It is a scam, they are using it as a ploy to sell laptops. It shouldn't even be called OLPC One Laptop Per Child, it should be called TLBOOGTCWWRHFOSI, Two Laptops But Only One Goes To Child Who Would Rather Have Food Or Shelter Instead.
The fact that Psion themselves didn't register the netbook.com domain name and instead Intel did years later, suggests Psion itself didn't take the term netbook seriously until others gave it value.
A PC user has to buy new hardware to switch to Apple.
True. But as the owner of a thinkpad I am able to run OS X without switching hardware.
Re:"Wasn't So Long Ago?!"
on
Jurassic Web
·
· Score: 1
I would argue that it is the content that has driven up usage. Back then you could get on University websites to read about about classes and sporting events, today you can send it your entire application online, buy event tickets and register of classes. Back then you did not have as rich a search experience to find content. Back then you did not have streaming media like you do today. You had static pages and sites where some idiot thought animated gifs were cool. Today you have flash players, blogs (I wish I could think of a good example), etc. One thing I miss is newsgroups, they just aren't what they used to be and one thing I don't get is facebook or myspace.
I think some/.ers miss the point when they suggest this is about selling MS software. This is not about increasing MS revenue by selling more software, this is about increasing MS revenue by selling courses and certifications.
I am so pissed with MS lately, after Bill left they switched over from "certifying qualified people to support their products" to "selling certifications". Red Hat and Cisco certs are the way to go, they do a better job of testing real world experience, Red Hat being the best.
For the record I have the following certs, MCP, MCTS, MCITP: Enterprise Adminstrator, MCSA, MCSA: Messaging, MCSE, MCSE: Messaging.
If I was advocating the big 3, I would have said US auto makers, I intentionally said "cars made in America".
How about a series to help lawyers understand
on
You Are Not a Lawyer
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I will try to disabuse computer scientists and other technically minded people of some commonly held misconceptions about the law (and the legal system).
What about writing a series to explain to lawyers they are not technical. How many times do lawyers misunderstand technology? Furthermore, I would argue it is the fault of lawyers that common folks cannot represent or understand the legal system. Doesn't it make sense to write laws the majority of common people can understand? A better use of time would be a series for lawyers that explains why the importance of spending the time and energy to draft clean and clear laws.
This bill is terrible. Here are a few truly bipartisan ways to stimulate the economy that aren't being discussed:
Energy independence Stimulus Package. Tax rebates for people who buy cars made in America, doubt rebate if the car is a hybrid. Add in money/projects to build wind and solar energy farms and that will make Democrats happy. Remove the offshor drilling band and you could easily create 3 million jobs and keep more money in county, making Republicans happy. If you toss in a few projects to build nuclear plants, which I think is the best and greenest energy model, then many common sense people will be happy.
Education Stimulus Package" Student tuition vouchers, this will make Democrats happy and people in college/trade school happy. Vouchers for private and home schools will make Republicans happy.
Tax Cut Stimulus Package (also delivering on campaign promise): Obama promised 95% of the people tax cuts, many people I know who voted for him for that reason wonder why he is not making the bush tax cuts permanent (which merely prevents their taxes from going up in 2010) and isn't pushing for the additional promised tax cut. This would help strengthen consumer confidence both in the short and long term because they know whatever they make, they will be keeping more, if they pay down debt that is good, if they save that helps banks with capital shortages and if they spend that helps companies who are having a hard time right now, plus it lets people decided what to do themselves.
Reduce Government Waste: The above items will not cost as much and get money into the economy faster, cut wasteful proects so that the federal government borrows/prints less money.
Obama proved one thing so far, he is not a leader. If he was he would have given specifics of what he wanted, cut a deal with the GOP to given them a fair representative amount of stimulus input and probably already had a bill on his desk. Instead he just said he wanted a stimulus bill and the result is that Congress is giving him a pork bill that doesn't spend money now, but waits until just before their election campaigns.
OOo sucks compared to MS Office. But for you let me also say OOo sucks compared to Google Docs. OOo also sucks compared to WordPerfect if it is still around, or even if it isn't around anymore come to think of it.
OOo sucks. ODF sucks. I say just use MS Office or Google Docs. Wine allows me to run MS Office on Linux, I can already run it on OS X and Windows. Problem solved, just require files saved as 2003.doc or.xls formats.
Why would you push going to OSS for the sake of going to OSS? Why not instead push to change the University policy to "Let's use the best software out there period." If you take this approach, you can quickly get FireFox in the door on pretty much every machine, regardless of OS. If you keep it up, you could bring in various OSS applications, provided they are the best solution. Perhaps you convert to an Apache web server from your Windows IIS web servers, but you keep Exchange for e-mail given your University's needs. Maybe on the other hand you keep your IIS web servers because you have a lot of ASP.NET 3.5 apps on it, but you switch to sendmail to save licensing costs and nobody uses the Exchange scheduling features. Point is if you build your reputation as they guy who suggests the best solution rather then that guy who walks around cursing everything Microsoft regardless of what it is or does, then you will add value to your University. If you on the other hand push OSS just because; well, then you will lose credibility and actually hurt the good OSS projects. For example, I love Firefox, Tomcat, Apache, RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, etc. But I hate OpenOffice.org because it is crappy compared to MS Office and ubuntu, because it doesn't give back to kernel.org like Red Hat or Novell do. I like sendmail when money is an issue, but if scheduling is important, I suggest Exchange. Don't get your panties in a bunch blindly supporting products because you are brainwashed, that is what Apple whores do (Note this post sent from Apple). If you recommend the best programs, then you, the University and those programs will be better off in the long run.
Fine. Everyone should stop working on your favorite distro now, and work on my favorite distro instead, okay? That'll get us "a little less fragmentation".
DragonWriter asked me to remind all you/.ers out there that his favorite disto is Fedora, but he realizes it might be to much to force everyone to come over to this bleeding edge distro full of awesomeness and built by people who actually give back to the OSS community unlike those pussies from the early days of ubuntu that were all for show.
So he came up with a compromise we can all agree on, I mean this is/. I cannot think of a discussion or debate where in the end, everyone was not on the same side, that being the poll options were incomplete. Am I right? So lets just all agree to toss out DEB based distos, like ubuntu (aka brown poop linux), Debian (aka respected but slow development times) and Linspire (aka a joke) and switch to the RPM distro of another's choice so long as it is Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, or SuSE.
In related news distrowatch.com is changing it's name to rpmbaseddistroswonsuckonthat.com
OK, I was just joking, DragonWriter did not say that... he e-mailed it, but, seriously here is the best way to solve the fragmentation problem, we get all the distros together, stick them on some remote island, break them into two camps, make them compete against each other, and then vote the loser off the island each release until it gets down to the last two, where we have the distros who were voted off come back to determine who the winner is.
I couldn't agree with you more so long as that apt-get were replaced with a yum. My point is that Linus is right, but I am willing to concede that you are correct, as long as I get to pick the base distro we build from.
I believe that the cost of fighting global warmer is worse then global warming.
I have asthma and the medicine that was both cheap and worked the best is no longer available. Why? Not because of health concerns to people, but because each puff released a tiny bit of green house gas. The replacement medicine doesn't work as well and costs more. So here is a case where because of global warming counter measures, poorer people have to pay more for medicines now and quite possibly could die if it fails to stop an attack.
The assault on personal freedoms under a convenient lie of helping the greater good is unjustifiable as far as I am concerned. If you think global warming is real, then you are certainly free to take personal action to stop it, plant a tree, fart less, ride your bike.
But the fact that you are using it to demand what car I drive and what medicines I can use crosses the line. I am not a collectivist thinker, I would never dictate how you should live your life, you want to pay more and drive a hybrid, great. You want to us public transportation, great. I don't like those things.
Now that said I pay for green energy (ordered it 5 years ago with locked in rate), I only got it because it is locked in rate and never goes up, saving me money. I also use energy efficient bulbs but that is only because I want to save money and has nothing to do with global warming.
Why don't you global warming believers show some respect for individual liberties and if you want us to help out then you can focus on building or inventing things that help the environment, but we will prefer to use because it adds value to our lives or saves us money.
Instead you dill holes are all about passing laws that reduce our quality of life and choice. And get upset whenever I ask the question "Well what is the correct average temperate for where I live?", which shouldn't be hard to answer, because if you cannot answer it how can you determine how far/bad global warming is or will be. Seriously what should the correct temperature be for Austin, TX today? I googled it and read that 60 degrees is the average temp for January; it is presently 41. Do you idiots have any idea how stupid you look and how dumb you are?
but I think it's a bit premature to say that our computer models are so good that they can definitively say what global conditions will be like in 1,000 years.
And especially considering that the current computer models failed to explain the cooler temperatures over the last 8 years. The only thing we can say about any computer model of the Earth's ecosystem with certainty is that the it will always fail to take all variables into account.
It's an easy thing to fix - require that H1B visa holders receive the same pay and benefits for their work as the rest of the workforce. If companies really have problems finding citizens to fill jobs, and aren't just trolling for lower paid wage slaves, then it ought not to be a problem, right?
Often times H1B workers make the same or more. If you really want to fix the problem, then American students need to focus more on degrees in science, math and engineering rather then say "art history".
And if they really wanted to get America out of debt, they'd
... get people in society to stop spending more then they make, start paying off their current debts and eventually start saving money. It is very simple to do, but to radical to ever happen. Instead of taxing income, the government should only tax consumption, i.e. toss out the income tax and replace it with a sales tax. If you don't want to pay so much in taxes? Use your money to pay down your student loans instead of spending money on a new game console. It would be a very productive change for several reasons. Mainly it doesn't target people for earning more, it targets people who consume more. Over time, people will catch on and people will pay off existing credit card debt or put money into savings/investments rather then buying unneeded stuff. Problem is that all the bean counter accounts, lawyers and IRS agents who would be put out of work will fight it, so such a common sense tax structure that promotes person savings, lower personal debt, even the environmental benefits that would result by lowering excess consumption will never happen anytime soon. Simply put it is "TO MUCH CHANGE".
"When a medicine taken by a patient costs $100 per month, and costs $5 in Cuba"
What about the medicines/treatments that cost a lot each month in the US, but are not offered in other parts of the world? I know a Canadian couple who come to the US to get medical treatment when the woman got breast cancer, but they are very wealthy, I suspect common Canadian with cancer is stuck with state treatment or waiting for treatment.
1). If they will completely rewrite their kernel as much as they rewrite their Constitution. 2). If they will simply steal ideas from the West, change them a bit and call them their own. 3). If all kernels are created equal. 4). If they will follow the GNU and open source and provide their changes to the OSS community.
Slashdot Mirror
It is a scam, they are using it as a ploy to sell laptops. It shouldn't even be called OLPC One Laptop Per Child, it should be called TLBOOGTCWWRHFOSI, Two Laptops But Only One Goes To Child Who Would Rather Have Food Or Shelter Instead.
The fact that Psion themselves didn't register the netbook.com domain name and instead Intel did years later, suggests Psion itself didn't take the term netbook seriously until others gave it value.
A PC user has to buy new hardware to switch to Apple.
True. But as the owner of a thinkpad I am able to run OS X without switching hardware.
I would argue that it is the content that has driven up usage. Back then you could get on University websites to read about about classes and sporting events, today you can send it your entire application online, buy event tickets and register of classes. Back then you did not have as rich a search experience to find content. Back then you did not have streaming media like you do today. You had static pages and sites where some idiot thought animated gifs were cool. Today you have flash players, blogs (I wish I could think of a good example), etc. One thing I miss is newsgroups, they just aren't what they used to be and one thing I don't get is facebook or myspace.
I think some /.ers miss the point when they suggest this is about selling MS software. This is not about increasing MS revenue by selling more software, this is about increasing MS revenue by selling courses and certifications.
I am so pissed with MS lately, after Bill left they switched over from "certifying qualified people to support their products" to "selling certifications". Red Hat and Cisco certs are the way to go, they do a better job of testing real world experience, Red Hat being the best.
For the record I have the following certs, MCP, MCTS, MCITP: Enterprise Adminstrator, MCSA, MCSA: Messaging, MCSE, MCSE: Messaging.
Yeh, I have a lot of friends who believed by "change" Obama intended to:
/SpecialInterests /newUS
./configure
/SpecialInterests /opt/agenda2009
/home/whitehouse/cabinet/
/home/whitehouse/cabinet/
su - President
del
cd
make
make install
Unfortunately for them, by "change" he meant:
su - President
mv
and they never expected to see
cp lobbyists
or
cp taxcheats
Intel is basically putting a $7 billion bet on a turnaround in the economy for 2010."
What a terrible bet.
If I was advocating the big 3, I would have said US auto makers, I intentionally said "cars made in America".
I will try to disabuse computer scientists and other technically minded people of some commonly held misconceptions about the law (and the legal system).
What about writing a series to explain to lawyers they are not technical. How many times do lawyers misunderstand technology? Furthermore, I would argue it is the fault of lawyers that common folks cannot represent or understand the legal system. Doesn't it make sense to write laws the majority of common people can understand? A better use of time would be a series for lawyers that explains why the importance of spending the time and energy to draft clean and clear laws.
How so? BMW makes cars in SC, Toyota in TX, Honda in OH, etc.
Obama proved one thing so far, he is not a leader. If he was he would have given specifics of what he wanted, cut a deal with the GOP to given them a fair representative amount of stimulus input and probably already had a bill on his desk. Instead he just said he wanted a stimulus bill and the result is that Congress is giving him a pork bill that doesn't spend money now, but waits until just before their election campaigns.
OOo sucks compared to MS Office. But for you let me also say OOo sucks compared to Google Docs. OOo also sucks compared to WordPerfect if it is still around, or even if it isn't around anymore come to think of it.
OOo sucks. ODF sucks. I say just use MS Office or Google Docs. Wine allows me to run MS Office on Linux, I can already run it on OS X and Windows. Problem solved, just require files saved as 2003 .doc or .xls formats.
Why would you push going to OSS for the sake of going to OSS? Why not instead push to change the University policy to "Let's use the best software out there period." If you take this approach, you can quickly get FireFox in the door on pretty much every machine, regardless of OS. If you keep it up, you could bring in various OSS applications, provided they are the best solution. Perhaps you convert to an Apache web server from your Windows IIS web servers, but you keep Exchange for e-mail given your University's needs. Maybe on the other hand you keep your IIS web servers because you have a lot of ASP.NET 3.5 apps on it, but you switch to sendmail to save licensing costs and nobody uses the Exchange scheduling features. Point is if you build your reputation as they guy who suggests the best solution rather then that guy who walks around cursing everything Microsoft regardless of what it is or does, then you will add value to your University. If you on the other hand push OSS just because; well, then you will lose credibility and actually hurt the good OSS projects. For example, I love Firefox, Tomcat, Apache, RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, etc. But I hate OpenOffice.org because it is crappy compared to MS Office and ubuntu, because it doesn't give back to kernel.org like Red Hat or Novell do. I like sendmail when money is an issue, but if scheduling is important, I suggest Exchange. Don't get your panties in a bunch blindly supporting products because you are brainwashed, that is what Apple whores do (Note this post sent from Apple). If you recommend the best programs, then you, the University and those programs will be better off in the long run.
But how about a little less fragmentation?
Fine. Everyone should stop working on your favorite distro now, and work on my favorite distro instead, okay? That'll get us "a little less fragmentation".
DragonWriter asked me to remind all you /.ers out there that his favorite disto is Fedora, but he realizes it might be to much to force everyone to come over to this bleeding edge distro full of awesomeness and built by people who actually give back to the OSS community unlike those pussies from the early days of ubuntu that were all for show.
/. I cannot think of a discussion or debate where in the end, everyone was not on the same side, that being the poll options were incomplete. Am I right? So lets just all agree to toss out DEB based distos, like ubuntu (aka brown poop linux), Debian (aka respected but slow development times) and Linspire (aka a joke) and switch to the RPM distro of another's choice so long as it is Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, or SuSE.
... he e-mailed it, but, seriously here is the best way to solve the fragmentation problem, we get all the distros together, stick them on some remote island, break them into two camps, make them compete against each other, and then vote the loser off the island each release until it gets down to the last two, where we have the distros who were voted off come back to determine who the winner is.
So he came up with a compromise we can all agree on, I mean this is
In related news distrowatch.com is changing it's name to rpmbaseddistroswonsuckonthat.com
OK, I was just joking, DragonWriter did not say that
I couldn't agree with you more so long as that apt-get were replaced with a yum. My point is that Linus is right, but I am willing to concede that you are correct, as long as I get to pick the base distro we build from.
Since Rachel should in not age, I think it would be interesting if they used a CGI version based on the original actress.
I believe that the cost of fighting global warmer is worse then global warming.
I have asthma and the medicine that was both cheap and worked the best is no longer available. Why? Not because of health concerns to people, but because each puff released a tiny bit of green house gas. The replacement medicine doesn't work as well and costs more. So here is a case where because of global warming counter measures, poorer people have to pay more for medicines now and quite possibly could die if it fails to stop an attack.
The assault on personal freedoms under a convenient lie of helping the greater good is unjustifiable as far as I am concerned. If you think global warming is real, then you are certainly free to take personal action to stop it, plant a tree, fart less, ride your bike.
But the fact that you are using it to demand what car I drive and what medicines I can use crosses the line. I am not a collectivist thinker, I would never dictate how you should live your life, you want to pay more and drive a hybrid, great. You want to us public transportation, great. I don't like those things.
Now that said I pay for green energy (ordered it 5 years ago with locked in rate), I only got it because it is locked in rate and never goes up, saving me money. I also use energy efficient bulbs but that is only because I want to save money and has nothing to do with global warming.
Why don't you global warming believers show some respect for individual liberties and if you want us to help out then you can focus on building or inventing things that help the environment, but we will prefer to use because it adds value to our lives or saves us money.
Instead you dill holes are all about passing laws that reduce our quality of life and choice. And get upset whenever I ask the question "Well what is the correct average temperate for where I live?", which shouldn't be hard to answer, because if you cannot answer it how can you determine how far/bad global warming is or will be. Seriously what should the correct temperature be for Austin, TX today? I googled it and read that 60 degrees is the average temp for January; it is presently 41. Do you idiots have any idea how stupid you look and how dumb you are?
but I think it's a bit premature to say that our computer models are so good that they can definitively say what global conditions will be like in 1,000 years.
And especially considering that the current computer models failed to explain the cooler temperatures over the last 8 years. The only thing we can say about any computer model of the Earth's ecosystem with certainty is that the it will always fail to take all variables into account.
It's an easy thing to fix - require that H1B visa holders receive the same pay and benefits for their work as the rest of the workforce. If companies really have problems finding citizens to fill jobs, and aren't just trolling for lower paid wage slaves, then it ought not to be a problem, right?
Often times H1B workers make the same or more. If you really want to fix the problem, then American students need to focus more on degrees in science, math and engineering rather then say "art history".
What if it was used and then the device discarded. Then it gets picked up by uninvolved 3rd party and sold to second hand store.
If it never worked as an MP3 player, it is more likely that the data was placed there from a spy. I mean think about it Sherlock.
And if they really wanted to get America out of debt, they'd
"When a medicine taken by a patient costs $100 per month, and costs $5 in Cuba"
What about the medicines/treatments that cost a lot each month in the US, but are not offered in other parts of the world? I know a Canadian couple who come to the US to get medical treatment when the woman got breast cancer, but they are very wealthy, I suspect common Canadian with cancer is stuck with state treatment or waiting for treatment.
1). If they will completely rewrite their kernel as much as they rewrite their Constitution.
2). If they will simply steal ideas from the West, change them a bit and call them their own.
3). If all kernels are created equal.
4). If they will follow the GNU and open source and provide their changes to the OSS community.