Not every kid needs to. Just some. I went nuts when I learned basic, and had spent many hours with another friend making various programs when we were kids. Most of my class-mates were (and the few I know still are) simple users that barely manage point and click their way through email.
If instead of giving me that opportunity when I was younger, somebody figured that statistically I would not be interested, I would have never gotten into computers. What the OLPC guys are doing is saying that kids might be interested in modifying the system, or creating something new. And you really have no idea what they might want to try, so why have any software limits at all?
I was thinking of the game actually ends up controlling real people. I can see the movie studios jumping on this
"It's like 'Stranger Than Fiction', but with a Video Game! We'll be RICH!" "Wasn't there an episode of Stargate Atlantis with this plotline?" "People who play the Sims != People who watch Stargate" "I'd be stupid not to give you my money"
They still are portable. SQLite is actually pretty easy to use, well tested, and small. It is extremely easy to write even a script to copy the contents out of the sqlite database and drop into a classic bookmarks.html file. If they were to use XML and write a new handler for doing all this, they still probably would not fall within the 250KB size of sqlite (which they already include, btw), and would have the problem of not just debugging experimental new functionality, but an experimental new storage back-end.
SQLite runs on more platforms that firefox does, so I fail to see the portability issue.
Aside from the potential new ideas that could come with fancier bookmark handling, I look forward to having epiphany-style tagged bookmarks in my browser so I can find appropriate links under multiple applicable catagories rather than a single location in a rigid structure.
I always picture some sort of Rube Goldberg action occurring when you press 'eject'.
When my girlfriend offers to switch discs on the DVD player, I often assist with a "Oh! Let me help you with that" thanks to the remote eject. For some reason, she believes I am teasing her, but I'm really just trying to be nice. If you time it for when she presses the unit's button, it negates the actual tray action and simply begins re-reading the disc, which adds another 10-15 seconds to the whole ordeal.
The real problem is that VMWare already has a viable workaround for the issue. CTRL+ALT+Insert sends C-A-D to the virtual machine in question. C-A-D gets caught by the host machine (Assumign windows like the gp, or myself at work) and pops up the lock windows dialog. When you log back in, you have a dialog from VMWare saying CTRL-Alt-Del is intercepted by the host, so don't use it for the client. But passes it to the client anyway, so even if you understand and use C-A-I for the client, it still passes C-A-D.
For Linux, it is trivial to disable C-A-D handling, however, to prevent virtual linuxes from rebooting. I just find it odd that there is an issue, and a workaround, and even following the workaround, the issue persists.
My phone has a never-quite-right vibrate. It is so weak that on my belt, I easily miss it (and is inaudible as it is muffled by clothing). On the other hand, place it on a table and I can hear it across the house while watching TV.
The ringer also is extremely loud in quiet situations (private meeting), or extremely quiet (Trade Shows).
I've got this on my e815, plus the "Voice Recognition"/"Speakerphone" (same button for different press durations) and "Camera" buttons exposed. When driving my car, I can not even begin to tell you the number of photos of my centre console I have. Or the number of times I've suddenly heard a voice asking me to speak the name of a contact to call.
Furthermore, who decided DD-MM-YY was a good format for photo file names. It makes it bloody impossible to actually find any photo on the device if you actually use it.
I had a similar experience when I was a kid in public school (grade seven or eight). Me and a friend were quite the Doom fans, and we decided to make a map of the school. Our teacher thought it was a great idea and gave us copies of layouts of the school. He even went and purchased a copy of Doom so he could get copies from us. After showing a WAD that had replaced the enemy sprites with Borg or Beavis and Butthead or something similar, we even had two other teachers who were willing to pose for photos to be placed in the game.
We managed to get both floors done thanks to some teleportation in the stairwells (doom had varying height, but not overlapping sectors). It looked wonky due to the same unit conversion issues combined with the fact that my school, amazingly, did not actually have things like giant metallic Doom doors that slid into the ceiling.
After Duke 3D and Quake came out we debated remaking the level, but had both moved on to things like Visual Basic Lottery Number Generators (aka Random Number Generators that sort the resulting numbers before presenting them).
I can only imagine what would have happened to us now.
I fielded an issue like this for my mother, who missed an episode of a show she was watching. wmp would not display on the TV, likewise with vlc. Switching to tv-only output, and opening the video in vlc [i]after[/i] the allowed the video to display properly, but no such luck for wmp.
This was a non-drm video downloaded from somewhere. At least with non-drm there is a technical fix, whereas if this was a DRM'd video with a software restriction like this, it would be well out of my mother's ability to correct (or mine, really -- removing wmv drm, etc. to play in another media app).
Don't forget Product Activation. Assuming you had like hardware that would not cause issues when moving between computers, the activation would prevent this functionality. Unless you had a specially-licensed version of Windows, in which case you are better off buying parallels for your testers and passing a single windows virtual machine around on the external hard disk as you suggested.
I recently picked up A&B on DVD. I called up my brother and attempted to watch the series. Unfortunately, neither of us could actually get through the whole season, though both of us watched it faithfully "back in the day". I was unsure if I could attribute this to being ~14 when it aired and not noticing the fairly flat acting (the stories are still good) or influence from later sci-fi.
Still not a bad show, but...
I'm in college as well. In a computer programming program. We're all software gurus now, right?
We (un)fortunately use laptops for everything. I'd say most of the class runs with no firewall and connect directly to the internet at home. The network chatter is incredible (I even had code red in my apache logs one day last year). When they installed windows, they never set an administrator password so spontanious remote shutdowns happen sometimes. The RPC DCOM worm that went around last year was very "fun". The college mandated that all computers connecting to their network have firewall and antivirus. Which was nice for the single day when the college did an audit (Most removed them because "it shows shit down")
These are people who are training to be professional software developers, but the sad thing is they only see what is laid out infront of them.
As for users exploring their systems, this is the first exposure many of these people have had to any operating system aside from Windows (We use Linux for our C/C++ based classes) and most people were toughing their way through vim because "its what the instructor uses". Very few people looked for another editor (gedit is right in the menu!).
I think this is an example of "shocked by complexity". Sure, computers are complex, but I think as soon as most people start seeing something they don't understand immediately, they glaze over and perceive the problem as too hard to solve.
I've often wondered why microsoft doesn't have a simple backup utility. Easy enough for mom and dad to use. A simple wizard that runs asking for "Important files", or a tray icon asking users to drag important files onto it. Or hell, simply grabbing the whole My Documents/Desktop combo if it fits on a single disc.
The reason I'm curious about this, is that standard support procedures from manufacturers tend to include recovery from included media, which MS tends to support. It is to the point where many people I know accept data loss due to the above as an accepted part of life.
My pentium M, a first generation one even, has several steps. That said, I usually run the machine at the lowest, 600MHz. You don't need more for regular system use, and it really helps with the battery.
As a beta tester of trillian (before pro) from version 0.62 -> 0.72(ish), I ended up ditching it for Gaim (on both Linux, and occasionally in Windows). I was one of the people back in the day who ran Trillian in Wine.
Think about it though, the two big linux "desktop environments" are really pushing for integration right now. The Gnome corner is trying to pull Evolution and Gaim's contact lists together, and keeping a unified look across all applications. KDE is pretty good at making the user feel like everything is tightly integrated already (I'm not a user, but it seems that way). Not to mention trillian wouldn't blend with the "look and feel" of either.
They might get some users in the new-user-from-windows and it-skins-so-it-must-be-1337 catagories, though;)
My mom uses Firefox, Thunderbird, and Nvu on a regular basis. Loves them compared to IE, Outlook Express, and Frontpage/Dreamweaver which she had previously been using.
She's not a techie, she just likes to put her photos online for family.
I find that alot of people I've worked with in software development have a "get it working, clean it up later" attitude. Usually basic error checking gets thrown in, but "hardcore" security often gets put aside in favour of other projects that need to be done. Thus, I think we end up with a fair amount of possibly shoddy code.
I've never done an audit, because I'm trying to write good code, and it's all I can do to be as "productive" as the others.
I don't think anybody seriously thinks "man, that could be a huge problem! well, nobody will notice".
In other news, you can rename a.rtf document as.doc. Your prof's computer will then send it to MS-Word (because it has a.doc extension). Their copy of Word will then read it, see that it's a RTF, and open it using the RTF filter.
Which is good, because if they don't see.doc, they will not try to open it (I am exactly the opposite in my email correspondence habits).
Slashdot Mirror
Not every kid needs to. Just some. I went nuts when I learned basic, and had spent many hours with another friend making various programs when we were kids. Most of my class-mates were (and the few I know still are) simple users that barely manage point and click their way through email.
If instead of giving me that opportunity when I was younger, somebody figured that statistically I would not be interested, I would have never gotten into computers. What the OLPC guys are doing is saying that kids might be interested in modifying the system, or creating something new. And you really have no idea what they might want to try, so why have any software limits at all?
I was thinking of the game actually ends up controlling real people. I can see the movie studios jumping on this
"It's like 'Stranger Than Fiction', but with a Video Game! We'll be RICH!"
"Wasn't there an episode of Stargate Atlantis with this plotline?"
"People who play the Sims != People who watch Stargate"
"I'd be stupid not to give you my money"
They still are portable. SQLite is actually pretty easy to use, well tested, and small. It is extremely easy to write even a script to copy the contents out of the sqlite database and drop into a classic bookmarks.html file. If they were to use XML and write a new handler for doing all this, they still probably would not fall within the 250KB size of sqlite (which they already include, btw), and would have the problem of not just debugging experimental new functionality, but an experimental new storage back-end.
SQLite runs on more platforms that firefox does, so I fail to see the portability issue.
Aside from the potential new ideas that could come with fancier bookmark handling, I look forward to having epiphany-style tagged bookmarks in my browser so I can find appropriate links under multiple applicable catagories rather than a single location in a rigid structure.
I always picture some sort of Rube Goldberg action occurring when you press 'eject'.
When my girlfriend offers to switch discs on the DVD player, I often assist with a "Oh! Let me help you with that" thanks to the remote eject. For some reason, she believes I am teasing her, but I'm really just trying to be nice. If you time it for when she presses the unit's button, it negates the actual tray action and simply begins re-reading the disc, which adds another 10-15 seconds to the whole ordeal.
The real problem is that VMWare already has a viable workaround for the issue. CTRL+ALT+Insert sends C-A-D to the virtual machine in question. C-A-D gets caught by the host machine (Assumign windows like the gp, or myself at work) and pops up the lock windows dialog. When you log back in, you have a dialog from VMWare saying CTRL-Alt-Del is intercepted by the host, so don't use it for the client. But passes it to the client anyway, so even if you understand and use C-A-I for the client, it still passes C-A-D.
For Linux, it is trivial to disable C-A-D handling, however, to prevent virtual linuxes from rebooting. I just find it odd that there is an issue, and a workaround, and even following the workaround, the issue persists.
My phone has a never-quite-right vibrate. It is so weak that on my belt, I easily miss it (and is inaudible as it is muffled by clothing). On the other hand, place it on a table and I can hear it across the house while watching TV. The ringer also is extremely loud in quiet situations (private meeting), or extremely quiet (Trade Shows).
I've got this on my e815, plus the "Voice Recognition"/"Speakerphone" (same button for different press durations) and "Camera" buttons exposed. When driving my car, I can not even begin to tell you the number of photos of my centre console I have. Or the number of times I've suddenly heard a voice asking me to speak the name of a contact to call.
Furthermore, who decided DD-MM-YY was a good format for photo file names. It makes it bloody impossible to actually find any photo on the device if you actually use it.
I had a similar experience when I was a kid in public school (grade seven or eight). Me and a friend were quite the Doom fans, and we decided to make a map of the school. Our teacher thought it was a great idea and gave us copies of layouts of the school. He even went and purchased a copy of Doom so he could get copies from us. After showing a WAD that had replaced the enemy sprites with Borg or Beavis and Butthead or something similar, we even had two other teachers who were willing to pose for photos to be placed in the game. We managed to get both floors done thanks to some teleportation in the stairwells (doom had varying height, but not overlapping sectors). It looked wonky due to the same unit conversion issues combined with the fact that my school, amazingly, did not actually have things like giant metallic Doom doors that slid into the ceiling. After Duke 3D and Quake came out we debated remaking the level, but had both moved on to things like Visual Basic Lottery Number Generators (aka Random Number Generators that sort the resulting numbers before presenting them). I can only imagine what would have happened to us now.
What are you going to do with a dozen spectrographs?
A quick search on google shed some light on the topic:
http://www.google.com/search?q=iis%20godaddy
It was covered on slashdot many moons ago as well
I fielded an issue like this for my mother, who missed an episode of a show she was watching. wmp would not display on the TV, likewise with vlc. Switching to tv-only output, and opening the video in vlc [i]after[/i] the allowed the video to display properly, but no such luck for wmp. This was a non-drm video downloaded from somewhere. At least with non-drm there is a technical fix, whereas if this was a DRM'd video with a software restriction like this, it would be well out of my mother's ability to correct (or mine, really -- removing wmv drm, etc. to play in another media app).
Don't forget Product Activation. Assuming you had like hardware that would not cause issues when moving between computers, the activation would prevent this functionality. Unless you had a specially-licensed version of Windows, in which case you are better off buying parallels for your testers and passing a single windows virtual machine around on the external hard disk as you suggested.
I recently picked up A&B on DVD. I called up my brother and attempted to watch the series. Unfortunately, neither of us could actually get through the whole season, though both of us watched it faithfully "back in the day". I was unsure if I could attribute this to being ~14 when it aired and not noticing the fairly flat acting (the stories are still good) or influence from later sci-fi. Still not a bad show, but...
I had thought my Inbox was rather empty today...
We (un)fortunately use laptops for everything. I'd say most of the class runs with no firewall and connect directly to the internet at home. The network chatter is incredible (I even had code red in my apache logs one day last year). When they installed windows, they never set an administrator password so spontanious remote shutdowns happen sometimes. The RPC DCOM worm that went around last year was very "fun". The college mandated that all computers connecting to their network have firewall and antivirus. Which was nice for the single day when the college did an audit (Most removed them because "it shows shit down")
These are people who are training to be professional software developers, but the sad thing is they only see what is laid out infront of them.
As for users exploring their systems, this is the first exposure many of these people have had to any operating system aside from Windows (We use Linux for our C/C++ based classes) and most people were toughing their way through vim because "its what the instructor uses". Very few people looked for another editor (gedit is right in the menu!).
I think this is an example of "shocked by complexity". Sure, computers are complex, but I think as soon as most people start seeing something they don't understand immediately, they glaze over and perceive the problem as too hard to solve.
Owning a laptop that has gone back for service twice due to damage caused by prolonged overheating, I'd say to definately worry about it.
Luckilly Xorg supports Dynamic clocks on Radeon GPUs, otherwise I get about eleven minutes of use before my screen begins to corrupt the image.
I wish I had mod points for you
I've often wondered why microsoft doesn't have a simple backup utility. Easy enough for mom and dad to use. A simple wizard that runs asking for "Important files", or a tray icon asking users to drag important files onto it. Or hell, simply grabbing the whole My Documents/Desktop combo if it fits on a single disc.
The reason I'm curious about this, is that standard support procedures from manufacturers tend to include recovery from included media, which MS tends to support. It is to the point where many people I know accept data loss due to the above as an accepted part of life.
My pentium M, a first generation one even, has several steps. That said, I usually run the machine at the lowest, 600MHz. You don't need more for regular system use, and it really helps with the battery.
As a beta tester of trillian (before pro) from version 0.62 -> 0.72(ish), I ended up ditching it for Gaim (on both Linux, and occasionally in Windows). I was one of the people back in the day who ran Trillian in Wine. Think about it though, the two big linux "desktop environments" are really pushing for integration right now. The Gnome corner is trying to pull Evolution and Gaim's contact lists together, and keeping a unified look across all applications. KDE is pretty good at making the user feel like everything is tightly integrated already (I'm not a user, but it seems that way). Not to mention trillian wouldn't blend with the "look and feel" of either. They might get some users in the new-user-from-windows and it-skins-so-it-must-be-1337 catagories, though ;)
She's not a techie, she just likes to put her photos online for family.
I find that alot of people I've worked with in software development have a "get it working, clean it up later" attitude. Usually basic error checking gets thrown in, but "hardcore" security often gets put aside in favour of other projects that need to be done. Thus, I think we end up with a fair amount of possibly shoddy code.
I've never done an audit, because I'm trying to write good code, and it's all I can do to be as "productive" as the others.
I don't think anybody seriously thinks "man, that could be a huge problem! well, nobody will notice".
Redhat removed the flag of taiwan from KDE to sell it to china[1]
I also seem to remember there being a problem trying to use the sodipodi flags in gnome, and the end result was that no flags would be included [2].
[1]http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/10/6/17315 3/329
Also do a google search for "redhat taiwan flag" for more information.
[2]http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel- list/2003-November/msg00267.html
/ 2003-November/thread.html#00267
and here for the whole thread: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list
Which is good, because if they don't see .doc, they will not try to open it (I am exactly the opposite in my email correspondence habits).
How is the ms office compatability. Currently my school wants assignments in a word .doc format.
- FireFox
- PuTTY
- WinSCP
- Gaim
- OpenOffice.org
- AVG
- Zone Alarm
That's about it. I only use windows for school, so when I head back in two weeks I'll have to install the likes of visual studio and such.
If you don't mind me asking as well, what does abiword offer that openoffice does not?