Now, it is obvious that the XO-1 is designed to be a sturdy piece of equipment, but I find it downright silly that the keyboard is non-replaceable. Why is the keyboard non-replaceable? Anything special about it? Since pretty much every part of the OLPC can be replaced with ease, the thing is designed so that broken parts can easily be fixed.
Since when has that been a fundamental rule of IT? You should keep your backup away from the real data for sure, so that when one burns down you still have the other. But keep the drive apart from the reader, what good is that supposed to do? If your drive files you might end up having a really hard time tracking down a new one, putting all your backups in limbo, especially it not just fails to work, but destroys your backup media in the process when you try to read it, like Zip Drives click-of-death. And well, if your backup burns down it doesn't really matter if they are with the reader or not.
Now keeping backup away from the real data is for sure a good thing and 10 years ago that could be easiest done with tape and a seperate reader, but today you could just take a few USB hard drives and let them do the job, since it is trivial to disconnect them and store them far away from the data.
Now of course drive durability might be a serious question and USB drives are also not exactly known for good error reporting, which might mean that some fail silently without letting you know. But that really has nothing to do with keeping disks and readers apart.
It gives a nice easy to read page with all the navbar and advertising crap removed. While you can also automatically remove some stuff via stylesheets, I find an explicit way to select the print version much better, since that way I can select what I want to see or print instead of letting browser magic do the job.
For instance, Wikipedia's proponents (defenders? apologists?) are fond of saying that Wikipedia's open model makes it less biased than, say, a copyrighted encyclopedia. That's a biased statement itself No, it is a statement of fact, because Wikipedia is among the very few sources of information out there that doesn't hide the fact that it might be wrong. How often have you read in your paper encyclopedia that the following article might lack sources, might be biased or otherwise flawed? Likely never. Paper encyclopedia, newspapers and TV don't do that, they present every information as if it would be correct, even so it might not be, not even close. Wikipedia on the other side as all those "Citations missing", "Article is NPOV", etc. banners that inform you when things are not right and as this wouldn't be enough there are also the Talk pages. When there is a controversial topic you have a very good change to find a lengthy discussion about the controversy on the Talk pages. This is something you will never see in a paper encyclopedia.
Now is Wikipedia perfect? Nope. I would like to see a separation between 'stable' and 'unstable' articles, I would also like to see the talk pages turned into a proper message board. I would also like to see the stupid habit of deleting good articles gone in the German Wikipedia. But none of those issues changes the fact that Wikipedia is among the very few information sources that actually outright tell you when there might be a controversy.
This all of course doesn't mean that Wikipedia can't be wrong, but then the Edit button and Talk pages are there for you to correct the matter *instantly*. No need to wait ten years till your library might get the revisited version of that paper encyclopedia.
Oh, and due to care to elaborate on which sources of information that you consider "good enough" for yourself?
I think it's a neat calculation. We've all lost track of what fast actually means for a modern CPU. I don't think so. There is still the good old 'benchmark' which we call games or when you don't have games for the CPU, just measure the speed in consoles. "This thing is as fast as a dozen PS3" would give a reasonably good idea of its speed. That whole "finger in front of your face" is just plain bullshit and doesn't give you any idea whatsoever in relation to other devices.
True a TB wouldn't be much good for HD video unless there is some really large jump in compression technique, however on the plus side that TB figure really isn't important, since the available storage we have starts to grow and grow. For as little as $100 I can buy a $500GB drive that can record a whole year, 24/7, of MP3 audio in good quality. That in turn means for as little as $10'000, giving todays prices, I can record *everything* I will ever hear in my whole life. Going from that to HD video is still a bit away, but if you settle for less you could already start to record your whole live in YouTube-like video quality.
There is of course still a bunch of info mission that isn't recorded, but what I find impressive about this is that recording your whole life on video isn't some future sci-fi any more, but something like is quite doable and also quite affordable, $100 a year is basically nothing.
And not even/. will cover the announcement because there will be consumer machines on the shelves that don't cost that much more, are more dependable and can do useful work. Such devices are already available, but they cost thousands of dollar, since there is little chance of these to ever become mass marketed I doubt that their price will fall anytime soon or ever for that matter. However what might likely happen is that somebody will allow you to send in your CAD design by email, get it printed out and then send it back to you. There already is a shop that is doing that for World of Warcraft character models, including custom armor, color and stuff, can't take long till somebody will start it for general CAD models.
No amount of system security (short of totally locking-down the computer to the point that the user can't run/alter a thing) will ever be able to prevent an uninformed user clicking on e-mail attachments, Yes, no amount of security will ever be able to control the user, but then, thats not the point of software security, the point is simply to not let a users actions cause unexpected harm. There isn't a single good reason why clicking an attachment should be dangerous, in fact there is a lot of reason for the user to believe that it would be harmless and with proper software it would be.
or clicking 'Allow' to every dialogue that they are presented with. The problem here is that users have been trained to click dialogs away, because 99% of them really are stupid, annoying and pointless. No surprise that the user will just continue clicking on that 1% of dialogs that actually matters, they simply have been trained for exactly that.
Educating people that computers are not appliances like fridges is the only way that things will ever begin to be better. No, thats the way to make things stay exactly the same. Software as we have it today is totally broken and while it is of good to educate users about that, it should be made clear that this isn't an unfixable problem. Software isn't the way it is because it has to, but because nobody ever spend the time to fix it. This whole educating the user about how he should have a firewall and a virus scanner and stuff is all nice and good, it however is also misleadings, since none of that would be needed in a good OS.
I think that the banks imposing a you-screw-up-and-you-lose policy is a pretty good way to make users face-up to the consequences of their actions - ie. to educate them. It is also a good way to stop the banks from fixing the problem, after all they don't have to pay the bill if things go wrong. If users computer can't be trusted then they simply shouldn't be used to handle money transfers, because the system as a whole isn't secure that way. Solutions with dedicated hardware (HBCI, etc.) exist, they just need to be supported by the banks.
Yep, 'easy to use' is simply the distro which you have the best chance to get help with and a popular distro beats a smaller one pretty much all time in that area. And beside that making Linux easier to use doesn't require another distro, it requires *less* distros. This whole distro chaos has been nothing but a big waste of time for Linux in general. There are only very few distros out there that really do something different then the other, for by far most of them it is all the same, they all try to solve the very same problems, just in slightly different and incompatible ways.
I really wouldn't mind if every distro out there died out instantly leaving only a single one left, since for usability and compatibility that would be by far the best that could happen.
Massmarket VR helmets had head tracking over decade ago, it just happened that they haven't sold all that well and got lost and forgotten in computer game history. Today you can buy TrackIR, doesn't have the VR googles, but does all the head tracking for gaming on a normal monitor.
While an interesting philosophical question, it kind of misses the point here. It doesn't matter if what we call reality is really 'real' or just looks that way, the point is simply that our self created artificial worlds (video games) don't even come close to what we call reality and thus distinguishing a video game from reality is trivial.
The joy of a virtual world is that it can take shortcuts, so it doesn't have to simulate every particle in the gaming world, it just has to create the results you see on your virtual computer screen.
I'm just guessing here, but I could see how this COULD be by design: I doubt it. For one thing it is not actually hard to decrypt the datastore, all you need is a list of keys and you are done, i.e. the 'encryption' of the datastore is for plausible deniability, not to protect anybody from looking into it. But more importantly, your browser history will give all that information away anyway and even if it would anybody could hack together a Freenet that doesn't have a slow datastore. And just for the record, getting stuff from your datastore is still faster then getting it from Freenet, just a lot slower then loading normal pages from your harddrive.
Anyway, if you want to hide that you are running Freenet you have to get a encrypted partition either way, that is the only way they can't meddle with your datastore or other Freenet stuff once they have seized your computer.
1) Yes, I know that setting, but it doesn't seem to have any influence here, upstream and down stream are always pretty much equal, never even close to 4x, which of course makes sense since that is the only way you can diny to actually use it. "I didn't download anything, I was just routing traffic..."
2) Might be a matter of CPU power that it takes to deoce from the datastore/cache, try opening up multiple pages at once, complexer pages, etc. Freenet very quickly becomes rather unresponsiv and loading stuff from local cache ends up being slower then downloading from the real internet. Also try a bigger download, just FEC decoding it can take hours.
4) And another two issue, not speed related: The documentation sucks, it is currently very hard to figure out how Freenet works and the lack of a standard FCP library makes tool writing more complicated then it should be.
The upstream bandwidth used by Freenet is much larger then upstream used by normal web traffic, the number of simultaneous connections is also much larger.
Trying to use Steganography to hide Freenet is like trying to hide a Steganosaurus in a mail envelope, might in theory work if the envelope is large enough, but it would be still rather obvious what is going on.
The problem is that you can't hide from your ISP. Your ISP knows to whom you connect and with steganography you can only hide what you send, but not that you send something. And with Freenet you simply have a traffic profile that doesn't match any normal web traffic, i.e. dozens of connection to random hosts and that 24/7 is something that you normally don't do.
When it comes to speed Freenet has still a few problems:
1) Freenet tries to keep downstream and upstream bandwidth equal, this means that it gets hard to tell if your node is downloading or uploading anything, which is good for anonymity, but it also means that you are limited to your upstream bandwidth, which with most DSL providers isn't all that great and often a tenth of your normal downstream bandwidth. There is basically no chance that this ever gets fixed.
2) Freenets datastore/cache is extremely slow, it doesn't really matter how often you already already visited a page, revisiting it again takes often a long long while, while it really should be instantaneous, after all the data is already on your machine. Tweaking a few settings in Firefox helps a bit, but the performance is still so bad that it is basically unusable for actual browsing, even if things are in your cache. This pretty much sucks, but luckily isn't by design and should be fixable.
3) KSK redirect downloads are slow, which in turns means that message systems like Frost, that are based on KSKs, are very easily spammed up to a level where you can't even download all the spam, i.e. it isn't just an annoyance but completly blocks both download and upload of messages. There is another messaging system in development and that KSK problem might also be fixable from what I understand.
Other then that Freenet works for most parts as expected. It won't win any speed records anytime soon, but it works for uploading and downloading even larger ones when you have the time.
Just because the majority of developers can't doesn't mean it has "failed" When you want to get parallelism into the mainstream then that is pretty much the exact definition of "fail".
That may be some of the confusion. You're thinking "IBM PC gaming", while I was thinking of "PC gaming" in the generic sense which included Atari STs and Commodore Amigas which were far more advanced than anything the consoles could do. In a twisted kind of way one could also say that the Atari ST and Amiga were consoles. They had all the special gaming hardware that consoles had and IBM PCs didn't, you could start a game on the Amiga simply by inserting a floppy, just like on a console, you didn't have a OS to worry about and all that stuff. The only big difference in home computers and consoles really was that the home computer were open and self-containing platforms, every body could write software for them and you could write software on them. You couldn't do that with any normal console, for one thing the console manufactures didn't let you and you also simply didn't have a keyboard to type in code.
All that said its kind of pointless to compare processing power while ignoring price and release dates, when you have a life-cycle of 5 years it is just natural that at one point in time you will have pretty decent hardware while at other points in that life-cycle you will look pretty outdated.
And to come back to normal PC gaming, the big problem these days is simply that PCs are fast enough for webbrowsing and office, even if they are five years old, but that same PC isn't good enough for gaming anymore. Throw in laptops and on-board graphic chips that aren't good for gaming right from the start and you end up with a pretty fractured market where too many PCs simply aren't gaming capable any more.
Why? Because the XBox360 has a sky high failure rate and Microsoft has waited a little to long with a price cut, i.e. it still hasn't reached the USA, there are also support issues and pricey online-gaming, pricey Wifi adapter, no BluRay and stuff like that. $400 XBox360 vs $600 Playstation makes the XBox360 look like a solid offer, but $350 XBox360 vs $400 Playstation 3 makes it look like a rip-off.
To make it short: XBox360 sucks more and more each day, because Microsoft doesn't seem to get a clue, while Sony pretty much undid everything of their initial mistakes.
Does software matter too? Of course, but in this generation I think PS3 and XBox360 seem to be mostly equally matched, the XBox360 has more western games, while the PS3 has more of the eastern type, while the Wii does its own thing completly.
Evoting can work if the source and hardware design of the machines are completely open to the public. That isn't enough because you have absolutely no guarantee that the hardware and software you vote on is equal to the hardware and software design that was published. And also you would still have a voting process that is basically a magical blackbox for 99.9% of the population, some experts might be able to verify it, but not the voter and this is a big deal, since a voter should be able to understand and verify the voting process. Good old pen&paper based voting does that, eVoting doesn't even get close.
I see eVoting as basically a first step to abandon democracy. Other then gaining the ability to temper with votes there simply isn't a need for eVoting.
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Since when has that been a fundamental rule of IT? You should keep your backup away from the real data for sure, so that when one burns down you still have the other. But keep the drive apart from the reader, what good is that supposed to do? If your drive files you might end up having a really hard time tracking down a new one, putting all your backups in limbo, especially it not just fails to work, but destroys your backup media in the process when you try to read it, like Zip Drives click-of-death. And well, if your backup burns down it doesn't really matter if they are with the reader or not.
Now keeping backup away from the real data is for sure a good thing and 10 years ago that could be easiest done with tape and a seperate reader, but today you could just take a few USB hard drives and let them do the job, since it is trivial to disconnect them and store them far away from the data.
Now of course drive durability might be a serious question and USB drives are also not exactly known for good error reporting, which might mean that some fail silently without letting you know. But that really has nothing to do with keeping disks and readers apart.
Even the spacer gif needs an alt tag, an ALT="" to be precise, since else there is no way to tell that the image doesn't contain anything of interest.
It gives a nice easy to read page with all the navbar and advertising crap removed. While you can also automatically remove some stuff via stylesheets, I find an explicit way to select the print version much better, since that way I can select what I want to see or print instead of letting browser magic do the job.
Now is Wikipedia perfect? Nope. I would like to see a separation between 'stable' and 'unstable' articles, I would also like to see the talk pages turned into a proper message board. I would also like to see the stupid habit of deleting good articles gone in the German Wikipedia. But none of those issues changes the fact that Wikipedia is among the very few information sources that actually outright tell you when there might be a controversy.
This all of course doesn't mean that Wikipedia can't be wrong, but then the Edit button and Talk pages are there for you to correct the matter *instantly*. No need to wait ten years till your library might get the revisited version of that paper encyclopedia.
Oh, and due to care to elaborate on which sources of information that you consider "good enough" for yourself?
True a TB wouldn't be much good for HD video unless there is some really large jump in compression technique, however on the plus side that TB figure really isn't important, since the available storage we have starts to grow and grow. For as little as $100 I can buy a $500GB drive that can record a whole year, 24/7, of MP3 audio in good quality. That in turn means for as little as $10'000, giving todays prices, I can record *everything* I will ever hear in my whole life. Going from that to HD video is still a bit away, but if you settle for less you could already start to record your whole live in YouTube-like video quality.
There is of course still a bunch of info mission that isn't recorded, but what I find impressive about this is that recording your whole life on video isn't some future sci-fi any more, but something like is quite doable and also quite affordable, $100 a year is basically nothing.
The problem is that when you blame the user you give those that actually could fix the issue a free pass to continue to produce insecure junk.
The user is by far the weakest party in this and has the least chance to actually do something about the problem.
Yep, 'easy to use' is simply the distro which you have the best chance to get help with and a popular distro beats a smaller one pretty much all time in that area. And beside that making Linux easier to use doesn't require another distro, it requires *less* distros. This whole distro chaos has been nothing but a big waste of time for Linux in general. There are only very few distros out there that really do something different then the other, for by far most of them it is all the same, they all try to solve the very same problems, just in slightly different and incompatible ways.
I really wouldn't mind if every distro out there died out instantly leaving only a single one left, since for usability and compatibility that would be by far the best that could happen.
Massmarket VR helmets had head tracking over decade ago, it just happened that they haven't sold all that well and got lost and forgotten in computer game history. Today you can buy TrackIR, doesn't have the VR googles, but does all the head tracking for gaming on a normal monitor.
While an interesting philosophical question, it kind of misses the point here. It doesn't matter if what we call reality is really 'real' or just looks that way, the point is simply that our self created artificial worlds (video games) don't even come close to what we call reality and thus distinguishing a video game from reality is trivial.
The joy of a virtual world is that it can take shortcuts, so it doesn't have to simulate every particle in the gaming world, it just has to create the results you see on your virtual computer screen.
Anyway, if you want to hide that you are running Freenet you have to get a encrypted partition either way, that is the only way they can't meddle with your datastore or other Freenet stuff once they have seized your computer.
1) Yes, I know that setting, but it doesn't seem to have any influence here, upstream and down stream are always pretty much equal, never even close to 4x, which of course makes sense since that is the only way you can diny to actually use it. "I didn't download anything, I was just routing traffic..."
2) Might be a matter of CPU power that it takes to deoce from the datastore/cache, try opening up multiple pages at once, complexer pages, etc. Freenet very quickly becomes rather unresponsiv and loading stuff from local cache ends up being slower then downloading from the real internet. Also try a bigger download, just FEC decoding it can take hours.
4) And another two issue, not speed related: The documentation sucks, it is currently very hard to figure out how Freenet works and the lack of a standard FCP library makes tool writing more complicated then it should be.
The upstream bandwidth used by Freenet is much larger then upstream used by normal web traffic, the number of simultaneous connections is also much larger.
Trying to use Steganography to hide Freenet is like trying to hide a Steganosaurus in a mail envelope, might in theory work if the envelope is large enough, but it would be still rather obvious what is going on.
The problem is that you can't hide from your ISP. Your ISP knows to whom you connect and with steganography you can only hide what you send, but not that you send something. And with Freenet you simply have a traffic profile that doesn't match any normal web traffic, i.e. dozens of connection to random hosts and that 24/7 is something that you normally don't do.
Steganography simply doesn't work here, because you have far to much traffic to hide and far to little traffic to hide it in.
When it comes to speed Freenet has still a few problems:
1) Freenet tries to keep downstream and upstream bandwidth equal, this means that it gets hard to tell if your node is downloading or uploading anything, which is good for anonymity, but it also means that you are limited to your upstream bandwidth, which with most DSL providers isn't all that great and often a tenth of your normal downstream bandwidth. There is basically no chance that this ever gets fixed.
2) Freenets datastore/cache is extremely slow, it doesn't really matter how often you already already visited a page, revisiting it again takes often a long long while, while it really should be instantaneous, after all the data is already on your machine. Tweaking a few settings in Firefox helps a bit, but the performance is still so bad that it is basically unusable for actual browsing, even if things are in your cache. This pretty much sucks, but luckily isn't by design and should be fixable.
3) KSK redirect downloads are slow, which in turns means that message systems like Frost, that are based on KSKs, are very easily spammed up to a level where you can't even download all the spam, i.e. it isn't just an annoyance but completly blocks both download and upload of messages. There is another messaging system in development and that KSK problem might also be fixable from what I understand.
Other then that Freenet works for most parts as expected. It won't win any speed records anytime soon, but it works for uploading and downloading even larger ones when you have the time.
All that said its kind of pointless to compare processing power while ignoring price and release dates, when you have a life-cycle of 5 years it is just natural that at one point in time you will have pretty decent hardware while at other points in that life-cycle you will look pretty outdated.
And to come back to normal PC gaming, the big problem these days is simply that PCs are fast enough for webbrowsing and office, even if they are five years old, but that same PC isn't good enough for gaming anymore. Throw in laptops and on-board graphic chips that aren't good for gaming right from the start and you end up with a pretty fractured market where too many PCs simply aren't gaming capable any more.
To make it short: XBox360 sucks more and more each day, because Microsoft doesn't seem to get a clue, while Sony pretty much undid everything of their initial mistakes.
Does software matter too? Of course, but in this generation I think PS3 and XBox360 seem to be mostly equally matched, the XBox360 has more western games, while the PS3 has more of the eastern type, while the Wii does its own thing completly.
I see eVoting as basically a first step to abandon democracy. Other then gaining the ability to temper with votes there simply isn't a need for eVoting.