox3-beta.
The problem is that you can't get thousands of apps stable at the exact same time. You can do it like Debian and wait really really long with a new release, but the you end up with software that is basically ready for a museum and no longer be useful for daily use. Or you can do it Ubunt style and release more often.
I prefer the later, since software doesn't get magically better when rotting in a repository, but it often get better when a new version gets released. And for the few edge cases where it doesn't a current set of libraries makes things much easier to fix then an obsolete one.
The point of a LTS is that you don't update the software across major versions, but limit updates to bug fixes. So if they don't include FF3 now, then they include it never and you are stuck with FF2. With FF3-beta in they can simply upgrade when FF3-final comes along.
The keyboard on the other side is hard to solve, when they keys aren't even large enough to fit all your fingers on the home row it can get annoying and I wouldn't want to type a lengthy text on that and of course the thing isn't large enough to fit a bigger keyboard in. Maybe its time to dust of IBM's TrackWrite again.
That little bit of Speed Racer I have seen in the trailer looked way over the top in terms of CGI, but on the other side I don't consider that a problem, because it obviously is supposed to be exactly that, it never tried to look real and it is based on a cartoon to begin with. CGI seems simply to be used to get a specific style and I don't mind that, I really liked Sky Captain because of that.
What bothers me much more is when CGI is overused in an otherwise realistic looking movie. King Kong for example was a pretty bad offender in that area. There you have things like a few dozen Brontosaurus running and stacking on top of each other in a stampede and humans running around right in between and if that wouldn't be enough you of course also have some carnivores dinosaurs chasing the humans right trough that ridiculous mess of CGI dino mass. That scene felt like a contest of how many CGI dinos you could stack per cubic meter and not something that would be even remotely believable, not even by already ridiculous Hollywood standard. If they wanted to trash all my suspend of disbelieve they have certainly accomplished that very well.
That aside, I agree. I would much prefer if all those distros out there would just die or merge together. Luckily that is already slowly happening. A lot of distros these days are Debian based, instead of being just hacked up from scratch.
I ran Linux on my Pentium 90 just fine and I am sure the OLPC can do better then that. There are however two issues, for one, a webbrowser today can need *a lot* of CPU, browsing some of those dynamic AJAX pages is nothing short of painful, sometimes close to impossible even on a much stronger computer then the OLPC and switching to a different browser doesn't help either. The web these days simply requires a ton of CPU when you want to render things as intended by the author. This has nothing to do with Open Source, but just the way people design webpages. And of course Flash only makes things worse and Adobe Flash or Gnash doesn't really fix a thing, stuff is just not designed to operate with low CPU usage.
The other issue is Sugar itself, starting applications in Sugar is mind boggling slow. Even a helloworld takes around 10 seconds, while it is pretty much instantaneous outside of Sugar. As soon as things run there really isn't much of a problem, but startup time is horrible. This is something that of course can be blamed on "OpenSource", but not on "us", since Sugar was created from scratch for the OLPC. However there is certainly a ton of room for optimizations and if those OLPC guys would just sell those things to more people they might actually have a chance to get this fixed (there is currently no way to obtain a OLPC for a reasonable price).
The people observing a user using the product, i.e. neither the user nor the developer.
If you let the user decide you end up with the something as awful as the "Homer Car". What a user needs is quite often simply not the same as what the user wants.
Simple example of two options:
[ ] Focus follows mouse
[ ] MacOS style menus
Great, each of those might be something that is wanted by the user. However if you switch them both on you end up with an unusable application, since the moment you move your mouse into the direction of the menu you lose focus. You simply can't combine both.
Now as long as both of these options are in a single application, you might be able to catch that, but what if they are in different application? One application choses 'Mac menus' by default and your window manager uses focus follows mouse by default. The user will have good fun trying to figure out why the menu always disappears when he tries to reach it.
Now this is just an example, but options can always have unintended side effects. And just because option X works and option Y work, that doesn't mean that X and Y work together. Which is the reason why one should try to keep options to a minimum, so that the behavior of the application stays predictable.
That all is of course doesn't mean that all options should be removed, some are important, but one really need to be careful about which to keep and just keeping everything will just lead to a mess.
When you want good usability you have to throw stuff away, completly. Moving the option around doesn't help, because you end up with more code to maintain, side-effects that might break other stuff and a lot of problem. With one option that might not be to hard to solve, but if you have dozens of options interacting with each other it gets trouble some.
All that said, I havn't read the discussion (trac is down) so I don't know if there really is a good use case for having a manually resizable inputbox or if it is just users wanting back the behavior they got used to.
Since track is currently down I can only guess, but I assume it is something like:
Developer: auto-resize makes app behave correctly, you never end up having to grab the mouse again to see your text or scroll around, there is no longer a need to resize manually
User: App behaves different, I want my old behavior back.
Not sure if there are any real use-cases for a manual reside inputbox.
Have a look back at the switch from Gnome1.4 to Gnome2.0, it was painful and a lot of options got removed, it pissed of a ton of users, lead to a fork (that soon died) and was quite a mess. However the cleanup really did improve Gnome in the long run. Since instead of a bazillion option you now have a desktop that behaves correct by default.
I think the main reason to not make it an option is because it is such a tiny obscure detail that you wouldn't even think to look for an option in the first place. And thus adding the option to the GUI would be useless clutter. Good usability is often about removing options and make things behave the right way at default.
OLPC needs to sell those things commercially, when they don't have the resources to do so themselves they need to partner up with somebody who has to. This whole elitist thing with "only for third world" is getting kind of tiring.
XO can run Flash, both Gnash and the normal closed source one, but it is not fast enough to watch video. That said, this is actually not a problem of the XO itself, since Youtube videos in mplayer work fine, just Flash being a little more CPU hungry then it should be.
The problem with G1G1 wasn't that it brought OLPCs into the hands of consumers, but that it basically was a public beta test for twice the price as a regular OLPC would have cost (especially the beta-test part wasn't made all that clear). This has nothing to do with the hardware itself, which is quite frankly fantastic and in some areas superior to the EeePC.
The problem I have with the OLPC is that they still haven't any announcements or even plans for a regular commercial release of the machines. Give that thing decent warranty, sell it for $250 instead of $400, offer replacement parts and all that stuff and it shouldn't be to hard to please the consumer. I just don't get why they want to make that thing a third-world-only device, when there pretty much isn't anything quite like it in the first-world.