One of the reasons that computers have not had as great an impact on education is that computers have traditionally imposed very structured requirements on input, and, as such, are result-oriented. For example, educational software focusing on mathematics typically evaluates the ultimate answer a user enters (via a keyboard), rather than the process by which the user arrives at the answer. Similarly, a user does not actually write a letter "B" out on the screen, but rather types the letter "B" by pressing a key appropriately labeled on a keyboard. In such situations, while the user may become more efficient at typing, the user is probably not learning to form the letter. Clearly, teaching the correct process/technique is not addressed by educational software.
Without being drawn into the complexites of the patent itself, this does not appear to me to be an old problem with no good. well-established, off-the-shelf solutions.
I can't find any hard information about the company. Who are these people, do they have the financial backing and manufacturing capacity to build 100,000 units of anything? Is $100 their wholesale or retail target price, and do they have a realistic chance of hitting the mark?
Slashdot has been quick to dismiss Windows XP Starter Edition as a competitor, localized and with a lot of help for first time users. Screenshots of SE suggest a very clean and attractive GUI.
Microsoft is well known and accepted at street level in the third world, something an eastern buyer has to consider when commiting to a million-dollar purchase. I am not convinced that Linux is the right marketing decision for the SolarPC, however big the PR win in the western Linux press, where nothing is at risk.
I don't think $100 includes the cost of the monitor or the keyboard/mouse. So by the time you're done buying those "optional" items and can actually USE the computer, you're looking at maybe $400.
You see this on Walmart.com. By the time you price a "complete" system, in-store pick-up, no free home delivery, whatever advantage Linux has disappears, and the Windows system will have brand name recognition (HP, eMachines.)
...of the current government in China. It'll one day, not to long from now, end with political protest, but the government will be virtually dead by then due to the internet.
and John Dean will be sworn in as President come January.
The point is that no one gives a damn. The analogy between the cathedral and the bazaar has become so twisted, stretched, and debased as to become meaningless. To me it has the same flavor as the much abused quote from Gandhi ("first they laugh at you...") posted ad nauseum on Slashdot
The RIGHT way is to push content providers to use technologies that we don't have to license, such as Vorbis, Theora, MPEG-1, Dirac, etc
Imagine if all the percieved gaps in Linux were fixed the same way... People using Linux will want photoshop, so license Photoshop for Linux, rather than creating The GIMP
Imagine licensing the PANTONE system for the GIMP and delivering a product that is suitable for pre-press worktodayand not five years down the road.
Free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer are obsessions only within the open source community.
While it is still cheap, its not quite as cheap as you make it sound.
true, and I apologize for the error.
but I stand by my argument that home users are not FOSS purists. meaning they won't abandon windows media, subscription radio, on-line music stores, etc., for a Linux distro that doesn't support these services out of the box.
You want to see Linux on every desktop? Would it kill you to admit that shelling out the bucks to license proprietary technologies that might actually get you there makes some sense?
None of the commercial Linux distros are going to touch a decoder that has "lawsuit" written all over it.
With an influx of smart westerners how long do you think India will stay a third world country? They're getting all the jobs from those western countries while the best workers from the western countries flee to India in order to have jobs. If India plays this right they could easily become a world power while the arrogant western countries slowly slide down the tubes.
60% of Indian workers are employed in subsistence agriculture, 23% in services.
The educated elite has gained a thin slice of the high-tech pie. But that has not translated into the kind of broad based economic development that would take the masses out of poverty.
The article clearly states that those people are not techs but "people with money."
The article also warns that this is a market driven by short-lived fads, the latest styles and designs. Remember the lemon-lime and strawberry flavored i-Macs? You can win big and you can lose big trying to be up-scale and trendy.
First the browser, next up... the desktop. So long Bill, its been a long strange trip. Hope MS has some other business models in the wings lest they follow Apple down the long slow downward spiral of O/S irrelevance...
XP has 60% of the market, up 16% from January. Linux has 3% of the market, up 0.4% since January.
The alternative browsers showed significant growth before the release of SP2, since then not much has changed. Browser and Platform Statistics
In the North American consumer market, Linux has no visibility whatever. Linux may be embedded in cell phones or devices like TiVO but only a Geek would know or care.
Bell was offering long distance service between Boston and New York in 1884. It had a quarter of a million subscribers a decade late, three million in 1907. Bell was privately financed from the beginning.
Consumers are not required to read the ads in magazines or newspapers. I really see no difference.
You are not required to read the adds in your Sunday paper. But the publisher won't sell you a copy without them. It was not so long ago when you could buy add space on the front page of any daily newspaper, in the 19th century unidentified adds were often placed seamlessly within the news columns themselves. Be careful what you ask for. Radio in the thirties and forties was notorious for integrating commercials into programming so tightly that they could never be stripped out.
I come from a smaller nation (New Zealand) that has decided to not support the US on several occasions, including various nuclear issues and the Iraq invasion. The result is that our government is now pursuing a Free Trade Agreement with China, because the US won't speak to us.
a population of four million doesn't give you much to bargain with.
and what does that get you? The Chinese law of intellectual property is built on the western model. Copyright Law of People's Republic of China Enforcement is erratic. But if Chinese films, videos, etc., gain significant, paying, audiences in the states, don't you think the government would move very quickly to protect them?
life can be beautiful when seen from a bike...
but not in the northeast, in winter. and not in DC in the dog days of summer.
the plain truth is, we all grow older. you can cycle for pleasure at any age, and be all the better for it, but as a daily, all-weather, all-season, commute there comes a time when the body rebels.
It fails to point out that OSTG is where a lot of code is checked into from coders around the world.
If the value of the time of these coders were taken into account what would the effective budget be I wonder?
generating "a lot of code" doesn't necessarily have the same significance as "the work product of a billion dollar targeted investment in basic research."
I attempted to install a purchased, boxed copy of HL2 on a system at work which is not connected to the internet because part of my job is testing. Guess what? I can't play my legit copy on this system.
guess what, you are not being paid to play HL2 on company time
During that time, everyone with a spare nickel and a desire to publish something put out their own rag.
William Allen White began his Emporia, Kansas, weekly with a borrowed $3,000, but wrote late in life of how expensive and complex it had all become. To make it in the big city you needed very deep pockets.
The two Open Source projects with brand name recognition and acceptance beyond Slashdot are Moz/Firefox and OpenOffice.org. Both have commercial, closed-source, origins, large development teams, substantial, stable, financial support, and neither are exactly cutting-edge, at a distance, a successful open-source project can look a lot like Microsoft.
But your metaphor fails in the end because it lives in the realm of the physical
Software development cannot escape the realm of the physical.
Your hyper intelligent grad student may come up with a plausible compression algorithm, but how does he test it without the backing of an organization that can bring almost unlimited manpower and financial resources to bear on the problem?
How do humans perceive color, pattern, texture and movement? Why do audiences find CGI humans so disquieting? Can a lossy video codec have a similiar effect? How does the perception of sound relate to the perception of sight and vice versa? The video codec cannot exist in isolation.
Does the codec address the needs of the visually impaired, the hearing impaired? Closed captioning and whatever other text and data services broadcasters will need to shoehorn in?
Should the resolution be fixed or scalable, and what are the trade-offs there? How far can you push existing video technologies and broadcast standards and still have a marketable product? What data, in the end, can be sacrificed and what data must be preserved in compression?
There is no supercollider or electron microscope of the software world without which it would be hard to make a contribution. Counting manpower, Microsoft is hopelessly outclassed by many orders of magnitude.
The BBC with 75+ years of experience and engineering resources is struggling to advance it's scalable Dirac HD video codec. There are many areas of research where money and tools and organization still matter.
If you are a creative genius, you can develop the Xerox process on your kitchen table and still fall billions short of having a marketable product, which you may never live to see, but you can also chose to work full time for Bell Labs and watch as your invention of the transistor transforms the world before your eyes, and maybe exit the stage with a Nobel prize.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the reasons that computers have not had as great an impact on education is that computers have traditionally imposed very structured requirements on input, and, as such, are result-oriented. For example, educational software focusing on mathematics typically evaluates the ultimate answer a user enters (via a keyboard), rather than the process by which the user arrives at the answer. Similarly, a user does not actually write a letter "B" out on the screen, but rather types the letter "B" by pressing a key appropriately labeled on a keyboard. In such situations, while the user may become more efficient at typing, the user is probably not learning to form the letter. Clearly, teaching the correct process/technique is not addressed by educational software.
Without being drawn into the complexites of the patent itself, this does not appear to me to be an old problem with no good. well-established, off-the-shelf solutions.
Slashdot has been quick to dismiss Windows XP Starter Edition as a competitor, localized and with a lot of help for first time users. Screenshots of SE suggest a very clean and attractive GUI.
Microsoft is well known and accepted at street level in the third world, something an eastern buyer has to consider when commiting to a million-dollar purchase. I am not convinced that Linux is the right marketing decision for the SolarPC, however big the PR win in the western Linux press, where nothing is at risk.
You see this on Walmart.com.
By the time you price a "complete" system, in-store pick-up, no free home delivery, whatever advantage Linux has disappears, and the Windows system will have brand name recognition (HP, eMachines.)
and John Dean will be sworn in as President come January.
The point is that no one gives a damn. The analogy between the cathedral and the bazaar has become so twisted, stretched, and debased as to become meaningless. To me it has the same flavor as the much abused quote from Gandhi ("first they laugh at you...") posted ad nauseum on Slashdot
You have answered your own question:
None of the attempts to wipe MS from the typical office desktop would have had any success without Sun's StarOffice or OOo.
Imagine if all the percieved gaps in Linux were fixed the same way... People using Linux will want photoshop, so license Photoshop for Linux, rather than creating The GIMP
Imagine licensing the PANTONE system for the GIMP and delivering a product that is suitable for pre-press work today and not five years down the road.
Free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer are obsessions only within the open source community.
true, and I apologize for the error.
but I stand by my argument that home users are not FOSS purists. meaning they won't abandon windows media, subscription radio, on-line music stores, etc., for a Linux distro that doesn't support these services out of the box.
The answer for a video decoder is 10 cents per unit with a $40,000 cap. Windows Media Licensing Fees and Royalties (September 2004)
You want to see Linux on every desktop? Would it kill you to admit that shelling out the bucks to license proprietary technologies that might actually get you there makes some sense?
None of the commercial Linux distros are going to touch a decoder that has "lawsuit" written all over it.
There is another. The airlift out when everything turns sour and your bodyguards have fled.
60% of Indian workers are employed in subsistence agriculture, 23% in services.
The educated elite has gained a thin slice of the high-tech pie. But that has not translated into the kind of broad based economic development that would take the masses out of poverty.
The article also warns that this is a market driven by short-lived fads, the latest styles and designs. Remember the lemon-lime and strawberry flavored i-Macs? You can win big and you can lose big trying to be up-scale and trendy.
XP has 60% of the market, up 16% from January. Linux has 3% of the market, up 0.4% since January.
The alternative browsers showed significant growth before the release of SP2, since then not much has changed. Browser and Platform Statistics
In the North American consumer market, Linux has no visibility whatever. Linux may be embedded in cell phones or devices like TiVO but only a Geek would know or care.
Bell was offering long distance service between Boston and New York in 1884. It had a quarter of a million subscribers a decade late, three million in 1907. Bell was privately financed from the beginning.
You are not required to read the adds in your Sunday paper. But the publisher won't sell you a copy without them.
It was not so long ago when you could buy add space on the front page of any daily newspaper, in the 19th century unidentified adds were often placed seamlessly within the news columns themselves. Be careful what you ask for. Radio in the thirties and forties was notorious for integrating commercials into programming so tightly that they could never be stripped out.
a population of four million doesn't give you much to bargain with.
and what does that get you? The Chinese law of intellectual property is built on the western model. Copyright Law of People's Republic of China Enforcement is erratic. But if Chinese films, videos, etc., gain significant, paying, audiences in the states, don't you think the government would move very quickly to protect them?
life can be beautiful when seen from a bike...
but not in the northeast, in winter. and not in DC in the dog days of summer. the plain truth is, we all grow older. you can cycle for pleasure at any age, and be all the better for it, but as a daily, all-weather, all-season, commute there comes a time when the body rebels.
If the value of the time of these coders were taken into account what would the effective budget be I wonder?
generating "a lot of code" doesn't necessarily have the same significance as "the work product of a billion dollar targeted investment in basic research."
guess what, you are not being paid to play HL2 on company time
William Allen White began his Emporia, Kansas, weekly with a borrowed $3,000, but wrote late in life of how expensive and complex it had all become. To make it in the big city you needed very deep pockets.
Chicken yesterday and chicken tomorrow, but never a chicken today.
But your metaphor fails in the end because it lives in the realm of the physical
Software development cannot escape the realm of the physical.
Your hyper intelligent grad student may come up with a plausible compression algorithm, but how does he test it without the backing of an organization that can bring almost unlimited manpower and financial resources to bear on the problem?
How do humans perceive color, pattern, texture and movement? Why do audiences find CGI humans so disquieting? Can a lossy video codec have a similiar effect? How does the perception of sound relate to the perception of sight and vice versa? The video codec cannot exist in isolation.
Does the codec address the needs of the visually impaired, the hearing impaired? Closed captioning and whatever other text and data services broadcasters will need to shoehorn in?
Should the resolution be fixed or scalable, and what are the trade-offs there? How far can you push existing video technologies and broadcast standards and still have a marketable product? What data, in the end, can be sacrificed and what data must be preserved in compression?
The BBC with 75+ years of experience and engineering resources is struggling to advance it's scalable Dirac HD video codec. There are many areas of research where money and tools and organization still matter.
If you are a creative genius, you can develop the Xerox process on your kitchen table and still fall billions short of having a marketable product, which you may never live to see, but you can also chose to work full time for Bell Labs and watch as your invention of the transistor transforms the world before your eyes, and maybe exit the stage with a Nobel prize.
They care because the US is a major trading partner, they care because Microsoft is a significant corporate presence in China, giving China credibility with the WTO. Microsoft Joins in China Software Industry Association
They care because Microsoft spends $7 billion USD a year in China on basic research. Gates: Microsoft to expand China research