Unmasking communist spies is a noble goal. Stopping piracy is a noble goal.
However, doing it as a witch hunt which only serves to harass legitimate citizens/customers, eroding their basic rights and generally being far worse than said communists/pirates, is not the right approach.
some hacker figures out how to do that and starts frying gadgets left and right; oh what fun!
"Figures out" depends how this is exposed to the user.
For instance, "some hacker" (you do realize you're abusing that term, right?) could just as easily take most desktop machines and overclock them, or flash the BIOS with garbage, etc etc. Which makes this comment especially funny:
I would never buy a gadget that I know can be fried permanently, unless it was really cheap.
Chances are, you're posting this on just such a device.
Now, as to whether Amazon has actually built in support for remote detonating of that, I doubt it -- though I suspect they could update the software and do it anyway. But I don't doubt it's possible.
And if you're specifically complaining about the ability to do this remotely, well, how many PCs have some auto-updating software? Windows itself is usually set for that, these days, as are dozens of pieces of third-party software -- so even barring a malicious "hack", there are still multiple companies who could probably fry your desktop if they wanted to.
Or, at the very least, force some re-soldering to fix it.
So he's not a complete moron in thinking that a "perfect" DRM scheme exists. However, it's pretty stupid to think that something would ever become "so difficult to pirate that nobody bothers" -- remember, it only takes one person to bother.
Defense Grid is ten bucks, and it's giving me more than ten bucks worth of fun. Sure, I'm at Microsoft's mercy, and I don't "own" the product, but hey. Ten bucks.
It's also twenty bucks for the Greenhouse version, which seems more than a bit odd. It's worth mentioning, though, that you do own that one, such as it is -- the only DRM is a single Internet check on first installation, which seems reasonable for a downloaded game.
I charge $28 for a new game. I would LOVE to charge ten bucks. But, to stay in business, I'd have to triple my sales, and that won't happen. Would sales go up? Sure. Would they TRIPLE? Almost impossible.
I don't know about that. You didn't seem to have much trouble getting onto Slashdot, which would get you a fair number of sales. But your general attitude in this article already makes me skeptical, and there's no way I'm paying $28 for what I see in that game. $10? Sure, and if it was good, I'd tell my friends about it. $28? You just lost a sale, buddy.
The result? My games get pirated like crazy,
The question: Would your games be pirated less with more DRM?
More importantly: Even if they were pirated less, would that mean more sales for you? Because if I was pirating your games, and I suddenly couldn't pirate them anymore, I'd probably go pirate another game, not start paying for yours.
DRM is fair if, for what the corporations take, we get something in return.
I will agree with that. However, very often, what we get in return is nowhere near worth the DRM.
An example of a marginally fair trade: Steam. Being able to IM a friend and hop into the game he's playing is cool. Being able to back up games, with a tool that will nicely create DVD-sized files, is very cool. Being able to download every game I own -- saturating my fiber connection -- after a reformat, in case something went wrong with the backup -- and needing only a username and password to recover all my games, and they're even planning to include savegames and settings, at some point -- is awesome.
But this is still a trade many users are unhappy with. I'm online all the time -- many users would like to play their single-player games offline.
An example of a very fair trade: World of Warcraft. The DRM is pretty much inherent in the system -- it connects to a server, and that server is unavailable to anyone who doesn't work for Blizzard. While there have been a few pirate servers, they pretty much have to reverse engineer and/or build from scratch most of the content and gameplay, and there's still the network effect -- if your guild's on a Blizzard server, you're on a Blizzard server. This is a case where you give up pretty much nothing for the DRM to work -- the one thing it takes from you is the ability to play offline.
One of the problems with eBooks is they take away the ability to loan or sell the books you buy online, not to mention the lack of a satisfying physical object, and they still charge the same price for the book.
That is why those of us in the know insist on unencumbered PDFs. I can get one that's watermarked, so I can't easily pirate it to the world, but I can easily share it among friends.
the purpose of DRM is to prevent free riders (aka self-justifying weasels and morally damaged scumbags).
The purpose of the McCarthy trials was to prevent communism from taking over America. It's a noble goal, but the casualties are unacceptable.
That is, however, still a fair amount of work, and it's never going to be as useful as it was, since a lot of its usefulness was tied to Amazon's service.
And keep in mind, it's only worth $300 in the first place. Stolen, it would be worth much less even if it was fully featured, and it's not -- so, we're already down to, what, $100? A geek capable of unbricking it is likely able to make enough money at a legitimate job that this doesn't sound that good, especially when you now have to split it with whoever is doing the theft.
Oh, and it doesn't have to be explosive charges to truly "brick" it -- the term "unbricking" is really a misnomer, as "bricking" generally involves making the device into an expensive paperweight, that cannot be restored to usefulness. One really simple example would be to adjust voltages and timings so that some crucial piece of hardware (like the CPU) gets fried.
Which is kind of the point. It works with SIP, which is already an open standard.
So you're not only wanting to reinvent the wheel, you're wanting to reinvent it for a proprietary protocol? It works with those seven or eight clients listed, all of which are interoperable, but that one is all you want?
It's the Adventure V750. It's difficult to pin down, but it seems very much like Verizon ripped out the media center and replaced it with "vcast". Of course, in general, I'm not liking the part where there's an app store (a tiny, wannabe app store), yet no way for me to actually develop software for it, even if the DRM wasn't an issue.
Also, mods, why's that a troll? I mean, is there something I'm missing that makes it actually trollish to people who don't work for Motorola?
Find a third party willing to speak up for it and we will listen.
The site I linked to did cite sources, including zdnet. Unbiased enough?
The larger problem here is that there are some things which it's pretty much impossible to be both informed and unbiased about. For example, it's pretty hard to be aware of the situation of AIDS in Africa without being either a complete religious moron, or being appalled at the Pope telling people that condoms are not the answer. There really isn't a middle ground there.
However, we can't even begin to control for bias without at least citing sources.
I've seen that same site posted many times to point out how IE's market share is declining.
And yet, it's the same site you used. How's that hypocritical?
If the source says anything negative against the Loonix ideology it must be biased and wrong, but when the same site shows something negative about the market share of a Microsoft product it is unquestionably posted everywhere to show how Micro$haft is dying!
The point wasn't that it was unquestionable -- though I think you'll find similar results elsewhere.
The point is that even if it were true, it doesn't bother me a lot -- Firefox is proof that we're doing ok, and if IE dies, I can write web services without thinking about Windows anymore. And since it's clearly not true, the whole argument implodes anyway.
Well, according to the same site, Firefox is almost 23%.
But in truth, all it reveals is a sadly biased study, one which doesn't reveal its sources -- does it count unpaid deployments? I doubt it. And if you're trying to measure the marketshare of a free operating system by counting the number of people paying for it...
I mean, yes, he was modded troll, but chances are, someone is taking him seriously. So, here's some facts.
Windows is telling him the disk is blank/unformatted;
Last I checked, Windows will say it's unformatted, not "blank", and will prompt you that this erases all data.
It's also not common (though, frustratingly, not entirely rare) that you'll meet someone who knows exactly enough to be that dangerous -- that is, they know how to format, but they don't know that Windows might just not be able to read the drive, and that formatting is dangerous.
Most users would ask me if they should format it, if it even occurs to them, and then they'd ask me how. Or more likely, they'd say "It's not working" and ask me to fix it.
Basically, everything even half-modern except Windows XP supports writing,
So, everything half-modern except the only decent OS before Windows 7, assuming 7 is decent.
Split it into a small FAT partition and a bigger UDF partition. If you can't write to UDF, save files back to the FAT partition instead. This variant works on computers where you have no admin privileges.
I'm still not sure how this is easier than ntfs-3g.
Wait until a read/write driver for exFAT [wikipedia.org] hits OS X and Linux (Linux already has a read-only driver for exFAT)
In what way would this be better than a read/write driver for NTFS?
Frankly, I haven't run into particularly that brand of asshole. "Hey, I did something for you without your knowledge or approval, clicking 'yes' past the warning that it DESTROYS DATA!"
Yeah, I can understand where if I lent it to someone else, they might not know what to do with it. But I always, always ask whether people care what's on a disk before I do something like format it.
Well, how's support for writable UDF, on a hard disk? You don't need to be able to write UDF to watch DVDs, and most DVDs are even set up to be read as ISO9660 as well as UDF.
I like ntfs-3g. The permission thing is annoying, but not overly so, as I'm in the commandline a lot, and I'm as often plugging in someone else's drive as my own anyway.
But, I also invest way more in fixed storage than portable. It's just cheaper.
Actually, it's not quite the same. This is the taskbar -- that is, switching between active windows. Mouse over each one, and a little bubble pops up, showing a preview of the app.
It does help that "dynamically updated" is "dynamic" as in "my compositing window manager is doing this for me" -- that is, it's actually realtime.
But you do have a point about the prior art -- showing that in the "desktop switcher" -- I think that's what other things might call a pager, that shows a preview of your entire desktop? -- has definitely been there for awhile.
Second, the Sugar code (not to mention the underlying OS) *is* being improved constantly. The OLPC organization may not be funding that, but it is happening. So it's not either fix Sugar OR improve the hardware, it's both/and.
However, it is still a question of priorities. And the OLPC organization has made it clear that not only is sugar not a priority, but that Negroponte thinks it's a mistake, and wants to see a plain old Windows OS on those laptops anyway.
the 1.0 hardware had some bugs that kept it from living up to its potential. In particular, the battery-saving micro-sleep thing has never worked well,
Does the hardware refresh address this? In particular, how does the battery life compare to the original?
Staying with the mass-produced herd as it improves can be cheaper than sticking with buggy-whips and steam engines.
Oh, I agree. I can see Apple's reasons for choosing Intel, for example. It's Worse Is Better at work.
But just as with Lisp and C:
The lesson to be learned from this is that it is often undesirable to go for the right thing first. It is better to get half of the right thing available so that it spreads like a virus. Once people are hooked on it, take the time to improve it to 90% of the right thing.
A wrong lesson is to take the parable literally and to conclude that C is the right vehicle for AI software. The 50% solution has to be basically right, and in this case it isn't.
So, the question is, is this new hardware basically right?
Dr DOS had a genuine incompatibility with Windows 3.1, and, moreover, was a configuration not supported by Microsoft, so the warning was entirely appropriate.
This one, I can prove. Not only that it was not a "genuine" incompatibility -- rather, a manufactured one -- but that management was well aware of what they were doing:
What the [user] is supposed to do is feel uncomfortable, and when he has bugs, suspect that the problem is DR-DOS and then go out to buy MS-DOS.
So, what's the rationalization for that?
all of them have an alternate interpretation where Microsoft's absolutely worst act is to protect themselves from lawsuits by people using an unsupported configuration of Windows 3.1.
If that was truly the intent, why obfuscate the code in question, and why not actually report the problem outright -- that it was explicitly checking for MS-DOS?
Ballmer? Or your crazy exaggerated caricature of Ballmer?
Ballmer is enough of a caricature onstage, without any help from me, but that's beside the point.
I said, specifically, that he "wouldn't be the first" -- that is, whether he's doing this or not, it's not as if no one else has ever fit that profile in history.
And it's actually run by Illuminati lizardmen who have tunnels from DC all the way to Area 51 in Nevada
You have a serious problem with critical thinking if you can't see why an entirely different species which has never been seen isn't even in the same category as a corporation acting in its own self-interest.
Indeed, we have seen corporations do evil things in their own self-interest before. (Citation needed? Enron. Need more? Tobacco marketing to children.) So suspecting Microsoft of the same thing wouldn't be entirely unexpected.
You really don't see the difference?
this is the same Microsoft who continues to fund SCO.
Has Microsoft's money been a significant resource for the financially ailing SCO? Without a doubt. In early 2003, Microsoft started paying SCO what eventually grew to $16.6 million for a Unix license, according to regulatory filings. Only longtime Unix fan Sun Microsystems previously paid close to that, with a $9.3 million license deal.
In particular, I think this is reasonable:
Although Linux threatens Microsoft, SCO was a convenient ally rather than a Microsoft puppet in the Linux fight...
Now, granted, you've also got this:
doesn't that represent a smoking gun that the Justice Department should at least be interested in? No, at least not yet.
Indeed, they tend not to do things blatantly illegal, and I don't believe I've suggested that.
Regardless of motive, however, they are still funding SCO, quite literally.
you've yet to PROVE that Microsoft has been underhanded and subtle.
If the AARD code isn't sufficient proof, you have a very high standard for proof.
IHCC has had the DHCP problems since 2001 when they first rolled out the wifi network.
No shit. That's pretty amazing -- I think I may send them another note at some point, once I figure out WTF it was.
I was accused of "hacking" and threatened expulsion for explaining how the network needed some configuration.
I suppose it's encouraging that their attitude has changed -- I was thanked graciously for my assistance in writing that script. Before I figured it out, I got a fair amount of suggestions from teachers, and pretty much free reign to try to solve my problem -- for example, unplugging a network cable from the back of a lab machine and plugging it into my laptop.
The only difference I can think of is time and the fact that I actually asked before I did anything, in both cases -- that is, I asked if there was anything I had to do to make wireless work, and I asked if I was allowed to borrow that network cable in the lab. It may be easier to ask forgiveness than permission, but you're more likely to get permission.
Then again, maybe things have simply changed.
ISU killed the linux lab Fall 2007 unfortunately. Blame Big Jim.
Seriously? And I always liked him...
But actually, I blame whoever trained (or didn't train) the teachers on how to actually use them. Again, you'd boot up, log into Linux, and then the very first thing you'd do is, not run the local Java compiler, but run rdesktop, connect to the Windows terminal server, and run Java there. Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
Come on people - we all know Linux on the desktop is profoundly less user friendly than Apple or Windows.
No, no I don't.
I still think linux makes almost no sense for non-techies.
I've seen non-techies use it every day.
The biggest problem are "power users" -- the non-techies who want to do more, but don't know any way to do that other than buy new software and hardware from Best Buy.
It also does not make economic sense for a university to support a platform until there are significant number of people using linux.
3. Vocal minorities Having a Linux build meant coverage on Slashdot. This of course generated huge interest in not just the Linux version of Lugaru, but the Windows and Mac versions too.
Imagine if some obscure community college happened to have a decent program, fair prices, and awesome Linux support. Don't you think Slashdot coverage would help there?
5. You canâ(TM)t choose your power users In the same vein as the above, you never know who the movers and shakers are going to be in your community. In Wolfireâ(TM)s case, we are forever indebted to Wolfire forum regular, Silb. He actually reverse-engineered portions of Lugaru and made a kick-ass, extremely popular replacement campaign for the game, providing a huge amount of extra content to other people. His single, epic thread has been viewed over a hundred thousand times.
Oh yeah. Heâ(TM)s a Mac user.
I think my little anecdote makes that point pretty clear -- for example, the helpdesk didn't have an answer, so I found one.
I think rather than his daughter, it is more a matter of contention for Yuna49.
Nice assumption. Macs are great, but depending on how much his daughter enjoys the laptop she's got, she may not want to switch.
I know the last time I did, it was a pretty horrible experience. Seriously, half the keybindings I've gotten used to in KDE -- and really, they were actually useful, productive things -- simply do not exist in OS X, and cannot exist without Apple's blessing.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly the DRM on XBLA does work.
A bit of quick Googling suggests that it doesn't -- that I could, in fact, download at least a few games via BitTorrent.
It also wasn't my point.
Unmasking communist spies is a noble goal. Stopping piracy is a noble goal.
However, doing it as a witch hunt which only serves to harass legitimate citizens/customers, eroding their basic rights and generally being far worse than said communists/pirates, is not the right approach.
some hacker figures out how to do that and starts frying gadgets left and right; oh what fun!
"Figures out" depends how this is exposed to the user.
For instance, "some hacker" (you do realize you're abusing that term, right?) could just as easily take most desktop machines and overclock them, or flash the BIOS with garbage, etc etc. Which makes this comment especially funny:
I would never buy a gadget that I know can be fried permanently, unless it was really cheap.
Chances are, you're posting this on just such a device.
Now, as to whether Amazon has actually built in support for remote detonating of that, I doubt it -- though I suspect they could update the software and do it anyway. But I don't doubt it's possible.
And if you're specifically complaining about the ability to do this remotely, well, how many PCs have some auto-updating software? Windows itself is usually set for that, these days, as are dozens of pieces of third-party software -- so even barring a malicious "hack", there are still multiple companies who could probably fry your desktop if they wanted to.
Or, at the very least, force some re-soldering to fix it.
So difficult to pirate that nobody bothers
So he's not a complete moron in thinking that a "perfect" DRM scheme exists. However, it's pretty stupid to think that something would ever become "so difficult to pirate that nobody bothers" -- remember, it only takes one person to bother.
Defense Grid is ten bucks, and it's giving me more than ten bucks worth of fun. Sure, I'm at Microsoft's mercy, and I don't "own" the product, but hey. Ten bucks.
It's also twenty bucks for the Greenhouse version, which seems more than a bit odd. It's worth mentioning, though, that you do own that one, such as it is -- the only DRM is a single Internet check on first installation, which seems reasonable for a downloaded game.
I charge $28 for a new game. I would LOVE to charge ten bucks. But, to stay in business, I'd have to triple my sales, and that won't happen. Would sales go up? Sure. Would they TRIPLE? Almost impossible.
I don't know about that. You didn't seem to have much trouble getting onto Slashdot, which would get you a fair number of sales. But your general attitude in this article already makes me skeptical, and there's no way I'm paying $28 for what I see in that game. $10? Sure, and if it was good, I'd tell my friends about it. $28? You just lost a sale, buddy.
The result? My games get pirated like crazy,
The question: Would your games be pirated less with more DRM?
More importantly: Even if they were pirated less, would that mean more sales for you? Because if I was pirating your games, and I suddenly couldn't pirate them anymore, I'd probably go pirate another game, not start paying for yours.
DRM is fair if, for what the corporations take, we get something in return.
I will agree with that. However, very often, what we get in return is nowhere near worth the DRM.
An example of a marginally fair trade: Steam. Being able to IM a friend and hop into the game he's playing is cool. Being able to back up games, with a tool that will nicely create DVD-sized files, is very cool. Being able to download every game I own -- saturating my fiber connection -- after a reformat, in case something went wrong with the backup -- and needing only a username and password to recover all my games, and they're even planning to include savegames and settings, at some point -- is awesome.
But this is still a trade many users are unhappy with. I'm online all the time -- many users would like to play their single-player games offline.
An example of a very fair trade: World of Warcraft. The DRM is pretty much inherent in the system -- it connects to a server, and that server is unavailable to anyone who doesn't work for Blizzard. While there have been a few pirate servers, they pretty much have to reverse engineer and/or build from scratch most of the content and gameplay, and there's still the network effect -- if your guild's on a Blizzard server, you're on a Blizzard server. This is a case where you give up pretty much nothing for the DRM to work -- the one thing it takes from you is the ability to play offline.
One of the problems with eBooks is they take away the ability to loan or sell the books you buy online, not to mention the lack of a satisfying physical object, and they still charge the same price for the book.
That is why those of us in the know insist on unencumbered PDFs. I can get one that's watermarked, so I can't easily pirate it to the world, but I can easily share it among friends.
the purpose of DRM is to prevent free riders (aka self-justifying weasels and morally damaged scumbags).
The purpose of the McCarthy trials was to prevent communism from taking over America. It's a noble goal, but the casualties are unacceptable.
If DRM enables pro
That is, however, still a fair amount of work, and it's never going to be as useful as it was, since a lot of its usefulness was tied to Amazon's service.
And keep in mind, it's only worth $300 in the first place. Stolen, it would be worth much less even if it was fully featured, and it's not -- so, we're already down to, what, $100? A geek capable of unbricking it is likely able to make enough money at a legitimate job that this doesn't sound that good, especially when you now have to split it with whoever is doing the theft.
Oh, and it doesn't have to be explosive charges to truly "brick" it -- the term "unbricking" is really a misnomer, as "bricking" generally involves making the device into an expensive paperweight, that cannot be restored to usefulness. One really simple example would be to adjust voltages and timings so that some crucial piece of hardware (like the CPU) gets fried.
It does not work with Skype.
Which is kind of the point. It works with SIP, which is already an open standard.
So you're not only wanting to reinvent the wheel, you're wanting to reinvent it for a proprietary protocol? It works with those seven or eight clients listed, all of which are interoperable, but that one is all you want?
I guess I'm not sure I see the point.
IRC can do that, too, it just takes slightly more effort.
What IRC can do that Skype can't is support more than one client, thus forcing clients to actually compete on functionality.
It's free.
So is SIP.
It's the Adventure V750. It's difficult to pin down, but it seems very much like Verizon ripped out the media center and replaced it with "vcast". Of course, in general, I'm not liking the part where there's an app store (a tiny, wannabe app store), yet no way for me to actually develop software for it, even if the DRM wasn't an issue.
Also, mods, why's that a troll? I mean, is there something I'm missing that makes it actually trollish to people who don't work for Motorola?
Except, there is still the question of where the "real world data" is coming from?
I didn't dispute Win7 marketshare.
I disputed Linux marketshare.
Measuring a free product by the number of sales is truly moronic.
Well, Kotaku mentioned that they checked with accounting, and found that they were fancy (if elaborate) checks.
Find a third party willing to speak up for it and we will listen.
The site I linked to did cite sources, including zdnet. Unbiased enough?
The larger problem here is that there are some things which it's pretty much impossible to be both informed and unbiased about. For example, it's pretty hard to be aware of the situation of AIDS in Africa without being either a complete religious moron, or being appalled at the Pope telling people that condoms are not the answer. There really isn't a middle ground there.
However, we can't even begin to control for bias without at least citing sources.
I've seen that same site posted many times to point out how IE's market share is declining.
And yet, it's the same site you used. How's that hypocritical?
If the source says anything negative against the Loonix ideology it must be biased and wrong, but when the same site shows something negative about the market share of a Microsoft product it is unquestionably posted everywhere to show how Micro$haft is dying!
The point wasn't that it was unquestionable -- though I think you'll find similar results elsewhere.
The point is that even if it were true, it doesn't bother me a lot -- Firefox is proof that we're doing ok, and if IE dies, I can write web services without thinking about Windows anymore. And since it's clearly not true, the whole argument implodes anyway.
Actually, I've got a Motorola phone from Verizon.
It's just so bastardized it's funny.
Well, according to the same site, Firefox is almost 23%.
But in truth, all it reveals is a sadly biased study, one which doesn't reveal its sources -- does it count unpaid deployments? I doubt it. And if you're trying to measure the marketshare of a free operating system by counting the number of people paying for it...
I mean, yes, he was modded troll, but chances are, someone is taking him seriously. So, here's some facts.
Windows is telling him the disk is blank/unformatted;
Last I checked, Windows will say it's unformatted, not "blank", and will prompt you that this erases all data.
It's also not common (though, frustratingly, not entirely rare) that you'll meet someone who knows exactly enough to be that dangerous -- that is, they know how to format, but they don't know that Windows might just not be able to read the drive, and that formatting is dangerous.
Most users would ask me if they should format it, if it even occurs to them, and then they'd ask me how. Or more likely, they'd say "It's not working" and ask me to fix it.
Basically, everything even half-modern except Windows XP supports writing,
So, everything half-modern except the only decent OS before Windows 7, assuming 7 is decent.
Split it into a small FAT partition and a bigger UDF partition. If you can't write to UDF, save files back to the FAT partition instead. This variant works on computers where you have no admin privileges.
I'm still not sure how this is easier than ntfs-3g.
Wait until a read/write driver for exFAT [wikipedia.org] hits OS X and Linux (Linux already has a read-only driver for exFAT)
In what way would this be better than a read/write driver for NTFS?
Frankly, I haven't run into particularly that brand of asshole. "Hey, I did something for you without your knowledge or approval, clicking 'yes' past the warning that it DESTROYS DATA!"
Yeah, I can understand where if I lent it to someone else, they might not know what to do with it. But I always, always ask whether people care what's on a disk before I do something like format it.
Well, how's support for writable UDF, on a hard disk? You don't need to be able to write UDF to watch DVDs, and most DVDs are even set up to be read as ISO9660 as well as UDF.
I like ntfs-3g. The permission thing is annoying, but not overly so, as I'm in the commandline a lot, and I'm as often plugging in someone else's drive as my own anyway.
But, I also invest way more in fixed storage than portable. It's just cheaper.
Actually, it's not quite the same. This is the taskbar -- that is, switching between active windows. Mouse over each one, and a little bubble pops up, showing a preview of the app.
It does help that "dynamically updated" is "dynamic" as in "my compositing window manager is doing this for me" -- that is, it's actually realtime.
But you do have a point about the prior art -- showing that in the "desktop switcher" -- I think that's what other things might call a pager, that shows a preview of your entire desktop? -- has definitely been there for awhile.
Second, the Sugar code (not to mention the underlying OS) *is* being improved constantly. The OLPC organization may not be funding that, but it is happening. So it's not either fix Sugar OR improve the hardware, it's both/and.
However, it is still a question of priorities. And the OLPC organization has made it clear that not only is sugar not a priority, but that Negroponte thinks it's a mistake, and wants to see a plain old Windows OS on those laptops anyway.
the 1.0 hardware had some bugs that kept it from living up to its potential. In particular, the battery-saving micro-sleep thing has never worked well,
Does the hardware refresh address this? In particular, how does the battery life compare to the original?
Staying with the mass-produced herd as it improves can be cheaper than sticking with buggy-whips and steam engines.
Oh, I agree. I can see Apple's reasons for choosing Intel, for example. It's Worse Is Better at work.
But just as with Lisp and C:
The lesson to be learned from this is that it is often undesirable to go for the right thing first. It is better to get half of the right thing available so that it spreads like a virus. Once people are hooked on it, take the time to improve it to 90% of the right thing.
A wrong lesson is to take the parable literally and to conclude that C is the right vehicle for AI software. The 50% solution has to be basically right, and in this case it isn't.
So, the question is, is this new hardware basically right?
Dr DOS had a genuine incompatibility with Windows 3.1, and, moreover, was a configuration not supported by Microsoft, so the warning was entirely appropriate.
This one, I can prove. Not only that it was not a "genuine" incompatibility -- rather, a manufactured one -- but that management was well aware of what they were doing:
What the [user] is supposed to do is feel uncomfortable, and when he has bugs, suspect that the problem is DR-DOS and then go out to buy MS-DOS.
So, what's the rationalization for that?
all of them have an alternate interpretation where Microsoft's absolutely worst act is to protect themselves from lawsuits by people using an unsupported configuration of Windows 3.1.
If that was truly the intent, why obfuscate the code in question, and why not actually report the problem outright -- that it was explicitly checking for MS-DOS?
Ballmer? Or your crazy exaggerated caricature of Ballmer?
Ballmer is enough of a caricature onstage, without any help from me, but that's beside the point.
I said, specifically, that he "wouldn't be the first" -- that is, whether he's doing this or not, it's not as if no one else has ever fit that profile in history.
And it's actually run by Illuminati lizardmen who have tunnels from DC all the way to Area 51 in Nevada
You have a serious problem with critical thinking if you can't see why an entirely different species which has never been seen isn't even in the same category as a corporation acting in its own self-interest.
Indeed, we have seen corporations do evil things in their own self-interest before. (Citation needed? Enron. Need more? Tobacco marketing to children.) So suspecting Microsoft of the same thing wouldn't be entirely unexpected.
You really don't see the difference?
this is the same Microsoft who continues to fund SCO.
[Citation needed]
Reasonably unbiased citation:
Has Microsoft's money been a significant resource for the financially ailing SCO?
Without a doubt. In early 2003, Microsoft started paying SCO what eventually grew to $16.6 million for a Unix license, according to regulatory filings. Only longtime Unix fan Sun Microsystems previously paid close to that, with a $9.3 million license deal.
In particular, I think this is reasonable:
Although Linux threatens Microsoft, SCO was a convenient ally rather than a Microsoft puppet in the Linux fight...
Now, granted, you've also got this:
doesn't that represent a smoking gun that the Justice Department should at least be interested in?
No, at least not yet.
Indeed, they tend not to do things blatantly illegal, and I don't believe I've suggested that.
Regardless of motive, however, they are still funding SCO, quite literally.
you've yet to PROVE that Microsoft has been underhanded and subtle.
If the AARD code isn't sufficient proof, you have a very high standard for proof.
IHCC has had the DHCP problems since 2001 when they first rolled out the wifi network.
No shit. That's pretty amazing -- I think I may send them another note at some point, once I figure out WTF it was.
I was accused of "hacking" and threatened expulsion for explaining how the network needed some configuration.
I suppose it's encouraging that their attitude has changed -- I was thanked graciously for my assistance in writing that script. Before I figured it out, I got a fair amount of suggestions from teachers, and pretty much free reign to try to solve my problem -- for example, unplugging a network cable from the back of a lab machine and plugging it into my laptop.
The only difference I can think of is time and the fact that I actually asked before I did anything, in both cases -- that is, I asked if there was anything I had to do to make wireless work, and I asked if I was allowed to borrow that network cable in the lab. It may be easier to ask forgiveness than permission, but you're more likely to get permission.
Then again, maybe things have simply changed.
ISU killed the linux lab Fall 2007 unfortunately. Blame Big Jim.
Seriously? And I always liked him...
But actually, I blame whoever trained (or didn't train) the teachers on how to actually use them. Again, you'd boot up, log into Linux, and then the very first thing you'd do is, not run the local Java compiler, but run rdesktop, connect to the Windows terminal server, and run Java there. Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
Come on people - we all know Linux on the desktop is profoundly less user friendly than Apple or Windows.
No, no I don't.
I still think linux makes almost no sense for non-techies.
I've seen non-techies use it every day.
The biggest problem are "power users" -- the non-techies who want to do more, but don't know any way to do that other than buy new software and hardware from Best Buy.
It also does not make economic sense for a university to support a platform until there are significant number of people using linux.
Well, a story like this helps. Or take Lugaru, for an example of why you should support Linux anyway. In particular, look at this:
3. Vocal minorities
Having a Linux build meant coverage on Slashdot. This of course generated huge interest in not just the Linux version of Lugaru, but the Windows and Mac versions too.
Imagine if some obscure community college happened to have a decent program, fair prices, and awesome Linux support. Don't you think Slashdot coverage would help there?
5. You canâ(TM)t choose your power users
In the same vein as the above, you never know who the movers and shakers are going to be in your community. In Wolfireâ(TM)s case, we are forever indebted to Wolfire forum regular, Silb. He actually reverse-engineered portions of Lugaru and made a kick-ass, extremely popular replacement campaign for the game, providing a huge amount of extra content to other people. His single, epic thread has been viewed over a hundred thousand times.
Oh yeah. Heâ(TM)s a Mac user.
I think my little anecdote makes that point pretty clear -- for example, the helpdesk didn't have an answer, so I found one.
I think rather than his daughter, it is more a matter of contention for Yuna49.
Nice assumption. Macs are great, but depending on how much his daughter enjoys the laptop she's got, she may not want to switch.
I know the last time I did, it was a pretty horrible experience. Seriously, half the keybindings I've gotten used to in KDE -- and really, they were actually useful, productive things -- simply do not exist in OS X, and cannot exist without Apple's blessing.