1995 called...and wanted to remind Apple what happened the last time they got away from their core business of making computers and operating system software.
It's a common downfall. Corporation X makes money doing something well, but either gets greedy, or starts to saturate the market...and looks elsewhere for revenue. Corporation X starts to spread to thin, outside its 'comfort zone', and abuses the trust consumers placed in the brand name. The brand name devalues. Company X finds itself competing against an upstart that is focused, and because its brand name has devalued, its high-margin items aren't selling.
If you want to see a great example of this, look at Nintendo: despite the might of Microsoft, the Xbox 360 isn't what people are desperate to get their hands on, and the Wii isn't having problems with its online service. Nintendo is making money hand over fist on the Wii, and Microsoft just lost almost TWO BILLION DOLLARS on the Xbox division. Meanwhile, Vista is an absolute disaster, and the world is gunning for Office.
I look at Apple and see warning signs too. Leopard's release *stunk*. There were the simplest bugs; they still haven't fixed an issue that causes the hard drive controller to lock up, and it took weeks for the fix to the "everything gets deleted if a file move to another volume fails" bug. The finder navigation related to file server volumes absolutely SUCKS, and frankly- the rest of the hundred-plus features are nothing but glitz, or grossly overdue (like workgroup calendaring.) About the only thing that was improved was Spotlight...
...and the beat goes on! Just google "ebay fraud" and see hundreds of news stories and personal accounts...
I recall reading a few years ago that eBay was a source of something like 75% of all complaints about online fraud. Just yesterday I saw an item for sale by a guy with a positive rating of something like 24,000. Unless he's selling 6 items a day for the last 10 years, I see nothing has changed.
Why is a company capable of such awesome technical inginuity (Amazon Web Services) getting hung up on something so utterly ridiculous? This just smacks of leadership that is a cut below the calibre of its employees.
One word: investors. Investors see patents as very, very valuable assets to be defended. If you defend an absurd patent, you have a chance at $xy million dollars. If you simply say "LOL J/K!" and walk away, you've got a guaranteed loss of $xy million dollars. Yeah, you waste the salary of a couple lawyers, but...that's so small to the perceived value of the patent that investors are willing to take that risk.
Big investors get voting rights or board seats, and- something most slashdotters don't realize- the officers of a corporation usually serve at the pleasure of the board.
When a CEO leaves a position to "spend more time with their family" or "for health reasons" or "retires", it's almost always because either the board gave them the boot, or he/she knew they were about to be given it...
well if he can cock the crossbow with just his hand then it's not a very powerful crossbow. try a 90lb long bow and get back to me.
Try a compound crossbow and arrows that don't have wooden shafts and soft iron heads, and call me when the arrow doesn't pierce the monitor, punch through the wall behind it, and impale itself in a marketing intern.
It is pretty impressive that he can pound on it with a hammer, even lightly- that's far better than anything else...buuuuuut there were a lot of things going for the monitor that I noticed:
Wood is soft and compliant, as is cast iron (he showed the rather bent arrowheads)...and the crossbow he used didn't put that much force into it. Also, did you notice how floppy the stand was?
All of that adds up and helps spread the force of the impact over time...
Idiot posts "OMG MAC IS TEH SUCK" and gets modded up to 4, insightful. I post pointing out that the guy in TFA should've turned on encryption, or done the repair in-house (and point out the glaring hole in the parent comment's argument about non-warranty service) and get modded "troll."
If there's sensitive information on the drive, you have every right to want it back (especially if it wasn't warranty work).
It's so trivially easy to encrypt data on a Mac, any decently saavy user gets exactly what they deserved in this kind of situation. Public service announcment: It's FOUR clicks to turn on FileVault, (seamless encryption for your entire home folder.) STOP BITCHING AND USE THE SECURITY FEATURES GIVEN TO YOU. BY APPLE. Oh, and did I mention it's just as easy to create a secure disk image, just for your "code" to live in? Protip: look in Disk Utility.
If it wasn't warranty work, why didn't the guy hire someone to replace the drive himself, since drives are dirt cheap @ retail prices? The drives are NOT (despite the tags on this article) proprietary. If it's that big a deal and it WAS under warranty, why didn't he do it outside the warranty? An hour's labor and the cost of the drive, and he's done- could probably even have it done on-site. On most macs save the Macbook Pros, it's a few screws at most to get to the drive. A child could get to the drive on a Macbook, flat panel iMac, G4, or G5/Mac Pro. Apple can't deny a warranty claim unless they can prove you did the damage or your drive caused the problems you're having, thanks to the Magnuson-Moss Warrant Act.
Apple deserves the highest possible mark of shame for this disregard for the security of their customers' information, it's absolutely not permissible.
Um...what? This is standard practice in the industry; components replaced under warranty have to be replaced, even if you're a big-shot enterprise comapny with a several-thousand-dollar 4-hour 24x7 support contract. "Highest possible mark of shame"? Jebzus, save the drama fo you momma.
PS: If you're that bothered about your data, and the drive failure is not complete- use dd to write/dev/random to the drive (with the skip-on-errors option) before you return it. If the failure is serious enough that such a method doesn't work, then your data is most likely not retrievable by a casual user- someone would have to go to the trouble of ripping apart the drive and repairing the mechanism, and guess what? You're one guy with "valuable code" in a sea of hard drives with nothing more scandalous than some racy photos in iPhoto and maybe some hot & steamy emails to old flames...
If you think someone will go beyond casual efforts because your stuff is that important/valuable/risky, why didn't you encrypt it?
The reasons are the same for video as for documents: magnetic media degrade quickly,
The myth of bit rot on hard drives is just that- a myth. It's been perpetuated for two decades by the idiot Steve Gibson, selling his own snake oil (Spinrite), and unfortunately, not enough people are calling him on it. I thought it actually did something too, until I read that post from someone who actually knows how modern drives work. As the author points out, there's a track that can only be written at the factory, and if what Gibson claimed were true, ALL drives would be dying left and right after a few years. Funny how I've found drives made almost a decade ago working just fine now...
The problem hasn't changed; it's mostly obsolescence in drive interfaces, and the drives themselves (for tapes.) PATA is common these days, but everything is going towards SATA, for example.
Both DAT and 8mm were in common use as little as 6-7 years ago...but you'd be fairly hard pressed to find a place to but either now save eBay. And...do YOU want to entrust a backup to an ebay drive?
Even if you are downloading something that is legal, like Linux?
Yes; they're fully aware of Linux distributions and whatnot being preferably distributed via BT. If you let them know ahead of time, it's not a problem. Granted, that was in the context of staff- I don't know if this applies to students. Staff can also get semi-permanent authorization; students MIGHT be able to as well.
Also, I should mention- this may only apply to the medical school.
Slightly off-topic, but I often see people mentioning Harvard hasn't been targetted by the RIAA.
It's not for legal reasons. If you use any P2P software, Harvard IT shuts off your access; you're blocked on a DHCP level. You get three "strikes" before this happens- unless you're on wireless, in which case, you're booted right away.
This solar panel is currently in Seller's possession but it will be held in escrow until 6/1/2009 before local pick-up by the winning bidder (or shipment at cost to the winning bidder).
sometimes arguing the letter of the law isn't worth the PR cost.
What PR cost? Their customers are other big corporations. The American public also has a notoriously short memory, and the voting American public cares more about how tough you are on terrorists and how much corn subsidies you're throwing their way.
When Company A announces they've done something already- and Company B announces they will, that's more like the "Company-B-caught-with-pants-down-and-family-jewels-showing department."
Google's Android may be getting all the headlines, but the venerable LiPS (Linux Phone Standards Forum), which launched to much fanfare in 2005, is rolling out the specs.
From what I understand, the LiPS had been "stuck in committee" with no real progress until Google announced Android. Then all of the sudden, there was a flurry of activity.
Specs are nice, and it's good to see progress, but the slashdot summary seems to have a distinct "look at LiPS, it's better, it has SPECS!". That's great, but..here's a prototype device running Android, and let's not forget the OpenMoko people, which have not only got a so-close-you-can-taste it physical device, they've got a pretty sorted software package as well, which runs on a couple of existing phone/pda widgets. The OpenMoko stuff and the Palm/HP/etc PDA stuff (I forget the proper project names, sorry!) is quite open and documented. The Linux-on-handheld boys have had working software out there for *years*.
Welcome to the party, boys. Beer's been had, chips are gone- there's some frosting left on the cake platter, though. Same thing to Google- it's nice that they have shiny prototypes, but if they're so open-source, why couldn't they work with any of the existing groups? Ah, I love the open source world: why help someone else, when you can re-invent your own wheel (anyone remember the days of Freshmeat's front page being literally FILLED with mp3 players software?)
The XO is not intended to go to children who can't afford food. How dense can some people be?
Which is exactly the problem; the XO project ignores the people most in need, and for those it doesn't ignore, it hands them a pound of cake instead of a hundred pounds of rice. The guy's talent and resources could have gone to better causes. It's an exaggeration to say "you could buy food with that money", but the continent needs basic literacy, which is achievable with paper, pencils, a schoolroom, and a teacher. It needs agricultural and job skills training, also achievable with basic, inexpensive materials.
$20 says that this story is tagged "troll" etc. just because it's Dvorak.
You know what, folks? He's right. OLPC is one of a long line of pet projects to "help the poor" from people with money and leadership, driven by their own egos and perceptions, not reality.
Witness Oprah's $40M school "for leadership" for African girls; total size of the school is about 150 students. It has two beauty salons, among other things, and has been described as extravagant, even ignoring that it's in the third world. That's a great use of money; meanwhile, a friend of mine spent a month in Ghana teaching kids there, and they didn't have the money for basic materials like pencils for lessons in reading and writing. But hey, 150 girls a year are whisked to a class higher than 90% of the people even in the United States; Oprah gets some pretty photo ops with them, and both the black and feminist communities love her to pieces.
How about the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation? Guess what- month-old children in Africa don't die from AIDS; they die from diarrhea because of contaminated drinking water. They don't starve because of AIDS; they starve because they need food. They don't get shot because of AIDS; they get shot because the western world stands by while genocide happens.
They don't need fucking laptops. They need clean water, food, peace, basic health infrastructure, peace, and educational/vocational/agricultural training.
Yes, but is this relevant to 85% of the body of work? Do we really need to throw the word "totalitarian" around, or "black helicopters?" Jeez.
Relax, chief. It's The Register's odd British humor. Go look at any of their articles about robots- they usually insert jokes about robots being one step closer to world domination/human enslavement.
Nevermind that this is the paper that runs the Bastard Operator From Hell series. I can't believe you got modded up to 5 for not realizing a joke on a famously snarky-humor-laden technology news sites.
Also, your comments were a lovely bit of straw man crap: nobody is seriously suggesting (or is it really even possible to) "take down" Wikipedia.
The Register has less credibility than Wiki, if only for this idiotic smear job.
Says you, chief. I think they're one of the best sources for technology news around and I love their (obvious to any idiot) twist. CNET and others happily parrot press release after press release; only the good 'ol Reg actually views 'em with an eye of skepticism.
That's a catchy term for the practice of taking a job traditionally performed by employees or a contracted company and outsourcing it to an undefined, large group of people in the form of an open call on the Web
You mean like a few days ago when a story submitter commanded us "slashdotters" to go rifling through Microsoft's OOXML documents for them so, that IBM and friends wouldn't have to pay staffers/paralegals/lawyers to do so?
Funny how in this thread we have no less than half a dozen residents from this tiny 400 person shithole on slashdot, and several UK truck drivers to boot...
Nice trolling, folks. What's hilarious is how many moderators fell for it.
this move could 'open a lot of possibilities for the future,' mainly in terms of the speed of the updates and avoiding sloppy and possibly dangerous binary patches.
Ugh. This is just another version of "open source code is more secure because you can review it and compile it yourself." Open source code can be more secure, because a qualified individual can conduct a lengthy security audit, and maybe catch some malicious or insecure code."
virtually nobody that uses the code will be even remotely qualified to even understand how the code works, much less be able to tell if it'll screw up their phone.
Opening development to more people makes the chances of someone SUBMITTING (note, I said "submitting", not "successfully getting away with putting malicious code into an official release) go up; now the few people who know what they're doing have to spend a lot of time reviewing code not just for correctness but malicious intent, something they may not be qualified to do.
Releasing the source code now makes it exceptionally easy for people to trojan the code and release a compiled version. The bar has been lowered from "knows assembler and iPhone internals" to "is decent with C."
They are illegally interfering with their customers' service
Since you've been modded up to "5, insightful"- would you care to tell us what is illegal about it? Extra credit for references to specific federal or state laws or regulations.
And, more specifically, if it is illegal, why this is (supposedly) pushing Congress towards net neutrality laws?
Or try "employment lawyer." Beware: the US is largely employment-at-will. So, unless you're a minority, pregnant/a woman, handicapped, over 50, or in the military...you're pretty much screwed.
Shame, as it wasn't always that way, and the US is one of the few places where at-will employment is the norm.
How about we blame Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the other "Hawks" for single-mindedly pushing a US foreign policy doctrine of preemption, which led to a war based on falsified "evidence" of a laughable "threat" to the US?
Networked troops were supposed to be so efficient, it'd take just a few of 'em to wipe out their enemies.
We did beat the "enemy"; only Saddam's core Republican Guard put up any sort of fight. The major fuck-up in the initial "war" was Rumsfeld repeatedly cutting supply lines and over-extending troops.
Then we failed to fill the power vacuum in a country with a history of sectarian violence even under a brutal dictator. Worse, we failed to keep the power, lights, and water going which left the door open for opportunists. Iraq fell head-first into a sectarian civil war, with both sides, most of the world, and half of the United States population agreeing on one thing: we need to get the fuck out of their country.
It's hard to "wipe out" your enemy when every day you create more just by your mere meddling presence. It's like standing in a bathtub holding a garden hose, wondering why the water's rising.
At the school I'm currently in, a lot of people already do use gmail. Unfortunately, none of them realize the consequences of putting their research up on servers the school can't control in terms of security, availability, and backups.
Google or MSN could (and have) "accidentally" zapped email or entire accounts. That is a considerable danger to a research student using that service as their primary email address and "workspace".
Will Google or MSN care (or even have the facilities) to:
Restore a folder of a year's worth of email you accidentally deleted?
Change the password you forgot, without making you remember "security questions", which hopefully weren't too easily researched, and thus represent a major security hole on their own?
Restore your entire account after your jilted ex deletes your account completely?
Look in their logs to see exactly why that email from the NIH about your million dollar grant didn't make it? Or even care?
No, no, no, and....no. Yet, all of those things are available to the students whose email server I administer. And you certainly can't run into MSN's office nearby and cry "Help!"; hell, you can't even reach them on the phone. Google's employees are too smart to do that whole "telephone" thing- that's SO 1900's.
Intel has designed their own laptop called the Classmate to sell between $230 and $300, nearly double the XO's price
What? The XO was targeted to cost $100. It ballooned out to $130, then $175, then $188, then $200.
Now, if you want to donate 10,000 of them, you get that $200 price. If you want to donate 100 or less, you pay $300 per laptop.
Why they have a sliding price scale is beyond me...they're supposed to be a non-profit, building the things for the poorest people in the world, and yet...the fewer you buy, the more you pay...
Slashdot Mirror
1995 called...and wanted to remind Apple what happened the last time they got away from their core business of making computers and operating system software.
It's a common downfall. Corporation X makes money doing something well, but either gets greedy, or starts to saturate the market...and looks elsewhere for revenue. Corporation X starts to spread to thin, outside its 'comfort zone', and abuses the trust consumers placed in the brand name. The brand name devalues. Company X finds itself competing against an upstart that is focused, and because its brand name has devalued, its high-margin items aren't selling.
If you want to see a great example of this, look at Nintendo: despite the might of Microsoft, the Xbox 360 isn't what people are desperate to get their hands on, and the Wii isn't having problems with its online service. Nintendo is making money hand over fist on the Wii, and Microsoft just lost almost TWO BILLION DOLLARS on the Xbox division. Meanwhile, Vista is an absolute disaster, and the world is gunning for Office.
I look at Apple and see warning signs too. Leopard's release *stunk*. There were the simplest bugs; they still haven't fixed an issue that causes the hard drive controller to lock up, and it took weeks for the fix to the "everything gets deleted if a file move to another volume fails" bug. The finder navigation related to file server volumes absolutely SUCKS, and frankly- the rest of the hundred-plus features are nothing but glitz, or grossly overdue (like workgroup calendaring.) About the only thing that was improved was Spotlight...
Slashdot story about ebay sitting on its hands and doing nothing when given proof of fraud, complete with stories from slashdotters who used to work for ebay: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/16/1316203&tid=95&tid=98&tid=123
This guy adds in his own personal experience, where eBay wanted a $25 fee to handle a fraud case: http://danwarne.com/ebay-fraud-under-scrutiny/
In 2002, ebay sits on its hands and does nothing when given evidence of fraud: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3078736/
FTC says Ebay is the #1 source of online fraud complaints (circa 2003): http://www.news.com/FTC,-states-take-on-online-auction-fraud/2100-1017_3-999009.html
Still a problem in 2004: http://www.nclnet.org/news/2004/internet_fraud_stats.htm
...and the beat goes on! Just google "ebay fraud" and see hundreds of news stories and personal accounts...
I recall reading a few years ago that eBay was a source of something like 75% of all complaints about online fraud. Just yesterday I saw an item for sale by a guy with a positive rating of something like 24,000. Unless he's selling 6 items a day for the last 10 years, I see nothing has changed.
Why is a company capable of such awesome technical inginuity (Amazon Web Services) getting hung up on something so utterly ridiculous? This just smacks of leadership that is a cut below the calibre of its employees.
One word: investors. Investors see patents as very, very valuable assets to be defended. If you defend an absurd patent, you have a chance at $xy million dollars. If you simply say "LOL J/K!" and walk away, you've got a guaranteed loss of $xy million dollars. Yeah, you waste the salary of a couple lawyers, but...that's so small to the perceived value of the patent that investors are willing to take that risk.
Big investors get voting rights or board seats, and- something most slashdotters don't realize- the officers of a corporation usually serve at the pleasure of the board.
When a CEO leaves a position to "spend more time with their family" or "for health reasons" or "retires", it's almost always because either the board gave them the boot, or he/she knew they were about to be given it...
well if he can cock the crossbow with just his hand then it's not a very powerful crossbow. try a 90lb long bow and get back to me.
Try a compound crossbow and arrows that don't have wooden shafts and soft iron heads, and call me when the arrow doesn't pierce the monitor, punch through the wall behind it, and impale itself in a marketing intern.
It is pretty impressive that he can pound on it with a hammer, even lightly- that's far better than anything else...buuuuuut there were a lot of things going for the monitor that I noticed:
Wood is soft and compliant, as is cast iron (he showed the rather bent arrowheads)...and the crossbow he used didn't put that much force into it. Also, did you notice how floppy the stand was?
All of that adds up and helps spread the force of the impact over time...
Ah, how I love the metamoderation function.
If there's sensitive information on the drive, you have every right to want it back (especially if it wasn't warranty work).
It's so trivially easy to encrypt data on a Mac, any decently saavy user gets exactly what they deserved in this kind of situation. Public service announcment: It's FOUR clicks to turn on FileVault, (seamless encryption for your entire home folder.) STOP BITCHING AND USE THE SECURITY FEATURES GIVEN TO YOU. BY APPLE. Oh, and did I mention it's just as easy to create a secure disk image, just for your "code" to live in? Protip: look in Disk Utility.
If it wasn't warranty work, why didn't the guy hire someone to replace the drive himself, since drives are dirt cheap @ retail prices? The drives are NOT (despite the tags on this article) proprietary. If it's that big a deal and it WAS under warranty, why didn't he do it outside the warranty? An hour's labor and the cost of the drive, and he's done- could probably even have it done on-site. On most macs save the Macbook Pros, it's a few screws at most to get to the drive. A child could get to the drive on a Macbook, flat panel iMac, G4, or G5/Mac Pro. Apple can't deny a warranty claim unless they can prove you did the damage or your drive caused the problems you're having, thanks to the Magnuson-Moss Warrant Act.
Apple deserves the highest possible mark of shame for this disregard for the security of their customers' information, it's absolutely not permissible.
Um...what? This is standard practice in the industry; components replaced under warranty have to be replaced, even if you're a big-shot enterprise comapny with a several-thousand-dollar 4-hour 24x7 support contract. "Highest possible mark of shame"? Jebzus, save the drama fo you momma.
PS: If you're that bothered about your data, and the drive failure is not complete- use dd to write /dev/random to the drive (with the skip-on-errors option) before you return it. If the failure is serious enough that such a method doesn't work, then your data is most likely not retrievable by a casual user- someone would have to go to the trouble of ripping apart the drive and repairing the mechanism, and guess what? You're one guy with "valuable code" in a sea of hard drives with nothing more scandalous than some racy photos in iPhoto and maybe some hot & steamy emails to old flames...
If you think someone will go beyond casual efforts because your stuff is that important/valuable/risky, why didn't you encrypt it?
The reasons are the same for video as for documents: magnetic media degrade quickly,
The myth of bit rot on hard drives is just that- a myth. It's been perpetuated for two decades by the idiot Steve Gibson, selling his own snake oil (Spinrite), and unfortunately, not enough people are calling him on it. I thought it actually did something too, until I read that post from someone who actually knows how modern drives work. As the author points out, there's a track that can only be written at the factory, and if what Gibson claimed were true, ALL drives would be dying left and right after a few years. Funny how I've found drives made almost a decade ago working just fine now...
The problem hasn't changed; it's mostly obsolescence in drive interfaces, and the drives themselves (for tapes.) PATA is common these days, but everything is going towards SATA, for example.
Both DAT and 8mm were in common use as little as 6-7 years ago...but you'd be fairly hard pressed to find a place to but either now save eBay. And...do YOU want to entrust a backup to an ebay drive?
Even if you are downloading something that is legal, like Linux?
Yes; they're fully aware of Linux distributions and whatnot being preferably distributed via BT. If you let them know ahead of time, it's not a problem. Granted, that was in the context of staff- I don't know if this applies to students. Staff can also get semi-permanent authorization; students MIGHT be able to as well.
Also, I should mention- this may only apply to the medical school.
Slightly off-topic, but I often see people mentioning Harvard hasn't been targetted by the RIAA.
It's not for legal reasons. If you use any P2P software, Harvard IT shuts off your access; you're blocked on a DHCP level. You get three "strikes" before this happens- unless you're on wireless, in which case, you're booted right away.
From the ebay auction:
This solar panel is currently in Seller's possession but it will be held in escrow until 6/1/2009 before local pick-up by the winning bidder (or shipment at cost to the winning bidder).
Um...what?
sometimes arguing the letter of the law isn't worth the PR cost.
What PR cost? Their customers are other big corporations. The American public also has a notoriously short memory, and the voting American public cares more about how tough you are on terrorists and how much corn subsidies you're throwing their way.
When Company A announces they've done something already- and Company B announces they will, that's more like the "Company-B-caught-with-pants-down-and-family-jewels-showing department."
Cisco's response is laughably cliche...
Google's Android may be getting all the headlines, but the venerable LiPS (Linux Phone Standards Forum), which launched to much fanfare in 2005, is rolling out the specs.
From what I understand, the LiPS had been "stuck in committee" with no real progress until Google announced Android. Then all of the sudden, there was a flurry of activity.
Specs are nice, and it's good to see progress, but the slashdot summary seems to have a distinct "look at LiPS, it's better, it has SPECS!". That's great, but..here's a prototype device running Android, and let's not forget the OpenMoko people, which have not only got a so-close-you-can-taste it physical device, they've got a pretty sorted software package as well, which runs on a couple of existing phone/pda widgets. The OpenMoko stuff and the Palm/HP/etc PDA stuff (I forget the proper project names, sorry!) is quite open and documented. The Linux-on-handheld boys have had working software out there for *years*.
Welcome to the party, boys. Beer's been had, chips are gone- there's some frosting left on the cake platter, though. Same thing to Google- it's nice that they have shiny prototypes, but if they're so open-source, why couldn't they work with any of the existing groups? Ah, I love the open source world: why help someone else, when you can re-invent your own wheel (anyone remember the days of Freshmeat's front page being literally FILLED with mp3 players software?)
The XO is not intended to go to children who can't afford food. How dense can some people be?
Which is exactly the problem; the XO project ignores the people most in need, and for those it doesn't ignore, it hands them a pound of cake instead of a hundred pounds of rice. The guy's talent and resources could have gone to better causes. It's an exaggeration to say "you could buy food with that money", but the continent needs basic literacy, which is achievable with paper, pencils, a schoolroom, and a teacher. It needs agricultural and job skills training, also achievable with basic, inexpensive materials.
$20 says that this story is tagged "troll" etc. just because it's Dvorak.
You know what, folks? He's right. OLPC is one of a long line of pet projects to "help the poor" from people with money and leadership, driven by their own egos and perceptions, not reality.
Witness Oprah's $40M school "for leadership" for African girls; total size of the school is about 150 students. It has two beauty salons, among other things, and has been described as extravagant, even ignoring that it's in the third world. That's a great use of money; meanwhile, a friend of mine spent a month in Ghana teaching kids there, and they didn't have the money for basic materials like pencils for lessons in reading and writing. But hey, 150 girls a year are whisked to a class higher than 90% of the people even in the United States; Oprah gets some pretty photo ops with them, and both the black and feminist communities love her to pieces.
How about the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation? Guess what- month-old children in Africa don't die from AIDS; they die from diarrhea because of contaminated drinking water. They don't starve because of AIDS; they starve because they need food. They don't get shot because of AIDS; they get shot because the western world stands by while genocide happens.
They don't need fucking laptops. They need clean water, food, peace, basic health infrastructure, peace, and educational/vocational/agricultural training.
Yes, but is this relevant to 85% of the body of work? Do we really need to throw the word "totalitarian" around, or "black helicopters?" Jeez.
Relax, chief. It's The Register's odd British humor. Go look at any of their articles about robots- they usually insert jokes about robots being one step closer to world domination/human enslavement.
Nevermind that this is the paper that runs the Bastard Operator From Hell series. I can't believe you got modded up to 5 for not realizing a joke on a famously snarky-humor-laden technology news sites.
Also, your comments were a lovely bit of straw man crap: nobody is seriously suggesting (or is it really even possible to) "take down" Wikipedia.
The Register has less credibility than Wiki, if only for this idiotic smear job.
Says you, chief. I think they're one of the best sources for technology news around and I love their (obvious to any idiot) twist. CNET and others happily parrot press release after press release; only the good 'ol Reg actually views 'em with an eye of skepticism.
That's a catchy term for the practice of taking a job traditionally performed by employees or a contracted company and outsourcing it to an undefined, large group of people in the form of an open call on the Web
You mean like a few days ago when a story submitter commanded us "slashdotters" to go rifling through Microsoft's OOXML documents for them so, that IBM and friends wouldn't have to pay staffers/paralegals/lawyers to do so?
As a UK truck driver,
Funny how in this thread we have no less than half a dozen residents from this tiny 400 person shithole on slashdot, and several UK truck drivers to boot...
Nice trolling, folks. What's hilarious is how many moderators fell for it.
...if the Bolivian navy hadn't been on maneuvers in the South Pacific.
this move could 'open a lot of possibilities for the future,' mainly in terms of the speed of the updates and avoiding sloppy and possibly dangerous binary patches.
Ugh. This is just another version of "open source code is more secure because you can review it and compile it yourself." Open source code can be more secure, because a qualified individual can conduct a lengthy security audit, and maybe catch some malicious or insecure code."
They are illegally interfering with their customers' service
Since you've been modded up to "5, insightful"- would you care to tell us what is illegal about it? Extra credit for references to specific federal or state laws or regulations.
And, more specifically, if it is illegal, why this is (supposedly) pushing Congress towards net neutrality laws?
Suggestion: wrongful termination
Or try "employment lawyer." Beware: the US is largely employment-at-will. So, unless you're a minority, pregnant/a woman, handicapped, over 50, or in the military...you're pretty much screwed.
Shame, as it wasn't always that way, and the US is one of the few places where at-will employment is the norm.
Blame the geeks for the mess in Iraq
How about we blame Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the other "Hawks" for single-mindedly pushing a US foreign policy doctrine of preemption, which led to a war based on falsified "evidence" of a laughable "threat" to the US?
Networked troops were supposed to be so efficient, it'd take just a few of 'em to wipe out their enemies.
We did beat the "enemy"; only Saddam's core Republican Guard put up any sort of fight. The major fuck-up in the initial "war" was Rumsfeld repeatedly cutting supply lines and over-extending troops.
Then we failed to fill the power vacuum in a country with a history of sectarian violence even under a brutal dictator. Worse, we failed to keep the power, lights, and water going which left the door open for opportunists. Iraq fell head-first into a sectarian civil war, with both sides, most of the world, and half of the United States population agreeing on one thing: we need to get the fuck out of their country.
It's hard to "wipe out" your enemy when every day you create more just by your mere meddling presence. It's like standing in a bathtub holding a garden hose, wondering why the water's rising.
Google or MSN could (and have) "accidentally" zapped email or entire accounts. That is a considerable danger to a research student using that service as their primary email address and "workspace".
Will Google or MSN care (or even have the facilities) to:
No, no, no, and....no. Yet, all of those things are available to the students whose email server I administer. And you certainly can't run into MSN's office nearby and cry "Help!"; hell, you can't even reach them on the phone. Google's employees are too smart to do that whole "telephone" thing- that's SO 1900's.
Intel has designed their own laptop called the Classmate to sell between $230 and $300, nearly double the XO's price
What? The XO was targeted to cost $100. It ballooned out to $130, then $175, then $188, then $200.
Now, if you want to donate 10,000 of them, you get that $200 price. If you want to donate 100 or less, you pay $300 per laptop.
Why they have a sliding price scale is beyond me...they're supposed to be a non-profit, building the things for the poorest people in the world, and yet...the fewer you buy, the more you pay...