"Actually, it'd be sweet if there was some sort of dynamic data management system that automatically put appropriate types of data on the appropriate drives, so I wouldn't even have to manage it."
Believe it or not there are many very educated people in developing countries. Many whose mathematics knowledge goes quite a bit beyond counting their fingers. Some may even exceed your skills in mathematics, yes, even you, sitting in your Manhattan high rise.
Where did your ancestors inherit that wealth from? If you investigate it, much if it you may consider illegitimate and stolen -- exploitation of these now 'developing' countries all over the world; don't forget that our initial wealth was inherited from the British Empire, of which I don't need to enumerate the crimes against these civilizations.
I don't see anything wrong in giving these people a fighting chance. I find it despicable that there are so many out there who would rather continue to maintain the current situation in the developing world, however beneficial it may be to our lives. These xenophobic ignorami clearly haven't spent any real time outside of their cozy clean safe world.
I don't really understand the focus on having anthropomorphic robots. Humans are relatively bulky and require quite a bit of energy for locomotion and so far move fairly slow. The one benefit of bipedal locomotion is the ability to walk over multileveled and rough terrain, but I'm guessing the majority of robot uses will be in offices, homes, etc. Why not have more designs like this? http://www.msl.ri.cmu.edu/projects/ballbot/
There are a lot of arguments relating to this in the book Guns, Germs and Steel. I'd recommend checking it out if you haven't. According to the author it comes down to geography and (related to geography) the availability of native domesticable plant and animal species -- which is the one resource that matters most. The Eurasian continent had them, the Americas, Africa and Australia did not.
It's a fascinating book with loads of information. I understand the difficulty people have with the question you pose -- it's not at all obvious. While treating these peoples (Native American, South American, Native Australians, Africans...) as inferiors for so long was/is not justified, it's understandable why so many people assumed they were an inferior subspecies -- it in fact takes a lot of analysis to figure out why their societies are so behind Eurasian based societies.
Now, I agree the OLPC may not do anything. I think it depends on what is included a lot. I worked as a mathematics and physics teacher for a few years in West Africa. In my opinion if the OLPC can serve as a substitute for the relatively expensive school books students are expected to purchase today it would be a massive help -- and in fact cheaper, OLPC and co wouldn't need to give these machines away if they could show the value of them. That's all of course beyond the IT educational component of the thing, which seems to be the focus at OLPC. From what I've seen on the wiki it looks like the ebooks component of the project is pretty undeveloped.
If the thing was packed full of 12 years of well made interactive textbooks, it would be a Godsend. I'm a bit worried though that it's going to be more of a toy that kids play around with -- IM, WWW, email, etc.
I remain at a loss as to why so many of my fellow Americans seem to believe that by being born within these borders they deserve a job.
Having lived and worked in a developing African country I would much rather see jobs go to people who work their asses off with few educational and technical resources than to lazy Americans who don't even appreciate the educational opportunities available here.
Fortunately not all Americans are as such, and those few will remain competitive, by working their asses off, just as it should be, not by being born with the national silver spoon in their mouths.
I agree, I probably wouldn't want one much for myself, but I am considering doing this and giving one to my 8yo niece who is starting to mess around with computers.
I need to do a bit more research about what exactly she could do with the machine though...
Clearly we are in the middle of an energy crises; any innovation that can reduce our reliance on fossil fuels could prove to be the most important of our time. My vote is for this fellow:
It's remarkable to me that you knew that and didn't know Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation, and the amount of evidence that it's a very close approximation in most situations.
Yes, of course merging is useful. Here's what the post I replied to seemed to be saying:
Say we have / ,/FOO and/BAZ/FOO as such:/FOO:
README
TODO
src (directory)
lib (directory)/BAZ/FOO:
README
src (directory)
From what I understand from this post and discussion (I don't have an OS X machine), using finder to copy/BAZ/FOO to / will cause/FOO to be completely clobbered, leaving just README and the/BAZ/FOO version of src.
Now above a poster said this can be avoided by copying the contents of/BAZ/FOO, ie selecting all in/BAZ/FOO and then copying into/FOO
A poster then asked my question, what about directories inside of/FOO (mainly src here)?
The reply was basically that 'i just checked and it works'.
I have a feeling the poster didn't understand what the questioner was getting at -- are these subdirectories merged or clobbered?
In other words, if I do this select all then copy, do I get that/src directory merged or clobbered?
If it gets merged, that's kind of weird, as just copying it directly there would clobber.
But let's face it, a GUI with 2-3 clicks can only set up the most basic apache, sql, samba, etc server. We're talking about applications with 100s of configuration options, and a GUI with 100s of checkboxes is not the most usable way to configure an application. This is why in general GUIs are useless for server applications.
Beyond the fact that your engineering friend is apparently not aware of current developments at NASA, would a new system really be designed with pencil/paper drafting? Is your friend also unaware of the advances in CAD in the last 40 years? It seems to me that CAD is a lot more practical as it can integrate with [astro|aero]dynamics testing software and such.
Look bub, I was simply giving an anecdote contradicting someone's claim
that Macs and PCs no longer have a price gap. I don't give two shits
what you decide to purchase, I was simply pointing out that for my
requirements, the price/feature gap exists.
Price wise it is more comparable to a MacBook, yes that is true.
But the MacBook has a 1280x800 resolution compared to 1680x1050. I'm rather at a loss as to how those are comparable.
After you spend some time working on high resolution screens it becomes downright painful to work on something where you can't fit two 80 column terminals/editors side by side.
Anyway, just for kicks I priced out a somewhat comparable MacBook, though it's impossible with the screen...
13" white mac book, 2.17gHz, 2GB ram, 120gb hard drive, $1449. I'll gladly pay $100 more for a nice high resolution screen and thinkpad build quality.
The MacBook is in reality a lot more comparable to the x-series (the x series having better build quality, in my experience).
Click the far left one. Select all the options I listed above.
I'll give you that I'm not able to run a 'hip' os and perhaps don't have all the truthinessy intangibles that go with owning a Mac, but I saved a good $500+ and own a laptop from a company that doesn't seem to have yearly recall issues.
Take it easy man, I really don't have any incentive to waste my time posting fabrications on/.
For me the thinkpad makes much more sense as the two things I value most in a laptop are display and keyboard. I really can't stand the Mac keyboard, and as I'm not living in a cave I really have little use for the backlit keyboard. I prefer to light my home.
That reminds me, I have in fact spilled two beverages into two different thinkpads.
Didn't even need to replace the keyboard, just took it off, hung the laptop
upside down for a day to dry and reassembled. Still works today (x21).
I owned an iBook for one year and the lcd went out. I brought a Thinkpad t43p to West Africa for two years in an extremely dusty environment and it had absolutely no problems whereas my colleague had to ship his Powerbook back to the states for repairs.. TWICE.
Today I have, functioning perfectly, a Transnote, an X21 and a 600 series. Sadly the T43p was stolen, which is why I was looking into a new laptop. I considered Mac simply because I knew I was going to run Debian primarly, and would rather have OS X as an option than XP / Vista.
Mac laptops only seem to make sense if you belong to the cult.
Slashdot Mirror
Would this mean the first Apple laptop that won't render
its lap users impotent since the G3?
"Actually, it'd be sweet if there was some sort of dynamic data management system that automatically put appropriate types of data on the appropriate drives, so I wouldn't even have to manage it."
You mean like... RAM and a memory manager?
2 billion more Hertz, assuming you're American.
Seriously? Your favorite president ever? Have you read any history prior to 2000?
Believe it or not there are many very educated people in developing countries. Many whose
mathematics knowledge goes quite a bit beyond counting their fingers. Some may even exceed
your skills in mathematics, yes, even you, sitting in your Manhattan high rise.
Where did your ancestors inherit that wealth from? If you investigate it, much if it you
may consider illegitimate and stolen -- exploitation of these now 'developing' countries
all over the world; don't forget that our initial wealth was inherited from the British
Empire, of which I don't need to enumerate the crimes against these civilizations.
I don't see anything wrong in giving these people a fighting chance. I find it despicable
that there are so many out there who would rather continue to maintain the current situation
in the developing world, however beneficial it may be to our lives. These xenophobic ignorami
clearly haven't spent any real time outside of their cozy clean safe world.
You're right. Probably shouldn't have included the Americas in that list. Thanks for the correction.
I don't really understand the focus on having anthropomorphic robots. Humans are relatively
bulky and require quite a bit of energy for locomotion and so far move fairly slow. The one
benefit of bipedal locomotion is the ability to walk over multileveled and rough terrain, but
I'm guessing the majority of robot uses will be in offices, homes, etc. Why not have more designs
like this? http://www.msl.ri.cmu.edu/projects/ballbot/
There are a lot of arguments relating to this in the book Guns, Germs and Steel.
...)
I'd recommend checking it out if you haven't. According to the author it comes
down to geography and (related to geography) the availability of native domesticable
plant and animal species -- which is the one resource that matters most. The Eurasian
continent had them, the Americas, Africa and Australia did not.
It's a fascinating book with loads of information. I understand the difficulty
people have with the question you pose -- it's not at all obvious. While treating
these peoples (Native American, South American, Native Australians, Africans
as inferiors for so long was/is not justified, it's understandable why
so many people assumed they were an inferior subspecies -- it in fact takes a lot
of analysis to figure out why their societies are so behind Eurasian based societies.
Now, I agree the OLPC may not do anything. I think it depends on what is included a lot.
I worked as a mathematics and physics teacher for a few years in West Africa. In my opinion
if the OLPC can serve as a substitute for the relatively expensive school books students
are expected to purchase today it would be a massive help -- and in fact cheaper, OLPC and
co wouldn't need to give these machines away if they could show the value of them. That's
all of course beyond the IT educational component of the thing, which seems to be the focus
at OLPC. From what I've seen on the wiki it looks like the ebooks component of the project
is pretty undeveloped.
If the thing was packed full of 12 years of well made interactive textbooks, it would be
a Godsend. I'm a bit worried though that it's going to be more of a toy that kids play
around with -- IM, WWW, email, etc.
Just my 2 cents.
No thanks, I'll just head down the street to the locally owned place and use their net
for free, on my spacious thinkpad keyboard.
disclaimer: Probably getting an OLPC.
I remain at a loss as to why so many of my fellow Americans seem to believe
that by being born within these borders they deserve a job.
Having lived and worked in a developing African country I would much rather
see jobs go to people who work their asses off with few educational and
technical resources than to lazy Americans who don't even appreciate
the educational opportunities available here.
Fortunately not all Americans are as such, and those few will remain
competitive, by working their asses off, just as it should be, not by
being born with the national silver spoon in their mouths.
I agree, I probably wouldn't want one much for myself, but I am considering doing
this and giving one to my 8yo niece who is starting to mess around with computers.
I need to do a bit more research about what exactly she could do with the machine
though...
Clearly we are in the middle of an energy crises; any innovation that can reduce our reliance on
fossil fuels could prove to be the most important of our time. My vote is for this fellow:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rA-zhTJuFU
Cool, thanks, I looked back over this thread and realized that yeah, I scrambled up the mac/win
responses a bit, my bad.
It's remarkable to me that you knew that and didn't know Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation,
and the amount of evidence that it's a very close approximation in most situations.
Yes, of course merging is useful. Here's what the post I replied to seemed to be saying:
/FOO and /BAZ/FOO as such: /FOO: /BAZ/FOO:
/BAZ/FOO to / will cause /FOO to be completely clobbered, leaving just README and the /BAZ/FOO version of src.
/BAZ/FOO, ie selecting all /BAZ/FOO and then copying into /FOO
/FOO (mainly src here)?
/src directory merged or
Say we have / ,
README
TODO
src (directory)
lib (directory)
README
src (directory)
From what I understand from this post and discussion (I don't have an OS X machine), using finder
to copy
Now above a poster said this can be avoided by copying the contents of
in
A poster then asked my question, what about directories inside of
The reply was basically that 'i just checked and it works'.
I have a feeling the poster didn't understand what the questioner was getting at -- are these
subdirectories merged or clobbered?
In other words, if I do this select all then copy, do I get that
clobbered?
If it gets merged, that's kind of weird, as just copying it directly there would clobber.
Wait, it actually did merge the sub-folders?
That seems like ridiculously inconsistent behavior.
But let's face it, a GUI with 2-3 clicks can only set up the most basic apache, sql, samba, etc
server. We're talking about applications with 100s of configuration options, and a GUI
with 100s of checkboxes is not the most usable way to configure an application. This is why in
general GUIs are useless for server applications.
OS X seriously has a web server running by default?
Beyond the fact that your engineering friend is apparently not aware of current developments
at NASA, would a new system really be designed with pencil/paper drafting? Is your friend
also unaware of the advances in CAD in the last 40 years? It seems to me that CAD is a lot
more practical as it can integrate with [astro|aero]dynamics testing software and such.
Look bub, I was simply giving an anecdote contradicting someone's claim that Macs and PCs no longer have a price gap. I don't give two shits what you decide to purchase, I was simply pointing out that for my requirements, the price/feature gap exists.
Price wise it is more comparable to a MacBook, yes that is true.
But the MacBook has a 1280x800 resolution compared to 1680x1050.
I'm rather at a loss as to how those are comparable.
After you spend some time working on high resolution screens it
becomes downright painful to work on something where you can't fit
two 80 column terminals/editors side by side.
Anyway, just for kicks I priced out a somewhat comparable MacBook,
though it's impossible with the screen...
13" white mac book, 2.17gHz, 2GB ram, 120gb hard drive, $1449.
I'll gladly pay $100 more for a nice high resolution screen and
thinkpad build quality.
The MacBook is in reality a lot more comparable to the x-series
(the x series having better build quality, in my experience).
Right sir, because processor, ram, screen size and resolution are pretty irrelevant when purchasing a computer.
Try the one with the Intel graphics chipset. Start here:
/.
http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/web/LenovoPortal/en_US/catalog.workflow:category.details?current-catalog-id=12F0696583E04D86B9B79B0FEC01C087¤t-category-id=2432D88590C944B79D33FDA517A5C756
Click the far left one. Select all the options I listed above.
I'll give you that I'm not able to run a 'hip' os and perhaps don't have all the truthinessy intangibles
that go with owning a Mac, but I saved a good $500+ and own a laptop from a company that doesn't seem to
have yearly recall issues.
Take it easy man, I really don't have any incentive to waste my time posting fabrications on
For me the thinkpad makes much more sense as the two things I value most in a laptop are display
and keyboard. I really can't stand the Mac keyboard, and as I'm not living in a cave I really
have little use for the backlit keyboard. I prefer to light my home.
That reminds me, I have in fact spilled two beverages into two different thinkpads. Didn't even need to replace the keyboard, just took it off, hung the laptop upside down for a day to dry and reassembled. Still works today (x21).
I owned an iBook for one year and the lcd went out. I brought a Thinkpad t43p
to West Africa for two years in an extremely dusty environment and it had absolutely
no problems whereas my colleague had to ship his Powerbook back to the states for
repairs.. TWICE.
Today I have, functioning perfectly, a Transnote, an X21 and a 600 series.
Sadly the T43p was stolen, which is why I was looking into a new laptop. I considered
Mac simply because I knew I was going to run Debian primarly, and would rather have
OS X as an option than XP / Vista.
Mac laptops only seem to make sense if you belong to the cult.