"It will have much longer range transmission than regular WiFi"
It will? Where does it say that?
In the Hardware specification. This may increase by a factor of 4 the area covered by a machine in the mesh over the typical commercial laptop. Of course it's hard to know until a working prototype is built, but current laptop antennas are far from as efficient as they could be with better design. You know, for someone who likes to mock people for being uninformed, you sure get a lot of facts wrong.
Uh, no, although Sudan's economy has been growing from its abysmal depths lately, it is nowhere near being a significant market for Microsoft's products. Maybe in 30 years, if the political instability were to go away. Nobody who cares only about profit cares about Sudan.
I think this is a case of charity envy from Gates. He's supposed to be the big technology and charity bigshot, and these guys are beating him on his own turf. Well, let's just hope it will push Gates to try harder.
I only meant the statement in a "root causes" sense. Naturally, starvation and disease are the main "bad" outcomes we want to eliminate. But saying they're a more serious problem than education is like having a gum infection and saying that the pain is a more serious problem than the bacteria that are causing it. Would you complain if your doctor gave you antibiotics rather than painkillers? Of course not. But that's what the critics of this project are doing. It's important to insist on the importance of education to avoid having the wrong priorities and focusing too much on symptoms.
When you go from "I have no computer" to "Hey, look at this cool TI-99/4a with a tape recorder!", you don't quite care how cool it _looks_.
Maybe it was cool to you, but most kids in your class thought it was lame. Notice also how no one is enthusiastic about MP3 devices other than the iPod.
Indeed, I ask you to _prove_ to me of a famine that happened in the past 30 years that was the result of _merely_ failing crops and not warlords fighting over resources. And we've had politicians in Africa _denying_ that sex transmits AIDS or that HIV causes it.
There are important other causes which should be addressed as well, but you can't deny that better information would be a great help on these issues. I don't get your resistance on this; you're being shown a good thing and all you do is look away and say: look! but solving this other problem would be even better!
A lot of good that does for someone outside the city limits.
You're uninformed about the specs of this laptop. It will have much longer range transmission than regular WiFi, and use other laptops as hops to the central station.
Charging someone $100 bucks for a computer in such a situation is almost an astronomical price compared to handing down a fully working desktop machine that would typically wind up in the rubbish here in the US.
No poor family's going to be charged 100$. The laptop is going to be distributed for free by governments and NGOs. It sounds like you're the one who's uninformed here.
To this day I get along just fine without a laptop. To say that the laptop form factor is an absolute must is silly. Besides, such a machine is going to be shared by more than one person. Laptops, and portable devices like them, are simply not rugged enough for the abuse.
A main goal of the project is to make a machine that children will actually want to use. Having a cool green laptop, rather than a beige monstrosity, makes a big difference. As for abuse, this thing is going to be much more rugged than most laptops sold here. It's going to have no moving parts and be completely sealed against dust/water when closed.
Plenty of people become educated and play just fine without computers. What people need are schools and well stocked libraries. FFS, calculators were banned for math until my senior year in HS.
Buying thousands of books for a "well stocked" library is much more expensive than some ultra-cheap laptops. Remember that many of these laptops will have Internet access through a wireless mesh network, giving vast amounts of free information.
If there is no electricity, the lack of a laptop is the least of their problems.
This is a fallacy. Lack of education is the most serious problem afflicting poor people. It's more serious than starvation and disease, because it's often the root cause of those problems. Poor people get AIDS because they are staggeringly uninformed about safe sex; many of them have no idea the disease is even sexually transmitted. They starve because they have no idea how to plant crops properly.
Well, the line between a great idea and a completely stupid one is pretty thin, so I'm inclined to forgive him. It just shows that he's the visionary type.
This is addressed in their FAQ. First, it seems working old laptops are not as available as desktops. Quote:
Why not a desktop computer, or--even better--a recycled desktop machine?
Desktops are cheaper, but mobility is important, especially with regard to taking the computer home at night. Kids in the developing world need the newest technology, especially really rugged hardware and innovative software. Recent work with schools in Maine has shown the huge value of using a laptop across all of one's studies, as well as for play. Bringing the laptop home engages the family. In one Cambodian village where we have been working, there is no electricity, thus the laptop is, among other things, the brightest light source in the home.
Finally, regarding recycled machines: if we estimate 100 million available used desktops, and each one requires only one hour of human attention to refurbish, reload, and handle, that is forty-five thousand work years. Thus, while we definitely encourage the recycling of used computers, it is not the solution for One Laptop per Child.
This post looks really fishy to me. The praise of JBoss and trashing of its competitors is just too extravagant. And I've never seen an Anonymous Coward sign their post with "-AC" before, and it indicates that the writer is self-conscious of his anonymity instead of just not bothering to create an account (and if the claims made are true, why bother posting anonymously?). Considering the allegations of astroturfing around JBoss, I'm almost certain the parent is a shill.
There are plenty of Filipino workers who would jump at the chance to work in an industrialized country like South Korea to do menial jobs at low wages, but the insular mentality of that country is such that they would be more comfortable integrating robots than foreigners into their society. Currently 99.8% of the population of South Korea is ethnic Korean, immigration laws are extremely restrictive, and there's huge political pressure to keep this.
Koreans know that as their population ages and moves increasingly to high-tech knowledge work, there will be a huge economic need for more unskilled laborers. But they can't accept the most reasonable solution so they go for this pie-in-the-sky scheme.
I do not see how seeing pornography is a problem at all for our youth.
Are you serious? Virtually all pornography I've seen on the web is heavily misogynistic and presents sex as a joyless, dirty activity. Women are described as "whores" and "cumholes" in the captions. Sex scenes have a heavy whiff of acting and feel vaguely abusive and undignified. Is this really the view of sexuality you want to communicate to children?
I would have no problem with kids encountering erotic imagery, that presents sex in a loving, human manner. But in practice that's just not what's out there in 95% of cases. When I have kids, I'm going to shield them from pornography, and explain to them in case they do encounter it that it's a grossly distorted view of sexuality.
Nah, this study was heavily biased in favor of making it easy to discover the phishing attacks (as the authors freely admit). The participants were warned in advance that many of the pages would be fake, and they were also self-selected (so more likely to be savvy about phishing). In a real-life scenario the results would be even more of a disaster.
Okay, it's easy to assume too much about someone's position from a single post.
Globalism means counting on everyone else to be slave to the financial implications of doing bad things... sometimes that just isn't true.
I do agree with this sentiment in theory, but I don't see that it applies at the moment. Why wouldn't most countries go ahead and do what's in their economic interest? There are serious downsides to protectionism (aside from the obvious economic harm, trade bickering can lead to increased tensions which might lead to precisely the military conflicts you are concerned about) and a reasonable decision must be made by weighing the alternatives based on how damaging and how likely they are to happen. Being paranoid and producing everything domestically "just in case" isn't a good solution.
He was fooled by a website identical in all respects except a visual URL spoof (www.bankofthevvest.com instead of www.bankofthewest.com). It is not trivial to create an identical copy of a site including URL, certificates etc; in fact, it is impossible. A careful enough investigation would have exposed it.
That said, you're right that it's never a good idea to click on a link in an unsolicited email, and that is certainly the best approach for nonexperts (and experts, really).
Your argument would have value if there was a possibility that China might suddenly go ballistic tomorrow and start nuking everybody (Taiwan and Singapore become "smoking craters"? What?), but that isn't on the cards. I might be made to support more protectionist military production if tensions with China gradually increased to the point where large-scale war seemed like a possibility, but this just isn't the case right now. By "very rapid" change of production, I don't mean overnight, I mean in the space of months. While I indeed know little about industrial engineering (this is "impressive" to you? what, you expect anyone outside of industrial engineers to spend their days reading about this stuff?), you seem to know little about international diplomacy.
Our steel industry is completely decimated now. We barely make any heavy machinery in the United States. God forbid we actually ever get into a real war against the countries we've outsourced these things to.
Ah yes, the classic protectionist defense argument. How can you make this claim when, whatever difficulties U.S. ground troops may have, U.S. naval and air domination is absolutely overwhelming? According to this, the U.S. navy is the world's largest navy with a tonnage greater than 17 of the next largest world navies combined! Shipping lanes are thus guaranteed to remain open in the event of a war, and there will certainly remain enough allies to provide the necessary production.
This argument also underestimates the capability of countries to very rapidly switch their focus of production in the event of a war, which has been seen several times in history.
No. If you drastically reduce dependencies, you also have to reduce integration and efficiency. That means a much less smooth experience for the user. Playstation emulators follow a model similar to what you're suggesting (separate plugins for input, sound and video) and everbody hates them.
I think they're afraid of attacks like DNS poisoning. It's a good idea to ask for confirmation even when getting software from a site that should be legit.
I'm not sure why anyone expects Lucas to worship the original canon. I mean, he made it. There's no reason why he should respect it if he believes he can do better now. (He can't, but that's not my point.)
Being force-fed propaganda isn't a game, and isn't fun. Being preached at isn't fun.
Right. I actually think the Master of Orion games are the best "political" games yet made. There's real political content in them --- they can be seen as a lesson in realist foreign policy --- but they don't shove it in your face and they're fun to play. Their "galactic future" setting allows them to stay metaphorical and avoid propagandizing about today's politics.
if you're going to emulate unix anyway you may as well just use unix.
Er, what? That makes no sense. Windows has certain development tools --- for example the Visual Studio C++ debugger beats the pants off GDB --- that are impossible to run on Unix. Meanwhile most every useful Unix tool has been ported to Windows. Windows wins.
If they were comfortable, had a built-in boom mic, and were USB based, then they might be worth $99.
Yeah, my headset exactly fits that description, the Steel Sound 5H. It was also full of idiotic marketing about being "designed for gamers" (personally I use my mic for voice recognition and VoIP, but even if I played online games it still wouldn't matter). But it fit my needs so I bought it.
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It will? Where does it say that?
In the Hardware specification. This may increase by a factor of 4 the area covered by a machine in the mesh over the typical commercial laptop. Of course it's hard to know until a working prototype is built, but current laptop antennas are far from as efficient as they could be with better design. You know, for someone who likes to mock people for being uninformed, you sure get a lot of facts wrong.
I think this is a case of charity envy from Gates. He's supposed to be the big technology and charity bigshot, and these guys are beating him on his own turf. Well, let's just hope it will push Gates to try harder.
Yeah, that's a good point. We can only hope there will be adequate auditing to try to avoid this sort of thing.
I only meant the statement in a "root causes" sense. Naturally, starvation and disease are the main "bad" outcomes we want to eliminate. But saying they're a more serious problem than education is like having a gum infection and saying that the pain is a more serious problem than the bacteria that are causing it. Would you complain if your doctor gave you antibiotics rather than painkillers? Of course not. But that's what the critics of this project are doing. It's important to insist on the importance of education to avoid having the wrong priorities and focusing too much on symptoms.
Maybe it was cool to you, but most kids in your class thought it was lame. Notice also how no one is enthusiastic about MP3 devices other than the iPod.
Indeed, I ask you to _prove_ to me of a famine that happened in the past 30 years that was the result of _merely_ failing crops and not warlords fighting over resources. And we've had politicians in Africa _denying_ that sex transmits AIDS or that HIV causes it.
There are important other causes which should be addressed as well, but you can't deny that better information would be a great help on these issues. I don't get your resistance on this; you're being shown a good thing and all you do is look away and say: look! but solving this other problem would be even better!
A lot of good that does for someone outside the city limits. You're uninformed about the specs of this laptop. It will have much longer range transmission than regular WiFi, and use other laptops as hops to the central station.
Charging someone $100 bucks for a computer in such a situation is almost an astronomical price compared to handing down a fully working desktop machine that would typically wind up in the rubbish here in the US.
No poor family's going to be charged 100$. The laptop is going to be distributed for free by governments and NGOs. It sounds like you're the one who's uninformed here.
A main goal of the project is to make a machine that children will actually want to use. Having a cool green laptop, rather than a beige monstrosity, makes a big difference. As for abuse, this thing is going to be much more rugged than most laptops sold here. It's going to have no moving parts and be completely sealed against dust/water when closed.
Plenty of people become educated and play just fine without computers. What people need are schools and well stocked libraries. FFS, calculators were banned for math until my senior year in HS.
Buying thousands of books for a "well stocked" library is much more expensive than some ultra-cheap laptops. Remember that many of these laptops will have Internet access through a wireless mesh network, giving vast amounts of free information.
If there is no electricity, the lack of a laptop is the least of their problems.
This is a fallacy. Lack of education is the most serious problem afflicting poor people. It's more serious than starvation and disease, because it's often the root cause of those problems. Poor people get AIDS because they are staggeringly uninformed about safe sex; many of them have no idea the disease is even sexually transmitted. They starve because they have no idea how to plant crops properly.
Well, the line between a great idea and a completely stupid one is pretty thin, so I'm inclined to forgive him. It just shows that he's the visionary type.
Why not a desktop computer, or--even better--a recycled desktop machine?
Desktops are cheaper, but mobility is important, especially with regard to taking the computer home at night. Kids in the developing world need the newest technology, especially really rugged hardware and innovative software. Recent work with schools in Maine has shown the huge value of using a laptop across all of one's studies, as well as for play. Bringing the laptop home engages the family. In one Cambodian village where we have been working, there is no electricity, thus the laptop is, among other things, the brightest light source in the home.
Finally, regarding recycled machines: if we estimate 100 million available used desktops, and each one requires only one hour of human attention to refurbish, reload, and handle, that is forty-five thousand work years. Thus, while we definitely encourage the recycling of used computers, it is not the solution for One Laptop per Child.
This post looks really fishy to me. The praise of JBoss and trashing of its competitors is just too extravagant. And I've never seen an Anonymous Coward sign their post with "-AC" before, and it indicates that the writer is self-conscious of his anonymity instead of just not bothering to create an account (and if the claims made are true, why bother posting anonymously?). Considering the allegations of astroturfing around JBoss, I'm almost certain the parent is a shill.
Koreans know that as their population ages and moves increasingly to high-tech knowledge work, there will be a huge economic need for more unskilled laborers. But they can't accept the most reasonable solution so they go for this pie-in-the-sky scheme.
Are you serious? Virtually all pornography I've seen on the web is heavily misogynistic and presents sex as a joyless, dirty activity. Women are described as "whores" and "cumholes" in the captions. Sex scenes have a heavy whiff of acting and feel vaguely abusive and undignified. Is this really the view of sexuality you want to communicate to children?
I would have no problem with kids encountering erotic imagery, that presents sex in a loving, human manner. But in practice that's just not what's out there in 95% of cases. When I have kids, I'm going to shield them from pornography, and explain to them in case they do encounter it that it's a grossly distorted view of sexuality.
You kept that username all this time just to make that post, didn't you?
Is that a joke? If not, source please?
Nah, this study was heavily biased in favor of making it easy to discover the phishing attacks (as the authors freely admit). The participants were warned in advance that many of the pages would be fake, and they were also self-selected (so more likely to be savvy about phishing). In a real-life scenario the results would be even more of a disaster.
Globalism means counting on everyone else to be slave to the financial implications of doing bad things... sometimes that just isn't true.
I do agree with this sentiment in theory, but I don't see that it applies at the moment. Why wouldn't most countries go ahead and do what's in their economic interest? There are serious downsides to protectionism (aside from the obvious economic harm, trade bickering can lead to increased tensions which might lead to precisely the military conflicts you are concerned about) and a reasonable decision must be made by weighing the alternatives based on how damaging and how likely they are to happen. Being paranoid and producing everything domestically "just in case" isn't a good solution.
That said, you're right that it's never a good idea to click on a link in an unsolicited email, and that is certainly the best approach for nonexperts (and experts, really).
Your argument would have value if there was a possibility that China might suddenly go ballistic tomorrow and start nuking everybody (Taiwan and Singapore become "smoking craters"? What?), but that isn't on the cards. I might be made to support more protectionist military production if tensions with China gradually increased to the point where large-scale war seemed like a possibility, but this just isn't the case right now. By "very rapid" change of production, I don't mean overnight, I mean in the space of months. While I indeed know little about industrial engineering (this is "impressive" to you? what, you expect anyone outside of industrial engineers to spend their days reading about this stuff?), you seem to know little about international diplomacy.
Ah yes, the classic protectionist defense argument. How can you make this claim when, whatever difficulties U.S. ground troops may have, U.S. naval and air domination is absolutely overwhelming? According to this, the U.S. navy is the world's largest navy with a tonnage greater than 17 of the next largest world navies combined! Shipping lanes are thus guaranteed to remain open in the event of a war, and there will certainly remain enough allies to provide the necessary production.
This argument also underestimates the capability of countries to very rapidly switch their focus of production in the event of a war, which has been seen several times in history.
Exactly. That's an annoyingly common cliche that anyone who actually thought about what they read wouldn't fall into.
The reason why reading novels should be encouraged is because it improves literacy. Everyone has an imagination and it doesn't need to be learned.
No. If you drastically reduce dependencies, you also have to reduce integration and efficiency. That means a much less smooth experience for the user. Playstation emulators follow a model similar to what you're suggesting (separate plugins for input, sound and video) and everbody hates them.
I think they're afraid of attacks like DNS poisoning. It's a good idea to ask for confirmation even when getting software from a site that should be legit.
I'm not sure why anyone expects Lucas to worship the original canon. I mean, he made it. There's no reason why he should respect it if he believes he can do better now. (He can't, but that's not my point.)
Right. I actually think the Master of Orion games are the best "political" games yet made. There's real political content in them --- they can be seen as a lesson in realist foreign policy --- but they don't shove it in your face and they're fun to play. Their "galactic future" setting allows them to stay metaphorical and avoid propagandizing about today's politics.
Er, what? That makes no sense. Windows has certain development tools --- for example the Visual Studio C++ debugger beats the pants off GDB --- that are impossible to run on Unix. Meanwhile most every useful Unix tool has been ported to Windows. Windows wins.
Yeah, my headset exactly fits that description, the Steel Sound 5H. It was also full of idiotic marketing about being "designed for gamers" (personally I use my mic for voice recognition and VoIP, but even if I played online games it still wouldn't matter). But it fit my needs so I bought it.