It's impossible to pick one right number... because it depends on many things. Yep - so the bad news: some internet users will not even have heard of Mozilla, or Firefox. And the good news: among specific user groups, Firefox has reached 100% market share.
This is one of those cases where I think we won. Websites are more compliant than they once were. Alternate browsers are taken seriously. This is what we clamored for a few years ago... and we've largely achieved it! Which (among others) is an important reason I use Firefox. Simply to let organisations & companies know that I prefer a web built on open & supported standards, rather than 'renders okay in your binary-blob-of-choice'. If I'm on a webstore, and I can't navigate, or see details for what's on sale because of some stupid "use IE 6/7 on at least 1024x768 for viewing this site" or similar, than too bad, that store will lose my sale, not my problem. If as a merchant you want to sell things to 100% of potential customers, regardless of what browser they use, then simply code to standards (and test with different browsers), period. For government sites, I think they should have a requirement to be accessible using published standards/protocols (and thus with a tool of choice). In some cases this is codified in law, but implementation isn't always done as it should be (and no-one keeping oversight).
Now if only actual kids in 3rd world countries did cool things with these laptops---like coding/hacking/whatever. From this Heise article you can read:
Since mass production of the first generation XO kicked off in November 2007, 600,000 units have been manufactured and distributed to Peru, Uruguay, Mongolia, Haiti, Rwanda, Mexico, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in the USA and Canada. I assume you're thinking most of those 600,000 XO laptops will NOT be used by actual kids to do cool things with?
First off, parent should (IMHO) be modded as troll, because it has nothing to do with the subject, and looks intended to start a flame war. But just to debunk the argument:
I'd say the OLPC project has succeeded in a technical respect. It produced a computer that's rugged, cheap, power-efficient and flexible. And for the combination of properties, better than what existed before. What's more, if it didn't break open the market of cheap, ultra-mobile machines like the Asus EeePC, then at least accelerated that. Causing millions of people to use smaller, more eco-friendly computing devices than before.
From the education side, success needs more time to show, if it will happen. But progress is blocked here by political or market forces rather than technological options.
So even if the OLPC project hasn't (yet) succeeded in helping poor kids to connect to the rest of the world, and improve their education, it has done 2 things: a) realize part of that dream, and b) bring that goal closer.
the entire paradigm of money for ideas (..) all IP is this way Not really... once you understand what exactly the 'property' in IP is, it makes perfect sense.
The keyword is 'exclusive', meaning only 1 person can use it at a time. If I use a car to drive from A to B, you cannot use it at the same time to drive from C to D. All physical property works that way, somehow.
Now for IP, many people think it's the patented/copyright work that is the 'property' in IP. It isn't - you can copy things anyway, so they're not really scarce. It is the right to determine who is allowed to make copies and when, that is regarded as 'property'. And this is exclusive. Only 1 person or organisation can hold the copyright on a work at any given time. This right is the (artificially) scarce item that is used/inherited/sold and so on. Once you understand this, IP makes perfect sense from a conceptual point of view. I don't like this concept, but it's perfectly in line with how people deal with physical property.
Where IP doesn't make sense, is from a practical point of view. Copyright may have served a purpose 1 or 2 hundred years ago, but times have changed. I have yet to see a convincing proof that the world as a whole has benefited from past IP laws. That technological/cultural progress would have been slower without it. In todays fast-moving society, it serves even less purpose. Countless patents fall in the 'obvious' or 'bound to happen sooner or later' category. Without IP laws, these things would have been thrown onto the world for everyone to use for free. Nor are there any objective standards used to determine IP protections. Protection periods aren't calculated or estimated for optimal effect, but lobbied by greedy corporations for maximum profit. As a result, society as a whole loses.
And then there's implementation. Take for example DRM: you hand a million customers identical 'black boxes' with identical locks, with identical content inside, then you give those customers identical keys, and you tell them: "now go open your box, but don't share what you find inside". Aliens would laugh at how silly this is. Or a company invests millions into development of a new drug, then brings it to the market, but not everyone profits because the poorest can't afford the high price. All the hard work has been done, the company wouldn't profit less if there where a group of 'freeriders' who can afford production costs but not market price, but still: millions are suffering because corporate greed is deemed more important than curing sick people.
If it where up to me, IP laws would be scrapped from the books, so that companies can have succes by innovating faster or smarter than the competition, as opposed to having a bigger pack of lawyers. In the mean while, I just try to ignore IP law as much as I can get away with (like so many people, whether they admit it or not).
From the article linked in 'previously discussed' you can read (near the bottom):
Johnson & Johnson noted that it had contributed $5 million (Eur 3.62 million) over the past three years to the Red Cross and will continue to make donations. Apparantly they put their $ where their mouth is, which deserves respect in itself. And regardless how small a part that may be on the annual budget of either J+J or the (American) Red Cross, more than a cool million and a half per year is no small contribution.
Afraid of taking risks Read: anyone who just wants their system to work, that is, not crash. Like your average user, sysadmin or company IT department. As for severity of crashes: even if it would just crash your browser, that's equivalent to a system crash if things get stuck bad enough that a reboot is the easiest way out. Not something you want to happen while you're on the phone talking to a customer, for instance.
That me be what the article says, but a better summary is as follows:
Voting machine technology has been under attack for a while now, and the machines used over here, have taken so many hits they look like swiss cheese. The keys used to secure them, could be ordered over the internet by anyone. At one point, a voting machine was hacked to play chess on. Another time, it was shown that a simple radio scanner was enough to tell which party people voted for. Hardware design and software leaked to the internet. There was a big fire at the manufacturer (Nedap), which destroyed hundreds of voting machines (destined for Germany, IIRC). The list goes on.
While this was going on, negative reports came in about voting machine problems abroad. Questions where asked in parliament, and few satisfactory answers received. And then there where mayor elections in Amsterdam, where the city counsil chose to revert to pencil and paper.
Basically, the position of 'voting machines work fine and secure' became impossible to maintain. Research into possible replacements has been started, but results from that are years away. So the Dutch government was simply forced to 'go back to the old ways' for the time being.
Frankly, the only reason I can think of someone wanting the illiterate to vote is if they are planning on tricking them into voting as part of their hoard. Just because someone can't read or write, or has little formal education, doesn't mean they're stupid. Intelligence, education and skills are not the same thing (although related).
A comment like yours sounds like a landowner telling one of his slaves: now go do this, because I know what's best for you!
In many cases you may be right, but who are you to say? If 99% of a nation is made up of monkeys, then democracy means the monkeys will run the country. If you don't like that, trying to keep them from voting is the wrong way to go. Instead, help people inform themselves, so that they can make a better choice.
ASUS has great overclocking options in their BIOS too...until OEM's get a hold of them and put their customer BIOS in place that leaves out all the good stuff. Yup, and it's f**king annoying. Along the same line: many retail ATX boards have all sorts of multiplier & voltage settings in their BIOS, while their smaller microATX cousins lack this. Same technology, similar feature set, just a smaller board and a few expansion slots less. But why cripple the BIOS if the hardware perfectly supports different voltage & multiplier settings.
Example: I'm using a mATX K7 board from MSI right now (one of the few mATX K7 boards with onboard SATA), coupled with a mobile Athlon XP2800+. The BIOS has zero support for this chip, it reports 'unknown CPU' at bootup and sets it at 6x multiplier (800 MHz) by default. Did a bridgemod on it to make default multiplier equal to nominal one, and a pinmod to obtain the correct voltage. And voila: rocksolid ever since, even software multiplier switching works fine. And why wouldn't it? It's basically a low-voltage Athlon XP. But why the hell aren't these settings in the BIOS, where a similar (fullsize) ATX board would include such settings? Is it less useful to run a mobile CPU on a mATX board, or what?
P.S. I don't recommend bridge-modding any CPU. It's a pain, and you have a decent chance to render the part useless. I just did it because I preferred taking the chance, rather than having to buy even more parts.
"contact all large opensource projects and find out what file formats they use and persuade them to use our new *open* file format." Well it may just be the other way around: provide better support for (3rd party!) closed formats on a Windows version of Blender (and if possible, only there). How? Let me guess - cut a deal with such a 3rd party and have them provide detailed format specs (privately to Microsoft), and code up a closed-source binary blob only useable by a Windows version of Blender?
Result: people might have better experience working with those formats when they use Blender on Windows. -> That would make it more attractive to use Windows as underlying platform (if support for those file formats matter to you).
In other words: give a competitive advantage to using Windows, make it less attractive to move to a FOSS operating system.
My thoughts exactly. But what's more important:
This is a fairly serious problem for me now (..) No it isn't your problem. Unless they're paying you, you are not in any way obligated to make users of your project happy. Ofcourse you try to, but any user should understand they're not the only one with questions. And if nobody helps out, you're just a single person with limited resources.
Suppose your user base where bigger. Say 100k users. Or 10 million. Could anyone still expect you to help out anyone of those users? Ofcourse not, and in that case these 10M users would be forced to help themselves (to some degree) anyway. The same goes for a university that decides to add X students to your userbase.
Probably it's more a question of why you are working on the project, and what you get from that. Set your own priorities, decide how much time you want to invest, and go from there.
May I suggest you ask the university to do some inhouse filtering of issues/questions (eg. using a local webpage / contact person), and give you a regularly updated 'top 10' list of what they consider most urgent/important.
If you want to support the widest possible userbase, then you might work on those issues that *also* affect other users of your project.
If you put this university first, then you could work their list from the top down.
If you're just doing it for fun, you could cherrypick from their list whatever issue seems most interesting.
--
Do only what only you can do. -Edsger Wybe Dijkstra
I remember that XP would barely run wel lat all on my old computer
IIRC it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 800mhz and about 512 MB of Ram Ridicilous! I started computing in the '80s, when CPU speeds where counted in a few MHz, with a few hundred KB's of RAM and a floppy drive at best. Yet, power it on, and it's ready for input in 2 seconds, with interactive development environment ready. Insert a diskette, type a short command and your favorite game loads in another 5 or 10 seconds.
Any PC built from, say, year 2000 or later is at least 100 times faster, with equally improved memory, graphics and background storage. Does it feel slow? Then either:
You're running the wrong software (like the wrong OS, too much spyware or other crap), or
You're using the wrong tool for the job (like trying to run Crysis on a Pentium 3 with onboard video), or
Your budget doesn't match your requirements.
Either way: complain all you want, but claiming such a computer is slow, is simply inaccurate.
Sure hope those are labeled correctly... just in case anyone at NASA would think it's a funny prank, I recommend NASA add one more rule to their launch procedures: "DO NOT lauch on April 1st"
Best use a time window, to allow for differences in 'local time' (a relative notion for space operations)
quadro will still outperform the geforce by a mile. Assuming the hardware is indeed different... So, exactly *which* Quadro and *which* GeForce are you comparing here? Which drivers? Which applications/benchmarks? Care to share some numbers, that people who have the same hardware can verify?
I doubt anyone outside a few hardcore individual users will use it. A mod like this could be interesting for anyone who
Has a suitable NVIDIA GeForce card
Likes to play with any of these professional applications like Maya
Doesn't want to pay for those applications, or the Quadro bonus
That group may be bigger than you think. Will probably include enthousiasts, people who just want to try out some of these professional applications, perhaps others. Will probably *NOT* include professional users.
Summarized: 'freeloaders', folks that wouldn't pay for the real thing anyway. Doesn't sound like anything that would threaten NVIDIA's business.
The hardware is usually the same, and probably in this case too. Much easier to use software to artificially prevent cross-market competition That means you're essentially paying a bonus for the software (the special driver set). The card double-serves as a dongle. In this case, one that's easily reproduced by modding the generic product.
as most corporate purchasers aren't spending money out of their own pocket they don't particularly care that they're getting scammed. Which I can understand from a people point of view, but not from a business perspective. Any well-run business should try to keep their costs down to a minimum. For instance a $600 premium could also buy you a nice set of office furniture instead.
So what exactly is it that these special drivers do, that the generic ones don't? Are the generic ones missing features (that the hardware does support), or is it the extra support & testing of hardware/software configurations that you pay for?
But don't your hands get tired? Sure, but keyboards work with your feet too, you know. That's the reason real coders of any kind (including HTML coders) have at least 2 keyboards at their disposal: one for collecting bread crumbs, and another one to collect foot.. ehm... smelly stuff.
It's not the people who are slow. Their comments are just tied up in the RISS awaiting gov approval. In that case, those gov. approval folks should outsource the work to far east, low-wage countries? I've heard they're cheap & good at it.
On the other hand, if it was sponsored by the Chinese leadership (..)
Yes, that would be interesting to know. But one of the more insightful views I've heard recently in the China vs. Tibet matter, is that "after so many years of communist rule, it is hard for Chinese people to make a distinction between government, communist party, policy and country". As a result, criticism of Chinese actions concerning Tibet may be felt not as attacks on policy, but attacks on the Chinese people and country. Don't know if that is true, but I'd welcome readers from China to comment on that.
There is a big difference between saying "you are bad" and saying "you are doing something bad". I guess the real gain is that more people (including the Chinese) are talking about Tibet now, and maybe someday the Chinese *people* will realize that Tibetans just want the same thing as the Chinese: run their own affairs, be left alone, and live in peace with their neighbors.
In general I feel that whenever 'weapons' (DoS attacks, censorship, physical force) are used to end a discussion, it means that party has run out of reasonable arguments (and in a way, admits moral defeat).
Is he the same developer who made a game (Crysis) so resource hungry that no gaming platform can handle it?
Are you kidding? Nobody wants to play the 100th Doom clone other than for replay value. For a 'wow' factor, a game needs something new, something that was never done before, or never done that good. A never-seen-before feeling of immersion, a great, unique storyline, artwork that makes existing stuff look old, and sometimes... unique technical features.
To enable innovative technical features, you often need more processing power, whether from CPU, GPU or elsewhere. And for that reason, any game that pushes the envelope will be coded to run on the latest available hardware. And vice versa, the latest hardware will be beefed up to run the latest games smoothly.
So as much as I'd like game developers to create "the most resource-friendly required for a new experience", they'll continue to aim for "get the most impressive out of the newest hardware". That's just how it is.
And 2, 3 years down the line, no-one will care anyway. I've got a machine built around +/- 2 year old parts, and it (just) meets Crysis' requirements. So systems you carry out of the shop right now will do fine. Apart from the fact that you don't have to buy current games or hardware.
Analog TV users are not REQUIRED to purchase a converter box. A converter box is needed if you wish to continue to view over-the-air TV after the transition. Big difference. It's not like Europa. Different from Europe, how? I live in the Netherlands, you're not REQUIRED to purchase anything, and you have similar choices here:
You can watch cable TV
You can watch TV using some ADSL internet/phone/TV combo package
You can get a satellite receiver
You can watch DVD's and read books, OR
For the small remaining group, your analog TV is useless these days, unless you get a DVB-T receiver. You can buy that and watch the public channels (3 here) for free, or get a subscription and watch your basic cable selection of channels. In that case, a simple/basic receiver will be thrown in for free as well, in the shape of a coupon/refund.
Note: that's in the Netherlands, but may be different in other countries in Europe.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, parent should (IMHO) be modded as troll, because it has nothing to do with the subject, and looks intended to start a flame war. But just to debunk the argument:
I'd say the OLPC project has succeeded in a technical respect. It produced a computer that's rugged, cheap, power-efficient and flexible. And for the combination of properties, better than what existed before. What's more, if it didn't break open the market of cheap, ultra-mobile machines like the Asus EeePC, then at least accelerated that. Causing millions of people to use smaller, more eco-friendly computing devices than before.
From the education side, success needs more time to show, if it will happen. But progress is blocked here by political or market forces rather than technological options.
So even if the OLPC project hasn't (yet) succeeded in helping poor kids to connect to the rest of the world, and improve their education, it has done 2 things: a) realize part of that dream, and b) bring that goal closer.
-- Oh and btw. it's Nicholas Negroponte
The keyword is 'exclusive', meaning only 1 person can use it at a time. If I use a car to drive from A to B, you cannot use it at the same time to drive from C to D. All physical property works that way, somehow.
Now for IP, many people think it's the patented/copyright work that is the 'property' in IP. It isn't - you can copy things anyway, so they're not really scarce. It is the right to determine who is allowed to make copies and when, that is regarded as 'property'. And this is exclusive. Only 1 person or organisation can hold the copyright on a work at any given time. This right is the (artificially) scarce item that is used/inherited/sold and so on. Once you understand this, IP makes perfect sense from a conceptual point of view. I don't like this concept, but it's perfectly in line with how people deal with physical property.
Where IP doesn't make sense, is from a practical point of view. Copyright may have served a purpose 1 or 2 hundred years ago, but times have changed. I have yet to see a convincing proof that the world as a whole has benefited from past IP laws. That technological/cultural progress would have been slower without it. In todays fast-moving society, it serves even less purpose. Countless patents fall in the 'obvious' or 'bound to happen sooner or later' category. Without IP laws, these things would have been thrown onto the world for everyone to use for free. Nor are there any objective standards used to determine IP protections. Protection periods aren't calculated or estimated for optimal effect, but lobbied by greedy corporations for maximum profit. As a result, society as a whole loses.
And then there's implementation. Take for example DRM: you hand a million customers identical 'black boxes' with identical locks, with identical content inside, then you give those customers identical keys, and you tell them: "now go open your box, but don't share what you find inside". Aliens would laugh at how silly this is. Or a company invests millions into development of a new drug, then brings it to the market, but not everyone profits because the poorest can't afford the high price. All the hard work has been done, the company wouldn't profit less if there where a group of 'freeriders' who can afford production costs but not market price, but still: millions are suffering because corporate greed is deemed more important than curing sick people.
If it where up to me, IP laws would be scrapped from the books, so that companies can have succes by innovating faster or smarter than the competition, as opposed to having a bigger pack of lawyers. In the mean while, I just try to ignore IP law as much as I can get away with (like so many people, whether they admit it or not).
That me be what the article says, but a better summary is as follows:
Voting machine technology has been under attack for a while now, and the machines used over here, have taken so many hits they look like swiss cheese. The keys used to secure them, could be ordered over the internet by anyone. At one point, a voting machine was hacked to play chess on. Another time, it was shown that a simple radio scanner was enough to tell which party people voted for. Hardware design and software leaked to the internet. There was a big fire at the manufacturer (Nedap), which destroyed hundreds of voting machines (destined for Germany, IIRC). The list goes on.
While this was going on, negative reports came in about voting machine problems abroad. Questions where asked in parliament, and few satisfactory answers received. And then there where mayor elections in Amsterdam, where the city counsil chose to revert to pencil and paper.
Basically, the position of 'voting machines work fine and secure' became impossible to maintain. Research into possible replacements has been started, but results from that are years away. So the Dutch government was simply forced to 'go back to the old ways' for the time being.
A comment like yours sounds like a landowner telling one of his slaves: now go do this, because I know what's best for you!
In many cases you may be right, but who are you to say? If 99% of a nation is made up of monkeys, then democracy means the monkeys will run the country. If you don't like that, trying to keep them from voting is the wrong way to go. Instead, help people inform themselves, so that they can make a better choice.
Can't believe IBM doesn't mention that in the specsheet. Features: * Does NOT run Vista
Example: I'm using a mATX K7 board from MSI right now (one of the few mATX K7 boards with onboard SATA), coupled with a mobile Athlon XP2800+. The BIOS has zero support for this chip, it reports 'unknown CPU' at bootup and sets it at 6x multiplier (800 MHz) by default. Did a bridgemod on it to make default multiplier equal to nominal one, and a pinmod to obtain the correct voltage. And voila: rocksolid ever since, even software multiplier switching works fine. And why wouldn't it? It's basically a low-voltage Athlon XP. But why the hell aren't these settings in the BIOS, where a similar (fullsize) ATX board would include such settings? Is it less useful to run a mobile CPU on a mATX board, or what?
P.S. I don't recommend bridge-modding any CPU. It's a pain, and you have a decent chance to render the part useless. I just did it because I preferred taking the chance, rather than having to buy even more parts.
Result: people might have better experience working with those formats when they use Blender on Windows. -> That would make it more attractive to use Windows as underlying platform (if support for those file formats matter to you).
In other words: give a competitive advantage to using Windows, make it less attractive to move to a FOSS operating system.
Suppose your user base where bigger. Say 100k users. Or 10 million. Could anyone still expect you to help out anyone of those users? Ofcourse not, and in that case these 10M users would be forced to help themselves (to some degree) anyway. The same goes for a university that decides to add X students to your userbase.
Probably it's more a question of why you are working on the project, and what you get from that. Set your own priorities, decide how much time you want to invest, and go from there.
May I suggest you ask the university to do some inhouse filtering of issues/questions (eg. using a local webpage / contact person), and give you a regularly updated 'top 10' list of what they consider most urgent/important.
- If you want to support the widest possible userbase, then you might work on those issues that *also* affect other users of your project.
- If you put this university first, then you could work their list from the top down.
- If you're just doing it for fun, you could cherrypick from their list whatever issue seems most interesting.
--Do only what only you can do. -Edsger Wybe Dijkstra
Any PC built from, say, year 2000 or later is at least 100 times faster, with equally improved memory, graphics and background storage. Does it feel slow? Then either:
- You're running the wrong software (like the wrong OS, too much spyware or other crap), or
- You're using the wrong tool for the job (like trying to run Crysis on a Pentium 3 with onboard video), or
- Your budget doesn't match your requirements.
Either way: complain all you want, but claiming such a computer is slow, is simply inaccurate.Sure hope those are labeled correctly... just in case anyone at NASA would think it's a funny prank, I recommend NASA add one more rule to their launch procedures: "DO NOT lauch on April 1st"
Best use a time window, to allow for differences in 'local time' (a relative notion for space operations)
- Has a suitable NVIDIA GeForce card
- Likes to play with any of these professional applications like Maya
- Doesn't want to pay for those applications, or the Quadro bonus
That group may be bigger than you think. Will probably include enthousiasts, people who just want to try out some of these professional applications, perhaps others. Will probably *NOT* include professional users.Summarized: 'freeloaders', folks that wouldn't pay for the real thing anyway. Doesn't sound like anything that would threaten NVIDIA's business.
So what exactly is it that these special drivers do, that the generic ones don't? Are the generic ones missing features (that the hardware does support), or is it the extra support & testing of hardware/software configurations that you pay for?
Yes, that would be interesting to know. But one of the more insightful views I've heard recently in the China vs. Tibet matter, is that "after so many years of communist rule, it is hard for Chinese people to make a distinction between government, communist party, policy and country". As a result, criticism of Chinese actions concerning Tibet may be felt not as attacks on policy, but attacks on the Chinese people and country. Don't know if that is true, but I'd welcome readers from China to comment on that.
There is a big difference between saying "you are bad" and saying "you are doing something bad". I guess the real gain is that more people (including the Chinese) are talking about Tibet now, and maybe someday the Chinese *people* will realize that Tibetans just want the same thing as the Chinese: run their own affairs, be left alone, and live in peace with their neighbors.
In general I feel that whenever 'weapons' (DoS attacks, censorship, physical force) are used to end a discussion, it means that party has run out of reasonable arguments (and in a way, admits moral defeat).
Are you kidding? Nobody wants to play the 100th Doom clone other than for replay value. For a 'wow' factor, a game needs something new, something that was never done before, or never done that good. A never-seen-before feeling of immersion, a great, unique storyline, artwork that makes existing stuff look old, and sometimes... unique technical features.
To enable innovative technical features, you often need more processing power, whether from CPU, GPU or elsewhere. And for that reason, any game that pushes the envelope will be coded to run on the latest available hardware. And vice versa, the latest hardware will be beefed up to run the latest games smoothly.
So as much as I'd like game developers to create "the most resource-friendly required for a new experience", they'll continue to aim for "get the most impressive out of the newest hardware". That's just how it is.
And 2, 3 years down the line, no-one will care anyway. I've got a machine built around +/- 2 year old parts, and it (just) meets Crysis' requirements. So systems you carry out of the shop right now will do fine. Apart from the fact that you don't have to buy current games or hardware.
- You can watch cable TV
- You can watch TV using some ADSL internet/phone/TV combo package
- You can get a satellite receiver
- You can watch DVD's and read books, OR
For the small remaining group, your analog TV is useless these days, unless you get a DVB-T receiver. You can buy that and watch the public channels (3 here) for free, or get a subscription and watch your basic cable selection of channels. In that case, a simple/basic receiver will be thrown in for free as well, in the shape of a coupon/refund. Note: that's in the Netherlands, but may be different in other countries in Europe.Ehmm, a *new* word? Look here ...