Read up on the Gujarat violence. BJP used the same argument that the Nazi's used ("spontaneous reaction" to the atrocities committed by the Zionists) to target muslims.
Also read up on the recent violence in Orissa. If you still have the time read up on BJP's good friends - the Bajrang Dal, VHP, the Hindu Munani, Shiv Sena, RSS etc..
Every single time they attack the minorities they use the same lame excuses to justify the attack - they are only "reacting" to the attacks from the minorities..
Some Indians commenting here are unfortunately the backward navel-gazing types, who will never understand the basis for economic growth and alleviation of poverty. They still think in the most primitive backward terms about how to bring development, prosperity and relief to the masses. The lost opportunities and economic stagnation of the past 50 years under the social welfare state show how such narrow mindsets can wreak havoc on a country. The answer lies in Indians showing each other and the world how to be achievers, instead of just beggars forever clamouring with their palms outstretched.
Ha! the wonderful belief that free market capitalism will solve all the worlds problems and mitigate poverty!
Do you really think that private corporations with no compulsions other than "shareholder value" will consider the good of the poor?
Just take a deep breath and look around you. Free market capitalism has failed spectacularly and the market is gone crying back to the governments to bail them out.
In the last couple of weeks, the US government and the Fed has purchased stake in pretty much all the major banks. The EU is doing the same for the European banks. The Indian government is brazing itself to save the "Public Sector" banks.
GM and other auto majors have already asked for their bailout. The telecom companies will follow suit.
What do you term this other than socialism? where do you think the money is going when people withdraw funds from the private banks? All the money is headed in the direction of government bonds or are being placed in accounts with nationalised banks.
Let me know if there is something that I missed in all this then perhaps I will drink that old "free market" capitalism koolaid again.
BJP is a fascist party with deep seated animosity towards anyone who is not an hindu. During the BJP regime, they and their supporting parties unleashed some of the worst atrocities against minorities in India.
To state that they have somehow instilled pride in the Indians is like saying that the Nazi party instilled pride in the Germans. That is to say that we (Indians) don't need that kind of pride. Thank you very much.
Also your claim that the moon shot will address poverty comes from the same school of thought that believes in the discredited "trickle down" theory of development which essentially says that if you continue to pamper the rich that the money will somehow magically reach the poor.
We know how well that has turned out. The wage disparity between the rich and the poor has never been more stark. The poor are poorer (google farmer suicides in India) and the rich are richer (google new Indian billionaires).
I am fully in support of the Indian space programme and the wonderful work that ISRO is doing, but let us not kid ourselves - the moon mission has nothing whatsoever to do with mitigating poverty.
Having written a HTML Viewer from scratch for an embedded project, I can attest to the truth of the parent comment. Gecko is a mess. It is very difficult to embed gecko while webkit is much simpler to embed.
If you want to find out how complex it is to embed gecko, take a look at the mozillaembed projects and try and embed it. It takes too much time and effort.
Store the negatives of the photographs. There are ways of generating negatives even for pictures taken using a digital camera. You can also consider microfilm.
These are easy to store as well. It just needs to be stored in a very dry box.
Like the GGP has pointed out, a EV car has far fewer parts than an ICE car. Just from that standpoint, maintenance is bound to be cheaper for an EV than for an ICE.
The BIG problem for EV is that the batteries will need to be replaced every few years. But this situation will change as better batteries become available, and perhaps batteries will themselves be replaced by hydrogen fuel cells or ethanol fuel cells later.
most TV stations rudely interrupt the show I'm trying to watch to throw loud, unwanted ads in my face.
Yes, Ads inserted during a show are very irritating, but at the end of the day it is just something that inconveniences the viewer - it does not cause any more damage than that.
Google doesn't do that. Instead, the give me Google Earth.
None of the Google tools are made available to you because Google wants to be unilaterally helpful to you. Remember that Google is a commercial enterprise which puts its shareholder's interests first.
Google's tools ensure that they have millions who give Google details about themselves. Google uses this information to generate revenue and a lot of it.
Google has just launched a service for storing medical records online. If you think that is just so that they can help you, think again.
I repeat - no TV station is nearly as dangerous as Google.
The result is that electric cars are much less likely to fail mechanically.
This is one of the reasons why the mainstream car manufacturers won't want to support EVs.
1. They make a ton of money selling parts. If EVs become popular, this revenue will dry up considerably. Also take into consideration the fact that vibration and heat contribute considerably to wear and tear on the parts. EVs have much less vibration and heat in the engine compartment which means that the parts will last longer. The car companies are pretending that EVs are complex machines by spouting all kinds of statistics about the "complex" power storage techniques, battery technology etc. So they price the cars very high stating that the batteries are very expensive.
But this is not really a big problem to solve. The batteries can be easily switched over when the owner of the car has the money to afford cheaper/lighter/more efficient batteries sometime in the future.
2. The service and support infrastructure (mechanics, service stations) will all lose money if EVs become popular. Even an oil change becomes unnecessary. Car companies have invested a lot of money in setting up their cars so that they can only be serviced by "authorized" service personnel who have the equipment which can interface with the car's proprietary control interface. All this becomes redundant if EVs become popular.
3. Automobile companies pride themselves on their engines which are difficult to replicate exactly and reuse between different models and even brands unless the person(s) making this modification have considerable experience and skill.
However in the case of EVs, the electric motors are fairly easy to reuse between different models and even brands. So if my 2008 EV has a motor which has a certain power rating, I can easily change to a motor with a different power rating or some other characteristic sometime in the future when this motor becomes available. It won't take very long to make this modification and it will also be reasonably simple to do.
Car companies won't want this to happen - they would prefer that you went in for a completely new car instead of purchasing just an updated part.
So in a sense, EVs reduce the car industry to makers of chassis, frame and panels and the basic drive train, steering, lights etc. This is not what a car company would want.
That's a good comparison. Although Google seems to be more honest about it, and it's nicer to us than many TV stations.
I find that a dubious assertion. Your local TV station is far more benign than Google.
1. They don't know everything about your browsing habits.
2. They don't know who emails you, who you email, what you email etc.. or your IM, your documents etc.
3. They don't know what products you prefer to buy, how much you are willing to pay for them (if you are using google checkout)
These are just some of the ways that Google could screw you over. An average TV station doesn't have as much information on you nor does it have the tools to cause you as much grief.
A weaponized anthrax spores have the following features which will aid its effectiveness as a weapon:
a) Normally the spores will clump together like dough. However, to allow easy dispersal of the spores, the spores will be ground down into very small particles and covered in a special chemical which will prevent the clumps from forming.
b) The each such spore will be given a weak electrical charge so that the spores repel each other. Again, this is to prevent the clumping together of the spores.
c) The strain used will be far more agressive and virulent to maximize the damage it does.
d) The strain will also be made resistant to many available vaccines.
None of these can be done without very specialized equipment which is not available on order. These are custom designed equipment developed specifically for the bioweapons program. It is very unlikely that Ivins could have done any of these things himself.
Apple is $100 off commodity hardware and sometimes cheaper? May I introduce you to the latest Toshiba Qosmio laptop which is listed on the Slashdot page today as being the first laptop to use cell processors:
You are bang on. I live in India and I know what it is like for the poor here. It is not stupidity that keeps them poor - but the fact that poverty significantly reduces their options.
If you are dirt poor and heavily in debt to a few loan sharks, your options are very, very limited. Most people in the third world live under a huge burden of debt and the circumstances that surround it.
So if they fall ill for even a couple of days (and many of these people are daily wage earners), they will stand to lose everything they have because the loan sharks will come and raid their house and take away everything they can lay their hands on.
MIT and many of the western organizations seem to think that it is the lack of information that keeps people poor, or it may be lack of education. But the truth is that it is these organizations who suffer from the lack of accurate information.
It is not possible to capture the screenshot of a movie playing using hardware acceleration on X on Linux either. Please see the Mplayer, Gstreamer, Xine threads on this - you will notice that the only way one can capture the screenshots from a movie is to disable hardware acceleration.
Telecom carriers in the US are really ripping people off.
Here in India, it is Rs. 1 per SMS with most telecom carriers. That works out to about 2.4 cents per SMS.
But there are plans which are even cheaper.
Example from Airtel (www.airtel.in), you have the following add-ons that you can opt for with your telecom plan:
250 Local SMS at Rs 25/month 400 Local+National SMS at Rs 49/month 999 Local+National SMS at Rs 99/month
Also, incoming calls as well as SMS is free unless you are on a roaming plan (that is, you are out of town but you want to remain reachable over the same phone number on your mobile).
Why is my post marked as flamebait? Can't the mods read? or have they already made up your mind about what they want to believe in?
Mods - if you don't agree with my viewpoint or that of any of the links that I have given, please go ahead and NOT mark me as insightful/informative/whatever.. but marking me as flamebait only indicates that you are looking to "punish" those you disagree with.
There have been many studies which have shown the exact opposite. What makes the study complex is the fact these cellphone towers have not been around for such a long time and brain tumors take a long time to develop - and so any study on this must take at least a decade or so.
I have been involved in many outsourced IT projects in various roles from developer to project manager.
Many outsourced projects succeed quite well, but there are many which fail catastrophically. There are several reasons for why a project either fails or succeeds and the number one reason is the quality of management.
The problem arises because many firms are not equipped to deal with the challenges of managing a project outsourced to a vendor residing in another part of the world. They assume that an offshore project can be managed exactly the way a project done by an internal team is managed.
But this is far from true.
The way one approaches a offshore project must necessarily be different from the way one approaches work done internally. This applies to IT projects, manufacturing, consulting.. whatever.
Because many firms do not seem to understand that they need to adopt a different style for managing offshore work, they find that their offshore projects start to fail - and since they had success with their internal team before, they extrapolate this to mean that the outsourcing vendor is completely at fault for the projects failing - or perhaps it is because of the vendor's nationality and background.
Some rules for managing offshore work:
a) Be prepared to spend a lot more time managing the work. Your vendor does NOT know your business - you do. So it is necessary for you to micro-manage the work done by the vendor's team until they have an understanding of what you want done. In the initial stages of starting a project, this will involve traveling across to the vendor's office and sitting with them to establish the requirements, designing screens, helping in the design of the architecture, the database etc.
As the vendor gets more comfortable with your style of work, your requirements etc, they will be able to deliver work without too much involvement from you - and then you can step back and reduce your involvement.
b) Be prepared to review work often - at least once in every 3 to 5 days. This will involve doing code reviews, reviewing the database design, reviewing the progress of work on each module etc.
c) Establish rules for how releases are made - how often are *complete* releases issued, how are hot patches released, how is the QA handled for each of these. It is particularly important in the initial stages of the project to receive deliveries at least once in every 2 weeks or so - this allows you to take any corrective steps early steps early when the pressure on you is low rather than right at the end when project deadlines are right around the corner.
d) You need to decide internally as to how long you are willing to wait till ANY vendor is able to deliver to the standards that you expect. If despite a lot of work, the vendor is not showing any improvement, then you should consider changing your vendor.
e) Insist on receiving code for everything done at least once a week. Review *ALL* code initially. If you notice *ANYTHING* which is not exactly like you want it, insist on it being fixed ASAP. Do this a few times and your team will realize exactly what you need.
(a), (b), (c) and (d) implies is that you need an onshore Project Leader.
f) Do QA internally. Anything which is delivered from your vendor must run through a set of exhaustive QC rounds internally. So you need a QA team internally.
g) Setup tools which you can access and which the team can use for project management, QA and bug tracking, document management etc. Use these tools well and use them often.
If you make the mistake of assuming that your vendor understands your culture, working style, domain, team and expectations thoroughly right at the onset of a relationship with them, then you are in for a big disappointment.
To establish a good working relationship with a vendor, the company outsourcing the work must spend a lot of time to train the vendor.
If you aren't willing to go through this effort, then please do not consider outsourcing.
You, dear Sir, are right on the button. The OLPC project was designed by people sitting in ivory towers who know next to nothing about their customers/market and what those customers actually need. Therefore they came up with a product which they think their customers need and they didn't come up with a proper system for manufacturing, distributing and selling these systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Read up on the Gujarat violence. BJP used the same argument that the Nazi's used ("spontaneous reaction" to the atrocities committed by the Zionists) to target muslims.
Also read up on the recent violence in Orissa. If you still have the time read up on BJP's good friends - the Bajrang Dal, VHP, the Hindu Munani, Shiv Sena, RSS etc..
Every single time they attack the minorities they use the same lame excuses to justify the attack - they are only "reacting" to the attacks from the minorities..
Some Indians commenting here are unfortunately the backward navel-gazing types, who will never understand the basis for economic growth and alleviation of poverty. They still think in the most primitive backward terms about how to bring development, prosperity and relief to the masses. The lost opportunities and economic stagnation of the past 50 years under the social welfare state show how such narrow mindsets can wreak havoc on a country. The answer lies in Indians showing each other and the world how to be achievers, instead of just beggars forever clamouring with their palms outstretched.
Ha! the wonderful belief that free market capitalism will solve all the worlds problems and mitigate poverty!
Do you really think that private corporations with no compulsions other than "shareholder value" will consider the good of the poor?
Just take a deep breath and look around you. Free market capitalism has failed spectacularly and the market is gone crying back to the governments to bail them out.
In the last couple of weeks, the US government and the Fed has purchased stake in pretty much all the major banks. The EU is doing the same for the European banks. The Indian government is brazing itself to save the "Public Sector" banks.
GM and other auto majors have already asked for their bailout. The telecom companies will follow suit.
What do you term this other than socialism? where do you think the money is going when people withdraw funds from the private banks? All the money is headed in the direction of government bonds or are being placed in accounts with nationalised banks.
Let me know if there is something that I missed in all this then perhaps I will drink that old "free market" capitalism koolaid again.
BJP govt instilled the country with some pride.
BJP is a fascist party with deep seated animosity towards anyone who is not an hindu. During the BJP regime, they and their supporting parties unleashed some of the worst atrocities against minorities in India.
To state that they have somehow instilled pride in the Indians is like saying that the Nazi party instilled pride in the Germans. That is to say that we (Indians) don't need that kind of pride. Thank you very much.
Also your claim that the moon shot will address poverty comes from the same school of thought that believes in the discredited "trickle down" theory of development which essentially says that if you continue to pamper the rich that the money will somehow magically reach the poor.
We know how well that has turned out. The wage disparity between the rich and the poor has never been more stark. The poor are poorer (google farmer suicides in India) and the rich are richer (google new Indian billionaires).
I am fully in support of the Indian space programme and the wonderful work that ISRO is doing, but let us not kid ourselves - the moon mission has nothing whatsoever to do with mitigating poverty.
I find it really funny that the only ads on their site comes in from Google! :)
Having written a HTML Viewer from scratch for an embedded project, I can attest to the truth of the parent comment. Gecko is a mess. It is very difficult to embed gecko while webkit is much simpler to embed.
If you want to find out how complex it is to embed gecko, take a look at the mozillaembed projects and try and embed it. It takes too much time and effort.
Store the negatives of the photographs. There are ways of generating negatives even for pictures taken using a digital camera. You can also consider microfilm.
These are easy to store as well. It just needs to be stored in a very dry box.
Why then are demolition teams paid thousands of dollars if the only way buildings fall is straight down?
Like the GGP has pointed out, a EV car has far fewer parts than an ICE car. Just from that standpoint, maintenance is bound to be cheaper for an EV than for an ICE.
The BIG problem for EV is that the batteries will need to be replaced every few years. But this situation will change as better batteries become available, and perhaps batteries will themselves be replaced by hydrogen fuel cells or ethanol fuel cells later.
most TV stations rudely interrupt the show I'm trying to watch to throw loud, unwanted ads in my face.
Yes, Ads inserted during a show are very irritating, but at the end of the day it is just something that inconveniences the viewer - it does not cause any more damage than that.
Google doesn't do that. Instead, the give me Google Earth.
None of the Google tools are made available to you because Google wants to be unilaterally helpful to you. Remember that Google is a commercial enterprise which puts its shareholder's interests first.
Google's tools ensure that they have millions who give Google details about themselves. Google uses this information to generate revenue and a lot of it.
Google has just launched a service for storing medical records online. If you think that is just so that they can help you, think again.
I repeat - no TV station is nearly as dangerous as Google.
Also, EVs won't require a radiator.
The result is that electric cars are much less likely to fail mechanically.
This is one of the reasons why the mainstream car manufacturers won't want to support EVs.
1. They make a ton of money selling parts. If EVs become popular, this revenue will dry up considerably. Also take into consideration the fact that vibration and heat contribute considerably to wear and tear on the parts. EVs have much less vibration and heat in the engine compartment which means that the parts will last longer. The car companies are pretending that EVs are complex machines by spouting all kinds of statistics about the "complex" power storage techniques, battery technology etc. So they price the cars very high stating that the batteries are very expensive.
But this is not really a big problem to solve. The batteries can be easily switched over when the owner of the car has the money to afford cheaper/lighter/more efficient batteries sometime in the future.
2. The service and support infrastructure (mechanics, service stations) will all lose money if EVs become popular. Even an oil change becomes unnecessary. Car companies have invested a lot of money in setting up their cars so that they can only be serviced by "authorized" service personnel who have the equipment which can interface with the car's proprietary control interface. All this becomes redundant if EVs become popular.
3. Automobile companies pride themselves on their engines which are difficult to replicate exactly and reuse between different models and even brands unless the person(s) making this modification have considerable experience and skill.
However in the case of EVs, the electric motors are fairly easy to reuse between different models and even brands. So if my 2008 EV has a motor which has a certain power rating, I can easily change to a motor with a different power rating or some other characteristic sometime in the future when this motor becomes available. It won't take very long to make this modification and it will also be reasonably simple to do.
Car companies won't want this to happen - they would prefer that you went in for a completely new car instead of purchasing just an updated part.
So in a sense, EVs reduce the car industry to makers of chassis, frame and panels and the basic drive train, steering, lights etc. This is not what a car company would want.
That's a good comparison. Although Google seems to be more honest about it, and it's nicer to us than many TV stations.
I find that a dubious assertion. Your local TV station is far more benign than Google.
1. They don't know everything about your browsing habits.
2. They don't know who emails you, who you email, what you email etc.. or your IM, your documents etc.
3. They don't know what products you prefer to buy, how much you are willing to pay for them (if you are using google checkout)
These are just some of the ways that Google could screw you over. An average TV station doesn't have as much information on you nor does it have the tools to cause you as much grief.
A weaponized anthrax spores have the following features which will aid its effectiveness as a weapon:
a) Normally the spores will clump together like dough. However, to allow easy dispersal of the spores, the spores will be ground down into very small particles and covered in a special chemical which will prevent the clumps from forming.
b) The each such spore will be given a weak electrical charge so that the spores repel each other. Again, this is to prevent the clumping together of the spores.
c) The strain used will be far more agressive and virulent to maximize the damage it does.
d) The strain will also be made resistant to many available vaccines.
None of these can be done without very specialized equipment which is not available on order. These are custom designed equipment developed specifically for the bioweapons program. It is very unlikely that Ivins could have done any of these things himself.
Apple is $100 off commodity hardware and sometimes cheaper? May I introduce you to the latest Toshiba Qosmio laptop which is listed on the Slashdot page today as being the first laptop to use cell processors:
http://www.hothardware.com/News/Toshiba_Launches_First_Cell_CPUbased_Laptop/
The price? $1549.99 for this:
* Windows Vista Home Premium (SP1, 64-bit)
* Windows Vista Home Premium (SP1, 32-bit)
* Tohiba Quad Core HD Processor
* Intel Core 2 Duo Processor P7350 (2 GHz)
* NVIDIA® GeForce 9600M GT
* 4GB PC2-6400 DDR2 800MHz SDRAM
* 500GB: Two 250GB 5400rpm hard drives
* DVD-SuperMulti (+/-R double layer) with Labelflash drive
* Atheros Wireless LAN (802.11b/g/n)
* Bluetooth V2.1 + EDR
* 18.4" Screen
Compare that against any Apple laptop and see if the Apple laptops have anything of the same specs and then compare the pricing on Apple.
Also, Toshiba makes good laptops and Qosmio is top of the range. This ain't some no name player and this ain't any commodity hardware.
Apple's success is not tech or the quality of its products, it is a success built up on branding and marketing.
You are bang on. I live in India and I know what it is like for the poor here. It is not stupidity that keeps them poor - but the fact that poverty significantly reduces their options.
If you are dirt poor and heavily in debt to a few loan sharks, your options are very, very limited. Most people in the third world live under a huge burden of debt and the circumstances that surround it.
So if they fall ill for even a couple of days (and many of these people are daily wage earners), they will stand to lose everything they have because the loan sharks will come and raid their house and take away everything they can lay their hands on.
MIT and many of the western organizations seem to think that it is the lack of information that keeps people poor, or it may be lack of education. But the truth is that it is these organizations who suffer from the lack of accurate information.
It is not possible to capture the screenshot of a movie playing using hardware acceleration on X on Linux either. Please see the Mplayer, Gstreamer, Xine threads on this - you will notice that the only way one can capture the screenshots from a movie is to disable hardware acceleration.
Telecom carriers in the US are really ripping people off.
Here in India, it is Rs. 1 per SMS with most telecom carriers. That works out to about 2.4 cents per SMS.
But there are plans which are even cheaper.
Example from Airtel (www.airtel.in), you have the following add-ons that you can opt for with your telecom plan:
250 Local SMS at Rs 25/month
400 Local+National SMS at Rs 49/month
999 Local+National SMS at Rs 99/month
Also, incoming calls as well as SMS is free unless you are on a roaming plan (that is, you are out of town but you want to remain reachable over the same phone number on your mobile).
Also, it doesn't deal with things like fear, noise, smoke, stress, trembling hands, weak knees, pain, extreme fatigue...
Also, you don't have to deal with things like gore when you see your pal missing a part of his face and lying face down in a pool of blood.
Eat shit!
Based on what? I have given links, you idiot. Or is it full of shit because it goes against your pet theory. Or are you just full of shit?
Why is my post marked as flamebait? Can't the mods read? or have they already made up your mind about what they want to believe in?
Mods - if you don't agree with my viewpoint or that of any of the links that I have given, please go ahead and NOT mark me as insightful/informative/whatever.. but marking me as flamebait only indicates that you are looking to "punish" those you disagree with.
There have been many studies which have shown the exact opposite. What makes the study complex is the fact these cellphone towers have not been around for such a long time and brain tumors take a long time to develop - and so any study on this must take at least a decade or so.
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss any concerns about the negative effects of cellular phone usage or the microwave radiation.
There have been studies which have shown changes in the expression of proteins due to microwave radiation.
http://www.mobiledia.com/news/65142.html
http://www.lef.org/magazine/mag2007/aug2007_report_cellphone_radiation_01.htm
Other studies have indicated that there is a link between increased microwave radiation and the dramatic decrease in the population of sparrows.
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/bline/2003/12/01/stories/2003120100431400.htm/
VIA and ATI have opened up their drivers - so what benefit does anyone get by using this new "open" card?
I have been involved in many outsourced IT projects in various roles from developer to project manager.
Many outsourced projects succeed quite well, but there are many which fail catastrophically. There are several reasons for why a project either fails or succeeds and the number one reason is the quality of management.
The problem arises because many firms are not equipped to deal with the challenges of managing a project outsourced to a vendor residing in another part of the world. They assume that an offshore project can be managed exactly the way a project done by an internal team is managed.
But this is far from true.
The way one approaches a offshore project must necessarily be different from the way one approaches work done internally. This applies to IT projects, manufacturing, consulting.. whatever.
Because many firms do not seem to understand that they need to adopt a different style for managing offshore work, they find that their offshore projects start to fail - and since they had success with their internal team before, they extrapolate this to mean that the outsourcing vendor is completely at fault for the projects failing - or perhaps it is because of the vendor's nationality and background.
Some rules for managing offshore work:
a) Be prepared to spend a lot more time managing the work. Your vendor does NOT know your business - you do. So it is necessary for you to micro-manage the work done by the vendor's team until they have an understanding of what you want done. In the initial stages of starting a project, this will involve traveling across to the vendor's office and sitting with them to establish the requirements, designing screens, helping in the design of the architecture, the database etc.
As the vendor gets more comfortable with your style of work, your requirements etc, they will be able to deliver work without too much involvement from you - and then you can step back and reduce your involvement.
b) Be prepared to review work often - at least once in every 3 to 5 days. This will involve doing code reviews, reviewing the database design, reviewing the progress of work on each module etc.
c) Establish rules for how releases are made - how often are *complete* releases issued, how are hot patches released, how is the QA handled for each of these. It is particularly important in the initial stages of the project to receive deliveries at least once in every 2 weeks or so - this allows you to take any corrective steps early steps early when the pressure on you is low rather than right at the end when project deadlines are right around the corner.
d) You need to decide internally as to how long you are willing to wait till ANY vendor is able to deliver to the standards that you expect. If despite a lot of work, the vendor is not showing any improvement, then you should consider changing your vendor.
e) Insist on receiving code for everything done at least once a week. Review *ALL* code initially. If you notice *ANYTHING* which is not exactly like you want it, insist on it being fixed ASAP. Do this a few times and your team will realize exactly what you need.
(a), (b), (c) and (d) implies is that you need an onshore Project Leader.
f) Do QA internally. Anything which is delivered from your vendor must run through a set of exhaustive QC rounds internally. So you need a QA team internally.
g) Setup tools which you can access and which the team can use for project management, QA and bug tracking, document management etc. Use these tools well and use them often.
If you make the mistake of assuming that your vendor understands your culture, working style, domain, team and expectations thoroughly right at the onset of a relationship with them, then you are in for a big disappointment.
To establish a good working relationship with a vendor, the company outsourcing the work must spend a lot of time to train the vendor.
If you aren't willing to go through this effort, then please do not consider outsourcing.
You, dear Sir, are right on the button. The OLPC project was designed by people sitting in ivory towers who know next to nothing about their customers/market and what those customers actually need. Therefore they came up with a product which they think their customers need and they didn't come up with a proper system for manufacturing, distributing and selling these systems.